It’s been around two and a half years since we started propagating our debut record, The History of Science & How to Mend a Broken Heart, by leaving numbered copies lying around in public places for the lucky and curious to pick up, take home and redeposit in a spot of their own choosing. It went, as the phrase goes, global. Almost to every continent in fact – an unequivocal low-rent marketing success.

And while the drops of History of Science… are an ongoing project (and we will continue to chart the record’s travels on our map), now we have a new record…

Oh yes, you heard right – a new record with new tunes and new words. It’s called Tomato Soup & Ghosts and it’s available for download, right here, right now – all for the price of free. The first one took us four years to make; this one took just over a month, recorded (and partially written) between March and April this year.

In many ways Tomato Soup & Ghosts is an exercise in quick song-writing and recording. It’s perhaps more intimate-sounding than before, and rough around the edges too, like a bunch of demos with a veneer of production. We couldn’t get together much during the recording process and as a result, it’s half and half: Scott wrote, sang and recorded half of it, Simon the other half. Scott’s are the ones that are all names.

We’re not doing any clever promotion this time either; it’s what you might call a ‘quiet release’. But we have packaged it all up for you in a handy little parcel of stuff that includes a *14-page digital pamphlet!!* (a pdf with some words and pictures in). So all you have to do is download, unzip and drag the resulting folder straight into iTunes. The rest is done by the magic Apple pixies – album cover displayed, lyrics embedded, songs in the right order and everything.

We hope you like it, or at least some of it, and we are happy to field all shades of praise, vitriol and indifference – just mail it to info_at_thewonderlandproject.org.

In the meantime we are going to start doing something else, fickle, restless artistes that we are.

Ps. If Mumford & Sons are reading I’d like you to do a proper version of Danny please, inserting that thing where you do the big shouty harmony and then play really fast with banjos. Ta. – Scott.

So, in the end we got out about 350 CDs to the streets of just about everywhere. We’ve had CDs travel to Berlin, the States, Nova Scotia, Australia, Japan, and most importantly to Bridlington Bay in the fair UK. A success by many standards. We got some airplay, and had a lot of fun. Thanks everso to everyone who helped us out and for making the experiment so rewarding.

We then had a few months off to do whatever people do without projects that suck up their very lives. It was nice. We did stuff with the kids. We wrote stories, took pictures, listened to records, watched telly. You know, stuff.

And so. A new year brings new ideas. It may not have escaped your notice that the last record took four (count ‘em) years to make. We can’t do that again, it broke us, but we do like making stuff. Anyway, we’ll have some news regarding what the press like to call “new material” in the next couple of weeks. Obviously, the press don’t say that about us because we’re so far off the radar as to be practically non-existent, but you get the idea.

Inabit.

Si xx

You may remember that a month ago we went on Radio Reverb here in Brighton on the Kairen Kemp show to promote THOSAHTMABH. Well,due to various gremlins, that show never went out, but the good news is that it’s going out today (6/9/09)!

You can listen live in Brighton on 97.2FM or tune in via the web at http://www.radioreverb.com

The KairenKemp show will air at 2pm today, and again at 2am on Monday.

We enjoyed a nice bit of media exposure at the weekend, on the BBC no less, when we were invited to do a little interview on Southern Counties Radio’s South Live programme with Kairen Kemp (thanks Kairen!). They also played out You Look Prettier When I’m Happy from the album The History of Science & How to Mend a Broken Heart.

The programme is currently available to listen again here and we appear at about 40 minutes in (I think). I’m afraid you’ll need Real Player to make it work though…

The Wonderland Project is having a weekend of radio interviews. The first is the Kairen Kemp show for Radio Reverb in Brighton (97.2FM, or http://www.radioreverb.com), which goes out Sunday afternoon. The second is a live interview for BBC Radio Sussex (http://www.bbc.co.uk/southerncounties/local_radio/), again with Kairen which goes out between 7-9pm on Sunday night.

Here’s hoping we don’t swear, or embarrass ourselves totally. In our heads, we’ll be as erudite as Stephen Fry, but I fear we might be more Liam Gallagher. Tune in to find out!

UPDATE: We’re on Reverb in ten minutes, and BBC Sussex/Surrey at 7pm tonight. Reverb pre-recorded, BBC not. Let’s hope we don’t swear.

UPDATE2, 2.11pm: Or not. We’re not strictly speaking Buddhists. WTF?

UPDATE 3, 2.20pm: Dead air from Reverb. Nuclear strike imminent?

UPDATE 4, 3pm: Reverb’s back, but we’re not. Whoops. Move along everyone. Let’s hope the BBC one pans out later!

UPDATE 5, 8pm: Back from the BBC. We played “drop tag” & didn’t swear. Thanks for having us on Kairen!

Yes folks, CD310 has made it from Oxford, England, all the way to Fukuoka City in Japan. This is seriously exciting; a whole new territory for us!

Thanks so much to Kimi who made the drop in the Morris pub, and to her unnamed boyfriend in Oxford who took the trouble to send her the CD all that way.

I wanted to put a pic of the pub up, but online promotion has eluded the establishment, which is a shame. If anyone has a pic of the pub itself, please drop us a line. In the meantime, a photo of this beautiful city will have to do!

[ Update: We now have a pic of the Morris pub - thanks Kimi! I think we'll keep the photo of Fukuoka City too, though, since it's so nice! ]

This lot are quite fun:

The disposable memory project

Essentially, they’re doing roughly the same as us, but instead of records, they leave cameras to be passed around. I note the guy in charge appears to be an ex DeepEnd design bod. I had an interview with DeepEnd in the late nineties, and they had the *loudest* drum and bass playing in the office and the wing of a Cesna as a conference table. Truly excellent Web 1.0 nutters.

Good luck to them anyway. I wonder if they nicked the idea from Radio 4 too?

In a TWP “Black Op”, one of our Australian undercover agents has dropped a CD in the Degraves Espresso café in Melbourne, Australia. The photo above was taken by our operative moments after the drop!

It’s a CD with no slipcase or number, so if you find it, scrawl an identifying number/code on the back and drop it again (and let us know where!)

Well, sort of.

One of our roving scouts fittingly (or should that be ironically?) left a CD in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (hello).

Unfortunately, we can’t remember what number CD it was. If you find it, please let us know.

PS. I’ve since been told this was CD151. Thanks Jude.

The Wonderland Project were drafted in to create the music for the 2008 Vicinitee Christmas card. Vicinitee is an online building community system. The idea was to create music to complement the gentle animation created by the lovely Mo MacNeill. It’s a kind of Eno-festive electronic feast!

See it here

Happy Christmas!