Songs for Swinging Larvae

LP: Do It Records RIDE 6:   See side A |   See side B
CD: T. E. C. tones 90802
    A certain quantity of copies of this CD were mis-pressed, and play the music of Garth Brooks!

  A Ralph promo button

Notes from the CD release:

Welcome to the days of early Renaldo & the Loaf. Renaldo (Brian Poole) and Ted the Loaf (Dave Janssen) hail from Portsmouth, England. After collaborating for a number of years, it was in 1977 that we discovered a music that excited us. To us it was a music with direction in uncertainty, with a strage coherence in ambiguity. Noise experiments seemed to distill into songs, and the recordings on this disc bear witness to the odd events that resulted in Songs for Swinging Larvae, the first full LP to be revealed to the world.

It is true to say that a previous, tape-only album (Renaldo & the Loaf play Struve' & Sneff) did see local, Portsmouth release and it was that tape that ultimately secured us a recording deal with Ralph Records in 1981. Two tracks from that period - 'Bathroom Song' and 'Metro Stomp' - are included on this disc as a taster. 'Melvyn's Repose' was recorded especially for the Ralph sampler Frank Johnson's Favorites and is contemporary with the Larvae sessions.

Made by chance and ruled by dice,Larvae can guide you through playful music of abandon, laid, hatched and recorded exclusively in a bedroom studio. Pursuing a weird medical/insect fetish, these songs saw us happily abusing our tape machines, plundering the hardware store, honing our scalpels and continuing to revel in the game of making conventional instruments sound synthetic. Invention is born out of necessity, as, at that time, we could not afford synthesizers anyway.

Renaldo & the Loaf never had a definable attitude as we said at the time; no great philosophies, no political stance, just a want to think sideways, enjoy ourselves and hope some others might enjoy it too. Not afraid to be ridiculous and not afraid of ridicule. So, welcome one and all, feel free to smile at our history. I believe in bugs, do you?