Urgent Zebra

Urgent Zebra

(UPDATE: Urgent Zebra is out on Six Songs In July, available on Bandcamp.)

It's hard to say when I got a proper guitar.

Before, I had a bass, a kazoo, my brother's saxophone, a scavenged phone bell. And a very warped old acoustic guitar bearing the image of cowboys singing 'round a campfire.

That guitar, dug out of the dark corner of a upstairs closet, would be the slide guitar in Hey Little Darlin' and the Fred Frith-oid prepared & flanged percussion guitar of Encounters With Insects.

So when my friend Mark sold me his Vantage electric, an actual guitar with decent action & intonation, it was a odd thing to play. And having come from the bass and not knowing a lot of chords, intervals were a big part of anything I played.

Thus Urgent Zebra was born.

The name was a reference, both oblique & obscure, to the instrumental tune Zebra Trucks that had originally come out on the Young Marble Giants' Testcard EP. I was and still am a big fan of that group and that record.

What I came up with may or may not resemble that point of reference.