Agile Tortoise
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From the Vault, vol. 1
Here’s my first two tracks dredged from the vault, or rather from the cassette. These are circa 1987-8 and are among my early experiments with a cassette 4-track and drum machine. These particular tracks are solo ventures. I did all the instruments, production, etc. The first is probably a product of an Eno phase. The second defies description, really, and may fuel a viable argument that recording devices should have a special chip that makes them stop function around 2am.
September 24th, 2004 at 1:50 pm
Here’s two more gems from the cassette modernization project. First a solo acoustic guitar instrumental from around 1991. I think this was recorded straight in the condenser mic of a boombox. Second, a punked up Arlo Guthrie cover from around 1989.
Instrumental, Acoustic
Coming into to Los Angeles
September 28th, 2004 at 10:46 am
Great fun — especially
enjoyed Coming into LA. I think you’re the lost Ramone…
Sean
September 28th, 2004 at 8:46 pm
While I was in college at NYU, one of my roommates was a Japanese-American goth rocker by the name of Eiso. He had long hair, wore boots up to his knees everyday and didn’t own any clothes that were not black. Eiso was a very nice guy but a bit of a dingbat and was terribly unorganized.
About midway through the school year (my junior year), a friend of Eiso’s left to spend 6 months in Africa or some other far away place. Eiso agreed to take care of his lizards for him during his absence. This was no small undertaking. There were about 15-18 lizards of different sizes and shapes — mostly geckos and chameleons. I think the biggest was about 10″ long. Their home was a 100 gallon aquarium. This aquarium was also accompanied by a 10 gallon aquarium for the crickets that the lizards ate.
After a month or two, the lizards became a bit of an issue around the apartment. The first couple of escapes were entertaining diversions…but pretty soon it became a real pain trying to track these guys down. We removed all the posters from the wall because they loved to hide behind them. We actually had to clean up some…which was no small feat for us.
But the biggest problems surrounded the crickets, both when there were none of them and when there were too many. First of all, you simply can’t contain crickets. You buy them by the dozen, and those lizards ate quite a few of them. Even if you tried to be careful, the whole process of transferring live ones from the pet store bag to the 10 gallon aquarium, and later on to their doom, always resulting in a few escapes. Also, crickets croak. And by croak, I don’t mean “make a frog-like sound.” Dead crickets stink.
I’m sure you’re thinking, why not throw away the dead ones? Well, that’s a good idea, until you try to figure out how to separate the dead ones from the lives ones without a complete containment breakdown.
Crickets also make a lot of noise in the dark. Which is all the time when you keep them in a closet. Oh, and shoo’ing them off your pillow in the middle of the night is a pain. They are basically athletic roaches.
More to the point of all this, we did kinda like the lizards and grew attached to them…but the crickets were a problem. Due to this, Eiso largely divorced himself from involvement with the crickets — meaning he pretty much stopped feeding the lizards. After watching this torture for a month or so, my other roommate Steve and our other practically live-in friends decided that something had to be done.
You might think that meant we started feeding the lizards. No, that would have been the high road. We felt it was more important to make our point by constantly harassing Eiso about his inability to live up to the responsibility he had taken on.
My contribution to this effort is the following song, which we played over and over and over whenever Eiso was around. I think we even inserted in the middle of some of his favorite cassettes so he’d be subjected to it on his walkman also. Without further ado, I present:
Eiso, You’re Killing the Lizards
September 29th, 2004 at 8:30 am
That is a truly marvelous story. The song’s a lot of fun, though I think it might could use a little more feedback.
The varied speed tape playback effects on the voice are a nice touch.
October 14th, 2004 at 12:53 pm
Here’s another one from the vault. I’ll call this one Movie Music, not that is was. Just that it sounds like it could have been. Sounds like this one was all sequenced, no live instrument tracks.
This was circa 1990. My setup was Voyetra DOS-based MIDI software, on an original model IBM PC/AT. I think it had a 20 meg drive in it, and a 5 1/4″ floppy. This was driving a Roland MIDI interface card, a Kawai Digital Synth and an Alesis drum machine. Along with this I had a Fostex cassette 4-track and a mixer. I’d lay a synch track on the cassette and then have 3 audio tracks I could add. Sometimes I even merged tracks 1 & 2 to 3 and then could do another extra audio track. Mastered it all to a regular deck on my stereo. Sounds so old fashioned now.
November 20th, 2004 at 6:05 pm
Another edition of “From the Vault” coming your way. These two entries from a session a did with long time friends Tim Blankenbaker (drums) and Steve Winter (bass) in 1991. Another of our high school buddies, Mike Leach, was working the sound board at The Bayou, a club in the Georgetown section of DC and arranged for us to use the club’s sound stage/sound system for an afternoon recording session. We laid down about 8 tracks, running through each 2-3 times. Mike ran the board. We rehearsed the songs once the weekend before, and think we did pretty good considering that was all the practice we had. Our only audience was the two girls interning at the International Sculpture Center, where I was working at the time, that I had invited to come down and watch.
First, Feelin’ Blue, one of my tunes. And second, Two Girls, a Townes Van Zandt song. Two Girls was the last thing we recorded and my voice was pretty shot, but it’s tolerable.