Ken & Me

Another failed experiment. Met this guy, Ken, through one of my "experimental musician seeks experimental situation" ads. Of course he was a wildly-talented performer-musician w/ extensive large-market experience but at the time he was looking for a live-sequencing situation. Of course as he found his musicians they were all uniformly hostile to anything that smelt of sequencing and ultimately, to even severe (albeit controlled) fx in some of the vocals (let alone click tracks) leaving me after six months of rehearsals hauling around one hundred lbs of gear in order to 'play the triangle' at a few opportune moments. So I quit. And his was my last band.

Early on however, I wrote this sequence in my Nord micromodular and let Ken suggest the chord changes within. I guess he liked them as this was a spontaneous jam against them. It was never intended for release and his words seem to be a precursor to some of his (presumably copyrighted) songs but again, I know he never released anything like this. The digital tracks are dated 1/2004 but I have no idea if this was analog or digitally mastered originally.

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Ken & Me

Smell Of Incense

This song (and only this one) breaks my rule of this site having only my original songs - this is my one & only cover so no download link and on request I will remove the streaming link as well. But I really like my version of it and wish to share.

Bob Markley & Ron Morgan have the writing credit. The song was first recorded by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band on their Vol. 2 record available here. The version I first heard (1968) was by Southwest F.O.B., a regional band popular in Dallas/Fort Worth, TX. Their album is available here. If you want the song please buy one or both of the albums as the versions are quite different. My version is based on Southwest F.O.B.'s arrangement but an interesting fact is this - at the time I was arranging this (1989?) I had a low-grade cassette of West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Vol. 2 but hadn't heard the Southwest F.O.B. version in decades. (Both albums were out of print for a very long time)

All the parts except for vocals are MIDI. The drum part took quite a bit of effort. Instead of a loud guitar in the break I used a massive bank of Casio CZ-10xx voices in multi-timberal mode. The effect on the vocals is tape echo courtesy of the Mk III echoplex. In case you're interested, the bathroom of my previous house served as the vocal booth & as I was both vocalist & engineer it took numerous takes to get what we have here. Not the best vocal, mind you, but ultimately good enough. This was of course tracked & mastered on the old 4-track. Enjoy.

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Another Damned Indie Cassette

I am finding all kinds of 'treasures' here. After bailing on the planned single of "The S&L Song" b/w "How Stupid Are we?" (see earlier posts below) sometime later in the early 1990s I had the idea to self-produce a cassette entitled Another Damned Indie Cassette. On it was "The S&L Song", the song I'll post next, these three pieces and a ridiculously indulgent & today un-listenable 15 minute long piece of crap that was to constitute the entire B-side. Fear not, that bit of tripe will not be posted here. (Are you sensing some kind of trend going on? Damn those B-sides...)

Unfortunately precise details of these three are sketchy (and pardon the stupid names, they were originally numbered pieces). Worse, until I find the original masters, not only is the audio quality a bit off as these are from the original Another Damned Indie Cassette master, I'm not even sure of the dates I wrote & recorded them. As a final insult, "Field Of Swoops" cuts off early so I had to fade out the digital recording. As I find the original masters (if they still exist) I'll post improved versions of these.

"Field Of Swoops" is the oldest song here. I can tell by the drum sounds, that's the TR-707 w/the flam technique. It probably dates from 1989 or thereabouts. The others sound like 1990 or 1991 but "Break Song" has that 'sound real but keep it a little impossible' style of composition so it may be a little bit more recent. As these are all 100% MIDI, they were most likely mastered directly to 2-track cassette but I also might have used the old 4-track instead.



Break Song.


Field Of Swoops


Ponderous March

AIRCH

Okay, I will not claim this song is one of my originals, but the reason I'm posting it is my additions & re-arrangement totally changed the nature of this piece. Originally this came to me as a MIDI track from a guy I was collaborating with sometime around 1995. For some reason although I found the track cryptic I wrote some fierce bass & drum tracks that mutated his "Air Of China" into a totally different piece of work known by him, me, and now the rest of the world as "AIRCH". 38 seconds of intense bliss. My intent behind the bass & drum tracks was to write parts that sounded like they could be played by actual instruments yet were just a little bit 'impossible' to be real. I wrote a number of tracks in that manner at the time, hope to find & post 'em.

