Position Normal

No one found it unexpected that Position Normal members Chris Bailiff and John Cushway had once studied art, since the origins of their audio collages assembled from scavenged noises and spliced fragments stayed unclear—whether born from heavy substance use or its total absence. The duo’s first release, the 1999 album Stop Your Nonsense, surfaced in the U.K. on Mind Horizon and surprised a handful of reviewers in a welcome way, earning placement on multiple year-end best-of lists. Position Normal’s antics left their modest following disoriented through mostly sample-driven journeys into a realm that blended frequent humor with recurring dread, laced with carnival-style warped children’s music plus hallucinatory guitar fragments and unconventional rhythms, suggesting a British version of The Electric Company gone to hell. Bailiff and Cushway resurfaced in 2001 with a self-released album.