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Shop | Music By Mel Croucher

Buy all releases from the following online outlets: Apple Music, Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Deezer, Rdio, Beats, Spotify, Microsoft Groove, Tidal, YouTube, MediaNet. One-click links to buy albums are provided below. All album tracks can also be bought individually in this brave new world of consumer choice.

PIMANIA
The Vidogame music of Automata - 1977-1984

Remasters (2015, streaming and download all formats)
With Christopher Lee, Ian Dury, Frankie Howerd

Track list: Pibolar Disorder, New Wheels John, An Act Of Wanton Thatchery, Video Nasty, Cuntry Music, Groucho, Ally Pally Wally, Don't You Know Who I Am, Lieder Of The Pac, Crummy Song, Hark Hark The PiMinister, Pompey Rock, Put Cat Out Mother It's On Fire Again, Donkey Hotay, I got Bugs, The Song Of The Sperm Parts 1, 2 and 3, Ass About Face

"A bizarre and unique trip. Stunning" The Wire
"Listen to Pimania and the diverse arts of Laurie Anderson, Monty Python and Robert Wyatt readily spring to mind." The Quietus

DEUS EX MACHINA

Remasters of 1984 original soundtrack (2014, streaming and download all formats)
With Ian Dury, Jon Pertwee, Frankie Howerd, Donna Bailey, EP Thompson, Children of Warblington School

Track list: I Am Machine, All The Screen's A Stage, Fertlizer, Foetus, Asked To Be Born, School, Love, War Crimes Are Easy, Justice, Old Age, Replay

"Deus Ex Machina is staggeringly original, unique and impresive." The Sunday Times
"A bizarre mixture of rock album, psychedelia and the Marx Brothers." The Listener

DEUS EX MACHINA 2

Original soundtrack (2011, streaming and download all formats)
With Christopher Lee, Ian Dury, Chyna Whyne, Chris Madin, Sulene Fleming, Mary Carewe, Joaquim De Almeida


Track list: Prelude, Fertilizer, Birth, Infancy, School, Adloescence, Love, Betrayal, Soldier, Pain, War Crimes, Dance, Guilt, Power, Decline, Danger, Old Age, Senility, Wonder, Death, Transfiguration, Thanks

buy on iTunes
Buy as audio CD
Buy American import CD version
buy as MP3 album on Microsoft Music Store

"High concept, demanding and not a little repulsive. A masterpiece." Edge

Pimania
The Music of Mel Croucher and Automata

Gatefold vinyl special edition (2010, Feeding Tube Records)

Track list Side A: The Piland International Anthem, Pi-Balled, Crummy Song, Pimania
Track list Side B: Some People, Pompey Rock, Leader Of The Pac, Video Nasty, Bit Of A Cult, Ally Pally Wally

"The crown jewel in the Feeding Tube Records catalog, an independent label operating in the USA. The music on this record was recorded as the conceptual soundtrack for computer games. Combining primitive synthesizer tones and meandering psychedelic blues guitar with cryptic, off-color lyrics, this is like finding a great lost electronics LP by '80s NYC underground legend, Copernicus. A bizarre and unique trip. This album represents a bona fide artefact exhumed from the age. While retro-futurists like James Ferraro and Daniel Lopatin refashion the cultural debris of their adolescent pasts into fresh meditative forms, here we have a taste of the genuine article, with a side-salad of saucy seaside humour thrown in.
The cover of Pimania almost looks like an Acid House record, a pill-popping cartoon that re-imagines Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold As Love as a Knockabout comic based around a gnomic alien known as the Piman. Pimania is a document of the last strand of British head culture, the final inheritance of the original psychedelic impulse as transmitted via the underground press and science fiction fandom to alternative comics and the early days of the home computer. It's also a spookily prescient in a way that is compulsive.
Automata had a dazed hippy vibe that was seductive to anyone starting to explore fringe culture. When I first discovered them they slotted into a space in my brain somewhere between the comics of Hunt Emerson, Dungeons & Dragons, Douglas Adams-era Doctor Who. Automata were remarkable for the way they bundled games with recordings of original music and surreal comedy sketches designed to be played on a tape recorder as a simultaneous soundtrack.
Mel Croucher performed and composed all of the music himself, confusing mainstream pop with primitive psychedelic and DIY styles. Listened to with 21st century ears, Pimania sounds like a broadcast from the parallel Albion inhabited by the Canterbury scene - Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine, Egg. The sound is eerily up close. At points it feels a bit like a British sitcom, but there's a degree of personal obsession that works in combination with the recurrence of certain English archetypes. An Arthurian quest re-imagined by Monty Python. Pimania feels like a time capsule from another world, a world where the possibilities and anarchic tendencies of new media had not yet been consolidated. And it's a testimony to the stunning job that Feeding Tube Records have done on this - full colour gatefold sleeve, sleevenotes, poster, art repros - that someone else felt exactly the same."
THE WIRE

Download the full press kit in PDF format by clicking HERE.