I’m Cult48
I'm Cult48
Yes. You read that correctly. Why am I revealing this ?
Go make a coffee and I’ll explain. I’ve thought long and hard about it for weeks, and it’s been a very difficult decision to arrive at. My reasons, briefly, are as follows…
1.. The sudden passing of my good friend DJ Steve Brown, a man everyone in the electronic music community loved. This was particularly jarring, and still refuses to sink in.
This was then compounded by the passing of Vangelis, Dave Greenfield ( keyboard player in The Stranglers), Andy Fletcher ( Depeche Mode ), and since then Dave Smith ( Synth Pioneer who created MIDI, the Prophet 5……
These people were Iconic to me.
The sobering realization that I too wont’t be around forever, made me think I wanted more of a legacy than a bunch of popular, yet “anonymous” tracks that no-one even knew I had made.
2. My dad had also died, of Alzheimers. He was an artist / sculptor and was just as obsessed with his work as I am about mine, but when he slipped away like that, it made me more acutely aware of how tenuous these things are. We weren’t close, but we shared that same obsession with art, and this was all affecting me subconsciously too.
I couldn’t even see him one last time as we were in the middle of the first national covid lockdown. It was OK to have multiple cheese and wine parties if you were in government, but I wasn’t allowed to visit my dad one last time before he slipped away.
3. On top of all this, there were “differences of opinion” within Cult48, that I could no longer work with. I guess this is the bane of most bands, and a common reason for a band members going their separate ways.
So, with all that going on, and after much soul-searching, I broke my silence and admitted ownership of my music. and admitted that about 80% of Cult 48’s music was made by me.
As you can imagine, this didn’t go down well but a decision was reached to be amicable. I thought that would be it, but later that day, the “shared” Cult48 bandcamp page that I set up, had been deleted by one of the others. These are just the objective facts of what happened, relayed now with detachment.
Their choices are beyond my control. I am only responsible for my own.
What’s done is done, and can’t be undone. This is now about what will emerge from the ashes………
I want to be crystal clear about this. I did not, and never would, delete anything.
I will continue as Cult48. I was making this style of music for many years prior to Cult48. Here are a few quick examples from 2016, taken from the 34 track album “Snowglobe Citizen”
I now plan to upload the 17 tracks that I made 100% of, as part of Cult48, to my own Carbinax page along with some remixes, alt versions, and new tracks which I’m very excited about.
And watch this space for more soon – https://cult48.bandcamp.com
Sad to learn about what happened when your identity was put out into the public domain. Surely the most important factor in all of this is the MUSIC. Denying people the music because of a revealed identity is a bit petty. I look forward to all those Cult48 tracks as I love the music. One positive to come out of the “reveal yourself” situation is that I had never heard of Carbinax.
Hey Martin =)
I agree with you. The most important thing “should” be the music, but, you’ll always get haters trying to weaponize it, or politicize it because the creator sees life through a different lens, and they just cannot handle that. In this particular case, a lot of it was the simple fact that some bands just don’t work long-term, and you hear it all the time.
The worst thing was that it was the fans who suffered, because they bought the download, and now can’t access it. Deleting the music was a despicable thing to do. I hope I can alleviate some of that, and if people get to also discover a load of Carbinax albums they never knew existed, that’s a bonus,