No Artificial Sweeteners Everybody Needs Their Monsters Play: Lo-Fi   Mid-Fi   Hi-Fi   Download: Lo-Fi   Mid-Fi   Hi-Fi (Excerpt from track 'Acid Drops')

Warning - This CD could seriously effect your sanity.

No Artificial Sweetener is basically Paul Nagle and friends. But don't expect anything like you have heard from him before. Its a million miles away from 'Red Book / Blue Book' or 'Lore' for example. This is the darker side of Paul. Him letting his 'Monsters' out of the bag if you like. The music is mainly challenging and quite frankly at times manic. And as for the artwork- no comment!

'Zero Zero' begins with what sounds like a distorted guitar.and other mainly dark effects. Strange and noisy could be one description of it. Some vocal samples can just be heard as we get into 'Looking for Charlie' A rather good 'Berlin School' type sequence bursts into life and for one of the few times on this CD you can bop to the pulsations and effortlessly go along where the music takes you. Most of the rest of the CD will take a bit more effort on your part. 'Acid Drops' uses a fast sharp static type sequence around which drift more vocal effects and other echoing sequence segments. It all then merges into a bubbling collage of sounds, sometimes laid back and sometimes aggressive. Its a bit like being in a bad dream and not being able to awake. 'The Vampire Hotel' gets straight into a fast aggressive bass sequence which mutates this way and that in an almost out of control fashion with various added detail here and there but basically its just a sequence going ape for over a quarter of an hour! 'Sea Devils' is a drone modulating all over the place then it settles down to do some Clangers impersonations with a few Doctor Who effects. We then go through a series of bleeps and twitters that even Conrad Schnitzler would have been hard pushed to concoct. Its formless electronic madness. 'Sensei Skunk Plays Temple Ball' returns us to some semblance of calmness though rather spooky. I'm sure there was even an Opera singer just on the edge of hearing somewhere in there.

Things get darker and darker as the track progresses, thick deep pads acting as a base for various electronic effects. In many ways its quite cosmic but as with most of this CD it has that edge of madness to it. 'Paths of the Dead' does actually sound as if the zombies have awoken. The rhythm sounds like the walk of the undead shuffling along occasionally bumping into things leaving the odd limb here or there. It is rather an infectious loop however and provides some welcome structure to contrast the formless atmospheric craziness of before. Eventually the Zombies reach 'The Old Church' and we get more twittering cosmic effects accompanied by a sort of helicopter rotor blade sequence. After three minutes however a rather good more conventional sequence keeps trying to break through but no- it is replaced by mindless pulsations and more spooky drones in the background.