Randy McStine releases new single with Marco Minnemann

Randy McStine (The Fringe) has released his latest single, Bottom Feeder Blues, with contributions from The Aristocrats drummer Marco Minnemann and Panic! At The Disco's Jesse Molloy on saxophone. You can listen below.

“I wrote the song with an early ‘70s aesthetic in mind as the foundation,” Randy tells Prog. “Guitar-driven rock bands like Montrose and Trapeze... At the same time, I was digging into DJ Shadow’s work, along with Beastie Boys-Paul’s Boutique. I started to see an opportunity to accentuate the subject matter of the song by lifting very specific things from my record collection, chopping them up, manipulating the performances, and weaving them into the fabric. It was an incredibly fun art project, and I got a mischievous kick out of the whole process. Those little bits make the arrangement come to life. If you’d like to go hunting, there’s over a dozen hard rock, progressive rock, and jazz samples, an old TV commercial, and…”

Weaving through genres at a frenzied pace, McStine manages to create a dense, unpredictable backdrop for his lyrical message in just over three and a half minutes.

“I’m really deep into this theme of humanity and technology at the moment,” he continues. “We’re entrenched in a war between the two, although I don’t think we collectively realise it. Retaining our humanity through leaps in tech should be bipartisan and apolitical, but it appears to be the exact opposite at the moment. Our addictions to social media and endless streaming content, along with our desires to want everything for free... these are hungry beasts that never stop feeding. I’m not taking an ‘anti-technology’ stance, but I think we should be talking with one another about how to renegotiate our relationships with it.”

Bottom Feeder Blues is available from McStine's Bandcamp page.

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.