Category Archives: The Exciting Hellebore Shew

Hellebore Shew is a weekly radio show, produced by poet and musician Dan Wilson.

“I know tape-dropping sounds like such an unprofitable, losery thing to do but just be thankful that I’m not doing something really anti-social like making colages from cut up Argos catalogues and porno magazines and super-gluing them to telephone boxes.”

“Tape-dropping is a nice exciting method of music distribution that has its roots in the historic medieval pastime of twig-dropping; leaving oddly shaped twigs around the courtyard to freak out the superstitious. Whether they be gentry or serf, it mattered not.”

Dan Wilson – The Philosophy of Mediadropping

‘The Philosophy of Mediadropping’ is a relentless musing on the practice of mediadropping – the dropping of home-made CDs, DVDs, tapes, books, manuscripts, etc. in public places for random people to find.

Mediadropping is a pathological habit of mine. My old Resonance show, ‘The Exciting Hellebore Shew’, documented many mediadroppings in detail (or tapedroppings as I referred to them back then, as cassette was the weapon of choice). Special ‘music’ was consigned to cassette or CD-R and scattered hither and thither. Over time, an instrumentarium was built up specifically geared toward sonically shocking unsuspecting mediadropping recipients.

Mediadropping may be seen as a physical analogue of the ‘crapflooding’ and ‘trolling’ phenomena of the internet age, but this is a debatable comparison to be treated in a later posting here. In the meantime, tune in to catch ‘The Philosophy of Mediadropping’ and hear Luscombe’s voice fed through a sawn-off trolley and a garage door. Feel the cassette-grot erode your tolerance threshold.

The Exciting Hellebore Shew: Unlistenable Special

Piping out unenlightened smog for the inverted jet nozzle of your sound perception to spray your brain internally with sweet anti-music… you guessed it, we present a compilation of deliberately unlistenable noise-musics.

  • Introduction, recounting the story of essex white-van lads who force passers-by to listen to happy-hardcore and gabba techno resulting in their arrest.
  • Sweet, Sweet Anti-Music.
  • Pulsar Cannon – an electro pop number simoltaneously boasting of Dan’s game-playing ability whilst bemoaning his own sense of social exclusion.
  • Tape made for George Webster’s Mum – Please do not let your son insult me in those ways. He casts doubt on my sexuality.
  • Untitled Track (Recorded on two tape-recorders in a bornmouth hotel. )
  • Jim’l Fix It

The Exciting Hellebore Shew: Jumped Skywards

So… you’ve jumped skyward, walked forward, stepped backward, looked downward, you’ve been in all directions but now it’s time to go awkward.

  • Life of Leylandii.
  • Helecopter Crash Fasions (harsh-sounding electro pop instrumental)
  • Uncomfortability introduction (crazy person on a train)
  • Uncomfortability
  • Lament for the demise of the casette – the Resonance Tape-Dropping project.
  • Mrs Shardenfraude (Performed on a barbed-wire guitar)
  • Story: Making the Animal Pretty
  • Mode of Transport (Partly recorded in an industrial water-barrel)
  • I Collect Plastics – Transistor Six, featuring Sexton Ming
  • Untitled mediochre tape-dropping noises.

The Exciting Hellebore Shew: Rambling Special

Pilfering through the voices of today’s logicians… First Broadcast on October 23, 2003.

  • Begins with nose-picking complaint, instructing listeners not to listen to the Hellebore Shew.
  • ‘Bring me a hail of slow-motion on a plate please (followed by the aerial bombardment of your head)’ – Ray Stispozeille, an atempt to subvert the ‘think before you talk’ ethic. Unintentionally tedious.
  • Commentary: The rights and wrongs of tape-dropping fodder.
  • Ripe, Ripe Vegetable
  • Intermission by poet and musician Mr Legge, in which he interrupts his own performance with an ad-hoc poetry one-man convention.
  • Makeover – recorded betwixt the 20th and 21st centuries in Hertfordshire.

The Exciting Hellebore Shew: Bush Special

First broadcast on November 19th 2003, this episode of the Exciting Hellebore Shew celebrates George W Bush’s visit to London. It’s dedicated to the American president, and also to bushes in general. The highlight of the show is certainly “chemical attack”.

  • George Bush introduction.
  • A Recording made from within a bush.
  • Re-constituted tape found within a bush. A selection of distorted and garbled high-NRG tunes.
  • George W Bush poem (by George W. Bush)
  • Blunder Baby (Does anyone want a hamburger?)
  • Chemical attack on the underground
  • The Grandmother
  • The Exciting Hellebore Shew: Robot Shew

    Dan finds himself made redundant because a robot voice has taken over the Hellebore Shew.

    * Introduction: Conflict with a some kind of robotic voice thing, leads to a lamentably shambolic fight in the studio.

    * Catch the nail-bomber.

    * Kerb Crawling in the 22nd centuary, interrupted with an actual act of wandering around.

    * A high-brow link, interupted as the robot thing attempts to eat Dan’s notes as revenge for disconnection. On radio… nobody can hear you cry (except the engineer)

    * Untitled Track – “Just a Load of Noise”

    * The real Dan Wilson unmasks an imposter.

    The Exciting Hellebore Shew: Audio Flyering Special

    A documentary on audio-flyering (or tapedropping): the unfine art of purposefully dropping a cassette of supposedly messed-up “distressed” music and sound as an affront to music retail. This episode was first broadcast on October 17th 2003.