The second leg of the 1996 tour began with the first of three transmissions the band broadcast to French station Fun Radio. The transmission actually began with Garry attempting his French in conversation with the presenters, put through a pitch shifter, as evidenced on this bootleg. He informs them the band will be playing “sonique electronique”, as well as answering questions with samples of laughter, all on top of a background environment of sounds frequently used in the tour. This is the first documented case of this kind of interview, a step on from the plain interviews or simply an introduction, as heard on the earlier UK shows. Garry later told Toronto Sun “I’ll do interviews on the radio before a gig, and some of the questions I’ll answer straight, some through a voice processor. And for some, I just drop appropriate voice samples taken from films that can say more than I can.” Fancy words for what is basically trolling.
The aforementioned bootleg also gives us a date for the transmission, as the one given with The Pod Room release is clearly wrong. It’s a largely familiar show of known music, environments and samples, with the usual subtle variation: ‘We Have Explosive (Herd Killing)’ features a lot of spoken samples on top, there’s some metallic percussion added near the end of ‘Max’, ‘War Machines’ is overlaid with ‘Kaaawa’ and ‘We Have Explosive (Part 1)’ environments. The transmission ends with its only exclusive piece: ‘Everyone in the World’, bringing the show to a slow, almost serene end. The final sample is the first appearance of the “Bonjour Monsieur. / What? / It’s French. / Oh.” quote, which finds a fitting home on this first French transmission.
The show was released in a Pod Room update 1st February 2010, credited as being broadcast on 17th May 1997.
Tracklist
00:00 Transmission intro
00:52 We Have Explosive (Herd Killing)
05:00 Slow of Motion
05:35 Accompaniment for Melodious Expression environment
06:19 Unknown environment
06:50 My Kingdom
10:46 Unknown environment
11:15 We Have Explosive (Part 2)
14:10 Max
17:00 Unknown environment
17:45 War Machines
21:49 Environments – Birds
22:04 Her Face Forms in Summertime
27:20 Everyone in the World
29:23 Unknown
30:13 Transmission end
Fractional Difference 