Pestrepeller

Improvisational Noise trio from the UK, formed in 1995. The core musicians are Harley Richardson, Ed Pinsent and Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey), occasionally joined by guest musicians. The band started life as Ultrasonic Attack Wave Pestrepeller around 1995 or 1996, and made "Rat Alert" for Sympathy For The Record Industry. Sonic Boom, the genius behind Spacemen 3, remade this early record by processing it through his VCS3, and released it as Pestrepeller with his Experimental Audio Research moniker. Apparently he liked its complete lack of musicianship. A second LP "Nug Yar" was a limited press LP for Gary Ramon's 'Prescription' label and sold out instantly, because only 99 copies of it existed and the print run was pre-sold to Coil fans. The trio played live in London 3 times. Soon they split up in acrimonious circumstances due to artistic disagreements, but reformed about two years later, met in the studio and recorded what became "Isle of Dark Magick" with Peter Hope-Evans, the blues harmonica player who used to be in Medicine Head in the 1970s. This session was released on CD by Important Records in 2006. Pestrepeller meet, play and record very infrequently, because they don't have enough time outside of their other pursuits in work, life, and art. Richardson is a mathematics and computer expert who made a late and sudden conversion to free improvised noise, now happily sitting before an amplifier and feeding its fuzz through a bank of guitar pedals. Ed Pinsent (who plays organ and Moog) is the editor of 'The Sound Projector Music Magazine' and presenter of a radio show of the same name. He was a small press comics artist and writer, now semi-retired, for about 15 years; through that medium, he met Savage Pencil, cult underground cartoonist. Pencil is the only core member with any history of playing in bands, through his association as singer with The Art Attacks and Tagmemics, and guitarist in The Kray Cherubs. He is an ardent collector of vinyl and was steeped in the sounds of free noise, jazz, avant-garde and noise music before letting his secret knowledge uncoil through twisted untutored guitar notes with Pestrepeller.