Tag Archives: He Said

Sketching Venus – lvu (Edvard Graham Lewis Venursion)

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One of the great pleasures of my Mortality Tables collaborative projects is being able to collaborate with artists who’ve released material through Mute. So far I’ve worked with Vince Clarke, Simon Fisher Turner, Gareth Jones and Maps, and there are several more collaborations in the works.

Yesterday, I released a new / old release which included a completely new version by Edvard Graham Lewis (Wire / He Said / Dome etc).

Full press release details below.

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In 2000, I made an album under the alias Sketching Venus. Hardly anyone heard it, and that’s how it should probably stay.

While revisiting and archiving old files, I came upon one track from the album, ‘lvu’, which stood out, and which I felt like I needed to do something with. It is unique, in the sense that it is the only song where you’ll hear me singing. It is also unique within the sound pieces that I’ve made over the years, in that every highly processed sound was made with a guitar.

Specifically, it was my ex-girlfriend’s guitar who I’d messily broken up with during the Millennium celebrations. ‘lvu’ was made at the very start of a new relationship, with my future wife. I think of it as a reflection on endings and beginnings.

Around this time, I was listening to a lot of Wire. My lyrics and vocals were a crude attempt to channel the band’s songwriter, bassist and occasional vocalist Edvard Graham Lewis, who has created a new version of ‘lvu’ that includes his own vocals.

The single is rounded out by a hypnotic remix by frequent Mortality Tables collaborator Rupert Lally.

Available at  mortalitytables.bandcamp.com

[1] lvu (Original Version)
[2] lvu (Rupert Lally Remix)
[3] lvu (Edvard Graham Lewis Venursion)

‘lvu’ originally appeared on the mostly unavailable Sketching Venus album svUTLD01abm (NominalMusics, 2000).

released March 28 2025 

[1] Written and produced by Mat Smith (2000) 
[2} Additional production and remix by Rupert Lally (2024) 
[3] Additional production and vocals by Edvard Graham Lewis (2025). Edvard Graham Lewis appears courtesy of Upp Records. 

Mastered by James Edward Armstrong 

Original photography by unknown photographer, Orlando, FL on 5 September 2001 

[1] Design and image processing by alka 
[2 + 3] Design and image processing by Andrew Brenza 
[3] Image re-processing by alka 

A Mortality Tables Product 
MTP38

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Mortality Tables / Documentary Evidende

FITTED – First Fits

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FITTED is a spontaneously-established quartet of Graham Lewis and Matthew Simms from the current Wire line-up, Minutemen’s Mike Watt and Bob Lee from Fearless Leader. The group came together during the LA date at The Echo on Wire’s DRILL 2017 festival tour, rehearsed just once and then took to the stage for a blistering performance loosely based on Dome’s ‘Jasz’, which, after several iterations in the studio, emerges on the group’s debut album as the biographical ‘The Legend Of Lydmar Lucia’.

That track acts as a logical centrepoint to a collection of six tracks that operate on a unique pathway between spacey, acid-fried grooves, the upstart urgency of punk and art-rock. ‘The Legend Of Lydmar Lucia’ finds Lewis intoning a diaristic spoken-word recollection of a particularly vivid art happening at Santa Lucia’s Lydmar Gallery, his delivery carrying the kind of oblique, unfathomable wordplay that is highly familiar from his occasional lead vocals with Wire. The unfamiliar aspect of this track is the swirling, turgid, many-layered bed of sound upon which his vocal rests; murky, impenetrable, thrilling and restless, the sonic stew created by the four musician’s is a breathtakingly complex listen, and a perfect foil for Lewis’s intonation.

Something similar happens on the ultimately incendiary and boisterous opening track, ‘Plug In The Jug’, with lead vocals from Mike Watt. ‘Plug In The Jug’ starts out in tentative, atmospheric territory, sound washing in and out but building, building, building toward something initially unclear but finally coalescing into a groove somewhere between The Doors at their most focussed and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley at his Krautrocking, cyclical drumming best.

Elsewhere, ‘The Chunk That Got Chewed’ is a sprawling, beautiful mess of a track with Watt sounding a lot like Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, while closing track ‘The First Fit’ is a mesmerisingly deep piece led by an especially emotional Lewis augmented by wandering, languid jazz rock fluidity buried under treacly reverb.

It’s not clear yet whether FITTED is a one-off project or the start of something that the group will return to whenever schedules allow. What’s immediately clear from the symbiosis of these four talented minds on the six tracks here is that their capacity to produce interesting, engaging, surprising music is probably limitless.

First Fits by FITTED is released November 8 2019 by ORG Music.

Catref: ORGM-2147
Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Documentary Evidence