VLS Offal by MightyPing

This is a special album, but don't take our word for it, this is what Igloo Magazine think of it:
"VLS Offal is a jaw-dropping amalgam of some of the best in the abstract electronic field, giving respect to VLS by sampling his strangely captivating and hilarious conversations along the way. Certainly not to be missed, and one of the best sample-laden compilations we’ve heard in a while."

Victor Lewis-Smith obituary by Heinz Jaki-Volvo:

Victor Lewis-Smith (VLS) was a (very) controversial and eccentric British comedian who very quickly revolutionised radio, and latterly TV, humour. As a journalist he was best known as a TV and food critic where he turned both forms of observation on their head in hilarious and very cutting, cruel ways. His writing for the British press covered many of the national newspapers, as well as magazines. His Private Eye page was cherished for decades, and he held a notorious column in The Evening Standard, London’s main newspaper, for 15 years, ripping apart famous television broadcasts in a way never done before – he held no prisoners, and it was hilarious, but also insightful, pre-dating Charlie Brooker by many years. He achieved this effortlessly in a daily column because he knew TV, which is why he quickly became an innovative TV director, producer, and broadcaster in his own right with his own production company Associated Rediffusion, through which came lunatic comedy shows, like TV Offal and Ads Infinitum, as well as penetrating journalistic documentaries.
However, it is the way he set the airwaves alight for which he will be best remembered. In the early 80s he progressed from turning local radio on its head at BBC Radio York, and also Radio Medway, to national BBC Radio 4 on shows Start The Week, Mid Week and Loose Ends where he wasted no time in breaking all of the rules with his truly innovative style where layers and layers of his own voices, tape winds, jingles, incidental music and sound effects to create a madcap, relentless sound design that became a major influence on the then unknown Chris Morris a decade later, who followed in the footsteps of VLS in the world of on-the-edge comedy outrage. Biographer Lucian Randall captured it perfectly:
“Evolving a breakneck, powerhouse style of his own as a performer of radio comedy, VLS created lightning-fast, densely-packed sketches, often linked by manic tape winds. He multitracked multiple characters and did his own jingles in mocking BBC harmonies. He was, said Morris, a ‘fully loaded weapon’, someone who had also come up through radio rather than stand-up and ‘unquestionably one of the few who’ve taken radio by the horns’.”
Both comedians were edgy to say the least, and both were banned by the BBC on more than one occasion, but before Chris Morris had emerged from BBC Radio Bristol into national stations VLS, not satisfied with just alarming Radio 4, now took on BBC Radio 1 as well. He was winning awards left, right and centre and his frenetic, hilarious new show for Radio 1 left him with the Best Comedy Radio Programme award in the 1990 British Comedy Awards.
During this same time there were the prank telephone calls to famous people and establishments – if people know only one thing about VLS it is probably the prank calls. So effective, so funny, and so controversial that CDs and cassettes of them were released, reaching the top of the iTunes comedy chart. The most famous call of all even got used on the UK number 1 album U.F.Orb by The Orb. For him there were no limits, and so his victims even included Princess Diana and the White House to hilarious effect.
The music producers on this lovingly constructed compilation album grew up in that golden era when VLS set the airwaves alight with his outrage and his madcap ways. Many of the tracks herein contained feature bits and pieces from those prank calls and radio shows – they make ideal fodder for sampling, adding a whole new edge to electronic music. The end result is a collection of amazing music that travels in so many different directions, always held together by the continuity of VLS’s lunacy. This is an album that will have you dancing, bopping, and wiggling, but also crying with laughter, and though the music will compel you to play it again and again, the bits of VLS that pop up throughout will create a kind of addictive obsession that will ensure you want to play it even more than that.
In his student days VLS studied music, which is why his self-created jingles were beyond sophistication with their dense compositional lampooning styles, which means we feel confident he would have loved this album. It was in the days that he was studying music that he was arrested for choosing to climb on top of York Minster and bellow out the ‘adhan’…
VLS had an obsessive, colourful career out of the things he loved, which was writing, radio, TV, food, music and….the telephone, this quote proves how much he loved the last of these:
“These days, there’s a vast array of specialist services on offer via the telephone. Every interest is catered for, although, if the pre-recorded medical helplines I phoned yesterday were a representative sample, then most are a load of rubbish. The Tinnitus line just rang and rang, the Circumcision line cut me off, the Diarrhoea line was engaged all day, the Premature Ejaculation line was all over in a couple of seconds and, as for the Amnesia line….well, I couldn’t remember the number.”

RIP Victor Lewis-Smith and thanks for turning our heads upside down in our formative years!

Heinz Jaki-Volvo, 2023

MightyPing is a collaboration between Mighty Force records and Pingdiscs, two long-standing champions of the finest in experimental electronic music! MightyPing is a spurious power in untold audio magic...