digital thermometer by Burnt Ogre

a short collection of off-cuts and formless things.

if there's a theme here, it's transience; the tracks are full of instruments i had, used, and sold to get other instruments; there is a funereal tone to most of the tracks; and they all come from the 'mixdowns' folder on my desktop, the immediate dumping ground for iterative mixes of released work, amongst which I found these 5 tracks that i'm actually quite fond of.

'sumer is icumen in' is a centuries-old pop song, which richard thompson has done a rabble-rousing cover of, but was also featured at the climax of the film 'the wicker man'. my arrangement was an attempt at a faithful cover of the version used in the film, but became something else. i used the behringer wasp deluxe reissue for the melody as well as the hi-hats and snare, which goes some way to giving the track it's hauntological/radiophonic feel. the guitars are actually both the same take, but split into clean and distorted, each of which has a different emphasis and dynamic.

'worms' is a fragment of 'the hearse song', a trad song cropped down by the pogues, which my brother requested when i decided to do one-hour covers during covid; while my attempts at simply red's 'stars' and gorky's' 'poodle rocking' were dreadful, this track has some experiments i think paid off, and felt it fitted with the sounds and themes of this collection.

'hobs moat' is a tune that is probably too melodic and straightforward for me to do anything with, much like the never finished 'jesus is a rubbish role model' (ask me about it sometime). hobs moat itself is a strange formation in the arse-end of solihull. i found it from the name of a gp somewhere, which stood out due to the use of the word 'hob', like 'hob's lane' in quatermass and the pit. i looked it up on the map, and drove my family out there for a day out; they thought it was a bit crap but to me it had all sorts hauntological feelings. a pair of teenage girls were hitting each other with logs; cats ran rampant and we saw them in the process of successfully hunting mice across tarmac; and the housing estate abruptly stops where a large field begins, surrounding a small word. the wood did indeed cover what is now just some very steep tumults, and it has a very fae/pagan atmosphere (to me at least, like some sort of sacred grove), as well as just enough significance to have an information sign and a wikipedia page, neither of which ultimately can decide on what the place *is*.

'the lost dub' is a mix i found while going through 'burnt ogre' files in september 2025, in order to produce a mix that can be performed live. i had obviously aborted it and i think eventually turned it into the very different and more pop-oriented 'burnt ogre (burnt ogre remix)'. this uses the 5-string bass also used on worms, which i sold to buy the wasp, which i also no longer have. it feels slightly low-effort and there's no echo sweeps or anything live like that, but i'm not going back and fixing it now. it's just how it was at the time.

finally, i thought i might as well put up the 'vertically integrated sluice' of unbilever, which i put out ahead of the full thing as a taster. 'vertical integration' is that thing that happens in capitalism when, e.g. a movie studio owns the parts of the chain like the cinemas - good news for them, bad news for us - which fitted with the anti-capitalist messaging of unbilever. felt like a good play on a 'vertical slice', where software companies etc produce a fully-completed section to showcase what the whole thing will be able to do (except it's a sluice now). this particular part of unbilever happened fairly late on, and was the combination of a simple guitar riff in an odd metre i sketched out one day at work, and staying up past two on a friday night working it in reaper. i dug out the sample of the film alien and used it as a vocal, which is closer to what i was going for on unbilever than most of the rest of it, where the samples were used kind of more for illustration than their musicality (an exception to this would be the sample of lesbo pig's track 'itchy nip', that occurs about 6'45'' into the full track). i was struggling ahead of putting uniblever out, as i'd wanted to do a series of micro-blips but they just didn't work out of the context of the full record. producing this cut was a different way, to find something that stood on it's own and had the intensity to maybe make people sit up and listen. anyway it didn't, so i'm working on taking the unbilever experience live to try to reach people.

i hope you it's a positive experience for you - thanks and i'll be back soon with 'unbilever 2: wherever you get your podcasts'. until then... grilly.


p.s. I've added my meditation on 'avinu malkeinu' to this release, which i've been playing as a guitar instrumental for many years. I'd hoped to do a whole album of klezmer/yiddish covers but it never gets near enough the top of the to-do list to make the cut. anyway, everything's feeling very yom kippur at the moment, and i felt the need to get this one recorded and released. hope you find it helpful.

Burnt Ogre is a post-prog-core home recording project disorganised by Grilly.

see also: totheboats.bandcamp.com

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