It is a few information and sources about The hirundu in the Internet while it is probably impossible to hunt out any traces of them from somewhere else. Although they have released more than 20 albums to date I was not able to find out some evidence about any released albums on tapes or CD`s in the past. Listening to them at lastfm it is quite ironic to see such a link as Buy CD from Amazon. Presumably lastfm is the sole place around you could get their stuff, being uploaded for free download some years ago sometime there. I could only imagine how long before it these master tapes have been coated with dustsheets on the shelf.
If to speak out "they" we ought actually to think "he", because that Blackpoolian project has been curated by John Crewdson, being the only constant member through 2 decades. The lineups have been changed in the course of times, and some albums are recorded by Crewdson on his own. He describes this beginning in the following way:
The hirundu were formed in 1987 after John Crewdson and Warwick Durnian watched "The Happy Mondays" on the Chartshow. Inspired, they decided to form a band and make the kind of music the world wanted to hear. When this failed to happen they formed The hirundu instead. The original concept for "The hirundu" was for a band so obscure, so "challenging" and so "noncommercial" that they would never play live, never do interviews and never "sell out" by writing songs. This experiment came to an end when John recorded some tunes by mistake.
One of the characteristic lines of the pop music history is to reveal its unknown chapters, though, it usually requires big delay of time. The first albums of The hirundu date back to 1989. It is hard to see parallels between them and someone else worldwide. If to bargain for Crewdson`s status as the powerful frontman, and cutting edge side of his music and the experiments of any descriptions as well we could see some similarities with The Fall in the embodiment of Mark E Smith. However, it is wrong to consider them as someone`s poor man band. Regardless of their initial idealism (of nothing to do) all the stuff Crewdson and Co have actualized in their own special way you have no chance to be indifferent to it. Their music has been ranged from nihilistic old school industrial, and cut and paste wassail to more conventional yet adorable alternative rock/pop and club dance rhythms and electronic pop. Moreover, there are some tracks (Show Us Your Ashtray; Nancy) from the first side of the 90`s which came long before Ariel Pink could enamor the listeners with his lo-fi driven timeless pop tunes. They have emphatically been anti-pop act destroying and deforming the structures of conventional pop songs while creating crackbrained outputs. Madness which is mixed with tape hisses and the lines of melody has highly purgative effect in that case. Their relation to pop music is comparable to the one of the Cynics, an group of philosophers, who have had it against the rest directions of philosophy, and the world as well.
No Preservatives was one of their first albums with Cortex Bycicle and It`s Reefer Time Kids (all of them are recorded in 1989). Avant-garde meets lo-fi meets... . All these sonic layers which consist mainly of primitive synth lines/rhythms, vocal pieces, and sonic effects (hip-hop scratches, tingled electro bleeps and whirls, vocal tricks) will create unbelievable synergy during 35 minutes. One of the bright-lines on the album is Salman Rushdie - a sunshine disco cut with ironic lyrics. The other highlights are Asteroid Belt (Too Tight) - the sounds of video game consoles are mixed with bubblegum bass lines; Funky Sexy, and Jimy In The Sky. Besides it this album is an excellent but yet an undiscovered pearl of dada lo-fi pop it is the good introduction to enter into complex world of The hirundu as well.
Download it from here
