[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
bells, bells, bells, 2005. Another seven second cue—that’s me on drums, bass, and synth, briefly.
dropped oxides
An archive of music that never was or is slowly ceasing to be.
In the bottom of my closet, I have boxes and boxes of unlabeled tapes--all 4-track recordings from the mid-'90s of me playing various instruments in various bands with various people. This blog is a daily trip to that stockpile, revealing how I spent my time in garages, basements, and sketchy apartments in my 20s.
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2011-06-08
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2011-06-07
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]angry notes cue, 2005. That’s me on guitar, bass, drums, and brief yelling. This is a little seven-second ID I made for my friend Sean’s freeform audio podcast, The Notes That Were. Sometimes seven seconds is all you need.
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2011-06-03
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Rope Goat Clan, Some Treeky Subject (Revised), 2001. This is a 2001 remix I made of a 1997 4-track recording by my faux rap group. Mostly this is evidence that Fruity Loops should be used judiciously…and that I have not always recognized that fact. Listen and you might (or might not) hear a brief sample from Count Basie’s orchestra playing Mambo Inn. The rest is fake drums, sampled/destroyed guitar, and lord knows what else.
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2011-06-01
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]The Hodads, Stroke Books, 1997. See previous post. That’s me on drums and overdubbed bass; Brendan on guitar; and Sean on vocals and overdubbed brief saxophone interlude.
My drums sound pretty rickety to me here, and the whole thing basically rides off the rails in multiple places, but this track still makes me smile. Sean’s vocal delivery seems to occupy some delicious spot between Jello Biafra and Fred Schneider.
Those books! Those books! Those books are nudie books!
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2011-05-20
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]The Hodads, The Music the Weather Channel Will Play When the World Ends, 1998. I’m sharing this today because, you know, there’s that rapture tomorrow, and you might want to know what the accompaniment for the forecast will be.
The Hodads take some unpacking, which I’ll save for another post. Suffice to say for now that it’s the first band I ever formed, and it may end up being the last band I’m ever in—my childhood friend Sean and I reunite every few years to do something musically odd, then go off to our separate corners again.
This track’s an instrumental, and is therefore not typical: Sean usually does unhinged improvised vocalizing that other musicians either immediately dig or immediately run from. “Polarizing” is the word.
On this track, that’s me on drums, Brendan Hynes on distorted bass and indecipherable background screaming, and Sean on Highly Intuitive Saxophone.
Here’s a band bio that has been posted in a couple of places:
The Hodads formed in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1990. Sean and Jeffry were two best friends obsessed with recorded sound and west coast punk rock, from the Minutemen to the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. Sean sang improvised lyrics; Jeffry played rudimentary guitar. Early on the band consisted of a guitar or two and a tape recorder, and a few ardent if unstable fans. Drummer Micah Hendrix and increased amplification were eventually added, but by the end of 1992, the band splintered apart. Five years later Sean and Jeffry reunited in Arlington and DC. By now Jeffry was playing drums; guitarist Brendan “Seb” Hynes was recruited from Jeffry’s other project, !Viva Cabeza!, and the band began recording improvisatory sessions that were very much in the spirit of the earlier material. Bassist Adalid “Perry” Claure was added a year later—just in time for a final show, more psychic battles, and the eventual break-up.
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2011-01-07
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]february 21, 2009. Cleaning off my hard drive, I discovered this little fragment that I recorded in February of 2009, but never finished. That’s me on drums, electric six string, acoustic twelve string, and synth. You can hear my fuzzy neurotic dog Olivia barking in the beginning.
It sounds almost like a complete song, except for the obviously missing bass track…and the odd fact that I recorded this in three parts, at three different times, only one of which was in February of 2009. It’s all spliced together into a continuous track, but you can definitely hear that mic placement, settings, and even the room in which I’m recording changes as the song moves along. Or at least I can.
Otherwise, this is yet more evidence that I still can’t pick up a guitar without aping J. Mascis, even at this late date.
