When we formed Fez Bastard, a kind of silly angry shouty electronic band with an unhealthy obsession with masks, we based it on two simple principles:

"fun over quality"

and

"creativity over professionalism."

Because fuck quality and definitely fuck professionalism.

Since Napster and the MP3 revolution musicians, artists and bands have been forced into a corner -- do it yourself or die.

Gone are the days when you would just form a kickass band and wait for a label to pick you up and take care of everything.

Now bands need to do the tour management, the marketing, the sales, supervise the album pressing and, in some cases, studio engineering, post production and mastering.

All by themselves.

Basically what the DIY scene was doing all along.

Paradoxically, though, this has not led to the DIY values extending to the rest of the music industry.

Instead of embracing solidarity, mutual support, fostering local and regional scenes and so on, many musicians have turned towards entrepreneurship, social media marketing, image control and a dark obsession with "professionalism" that has taken all the joy out of music and the culture surrounding it.

An elitism that centres around "doing things the right way" and "making sure you remain appealing to the audience."

All of this stifles the joy of a music scene as well as the creative process.

And we say, "Yeah -- fuck that thanks."

Hence: Fun over Quality and Creativity over Professionalism.

And our ridiculous love of masks, lack of coherent vision and doing things WRONG.

And it's in this spirit that we set about creating this..

At first, we simply wanted to launch our album on video.

We were already putting it out on tape, so we thought, "What the fuck. Let's put it out on video, too."

Then we realised our album was 35 minutes long, and most videos are over 2 hours.

So we thought, "OK. We can fill that up."

We tried. And failed.

Then we thought, "Hey! Let's get other people involved!"

And we did.

And now we have a massive beast on our hands.

This album, that you can get digitally here, or on cassette.

But also a 2-hour-20-minute long VHS of fucked up animations, music videos, fake adverts, film trailers for films that will never be made and much more.

As more and more amazing artists from all over the world, artists with a strong instinct for what makes a scene great, got involved, the more the concept developed.

The concept of a "found VHS."

The VHS we are launching on the 24th Oct at Fabrika Avtonomia is a video recorded off some long-forgotten channel from the late 80s called Keith TV.

So once again.

Fun over Quality.

Creativity over Professionalism.

And let's all just do things WRONG!