Stop Your Nonsense

''Stop Your Nonsense'' is the debut album by English musical duo Position Normal, released in August 1999 by Mind Horizon Recordings. The album is constructed primarily from samples and found sounds, often taken from unusual vintage sources such as second-hand children's records and answer machine cassettes, often purchased by member Chris Bailiff in jumble sales and charity shops, or inherited from his father. Bailiff's bandmate John Cushway also contributes instrumentation and vocals. Released to critical acclaim, ''Stop Your Nonsense'' was praised for its distinctively whimsical and eccentric style, with writer Simon Reynolds later crediting the album for pioneering hauntology music. Position Normal later re-released the album themselves.

Background and production

Position Normal emerged in London in the late 1990s, consisting of producer Chris Bailiff and vocalist/guitarist John Cushway, both are former art students. In the years prior to forming Position Normal, project leader Bailiff's first group Bugger Sod dissolved, and he faced mental issues such as public anxiety, and felt focusing on making music was a therapeutic activity. The duo's only release as Position Normal prior to ''Stop Your Nonsense'' was the twelve-inch single "Part of the Bugger Sod Empire" (1998). Bailiff aimed to create his own distinctive sound for ''Stop Your Nonsense'', dispirited that other music was what he described as "sounds from people that wanted to be part of something as opposed to being themselves." Although not wishing to be part of musical trends, he later commented that the album "sonically suggests that I had absolutely no idea of what musical scenes were happening around me at the time."

For musical inspiration and for sourcing samples for ''Stop Your Nonsense'', Bailiff went to charity shops and car boot sales purchasing the cheapest records he could afford "with beautiful artwork and photography/illustration". He listened to various sources, including electronic music, easy listening, bands like T. Rex, church bells, "old music radio stations", world service radio, radio interference and "fruit and vegetable markets". He later commented: "You never know where the next lovely sounds are going to come from and what style or from what era they will be. There is no way of knowing, before you hear it, how you are going to feel or react." Sources for samples on the album included spoken word albums, nursery rhyme records and documentary records collected by his father, who had developed Alzheimer's and was unable to continue collecting, leaving Bailiff to archive his own "history".

Featuring an image of a child revving a toy car on the album sleeve, ''Stop Your Nonsense'' was Position Normal's sole recording for Mind Horizon Recordings. Having been signed to the label by an A&R sole, the duo believed Mind Horizon to be a small independent label, but later discovered it was being funded by PolyGram, who Bailiff dismissed as egotists. He later commented: "When the bosses of Polygram found out that Position Normal was on their label they went ape shit. They spent the next five months trying to kick me out."

Composition

''Stop Your Nonsense'' is a fuzzy, sample-based lo-fi album, consisting mostly of short tracks. It is constructed entirely out of samples, aside from Cushway's sporadic vocals and ethereal guitar work. The samples, many of which are voices, are variably either sourced from or resemble unusual vintage items, such as spoken word albums, faded BetaMax videos, time-worn answer machine cassettes and old reel-to-reel tapes. The fragmented speech samples are turned into "melodious mosaics" according to writer Simon Reynolds, who wrote: "Position Normal music is woven almost entirely out of samples which have a musty quality redolent of things stowed away in attics and forgotten for decades. This is B-boy crate-digging adapted to the English landscape of jumble sales and Oxfam." According to Tom Ewing of ''Freaky Trigger'', the album aims to "take a bit of background noise and move it up front, spend a track exploring it. More often than not this sound is human speech."

The recurrent sampled children's voices, cover picture and album title have led critics to describe ''Stop Your Nonsense'' as childlike in nature. Dominant throughout the album are sampled music taken from 1960s and 1970s children's albums and television series, material which makes heavy usage of horns, whistles and commonplace percussion. According to Ewing, the second half of the album is largely "a big dreamy suite of children’s voices babbling away between half-remembered TV themes and carefree sonic gurgles." According to Reynolds, a production trick used throughout is combining reverb and filtering to make sounds "glint like they've been irradiated by a sudden shaft of sunlight pouring into a gloomy room." Despite being sample-based, the homemade quality of the album emphasises a feel of hand-made tape loops; the writer says "collage-wise, it's somewhere between Nurse with Wound and De La Soul's first album. Only ''Nonsenses stoned-to-say-the-least aura locates the album in the post-rave Nineties."

Critics compared the album's surreal, eccentric style to Dadaism and whimsical English comedians and humorists like Ivor Cutler, Viv Stanshall, Chris Morris, Spike Milligan and Reeves & Mortimer. In an interview with ''PopMatters'', Reynolds reflected that the album's eccentric usage of odd samples and dreamy, Durutti Column-style guitar related to the whimsical, ethereal side of late 1970s post-punk that was absent in the more angular post-punk revival bands of the ensuing decade, comparing it to the unusual "bedsit" one-off singles of acts like Family Fodder and the Native Hipsters played by radio DJ John Peel. The album's usage of found sound, such as Cockney stallholders in a fruit and vegetable market or a phone message left by one Aunty Betty for her niece Doreen, drew comparison to the interludes on Saint Etienne's first two albums. The poetic speech on "Jimmy Had Jane" bears the influence of Dr. Seuss

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