We are huge fans of Adult Jazz and while they haven’t released any new music for a while, the quartet’s lead singer Harry Burgess has been busy with other musical endeavours, including Offer, his experimental electronic duo with Jack Armitage (AKA Lil Data of PC Music) and his solo work under his own name. Last July saw him unleash Live Scraps, a live recording of a performance in south London at the tail end of 2018, accompanied by Fall Of Troy, a print of an essay written by Burgess about his dog, Troy. He explains:

“I was keen to just play with the basics like melody, single guitar notes, and two note chords, but also trying to be dextrous with them. And no strumming!! With Adult Jazz things take a long time to sculpt into what we want them to be, and it was refreshing to do something impulsive, do the work in the feeling of the performance, and not dig too deeply into slick execution, to document something warts (doors slamming, Heineken cans hissing) and all.

The tape comes with a print of an essay I wrote called Fall Of Troy (some of which was published earlier this year in Pilot Press’ Queer Anthology of Sickness) about my dog, Troy (FKA Bonedigger). I knew when giving this performance I was going to travel home the next morning because we had decided to kill him, as he was very old and sick. I’m not into the euphemism putting down, let’s not beat around the bush. So the performance became a kind of swansong by proxy. He was used to me speaking for him. The intensity of emotion around the decision took me by surprise, and the kind of ethical storm of owning a pet reared its head up again in me. He brought me so much joy!”

Live Scraps / Fall Of Troy is available on tape and digitally on bandcamp. To get you enticed take a listen to the sublime ‘Disarm’.