100 Copies / Eight Songs / No Algorithm

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

You're not resigned. You're listening.

Instruction Manual for a Finite Object

Step 1: Acquire one of 100 copies. Not 101. Not 99. Exactly 100 exist in this universe. When they're gone, they're gone. No second pressing. No deluxe reissue. No coloured vinyl variant for Record Store Day 2027. This is scarcity as honesty, not marketing.

Step 2: Remove shrink wrap carefully. Notice the weight. 180 grams. Heavier than your phone. Heavier than your attention span. Artwork by Louie Morris. Directed by Pascal Blua. Real humans with real names making real decisions about shapes and colours.

Step 3: Place on turntable. 45 revolutions per minute. Same speed as 1958. Same speed as now. Some things refuse any evolution.

Step 4: Listen to Side A. Four songs recorded at Eve Studios. Richard Harris Bond and Luke Clarke engineered. Arthur, Eddie, Arvin, Matteo, Risha performed. Past tense. Already happened. You're hearing ghosts.

Step 5: Flip. Side B. Air Tight Studios. Seadna McPhail engineering. Four more ghosts. Jason Mitchell mastered everything. Made sure the ghosts were loud enough.

Step 6: Repeat until the grooves wear out or you do. Whichever comes first.

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine

Philip Larkin

Evidence That Five People Existed in Three Different Rooms

Location Alpha / Eve Studios / 2024

Arthur Arnold brings coffee shop shoulders and a guitar. Years of lifting bags of beans. Years of lifting chords. Eddie Wigin's bass is a conversation he's having with himself about nuclear physics. Arvin Johnson hits drums like he's developing photographs in real time—one exposure at a time, permanent, irreversible.

Matteo Fernandes teaches teenagers quadratic equations Monday through Friday. Saturday he brings a trumpet to a studio in a building that used to be something else. Everything used to be something else. Risha Alimchandani's trombone slides through the space where words fail. Where words should fail more often.

They record Adaptive Release. Margate Itch. Compact Risk. Walk In a Straight Line.

The room captures it. Microphones witness it. Cables conspired. This happened. You can hear that it happened.

Location Beta / Air Tight Studios / 2025

Same five people. Different postcode. Different year. Different songs that sound like the same conversation continued after everyone thought it was over.

Silver Lashings: Arthur shouts about survival. About rage. About needing both.

Hulme Highstreet Ablaze: "Brothers of the lung." The stupidest beautiful phrase. The most beautiful stupid phrase. Manchester burning. Manchester always burning. Cities as palimpsests of fire.

Going To Bed: The quiet one. The knife that goes in soft. "When you leave, half of me walks away too." Economy of destruction.

Enoch's Hammer: The closer. The door slamming. The sound of five people leaving a room and the room remembering.

Seadna McPhail records it all. Knows when to press record. Knows when to press stop. Everything between those two moments is music. Everything outside those moments is noise pretending.

Location Gamma / Your Room / Now

You. Listening. The third location. The circuit is complete. Without you, it's just vibrations. With you, it's communion. Or commerce. You choose.

"“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”"

Zora Neale Hurston

This is not tragic. This is not sad. This is five people who refuse to be sad about making music.

The Mathematics of Distance

Equation 1: Geographic Scatter

Arthur Arnold: London (Monmouth Coffee Company, packing beans, studying words at Goldsmiths)

Eddie Wigin: Sellafield, Cumbria (nuclear facility, the things that make the things that might end things)

Arvin Johnson: Manchester (drums, film cameras, intentionality)

Matteo Fernandes: Manchester (teaching maths, playing brass, proving theorems in 4/4 time)

Risha Alimchandani: Manchester (trombone, crackle sounds, Indian classical music via Nitin Sawhney)

Distance between points: Significant.

Distance between sounds: Zero.

Equation 2: Temporal Logistics

Rehearsal frequency: Sporadic

Demo frequency: Constant

Arthur records alone. Adds bass. Can't help adding trumpet ideas. Sends files.

Matteo improvises melodies. Waits for faces. Waits for approval. Gets it or doesn't.

Arvin writes drum parts for songs, not for drummers.

They meet. Everything changes. The good stuff sticks. The rest evaporates.

Equation 3: The Friendship Algorithm

Matteo: "Being in a band is just as much about sitting on the sofa watching Married at First Sight together as it is being in the studio."

Arvin: "Some of the best parts of rehearsals have been trekking up Kentish Town to secure an overpriced focaccia."

The music is the excuse. The friendship is the reason.

Or: The friendship is the excuse. The music is the reason.

Both true. Simultaneously. Quantum friendly. Schrödinger's band.

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

W.B. Yeats

Inventory of Things That Matter

Item 1: The blackout at the London venue. Late 2024. Power dies. Amps silent. Crowd sings. Every word. A cappella gospel. The moment the band realises they're not breaking up. The moment the funeral becomes a wedding.

