I’m at the 2025 Skynet LAN event and due to requiring an update the software that I use that strips ads from my Facebook feed isn’t working properly. As a result, certain adverts are creeping through like plantlife punching through concrete.
I’ve never felt overly susceptible to adverts but my attention was caught by what appeared to be a short clip of an innocuous human man going to town on an overly-engineered and utterly bespoke banjo. It didn’t stop there, the back-drop a never ending kaleidoscope of simplicity, a seemingly innocent enough logo of a manic-smiling pumpkin ever moving about the screen as an angled-handle type device, attached to the banjo was used by the operator to strategically punch large, rubber buttons of an early sampler machine, which, stood in front of him like a flamingo, on one foot, desperately trying to keep its balance as it was frequently jabbed.
All this with no sound!
The innocuous human man pressed his mouth up to a microphone, positioned calmly above the well-timed chaos of strum strum, bash bash, strum strum, bash bash. Time to adorne the headphones and see if this truly unique video clip came with just as unique audio, or perhaps moreso. It did.
Sat in a crowded room, surrounded by high-tech equipment and hardworking minds invested in strategic victory all around me, I was overwhelmed by feelings of nostalgia, deja vu and childlike wonder at music I had never heard before.
The music of LC Pumpkin filled all four-corners of my aural receptors, every dial cranked as far as it’d go, the banjo cutting through like a fine cheese-wire, simple drum loops of another time crackled and punched, whirling about like grandma’s organ through an old Leslie, reminiscent of those hypnotic beats used by Suicide.
Suddenly the video made sense, kind of… at least from a ‘what’s going on’ perspective less so a ‘what’s going in’ sense… the banjo did banjo things, granted. Sometimes leading, sometimes underlating, with a simple complexity of The Monks, it’s additional appendage, an arm for pressing pre-determined buttons on the sampler before him, some squwonky, some familiar, playful and meddlesome synth womps and wiggly zhuzhs beat their way over those drums and around those banjo-twangs. Across the top of this, in a higher plain, the vocals, a beautiful, blown out, incomprehensible lullaby dripping in equal parts child-like charm and melancholy.
It took me back to points throughout my upbringing, with my fascination of radio, my love of those voices somewhere out there in the ether. Something that has truly mesmerised me. It made me think of holidays abroad, when foreign radios echo down alleyways and through walls, as audible as your neighbour’s dog and as alien as a distant language you’ve never heard.
Now perhaps Mr Pumpkin is a hypynotic genius who has learnt the art of weaving subliminal messages into his work, akin to Derren Brown because the next thing I did was order his discography through a website of crimson and white – it promised me the world in five easy to purchase CDs.
Those discs themselves are an extension of the beautiful little world LC Pumpkin has created, hand-made and hand-folded paper sleeves protect the home-printed discs of ear-filling joy. Complete with no less than three Oh Sees covers that, superseed the originals in my opinion! (I love The Oh Sees, but their prophetic nature and consistent themes bore me on occasion).
LC Pumpkin has become a staple of one’s kitchen, those ethereal soundwaves meandering through the house in a diegetic fashion. I note that each CD came with a booklet featuring all of the lyrics of the songs – something I admire for the efforts it took to include it but have resisted the urge to read. At least for now. There’s a charm to not quite knowing what is being sung, allowing you to pick out bits and pieces and come to your own conclusions. Lyrically they might not be rocket scientist, but right now I don’t know that for sure.
There are many qualities that shine throughout the music, it rarely sits still, sometimes the forms are akin to sixties-garage, before roaming into psychadelia, I referred to the paired-back yet off-kilter stylings of The Monks, this is true but not simply because of the inclusion of the banjo – When it came to The Monks the banjo functioned almost as a section snare, picking out the odd numbers seldom seen by the mainstream listener. This time it’s function is far more important, it’s paving the way and it’s the car that drives at the same time.
I’m not one to want to overly compare a piece of music, but LC Pumpkin and Silver Apples sit at the same table in my mind. Experimental, outsider and above all-else pure. Taking an entirely unconventional approach at creating music, with tools that other musicians, and indeed regular boring human listeners would not consider compatible or capable of musical use. There’s a degree of engineering here, problem solving. LC Pumpkin had music in his mind and the only way to deliver it was with a precariously tabled sampler and a banjo with a big weird arm stuck to it.
He may describe himself as low fidelity, but to me, it’s the most feddle music I have ever heard.
LC Pumpkin can be found and enjoyed any of the following ways:
https://lcpumpkin.bandcamp.com
Debt Based Money – this was the first clip I heard, it was all I ever needed!
“I’ll eat my toes, eat my money, death to toes isn’t funny, eat my woes eat my cares, maybe even eat my chest hairs” – probably not the lyrics. “probably eat machinery, eat the scenery, probably drink cat food” – a total guess, I will read them one day!
