In 2016 Stathis discovered, in his archival vault, some of the original cassette tapes that the DoD sessions had been recorded on. For some reason he still owned a cassette deck and was able to play these and ascertain that there might actually be another album’s worth of material there. Another Dudes on Drugs album after 30+ years? Could we do that? Of course we could, we have a fucking record label! So we began pouring over the tapes and picking out stuff that might be palatable to the kind of listener who enjoyed the first record.
To our surprise we came up with perhaps a stronger showing than the first, which admittedly did not have as much thought put into it.And contrary to the first release, when compiling and remastering these tracks, we elected to celebrate the atmosphere of the original recordings and not add any effects at all. The only exception to this is the track “Hieroglyphs Lament” to which we added a beautiful large room reverb, because, well, it just sounded so good!
All of the DoD sessions were peppered with priceless performances of young Stathis interpreting his own poetry over a variety of noise. We decided for this last DoD release, to include these poems as the “lyrics” of the album. For this Stathis had to painstakingly pour over the tracks to pick out the words, as he had long since lost and forgotten the poems.
So yes, this is the last of the Dudes on Drugs recordings, as there is simply no more usable material from the sessions left. But there is rumour of a DoD remix album in the works at Sublamental. Who knows? If you enjoy this material and appreciate where it comes from, bless you! If you don’t, why are you reading this?
David Fenton
Stathis Gourgouris
Todd Brunner
November 2018
You can download the album for free below, along with more detailed info on the Dudes on Drugs project.