Item 2: Big Flame's manifesto. 40 years old. Still true. "Provide a positive and constructive alternative to the blind and corrupt world of pop through the application of honesty, integrity and dynamic enthusiasm." Arvin carries this. Quotes it. Lives it.

Item 3: Arthur's paper round. 1 hour 13 minutes. The Claim's retrospective. His dad's band. Listening every Sunday. Learning that earnest isn't embarrassing. Learning that sincere isn't stupid.

Item 4: Matteo's trumpet heroes. Lee Morgan. Clifford Brown. Jazz greats who pulled melodies from thin air at 100mph. Matteo knows he'll never reach that. Steals their tasteful trills instead. Repurposes them. Makes them post-punk.

Item 5: Risha's crackly sounds. Frying eggs. Crackling fires. Crunchy leaves. Everything that burns. Everything that snaps. Everything that refuses to be quiet.

Item 6: Arvin's Olympus Trip 35. His girlfriend's grandad's camera. Film photography as ritual. As intention. As the opposite of iPhone passivity. 36 exposures. Make them count. Document everything. Remember cheese croquettes in Amsterdam.

Item 7: Fuel Cafe Bar, Withington. Walk in any time. Five people you know are there. Community as venue. Venue as community. Now closing everywhere. Hold tight to what remains.

Item 8: This record. 100 copies. Proof that eight songs happened. Proof that five people existed. Proof that you're listening.

"Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defence: the creative act."

Kenneth Rexroth

What This Is Not

NOT: A greatest hits collection

NOT: A compilation of singles

NOT: A stopgap between "real" albums

NOT: Content

NOT: Product

NOT: Optimised for algorithmic discovery

NOT: Designed for passive background listening

NOT: Recorded to go viral

NOT: Mixed for earbuds on the tube

NOT: Mastered for Spotify compression

NOT: Marketed to playlist curators

NOT: Demographic-targeted

NOT: A/B tested

NOT: Focus-grouped

NOT: Branded

NOT: Sponsored

NOT: Partnered

NOT: Sorry about any of the above

What This Is

IS: Eight songs by five friends

IS: Nervous Entertainment (2024) + Smashing Scene (2025)

IS: Finite object in infinite world

IS: Heavy thing you can hold

IS: Proof of concept (the concept: joy)

IS: Document of two years

IS: Archive of evolution

IS: Snapshot of process

IS: Evidence of care

IS: Recorded with intention

IS: Released with honesty

IS: Limited to 100 because scarcity can be truth

IS: VIO-082 - Violette Records

IS: Available 3 November 2025

IS: The thing itself, not a simulation of the thing

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it."

Bertolt Brecht

The Only Review That Matters

Arthur Arnold: "We're pressing these to vinyl not because they're perfect, but because they're honest. If they mean something to you too, that's everything."

End of the review.

Instructions for What Happens Next

Option A: You buy one of 100 copies. You own a finite thing. You listen. You're part of a small club of people who decided this mattered. The club has no name. No meetings. No membership cards. Just 100 people who own the same vibrations pressed into wax.

Option B: You stream it. You borrow it from the cloud. You return it to the cloud. The cloud forgets you were there. You forget you were there. Everyone forgets. The algorithm moves on.

Option C: You do nothing. The world continues. Tigers & Flies continue. The music exists whether you witness it or not. But you miss the point. The point is witnessing.

Option D: You go see them live. You stand in a room with strangers. Five people on stage make noise. You sing along. Power fails or doesn't. Doesn't matter. You're part of the thing happening. You're watching. You're participating.

That's the option that changes everything.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

Joan Didion

THIS is the story: Five people in different cities refuse to let geography kill what they built. They write songs in batches. They demo alone. They meet when they can. When they meet, everything clicks. The good stuff sticks. The rest falls away. They record it. They press it. They release it. 100 copies. Not 101.

You're reading this story. You're deciding if you're in it.

The End or the Beginning

Arthur: "We've made it, because we get to do it."

That's the definition. That's the whole thing. Success is: you get to do it. Everything else is noise.

Tigers & Flies get to do it. They're doing it. They've done it. Eight songs. 100 copies. Two studios. Five people. One conviction: that making music with your friends is worth the logistical nightmare. Worth the distance. Worth the Transit van held together by gaffer tape. Worth the overpriced focaccia. Worth the rain. Worth everything.

You get to listen. That's your part. Do it loud. Do it intentionally. Do it like it matters.

Because it does. Because they made it matter. Because 100 copies times however many times you play it equals however many moments you reclaim from the algorithm. From the noise. From the quiet desperation Thoreau warned about.

This is the opposite of resignation.

This is the opposite of desperation.

This is five people making this noise on purpose.

Turn it up.

Arthur Arnold — Guitar & Vocals

Eddie Wigin — Bass & Vocals

Arvin Johnson — Drums & Percussion

Matteo Fernandes — Trumpet & Percussion

Risha Alimchandani — Trombone