Pure Science Fiction

Mikee

Pure Science Fiction was born mostly listening to very stilted dialogue from the film Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombie 3). It’s a film so bad that you can get through the 95 minutes laughing back to back. It also features lots of really intense musical strings, so we just took a couple of samples from that.

At the time, I was trying to write something ‘very hip-hop’ so entirely turned to the cheapest tools we had in the arsenal: an outboard sampler and drum machine and samples from VHS. We turned up an 808 kick until it filled the mix and mixed in a slightly pitched down kick from the Zoom RythmTrak 234 to get just a very funky beat. The SampleTrak had a pitch bend effect on it, so using the volume, pitch and pressing the button for the sample at the same time produced the scratch effects.

The lyrics came easy, because the entire song is a kind of ‘what if we’re doing a band introduction track but it’s also the zombie apocalypse’ theme.

We were already using a turned up 808 kick, so we used that for the ‘gabba breakdown’ just with a little more compression and distortion.

We had a pretty good track on our hands, but the final part was to come. Misc had been working on a guitar that effectively played itself. This device, the Avonator let out the most discordant drone. But two things: it could play itself and it also could be pitch bent. So, Misc used a slide bar to play Avonator drones over the sliding samples. What resulted is something we’re pretty proud of. It’s a noisy raucous affair that does its job. At one of our gigs, Misc misplaced his slide bar, so he just picked up a bottle of beer and used that.

Listening back in 2026 it’s hard not to be proud of this one. It’s funny, conceptual, loud, chaotic and it was fun as shit to play live. We often had people say this one sounds like ‘an English Beastie Boys’ and while we didn’t intend to do that, that’s as good a compliment we can receive in our eyes.

Misc:

After building The Avonator, I was hunting for an excuse to use it and Mikee suggested layering its unique industrial noise over Pure Science Fiction. It’s definitely not an easy background listen, but it seemed to fit with the violent attitude and frenetic pace of the track. I wasn’t involved in writing lyrics but I do remember sitting around with Mikee when he decided to change the original “Baring our teeth because we’re angry and mean” line to “Baring our teeth, making your girlfriends cream”. You just can’t argue with that kind of genius.

PSF was always a fucking riot to play live, especially in the early days. Mikee and Felix put their instruments aside, grabbed the mics (strictly handheld), and gave it full energy, bouncing off the walls. I attacked the instrument with whatever came to hand in order to give a percussive, and sometimes vaguely melodic layer of texture.