So far I have only managed to find the master of the 'slow version' but that came later, the 'fast version' was the original. So I faked it (for now) with editing software hence the artifacts.

AIRCH Fast Version
Here's the master of the 'slow version' dated sometime after after 01/22/96. Kinda has its own groove, eh?

AIRCH Slow Version

8 Measley Bars

This is the most recent piece I've posted. It was written & recorded Fall 2005 for a music sampler I assembled for some old friends. The recording was direct to digital 2 track and all the sounds are of course MIDI-controlled.

The actual 8 Measley Bars themselves are the bass and drums with a cascading keyboard sound that occurs in bar 7 or 8 and the bars were then looped. All the other keys were played "live" against the looping 8. The modulations in the bass part were written into the bass patch itself.

8 Measley Bars

The Fragment

This piece has been something a 'holy grail' in my catalog. What you hear is the last half of a composition by me & the guitar player I was working with at the time. He wrote the first half but that bit of the bit never worked all that well IMHO. This is my part of the piece and it's all about this odd bass riff I came up with some time previously. The recording was just a 'punch & crunch' on the old four track and when it was over he & I stared at each other in slack-jawed amazement: "Did we really just play that and we really got it on tape as well?". Try as I have over the decades I've never been able to do anything better with that little riff and just about everyone else I've played it for is totally clueless as to how to accompany it. While it can be counted in 4-4 it's really a free-time kind of thing and doesn't lend itself at all well to a drum part. Maybe hand percussion. Hmmm, someday. That's of course me on the old 4-string, probably through the Alamo I frequently used at the time. The guitarist is using a Digitech rack effect. The master is from sometime in 1990, I think, probably fall or winter.

The Fragment

How Stupid Are We?

This song is another one of those failed experiments and was intended as the b-side of "The S&L Song" posted previously. The sad fact of the matter is that I really like the music for this song especially when the synth comes in on the break/turnaround. I also thought the drums were quite nice, considering that's a TR-707 with a special flam technique I created in order to fatten the sounds. Problem was, the idiot lyricist had a misguided idea to write an angry political song with far too many words and no attention whatsoever to the singer's need to breathe occasionally. Furthermore the singer did a lousy job, couldn't articulate the torrent of words he was spewing or at times, even stay with the rhythm. Of course the 'two individuals' being blamed were of course moi. The master is dated 9/90.

The topic of the first verse is roadside litter, the second verse was about all the crooks looting the country in the S&L scandals while getting away scott-free and the last verse was about the ugly stuff we were preparing to do to the people of Iraq the first time, Bush Sr.'s war. Should anyone request, I most likely still have the lyrics in an old notebook and will post them. Jello Biafra I ain't.


How Stupid Are We?

The S&L Song

I wrote & recorded this to self-release as a single! For various reasons that did not happen (see next song) but I've always liked it, a rather strange cross between the Bobby Fuller 4 & Devo. For those of you much, much younger than dirt, an "S&L" was a Savings & Loan Association, similar to a bank that primarily loaned their money for real estate purchases. But back in the 1980's due to some misguided deregulation & lax supervision, these S&Ls as an industry made a number of stupid and downright fraudulent transactions leading to a wholesale collapse and ultimately a Federal bailout (read taxpayers) of the various institutions. Oh, a few fat cats saw the inside of a cell, a few lost a lot of their money, but for the most part, the wealthiest people in this country walked away with anywhere from $100 to $500 billion dollars of taxpayer money. And by coincidence, 'twas a Bush in the oval office while it happened. Hmm, fancy that? Surprised to find today there is a major crisis brewing once again in the finance & real estate industries, only this time threatening to take out the entire financial sector? Bush Jr. is obviously determined to repeat every one of Bush Sr.'s mistakes in office but Junior's gonna show us how he can really truly screw things up.

The song is all MIDI, it was tracked & mastered on the old four track, the master is dated 9/90 but I know I was working on it in 1989. Personally I prefer Take 2, it's longer and has an extra verse or two but unfortunately it shows what happens when one double-tracks unison vocals but changes the words a little each time - OOPS. Take 1 is shorter & more direct, it was going to be the released version.

The S&L Song Take1


The S&L Song Take2