NOTES ON THE MUSIC (2)

(EVOX "Electronic/Vocals")

1) and 3) interview with me and Andrew Haig on a radio show he was doing called "Future Static" on PBS-FM in Melbourne. I was involved in communication work with dolphins using music in the early 80's...

2) Sound Collage composed of three audio tracks playing simultaneously...no planned synchronizations...Mickey Hart, "Drumming at the Edge of Magic"; Fiorella Terenzi galaxy sounds; and songs of the humpback whale recorded by Roger Payne. This was done during intermission of a concert by a Boulder band called Midnight Kitchen. I was doing visuals for them, and at the break I had three cd players going into the board...I just started them one after the other...I let it run for all of the break, the whole thing is about 20-30 minutes long...

4) "Threshold/Infotoxin" These are the first songs that I ever multi-tracked, playing Emulator "Drumulator" drum machine (that's a sample of John Bonham of Zeppelin on kick!), Prophet 5 synth, strat, and vocals. Engineer Rick Chapman played lead guitar on "infotoxin." It was meant to be a piss-take, an advert for 'infotoxin' = bullshit in mass-media!

5) "Einstein's Brain"...the true story of how they saved Einstein's brain in a jar, against his will! This song was recorded at Rick Chapman's Harmonic Labs in 1985; this and "Threshold/Infotoxin" got played on several college radio stations and enabled me to get to meet Frank Zappa in Berkeley in 1985.

6) "SDI" or "Strategic Defense Initiative"...based on the Reagan administrations plan to build "weapons in space"...to fulfill Hitler's vision of military dominance from space. I did this using a Korg Poly 6 synth and a Yamaha drum machine...this was 1985 when drum machines were just coming out. The lyrics are from a Carl Sagan pamphlet on the implications of nuclear war.

7) "Airborne Plutonium" This one was recorded only to a re-used cheap cassette on a Roland D-50 in the basement of a friend's apartment in Boulder CO in the summer of 1989. Rocky Flats, a plutonium processing facility, was located only 30 miles to the north and "airborne plutonium" had been a recent item appearing in various Boulder news media

8) "Sanskrit Fourier Operator" All I have of this was recorded on a cassette, hence the shitty sound. But the original was a brilliant digital recording done using an at that time brand new Synclavier with a Roland D-50 midied to it...my friend Scott was working at a studio called Prosonus in LA and he invited me to come and check out the new Synclavier...I just sat down at it and started dialing up some sounds. first the shaker part, then the bass/synth part...then the percussion, then the strings from the D-50. Because the Synclav was new and the sound samples were hot, he refused to give me the song in digital format. This was a great pity...by the time I made it back to LA Scott was in Berkeley...

9) "Earthquake Jam" This jam was a very special occurrence...I had met Carl Malone at the recording studio of Michael Boddicker in LA, at an Emulator party. He worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena working on I believe it was space probe power systems. He was a killer flute player and also had built his own digital reverb unit. He invited me up to his place for a jam. He played flute and I played his synth, using a bunch of his own samples/sounds, through his new reverb system. It was a KILLER jam. After we stopped playing, we sat on the veranda on the nice southern California September evening. We both noted that the crickets and bugs sounded unusually loud. Next morning, when I was on-lab at JPL nearby, a 6.2 earthquake happened. We figured that the insects somehow sensed that it was coming and were letting us know...and hence the name of the jam.

10) "Trilobite" This and track (11) were done at Daktaris Sound in Boulder in May-June of 1995. I played keyboard drums and synths, as well as vocals. I had just done a trek onto Blanca Peak in southern Colorado, one of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo, their name being "Sis Naajini", "the home of the sky people." After hiking on that mountain, all I could think about was trilobites. It was like trilobite consciousness hit me out of the blue. I was inspired to read up on them and do this song...they were nature's first use of the eye...a compound eye, like an insect.

11) "Return of the Lorax" After my visit to Sis Naajini, I also was inspired to write a poem called "Return of the Lorax", picking up where Dr. Seuss' s book leaves off. I did this at Daktaris studio; I played Doctor Dan Burns' 1964 Strat, keyboard bass and drum programming.

12) "I am aware" might be the freakiest thing I have ever done. It was inspired by a dream I had in which Jimi Hendrix showed me some stuff on guitar. I took his Woodstock performance of "The Star Spangled Banner", recorded it, then reversed it, all on one track. Next track was all of this but slowed down. Then we (I was working with Ian McAllister on the winter solstice of 2002 in Christchurch) added in some dialogue from an excellent film called Judgment at Nuremberg, which is a re-enactment of the trial of four Nazi judges for their part in the Third Reich. Then I recorded my own voice, pitch-shifted one octave lower and one octave higher, saying the words "Freedom and democracy...greedom and dumbocracy..." Then, near the end, I recite the words to "The Scar-Strangled Banter"...my piss-take version of Amerika's "transnational anathema."

13) "Frat Yak" This was done during an impromptu visit to Steve Koppe's RedDoor Audio studio in Boulder in the summer of 1989. I had written the lyrics ahead of time...again, a piss-take on the partying scene in Boulder, based on my experience of being in a fraternity in college...I lovingly refer to it now as "Phry Krappa Trou"...a social group in which people were free to eat acid and shit themselves! My live-in experiment in primate social psychology lasted a year...but I will always remember "frat yakking"!