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Artist
Edmund Cake is the pseudonym of Edmund McWilliams, a one time member of Flying Nun Records band Bressa Creeting Cake and a noted producer and engineer. Obsessed from an early age with the production and manipulation of musical sounds, Ed Cake's experience of recording a solo album struck him as a happy return to the solitary experimentation of childhood. Cake recalls a boyhood incident when he was caught modifying his father's prized Pye radiogram in the back of their cluttered suburban garage. By disabling the turntable he managed to convert the fifties audio classic into an amplifier for his newly acquired casio VL tone keyboard. This inspired audio synthesis could be seen as the beginning of a music career defined as much by technical experimentation as song writing. Over fifteen years later, the same deconstructed vl tone makes an appearance on Downtown Puff (Gunga). Much of the material on the album was devised while Cake was living in a third-floor studio space on Gore Street in Auckland's red-light district. This particular audio environment - with its incessant street brawls, strip club pop and Doobie Brothers hits played by the covers band in the 24-hour bar downstairs - provided a peculiar backdrop for the evolution of delicate instrumentals on tracks such as 'Airshow' and 'Watching Me'. It was here too that Cake recorded the one-take improvised vocal for My Son the Harpist, an intentionally free-form lyric which reveals itself to be the story of a complex fathe