Unsavoury Products

Unsavoury Products is the fifth full-length studio album by The Black Dog featuring Parisian spoken word artist Black Sifichi. The album was released in 2002 on CD. It is meant as a tribute to William S. Burroughs and inspired by The Black Dog’s collaboration with Burroughs before his death.[1] Ken Downie explained: "We’d sent tapes to William Burroughs, and were waiting for him to deliver some spoken word back to us, but he fell ill, and died. Mr Sifichi sent us a pair of blue underpants he'd found in Paris, so he was the natural person to help us finish off the album. We got on very well, and had a lot of fun making it." [2]
Black Sifichi remembers: "The Black Dog heard my first album with Negative Stencil 'Tick' and I made contact when I heard about their Burroughs project. I thought I could do a 'cameo' reading of one of Bill's texts somewhere on it. Anyway, The Black Dog loved my voice, how it was delivered. After Bill's death a demo of mine inspired them to produce a homage to Burroughs with me. Unsavoury Products has a message... the majority of traditional electronic albums do not. It is a way to use musical aesthetics and seamlessly merge them with words. In many ways the album is closer to art than most music media/products, which are constrained by commercial demands."[3]
At the time of the album's production the band considered itself a "multimedia collective" with members Martin (in charge of creative design and development), Steve Ash (studio production) and Ross Knight (guitar) besides Ken Downie: "We're essentially a collective in the Warhol 'Factory' sense; we float in and out of the group depending on the projects we're working on, independently or together." [4]