Old Flame's Mixtape on Bandcamp

Created, recorded in layers between cassette decks circa February 1988 in the Comm Ave Adjacency. All tracks © 1984-1988 Kevin R. Seward. As dubbed from ancient mixtape, edited in Audacity.

And now, too many words:

With an old but cool and handy Arp brand mixing board borrowed from a bandmate, with its built in analog delay and a grey guitar compressor pedal on pretty much everything, these recordings were built up passing take after take from stereo cassette deck to another at mostly +3 to 5 dB recording levels. It was a crazy, mucked together pop version of what I’d been doing circa Bengal Burlap with a couple of cheesier cassette recorders (the best of which was a cassette boombox and it just got nuttier and more make-do from there). Drum machine, bass, guitar, layers of voice, stray lines of sax and penny whistles and I dunno maybe jingling keys, these were grandly shmushed together pop recordings.

Why? Well, why not.

And about this time I was rather young-ish and headlong in love with someone with whom I thought I’d be sharing love forever. Or at least for the rest of my life. As my actual clinical functioning heart has outlived all such intoxicating abstraction, seemed a waste not to impose these old crazed bits of pop whatnot on the world at large. (I would here solemnly pause to caution the young and/or impressionable, but who ever reads these notes much less takes them at face value.) And so impose I do.

There are, in theory, more of these sorts of things. There were before leading into this. The recording of “Veteran’s Day” (on Winter Palace, as released on Bandcamp—along with the original, perhaps definitive dub of “Music And Candlelight”) is very much a fine precursor. Later pop is over the top in other ways. Something else of the in-between might come out eventually.

But this vintage will always be as special as a certain sunny day one basks in for weeks and months and years afterward. Because it was a certain sunny day. Or as much so as bucket brigade delay, stomp box compression and piled on layers of buried-in-the-red cassette recording would allow. Not really so bright, perhaps oddly dark and squeezed together.

And a caution to young and old and in-between to be not so erstwhile. Ever.

But again I speak much as the long ago Chaucer did (with some niggling differences in circumstance & talent), recanting way too late.

Winter Palace release now on Bandcamp

Winter Palace, Veteran's Day, Music And Candlelight and Listen are now on Bandcamp. Also Provisionally Yours, Instrumental For Plug, so on . . . 

Six Songs In July on Bandcamp

"Mary Magazine", "Running Scared", "Justine" and such like are on Bandcamp.

It had to happen sometime. And that sometime is now.

Bengal Burlap now at Bandcamp

I'll be honest.  I've no clue. 

But stuff like "Grunt Grunt Pig" and "Encounters With Insects" is now downloadable via Bandcamp.



Price varies according to my whim.  And yours.  Sometimes the album minimum price is 5 bucks US.  Sometimes it's zilch.   (Sorry,  I'm going through a crazy time right now . . . )  But from that minimum on the rest is up to you--name your price.   In any case, the album of 11 tunes is the value package.

Meanwhile, still considering reupping the soon to be dead streaming links.

ye olde J-card

Provisionally Yours, Someone In There, At Night

Provisionally Yours


Somewhere around the spring of 1985 I had the presence of mind to go shopping for an actual guitar amp.

Through the Auto Trader I found a Fender Twin Reverb for sale. The owner was an electrical engineer who lived in Eclipse, worked for GE and gigged in country bands. He was looking to sell the Twin and get a more reliable Peavey combo instead. I liked the amp, he showed how to check speaker polarity with a battery and that was it.

Soon after I was putting that tremelo & reverb to heavy use recording the likes of Provisionally Yours and working up my Howard Devoto impression.


Someone In There



At Night



This was recorded some years after being written. I like it musically and like the arrangement done here. Even tho' this meant to be a classic unreliable narrator kind of tune, the lyrics still spook me.

Literal minded folk (of either a dark or a protective frame of mind) be warned--this just ain't your song. Go behave.

Instrumental for Plug, Endlessly

Instrumental for Plug



Endlessly

Running Scared, Mary Magazine, Justine

Running Scared


(UPDATE: This song & the ones below now out on Six Songs In July.)

In the late spring, early summer of 1984 I was malingering in a house some friends Jenny and Jim were subletting on Baker Street in Charlottesville. Yeah, watching cable (my first extended exposure to MTV), washing dishes at an Indian restaurant (until I was fired), eating lentils (and little else).

And recording songs on an 8-track reel-to-reel that Brian Daley was nice enough to let me use. Indeed it was Brian's generous offer, with no prompting from me. Downtime when he and his band mates from Rude Buddha weren't recording in the basement, I could thread a scratch reel of tape and record a song of my own.

In spite of my lack of experience with serious recording equipment, I recorded four songs. Running Scared was one of those.

Mary Magazine




While Running Scared had already been written weeks before, I believe Mary Magazine had just been written.

I only recall that in the months previous, when I'd lived above a pipe shop that mostly sold sweatshirts, my neighbor Sean was constantly playing Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom. I loved that record, every damn song on it, and could not get sick of hearing it. So you can blame Sean and Elvis for the above.

Justine




Here and in the other songs above there's the beat of a Synsonics drum machine. It was a fun gizmo and I'd used it for a while by this point. An early rack delay of Brian's gave the guitar its gallop. I think there's a keyboard part in there somewhere played on a tiny Casio my friend Jim had.

It's Time, the fourth song, is good in some ways and embarrassing in others. I'll sneak it on when no one's looking.

Aside from Rude Buddha, I recall Baby Opaque playing at Baker Street. The guitarist Todd was an actual (i.e. non-malingering) housemate. The drummer Michael was one of the first person in my undoubtedly sheltered life to mention Weekly World News.

After several weeks in this house of music, it was time to malinger someplace else. My friend Bob and I flew standby on People Express to England and wended our way to Paris . . .

Veteran's Day, Listen, Music and Candlelight

Veteran's Day


Here's another fave of mine, another bigger and better than me surprise.

Being just enough of a geek to connect my old two tapedeck recording setup to a mixing board (my bandmate Dale's ARP gizmo), I could do almost decent recording of songs. Something of a old habit that was now half-justified (& half-obviated) by playing in a band. I could record demos . . .

Being more of a control addict than a team player, I'd get all fancy with the production and effects galore. And thanks to Dale, there was a Roland drum machine to do my rhythmic bidding.

Listen


This is another demo recording.

There's also a studio version that Dale, band mates Dan and Dan and I recorded as Nobody Home. By that time, the song had been kicking around a while, but I still liked it. I still thought of it as a pleasant surprise.

Music and Candlelight


Years before this recording, my friend Bob and I were loitering in our friend Pete's apartment. It was in Paris, someplace I'd never been and would likely never go again. Montmartre was close by and we could see Sacre-Coeur Cathedral through the window. Strumming along on Pete's classical, this song kinda just fell out of thin air.

In like fashion, this recording came along. Thrown in there was the sound of my brother Alex's verdigris'd saxophone (same one used on Grunt Grunt Pig). Not really planned, not really perfect, it was yet another surprise.