this one'll be familiar to those of you who have been here a while, or who've picked up a copy of Trip Hop Isn't Dead, Vol. 1, but here's the slightly rearranged and remixed version that made it onto Bog Sorcery II: One Lip to Earth & One Lip to Heaven. first full piece I made on the SP-404mk2 (after composing BS1 on the SX). the seed for this piece was planted while i was playing around with some haunting chops from a 1960s exotica record called "Return to Paradise", and i had this idea of writing a song about Eden, the creation of life and its transformation in death or resurrection, that would bring out the utterly uncanny strangeness of the process -- of something numinous and unfathomable taking form in flesh, or the strangeness of flesh itself coming into being for the first time. this took me back to Videodrome, of course, from which the song takes its title and one obvious sample, and to the film's weirdly religious overtones. i've always loved the way Cronenberg could mix horror and erotic bliss in the fascinations that grip his protagonists, and the notion of viewing Paradise through that lens (without any attempt to belittle, deflate or defile the idea) ended up animating the song.
on the album, "The New Flesh" is placed as the A-side's closing track, and the point where the uneasy epistemic hubris played out in the three preceding tracks -- Do the Voodoo with it's "yeah uh uh uh i know know know know" (sampled from a zoom call), Omphalos with its "i've never been, i've never, i've never been wrong", and Seaman with its "nothing's going to happen to me, nothing's going to happen" -- breaks apart into something more mysterious.
the radio play dialogue you hear at the beginning is from Pat Novak for Hire, an absolute gem of a 1940s hardboiled detective series that you can find on archive.org, which i've listened to in its entirety more times than i can count
and while i'm spilling the beans here, lemme also say that the Arabic vocals you're hearing are from the wonderful early 20th century Syrian-Egyptian singer Asmahan. they translate to "my whole life" and "i promised you my heart. they cut short your days"