No Wings Talk on Electronic Cottage site

Posted this noise memoirish essay on the Electronic Cottage site.

As its many hyperlinks may take you back here or hereabouts, the point really is to tie in what's already in plain sight here with the many other voices and stories awaiting at EC.

So, there.

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.

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

posting records to the hinterlands

As I've said, I was a hick from the sticks.

Mark, a friend from high school, was one in a vanguard of people who would turn me on to the wide world of music. Post-punk music in particular.

Aside from his mixtapes bearing the likes of the Velvet Underground, he got me ordering from the Rough Trade Records USA catalog.

Meantime, someone was working in San Francisco, filling those mail orders & posting records to the hinterlands: Hilary, the bicoastal city mouse to us two country mice.

During our summer of discontent back home from college, she was our vinyl connection/muse/friendly crush and all around beacon of cool things happening in the big world.

scans slightly stalinized/click to make bigger . . .


And yes, the grass is always greener, even when the paper is pink . . .




This note probably piggybacked with one of my orders:


By summer's end, it was back to college (& college towns with better record stores).

Maybe for Hilary, too, since the next RT order was sent out by Bill.

the author of Grunt Grunt Pig

I couldn't fully claim that distinction without crossposting here.

a legacy

My middle brother passed away late last month.

And for better or worse, for anyone in earshot, he had made some contributions to my music. Direct or indirect.

His old sax that he used to play fell into my untutored hands to be used in numerous tunes:

the ever popular Grunt Grunt Pig


the skronky Bobo


the comparatively refined Music and Candlelight


And tho' I'm leery of words like "inspiration", my brother was somewhere in mind when I wrote these:

Cascade


Who in the Heck Are You?


as well as . . .

sounds like?

Ehh, maybe the Bengal Burlap. Or something noisy & recent.

3:13 AM, Instrumental Frenzy, I'm Off, Afterdinner Outerlude

3:13 AM

(UPDATE: 3:13AM and the rest are on Bengal Burlap, available at Bandcamp.)

I was always kinda happy with this instrumental. I had a bass, that Synsonics drum machine and a flanger. I played something that resembled a melody (not something I'm entirely adverse to doing) without concerning myself with having a real guitar.


Instrumental Frenzy



When I did get a real guitar, this was about the first thing I did. Urgent Zebra may've been the second.


I'm Off



Before said real guitar, my friend Dom or someone loaned me one of those electric fan powered gadgets, a Magnus Chord Organ. My friend Bob, who could actually play, played the organ. Flanging everything in sight, I did the rest. All in view of the Corner rooftops of C'ville and the HoJo MoLo sign.


Afterdinner Outerlude

Bobo, Gamelan Cakewalk, Whine-oleum

Bobo


(UPDATE: Bobo and Gamelan Cakewalk are out on Bengal Burlap, available at Bandcamp.)

I marveled at the remote on/off switch on the garden-variety mic that came with a cassette recorder. At some point I clued in on how that on/off switch could be used during playback when the mic was plugged in.
















Thus the coming & going of that voice and squealing saxophone in the left channel: it's a tape recording that keeps cutting in and out as the remote switch is turned on and off.


Gamelan Cakewalk



The bargain basement tape effect in this instrumental was the cue/fast forward button on the tape deck. I liked this piece but found it a bit long. This was a cassette recording and I lacked the savvy or the nerve to splice tape.

So I just hit the cue button during playback to move things along. I thought of it like some Dada editing method. And I liked that chattering, chirping "screeeeeee!" sound.


Whine-oleum



Years, decades later, I was reading of the Melloman, a Mellotron-ish gizmo fashioned from Walkmans loaded with cassette recordings of instruments.

Too klutzy & impatient to build such things, I went cheap & dirty and tape recorded continuously playing chords on two cassettes. Then with the same remote on/off mic switch control used in Bobo, I'd alternate playback between the two tapes/chords.

