Star Wheel Press: Indie - folk - jazz - pop weirdos
Reviews:
“Beautifully unraveled music of Star Wheel Press”
Bob Harris (Radio 2)
“Lovely grounded Rootsy music”
Tom Robinson (BBC 6 Music)
“Really Charming”
Ricky Ross BBC Scotland
“I absolutely love it”
Lauren Laverne (BBC 6 music)
“Fine stuff, witty and wise,
with solid tunes and a playful tone”.
Ian Rankin
New Album: Release 1st June 2024
Machines with the Knowledge of Good and Evil
A collection of songs about the madness of our modern culture.
Lyrics about machines stealing our brains and falling in love with our devices.
There is also an obvious nod to Adam Curtis in the title.
Star Wheel Press have looked to other creatives to help make this record - Beoga, Midlake, their own children, various wives and an old radiator. Old ideas and new technologies - hope for something better with female harmonies and horn arrangements. This is stripped down sounds with clever production- quirky lyrical ideas with catchy melodies. A touch of jazz with songs that create an idea in an indie country construct with rocky riffs and wordy interplay.
Friends guesting on the album:
Michael Irwin (ex Low Anthem) on Trumpet
Eric Nichelson (Midlake) organ and guitar
Evan Jacobs (ex Midlake) organ
Sean Og Graham (Beoga) accordion
Niamh Dunne (Beoga) Fiddle
Debut Album: Life Cycle of A Falling Bird - 4 star reviews in the Scotsman, The List and The Skinny
Lyrics for… Trampolene:
Supermarket packaging and gumtree
Twitter Instafacegram and me
Boil in the bag microwave your tea
I’ve lost my phone again left it on the train
Or it’s fallen down the latrine
LYRICS FOR… Selling Stuff to the Americans:
Reality TV, Anorexic politics
And Technology that’s new
We might get sucked right up in all that too
Avoidance being passive and weird in a social glue
And I just want to dance with all of you
Star Wheel Press are named after the flat bed etching press that William Hogarth and William Blake would have used. This press is how Ryan Hannigan communicates his world after his brain was slightly rotated from some traumatic events. William Blake otherworldly madness gripped Ryan and so he sent his prints, poems and ideas to Craig Milton to help save him from going totally insane. Craig is a potentiometer expert and used old valves, vintage pickups and early amplifiers to decipher the mutterings and weird tunes that resonated from Ryan’s work. Lyrics about devices stealing our brains or falling in love with a machine stand out in this new treatise on the dangers of robots. Craig banded together with other muso nerds and engineered this new record - Machines with the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
This continues to help Ryan deal with his fears that the world will be taken over by Artificial Intelligence - controlled primarily by the greedy. Inspired by EM Forester’s - The Machine Stops - this collection of songs stands as a warning that the singularity is near. As you probably read this for the first time on your AI controlled device.
