The Comedy of Errors: Purple Om - Armageddon [Mix 2] (28 June 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

Sent to Peel by “Two people who live in a caravan in Cornwall, according to the letter they sent me”, John was a little unconvinced that the music matched up to the title.  However, I think that Simon Posford and Nick Dixon were more focussed on the none-more-1992 concerns about deforestation than they were on trying to bag a future spot alongside Aerosmith on the soundtrack of Michael Bay’s 1998 magnum opus.

The vibe here is for the most part New Age dance, but Purple Om sneak through plenty of diverting surprises which lift this track up for higher attention.  The doomy bell sounds running alongside the exotic birdsong set the scene of an Eden being prepped for upheaval. The metallic, gated synth riff sounds for all the world like articulated lorries pulling themselves into position to begin unloading the equipment needed to begin paving over the rainforests and putting up the office blocks. Then there’s the bass riff which bubbles away like the wildlife of the forest taking up positions to defend their turf and call out to each other about the coming encroachment, which is first evidenced around the 2:15 mark as guitars ring out like chainsaws being made ready to start cutting a swathe through the vegetation.  Sonically, the track is tremendously warm and the fact that it leans so heavily on analogue instrumentation amid the beats and effects helps to convey the sense of an eco-system being simultaneously defiled and attempting to protect itself.  There’s also something quintessentially British about the fact that while Joni Mitchell might have predicted this kind of despoliation while sitting on the porch in Laurel Canyon; it took two blokes cooped up in a caravan on Kenwyn Caravan Park in Truro (I hope...) to envisage the actual building site.

Armageddon never saw commercial release, though I would hope that as Cornish residents, Purple Om would have maybe dropped white labels into some of the local record shops for discerning collectors to take home to their record collections (which would have ruled me out in 1992, for sure). The disc Peel received had five mixes on it, all of which can be sought out on YouTube.  He played Mix 2 on the 28/6/92 BFBS show, but Mix 1 contained vocals which emphasised the message that the  destruction of the title was playing out around us.  “Running away from a life to say/Escaping from the world I’m leaving”. A brilliant one-off that borrows the jagged intensity of 70 Gwen Party and looks ahead to the analogue/digital wonders of future Peel favourites like Hint

Video courtesy of Giant Kettle
Lyrics copyright of their authors.