Career retrospective tape coming soon

Coming soon on the mighty Deathbomb Arc label of California: a career retrospective of my solo music works, spanning back to 1989 when I was yelling into a boombox all the way up to my most recent stuff. 33 songs - value!

It's called "Memory Excellence" after a clunky but great slogan for a certain magnetic-media company, and I made the cover with index cards, an old diskette, and an Apple //c.

I've made a lot of music in my life, most of it only nominally for public consumption, so it is weird to make a big production out of it. I mean, a cassette isn't exactly a "big production," but it's going to be pro-duplicated on eye-searingly green cassettes.

I'm hoping to make a zine to go with it. Maybe I'll make that happen over Labor Day weekend.

Hoping to post more here soon - I got caught up doing actual work.

On "NK"

I bought a little bottle of Angostura bitters at my favorite expired-goods and overstock-produce store down the street the other day. You know, why not, right? The cashier was mystified by this object, and who knows how it got there? I love stuff like that.

But what I love more than that is the kosher-certification logo found at the bottom of the label, from National Kashruth:

(image credit: kosherquest.org)

Which any child raised among cornfields will recognize as the logo of Northrup-King seeds (now a product of the not-at-all-ominously-named Syngenta):

(image credit: www.cornrus.50megs.com)

No idea which one came first, but I like the fact that an internet search shows there is apparently no-one else with a weird fascination for both kosher symbols and seed logos.

As someone who's been writing songs about arcane subjects for nearly thirty years, I should use this moment to point out that I have, of course, written a song about this, from my extra-brittle 2004 album Spirit Duplicator. The "winged ear" is of course the DeKalb logo and the "sprouting infinity" the Pioneer logo. Do I have green promotional jackets with their patches from various Iowan thrift stores and/or grandfather's closets? Of course. Do I get a weird feeling when I associate this weird nostalgia with  the logos of what are by this point horrible corporate megaliths? Of course.

Stereo update

In an attempt to keep our now one-year-old son from injuring himself, I have decommissioned my crazy person stereo for now. Alas. I've replaced it with a weird little compact Japanese thing that I got out of the free bin at a yard sale. It is tiny and has a minidisc recorder (!) If the built-in CD player also worked, that would be pretty great, but at least I can line-in a Cqromeqast Audio or a tape player. Anyway, not having that crazy stereo around has, for some reason, made me feel a lot calmer. I miss it, and I miss playing disco LPs for my baby, but I'll set it up in my office at some point.

I am glad that my bowing-to-reality stereo setup is just as ridiculous and janky - if not more so - than its predecessor. Just smaller.

First birthday

Today was my boy's first birthday. We hung out with the grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins and ate cake. He took it all in (including the swirl of excitement from three cousins) with an air of calm bemusement, even the cake. So sweet. Here is a picture.

Songs for Birds

And as if on cue, after talking about listening to my own juvenilia, the universe spits this out:

Yak (&): Songs for Birds

A compilation I made for legendary British tape label Traumatone back in, hmm, 1994 or so? It features just-post-high-school album A House with a Garden, plus various bits and pieces, some unreleased. The Winchester Geese classic "Gumby Dreams of Assault Weapons" had previously included a snippet from legendary X-rated comedy film Wham-Bam, Thank You Spaceman, but now it gets the line:

I am a ninny
And I am too skinny
And I don't watch enough TV

Two out of three still hold true!

Anyway, probably worth listening to, I guess? It is not too mortifying.

On listening to one's own music

Yes, I listen to my own music all the time. That's why I make it.

When Eric and I invented Activity Universal (Associates), our express purpose was to make music for washing dishes to. I think it worked particularly well for that purpose. Nobody else was making music that I wanted to wash dishes to. So we made six and a half albums of dishwashing music (plus a lot of outtakes that have never been shared for some reason).

I remember reading some David Lee Roth interview a while back where he talked about never wanting to listen to his albums after he made them. Like, he'd worked too hard on them, burned out on them already. That seems crazy to me. I guess I can imagine being a little too burned out if I'd spent two weeks in some smoke-filled 80s studio dialing in a perfect bass drum sound, but fortunately I just press buttons and bass drum sounds come out without much effort on my part.

Activity Universal and Cosmonox

My car album of choice for the last week or so has been Activity Universal's Flee, the last album Eric and I recorded as a duo before Jason brought his scintillating rhythms on board.*  What a crazy album, totally maddening. Really a terrible choice for driving around, especially with a baby in the back, but also a pretty great choice for driving around, particularly with a baby in the back. There is something great about turning three seconds of audio samples into eight minutes of mesmerizing repetition. Anyway, I'm very proud of it. There are moments where it goes so far into the weeds that they start to look like a garden. Free for download from the Internet Archive at the link above (and give the I.A. a few bucks while you're there).

It's interesting to compare this album to the Cosmonox stuff that Jason and I have been doing lately (and please note that Cosmonox is playing on Jan. 12 at the Firkin Tavern). Cosmonox's 4-track tape-based approach allows for more dramatic changes - choruses, bridges, sudden dropouts, etc. - and Jason has a strong sense of pop songcraft in how he makes the tapes. So it feels worlds apart in some ways from Activity Universal, even though it's basically the same idea -  bookish hermit takes educational audio device and abuses three seconds of audio until the song is done eight minutes later.

*See next post for comments on listening to one's own music.