Wow, my last post was in October. I’ll work on that. I think I also need to throw in the towel on my original description of this tumblr: I have a lot more material recorded digitally in the last ten years or so than I do salvagable audio tape from the 1990s. I barely have a functioning tape player at this point—my venerable old AKAI with dbx noise reduction has turned into a paperweight, making digitizing the old tapes a challenge.
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2010-10-05
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Genetic, 2002. See previous post. Sean’s CD burner had freaked out in the middle of burning some live mixes for me, and I liked the way one of the resulting tracks sounded…so I dropped it into this little unfinished live-bass-and-drum-machine pattern.
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2010-10-04
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Thirty Years Ago, 2002. My friend Sean had passed me an audio bed featuring odd bits of click-y percussion and a reverbed-out voiceover. As was my habit, I looped a few pieces of it and threw drums and a bass line on top. No idea what happened to the file. Eight years later, digging through a pile of unlabeled CDs, I hear it again for the first time.
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2010-09-30
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]A Lasting Vision of Birds, 2001. I had just downloaded FruityLoops and was attempting to figure out how to create a song/use the sequencer; this rudimentary track was the result. It’s really just an exercise using the existing samples and not really tweaking them or anything, and it sounds like it belongs in an old video arcade, but I always liked the melodies in this, for some reason.
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2010-09-28
Oh, and we had a bass player, too. That’s Chris Mann playing a Peavey bass (ugh) through a Peavey amp (double ugh).
Can’t believe how young we all looked—we were kids!
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2010-09-27
Mollyhouse playing The Waffle House (Darius van Arman’s group house in Charlottesville) back in 1993. From L to R: That’s me on drums and unfortunate sideburns and neckwear; Beth Kelly on vocals, crucifix, and heart-shaped 90210 pillow; Eric Jones on guitar and Lollapalooza protest tee; and Mark Cornick making some kind of announcement to the dozen or so people standing around trying to get drunk. Mark ran The Indie-List Digest for awhile there (remember that? Can’t find the archives online anymore), and played drums for Friendly, a Richmond band that wasn’t necessarily any worse than we were. We played our final show in Richmond with them later that same year.
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2010-09-24
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Pink Lemons, What Remains, 2003. Pink Lemons was an imaginary band that my wife Cassandra and I formed when we used to live in Woodley Park. That’s me on guitar, fake drums, keyboard, and backing vocals; that’s Cassandra on lead vocals and bass. We were channeling (or attempting to channel) Galaxie 500 and/or Damon and Naomi—or maybe Luna and/or Dean and Britta? Confusing.
For a brief window we tried to recruit some other musician friends to play with us, and it seemed like we might actually become an honest-to-goodness band…but then lead guitarist Eric moved to LA, and prospective drummer Scott moved back to Chicago, and, well, we just didn’t end up doing anything.
I’m a little too much of a control freak to make bedroom music projects with other people fun (or so I’ve been told)…so what remains of Pink Lemons? Answer: a handful of unfinished demos for unfinished songs, and at least two finished songs that were never recorded properly. Also: Pink Chum Chum, a silly, loopy song extolling the virtues of Indian desserts that I might post here at some point.
Maybe when our son Miles gets a little older, he can be our drummer.
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2010-09-14
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Untitled generic indie rock instrumental sketch. 2003-ish?
That’s me on guitar, bass, and self-evidently looped drums. Straightforward little exercise.
Once upon a time, I had a perfectly nice 1974 Fender Vibrolux Reverb amp. This, however, is the sound of a crappy Traynor practice amp that I got from a friend for free. Kids: Never sell your gear.
Good grief—I haven’t posted anything here since May! Sorry ‘bout that. Lord knows I have plenty more material for you in the archive. Coming soon: Fliers, videos, and embarrassing photos. Hooray for variety!
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2010-05-19
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2010-05-17
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Comedies of Similarity, 2002. A bouncy repetitive little instrumental. That’s me on bass, guitar, drums (real and fake), all recorded in brief snippets, looped, and sequenced. Now unfortunately sounds to me like theme music for a nonexistent NPR show or something. Title comes from an Arthur Danto essay featuring a hypothetical scenario in which there are two identical handmade objects which have evolved independently of one another, and are made of the same materials…and only one of them is actually a work of art.
