Detective Instinct Presents #2: Mike Watt

VINYL FORMAT. Number two in a series of limited edition EPs! Hailing from Middlesbrough, a small industrial town in North East England, Oli Heffernan has been making loops, field recordings and 4-track doodles at home and on holidays since the mid-nineties. From early on in his life, he has played with a number of different groups, and over the years ended up supporting bands like The Fall, Echo and The Bunnymen, Clinic, John Cooper Clarke, Leaves, Future Of The Left, and Archie Bronson Outfit. His current project, Detective Instinct, was born out of a combination of boredom and a need for distraction: "I began by going through old tapes and realizing a lot of it was good stuff and I needed to do something worthwhile with it, so I wrote to a few friends from bands I'd been involved in or had played with and then we began a type of online exchange of recordings: I'd send tracks out then they'd add vocals and send them back. Mike Watt heard the songs on Myspace and wrote asking if he could play them on his radio show in LA so I chanced my arm and asked him if he wanted to get involved, which he did. I then began asking other people whose work I admired and was surprised by how many people wanted to contribute, and it went from there."

Buried in the mix of the songs are field recordings of haunted buildings, people going about their business, and lots of found sounds recorded while he was on tour throughout Europe with Das Wanderlust. The imagery for the series, as well, was found in an old book of woodcuts bought in a dusty bookshop in a small seaside town, assembled with the help of Nicky Peacock.