Katelbach is an anonymous project from the town of Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. The project has existed in various forms since the late 1980s, starting out with a series of cassette releases involving manipulated tape recordings of radio programmes. The first tape involved a recording of the daily Shipping Forecast, with the audio master tape being left to bake in a low-heat oven for twenty minutes, causing irrepairable damage.

The project became well known on the islands for it's avantgarde nature, with a debut live performance at a local gala day in Lerwick on 12th of July 1993 featuring an incomprehensible tape loop contraption designed with four walkmans, a few pedals borrowed from a local twee-guitar pop band and a megaphone.

The performance gave Katelbach a local celebrity status, appearing in local newspapers. This allowed Katelbach to become a more regular live act, performing bizarre experimental pieces in town halls throughout the islands for curious and somewhat bemused locals.

The project's peak came in 1997 when Katelbach organised an orchestra of Viking horns to perform during the procession at the island's legendary annual Up Helly Aa festival. Around the time, Katelbach also contributed several remixes for local Shetland bands, manipulating cassette tapes of their works for limited edition releases.

The project continued until 2001, when the person behind the project had a panic attack on a ferry coming home from a disastrous tour of the Orkney Islands and threw the majority of his equipment overboard. All remaining cassettes were sold off for pennies to distros or handed into an Inverness record shop to languish in the bargain bin section for years.

Katelbach came to my attention two months ago when I travelled to Aberdeen for the Scottish Cup Quarter Final between Aberdeen and Partick Thistle, meeting him in a local pub and bonding over a shared love of the UK hardcore band Heresy. Emails were exchanged and Katelbach decided to create some new music for the first time in sixteen years. This is the result.

Katelbach is a devout fan of Ocean Kinetics Premier League side Lerwick Spurs and has one cap for the Shetland Islands Football Team, earned in a friendly against Orkney in 1991.