"Victorian sound artist B’O’K aka Buttress O’Kneel has been active since the late 90s, experimenting with sound collage, cut-up political speech, glitch-pop, mashup and media manipulation. She has created everything from ‘audio documentaries’ to compilations of damaged CDs skipping. B’O’K chops, distorts, stretches and mangles popular music in compelling ways and has gifted Ears Have Ears with a very special soundtrack called A Basket of Ears, in celebration of our 7 year birthday this week."
- Ears Have Ears, FBi 94.5FM, 29 11 18


"i basically wanted to give a gift to you because you gift us all the time - it's increasingly rare to find a space for noncommercial weirdness in our culture, a place for non-financial culture to blossom. it's all ads and marketing and brand-awareness and selfies - and here you are, willing to take risks and play music that very few others are willing to play - and not only play it but embrace it, support it. it's a special special thing. i felt like, so many years ago, you were willing to support some weird reclusive angry riotgrrl who had zero chance of commercial success, so i kinda felt like i owed you one. creating art outside the law can be stressful, and you make it less stressful! so i wanted to make something that was just for you. something that had no reason to exist other than as a dedication to you people who support the unsupportable.

the piece is basically a journey through the deep dark forest of my hard drive, unearthing a bunch of sounds i've made that have no obvious home. weird CD jams, odd experiments in turning things (like vocals or thunderstorms) into bizarre midi-piano pieces, fucked up breakcore improvisations, unusual layers of weirdness that have no real place to be or reason to exist. i thought maybe, as some kind of tribute to those People Who Play The Unplayable, these were the perfect pieces to mould and shape and tweak and caress into some kind of new being, some kind of new frankensteinian entity that could become Something, instead of a whole lot of nothing... and then i thought that i could probably make the phrase "ears have ears" by cutting up some Little Red Riding Hood, which just fit so well into this idea of exploring the deep dark woods that it just had to be made. then, once composed, i kept on adding more and more fragments of acapella voices, rearranging it, adding more layers... until it seemed finished. so now, all these dead things are alive, and all these half things are now whole, and the deep dark forest of my hard drive's hystory is no longer so dark. "
- private message to Brooke and Scarlett when discussing A Basket of Ears

"NOTES ON THE PIECE:
-starts with a simple cut-n-paste, before going into an unreleased breakcore jam.
-about 2:40 in, you'll hear Handel's Messiah turned into a midi file and replaced with piano. (also unreleased)
-at about 3 minutes in, the same approach is applied to Freddie Mercury, but with the backing vocals unaffected. it sounds bizarre! love it. (also unreleased)
-about 4:40, it's an improvised CD jam. (unreleased. i should stop saying that - it's ALL unreleased! it's all just for you.)
-about 12 mins in, it's a pumping mashloop of 212 and Skibidi.
-around 15 mins, the same midi-fuck treatment as earlier, but this time, i just did it to thunder. overlaid over some untreated rain sounds.
-at 16:20ish, to keep with the rain theme, it's just the drum part from the Led Zeppelin song 'Fool in the Rain'. (midi-piano-thunder continues.) stretched strings enter and soar.
-about 20:10, another CD glitch improvisation.
-more stretched strings, plus the acoustic guitar part from an old Yes song.
-then it harks back to the very start of the piece, with a cut-up version of Red Riding Hood. the title of the piece (A Basket of Ears) comes from this section.
-a few isolated layers of I Am the Walrus appear.
-and we're done! eaten by the Big Bad Wolf of time... we disappear."

- notes i made when WeTransfering the file to Brooke and Scarlett