Those whining faraway chords in the left channel, the ones that ramp up to pitch when starting and down from pitch when ending?

Yep, those . . .

cassette recorded

I started a new label for the entries here: cassette recorded.

As that label applies in some way to most of what I've recorded in the 20th century, it seems like saying of people: oxygen breathing.


Very early on, I'd just use two cassette recorders. One would record my playing a new part along the playback on another recorder of parts previously recorded. I'd layer open air back in the early days of Bengal Burlap. Then I tried wiring things together, for a while without the benefit of a mixing board. The newly recorded part went to one stereo channel while the old parts were fed (in mono) to the other.


Anyway, even when multitracking, most of that was on a cassette machine. And until the early 90s anything I recorded on my own was mixed down to cassette. Hit the eject button, there's the master . . .


As I realize the lids of many readers are growing very heavy by now, I may get into more particulars later.

Suffice it to say, true blue professional recording formats were too pricey for me. I may yet post images of some of the stuff I used instead.


Meanwhile, here's a sliver of cassette arcana from way back when.

the once & future Burlap

Just some images to doll up the place . . .


Policy made manifest.

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.

Happy Halloween

Here are a few holiday appropriate entries . . .

I am responsible for me: 12 Bit Jimson's spooky machine

Zsa-Zsa's Bra by any other name . . .

Encounters With Insects, Hey Little Darlin'

long beginning: wayohh

Wayohh is not spooky per se, but might go that way in a haunted house.

And tonight only, 7-10 PM Eastern time, Thick Wisps broadcast a live Halloween show.

Encounters With Insects, Hey Little Darlin'

More of the Bengal Burlap collection, created during that same summer as "Grunt Grunt Pig".

Encounters With Insects

(UPDATE: Encounters . . and Hey Little . . are out on Bengal Burlap, available at Bandcamp.)

Everything of this vintage was created in layers. First I'd record something on one tape recorder, then I'd play the tape on another recorder in the background while adding something new and recording the old & new together on a second tape.

Hey Little Darlin'



Along with any other instrument or gizmo I could lay hands on, I had an MXR flanger I got second hand from my friend/musical mentor/never-to-be bandmate, Mark. I ran practically any sound I could through that flanger, including my voice.

they call me Mau-rice . . .

Okay, no one calls me Maurice. And this, um, song bears little relation to the Steve Miller Band. Press the play button below (or click here) and we'll continue . . .

Grunt Grunt Pig


(UPDATE: Grunt Grunt Pig is out on Bengal Burlap, available at Bandcamp.)

One old friend, Dom, suggested I make a t-shirt for myself that reads "I am the author of Grunt Grunt Pig".

Sometime back circa 1982 after:

--an even older friend had convinced me to take up the electric bass to play in a band he & I never actually started

--I had heard the records of Fred Frith, Laurie Anderson, Wm. Burroughs, Brother Dave Gardner, the Go-Betweens and heaven knows who else

--I got a Panasonic cassette boombox at Best Products to go with my trusty all-in-one record/cassette/AM-FM stereo

I thought I was some artsy hipster type ready to record some music.

This I believed even though I was actually a twenty year old college student who was spending the summer where I'd grown up--on my parents' hog farm in rural southeastern Virginia. Rows of peanuts, soybeans and corn stretched out to dusty lots where the sounds of metal hog feeder lids clanging shut echoed in the trees beyond.

I was a hick from the sticks. Armed with some obscure records (mostly those of my friend & never-to-be bandmate), aforementioned consumer electronics, some stray musical instruments, and sheer delusions of grandeur.

Many of my friends from around this time who heard the resulting din still think Grunt Grunt Pig is one of best things I ever did. Well, it's certainly one of the first things I ever did. And yes, I like it.

All these years later, no matter how near or far any new bit of music may be to this first thing, I am still the author of Grunt Grunt Pig.

And no one calls me Maurice.