“Don’t Leave Me Tired” / “The Unloved Insane” (Target Records TGT 006) 1992

Both sides of this debut record are trippy mind blowers with fuzz, sitar, distortion and eerie sound effects. I’m amazed that a band could get this sort of Electric Prunes inspired sound in 1991.

The back cover of the sleeve indicates that the music was recorded in the Summer of ’91 but the record wasn’t released until the following year!

The Vibrasonic were just two English musicians, Victor K. Fitch and Simon Paul Jones although the strangely named Dr Daryl Bowers played organ on ’The Unloved Insane’…. This is psychedelia of the highest order, shame though that the vocals are deeply buried in the mix. This could have been intentional of course.

The single came with an insert from Target Records confirming their previous releases and a future 45 from an outfit called Arthur, available from the 5th November, 1992.

And at a period in time when CD was King and no one in their right minds wanted vinyl they were selling their singles for £2 each including postage and packing. My word, haven’t the prices increased dramatically over the course of thirty years.

Richard Prest interviewed Vibrasonic many years ago on his now archived yahoo page “Shake” – he sent me a link back in 2008 but it no longer works. Fortunately, I saved it back then and have reproduced some of the dialogue here.

How Long Have You Been Together? How did Vibrasonic come about?

The first single was recorded in the Summer of 1991 and released one year later on Target (“Don’t Leave Me Tired”/”The Unloved Insane”). I had been experimenting, writing and recording on a portastudio with Vic (Fitch) since 1991. We were friends and started making music together after Vic’s old group called The Sound Asleep broke up. Vibrasonic was never a band as such, more a project. We could not find the right musicians for a full-time band. We stopped in Winter 1996.

What Infulenced your music?

Simon Jones – 13th Floor Elevators, The Seeds, The Electric Prunes, Fuzz, The Everly Brothers, The Ventures, Tremelo, Reverb, Dick Dale, Instrumental Groups of the 60s, Japanese and Indian classical and film music, Vibrato, 50s Rock and Roll, Horror and Sci-fi B-Movies, Echo, Film Soundtracks and Cartoons, Japanese G.S groups, Marijuana and LSD.

Vic Fitch – 13th floor Elevators, Echo, The Electric Prunes, The Soft Boys, Film Soundtracks, Tremelo, Reverb, Vibrato, 70s Punk, Indian Music, David Bowie, Small Faces, The Rolling Stones, Syd Barrett, The Beatles, Vaudeville, Marijuana, LSD and Beer.

Do you strive to produce an as authentic 60s sound and style as you can? How important is authenticity to you?

We just prefer older sounds. We always used very primitive equipment to record, mainly due to us having no money. We just wanted sounds that we heard in our record collections and the equipment needed to make them was always stuff that other groups at the time or shopkeepers thought was just old shit.

So we used to find things we would have paid a lot of money for, but the shopkeepers would think they were no use to anyone anymore and let us have them for next to nothing. They would laugh at us thinking we were mad for wanting old equipment.

Now we laugh at them when we see how expensive and sought after this ‘old shit’ is now. Luckily we have almost every piece of equipment we ever wanted now so we didn’t have to pay the silly prices being asked for the stuff we use today. I Wouldn’t say old equipment is better than new, it’s just my own personal taste