TRACKS CD - Regular Edition

1. David Bowie – 10th of January 2016
2. Keith Emerson – 10th of March 2016
3. George Martin – 8th of March 2016
4. Maurice White – 3rd of February 2016
5. Prince – 21st of April 2016
6. Pierre Boulez – 5th of January 2016
7. Lemmy – 28th of December 2015
8. Tony Conrad – 9th of April 2016
9. Primo Brown – 1st of January 2016
(or James Brown – 25th of December 2006)
10. Zagor Camillas - 14th of April 2020
 

TRACKS CD EXTRA (feat. Phil Sanderson and Geist'nait) - With Comic Book

1. Digging Up new corpses
2. Shane MacGowan – 30th of November 2023
3. George Michael – 25th of December 2016
4. Ryūichi Sakamoto – 28th of March 2023
5. Peter Brötzmann – 22nd of June 2023
6. Tina Turner – 24th of March 2023
7. George Winston – 4th of June 2023
8. David Crosby - 18th of January 2023

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THE WHOLE STORY OF THIS ENDLESS (8 YEARS) PROJECT?

CLICK HERE FOR THE ENGLISH VERSION OR THE ITALIAN ONE.

DESCRIPTION

In 2016 a lot of very important musicians started to die, one after the other.

A few months before all of this happened, the Rome-based band Vonneumann had contacted Matteo Uggeri (aka Barnacles) to collaborate on a project together. The more Matteo and Vonneumann spoke together, the more the death bonanza continued, the more they craved to do something about this insane streak of musical deaths. Especially: the perverse way with which social media and sensationalism were able to absorb all of this into the capitalistic machinery.

After endless phone calls and deranged e-mails and Whatsapp messages filled with sarcastic jokes and surreal hypothetical situations, the embryo of a story started to emerge...

What if a boy, who knew nothing about Bowie, Lemmy, Prince and other important musicians that were dying that year, started to gain interest in them only because of the social (and not) media coverage? And what if he decided to purchase albums from these artists without knowing anything about them at all? Of course *rigorously on vinyl* because that's just way more hipster than CD, you all know that. And what if he went to a record shop and the shop owner was actually a wanna-be shaman, who realized that if he could summon death upon more musicians, this kid (and other brainwashed kids like him) would purchase more vinyls, and he'd become rich? And what if, on top of this, he wouldn't even sell the albums the kid was asking for, but some crazy obscure releases which presented unexpected associations (eg. Maurizio Bianchi/M.B. instead of Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire)?

Thus was born... THE GRAVEDIGGER KID! (GDK)

It took even more phone calls, e-mails and IMs to tweak the details, but in the end Barnacles and Vonneumann were able to develop a full storyboard. It was idiotic, flipped out and nerdy to the max. We absolutely loved it. Now we just had to find an illustrator. We luckily connected with Raffaele Capasso, an amazing designer who in his free time was drawing fantastic cartoons. 

There was just one last request: we wanted the whole thing to be a tribute to Skin Graft. Precisely like those early SG editions which always included a comic book in their releases, we wanted to do one too. So we gave Raffaele all the references, from Gumballhead the Cat to Mr Brown and his friends.

The cartoon was hilarious, but at the same time maniacally accurate and technically impressive. 

Sadly, even before the comic was finished, in 2019 (yes, the whole thing took us a while), Raff took the irrevocable decision to stop drawing comics. But the GDK wasn’t finished yet. We realised that the story needed a couple of tables to be (nearly) perfect. So Matteo made a huge effort in order to draw them in Raffele’s style. Raff approved. 

And then... almost 8 years passed without us being able to find a label that was interested in both the album AND the comic book... meanwhile, so many more musical deaths were occurring (with a little help from the pandemic), including even close musician friends… (:’-(

When we finally found a deal with the great Klanggalerie, the Austrian label whose rooster includes members of Residents, Tuxedomoon, Cabaret Voltaire, This Heat and Throbbing Gristle (and some of these died in the meanwhile, sadly), we had accumulated other ideas and music that we wanted to put into this cornucopia of deaths... thus another CD was inevitable, which we decided to annex to the comic book.

This second record was made in collaboration with two other Klanggalerie artists, Phil Sanderson and Geins't Nait, but we even decided to celebrate a dear, real friend that left in April 2020 because of the well known Covid-19, Zagor Camillas. The song we made featured him as well, as his bandmate Ruben Camillas, intrigued by the GDK project, dug into the archive and found an unexpected draft of a song for piano and voice. Vonneumann provided new sounds and Barnacles put the whole thing together. The result was so great that we all decided to place this new track, done in 2024, on the first CD. 

The final seal was set. The GDK was ready to make itself known to the world.

A huge thank you to all those who had to die to make this possible – this wouldn't have been possible without your incredible cooperation!

DISCLAIMER: many musicians were harmed irrecoverably in the making of this.

2024

REVIEWS, COMMENTS and more: Mark Fisher of SKiN GRAFT, SodaPop, Vital Weekly...

"Seeing the homage to the Mount Shasta Nodule 7″and comic cover – and then digging deeper and finding out that the classic SKiN GRAFT comic characters like Hot Satan and Serious Brown actually have cameos within the pages of the comic book is an incredible feeling." SKiN GRAFT (Mark Fisher)

Limited Edition Double Compact Disc + Comic book

- the regular album in 4 panel digipack, with cover design inspired by the famous Mount Shasta Nodule 7" (homage to Gumballhead the Cat)
- the bonus CD EP "More Freshly Baked Corpses for the Kid" of unlrealead tracks in collaboration with Geins't Nait and Philip Sanderson;
- "The Gravedigger Kid" 28 pages full comic book in 18x18 mm format by Raffaele Capasso, Barnacles and Vonneumann.

Limited to 100 copies!

Limited Edition Compact Disc in 4 panels digipack

- the regular album in 4 panel digipack, with cover design inspired by the famous Mount Shasta Nodule 7" (homage to Gumballhead the Cat)