Remastered full album HQ audio stream including CD visuals and lyrics.
(turn Closed Captions ON for lyrics)
TRACKLIST:
Labeled (00:00)
Jackpot 5.0.1. (02:41)
Thistle (05:27)
Love One (10:17)
Herb the Bum (14:06)
Secondhand Smoke (19:21)
Ded Hik (24:35)
Frost (28:24)
The Haunting of Curtiss Street (instrumental) (32:27)
You Said You (34:49)
BACKGROUND:
In 1992 my friends and I were playing in a band called Circle of Fear and we went into a local studio to record our first collection of original songs. We had never been in a recording studio before so a friend of the band, who taught a multimedia class at the local high school, volunteered to help guide us through the process.
The studio was state of the art for the time, but it catered mostly to folk, acoustic and jazz music so the production didn’t come out the way we had envisioned. We wanted a huge, loud rock record but ended up with a quieter, almost lo-fi sound. It was still a great experience though!
We self-released the final recording on cassette AND compact disc, which was a pretty big deal at the time because unsigned indie bands weren’t really releasing recordings on CD yet.
It ended up taking over 6 months for our CDs and cassettes to be manufactured and shipped to us due to some controversy over something that was written on the back of our CD and cassette inserts.
On the back of most audio releases there is a copyright warning printed in ridiculously small print that no one ever reads. We thought it would be funny to type a bunch of stupid stuff in there and see if anyone would ever notice, so we filled it with things like “We Worship the Devil” and “Unauthorized Reproduction is a Violation of Lucifer” among other nonsense.
I was doing all of the album artwork cut and paste style, resizing images and lyrics with a photocopy machine and I misjudged how big this particular lettering would print on the final copy.
Instead of tiny lettering on the back, our joke satanic warnings came out large and easy to read! When the printing company saw this they took issue with the idea of “supporting satanists” and refused to print our inserts. This put our project in limbo for many months until the manufacturers worked this out.
Then, when we finally got our CDs and cassettes months later, our friend who helped produce the album for us noticed that the offending text was located right below his production credit. Fearing this could potentially cause trouble at his teaching job (we all lived in an extremely small town where rumors traveled quickly) he asked to remove his name from the credits at his expense.
He ended up paying to have all of the CD inserts reprinted, went through one by one and marked out his name in the credits on the CD booklets and the cassette J-cards.
And then had all 1000 cassettes and CDs re-shrink wrapped!
ALBUM CREDITS:
Circle of Fear (active on and off from 1992 -1998):
Adam Burns - Bass
Charlie Burns - Guitars
Len Enders - Vocals, Keyboards, Samples
Eric Jensen - Drums
Recorded at Synergy Studios in Port townsend, Washington
on August 9th, 10th, 16th and 25th, 1993
Produced by Robert Force
Engineered by Neville Pearsall
Management: Hue Jardon
Legal counsel: Ben Dover
Artwork: Len Enders
Photography: Ilene Dover, Jodi Forker
Lyrics by Len Enders
except “Love One” lyrics Len Enders and Adam Burns
