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.

Looking back on Standing As Never Before

Other than the upcoming CD limited release coming from Thirsty Leaves Music, there is only one corporeally available release of anything KR Seward. And that is Standing An Never Before, the cassette collaboration done with Hal McGee.

Nothing To Do on Bandcamp

Now on Bandcamp, Nothing To Do, a whole big slew of songs from the mid 1990s. Tray card tells the story.

Connection Cassette Compilation #5 on Bandcamp

Yep, here's that aforementioned cassette compilation.

Lots of real cool stuff to hear, including my own contribution.

Mood Wring Reenactment is on Bandcamp

A whole slew of songs circa 1993 are now out, released as Mood Wring Reenactment.


Included are Francis Bacon, Sad In All Directions, Lifted--nineteen songs in all.

High View To Low on Bandcamp

Lonesome Yodel, Busker's Holiday, Middle of May, Breathe And Sway, 10AM and many more tunes are out on Bandcamp.

Tray card with handy track listing:

Zsa Zsa's Bra on Bandcamp

D00d . . . Zsa Zsa's Bra . . . On Bandcamp . . .

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

Wither Thou Goest

Wither Thou Goest


A big production, even for its time of reverbosity.
Had meant to post it. But a glitch in the one of its kind master recording inspired notions of digital fixing, which mostly happened and slightly didn't. Accelerating only the procrastinating process.

So now's it posted with the rest.

Meantime, mostly non-songs are continually going up in the less archival Tumblr version of audiokayness. Stuff of Berna, Gleetchlab and Monotron & so on.

24 July 2010 Tape Trio No 2

Probably this needs no explanation. Handheld tape recorders record oscillators & stuff, rewind and playback said stuff. Video of the rewind & playback, including disembodied hand that rides the pause switch on the er, um, lead tape recorder.

Francis Bacon-video

Getting all glare-filled & artsy with the lack of depth of field and the feedback and the glaven. This time doing low rent Jodorowsky Holy Mtn. with the trippy symmetry and hoodie shroud.

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.

Eee-noid Wonder Pt.2

Eee-noid Wonder Pt.2

Eee-noid Wonder Pt.1

Eee-noid Wonder Pt.1

Dream One, Meat's Meat

Dream One Meat's Meat More 12-Bit Jimson found on cassettes of yore. One spooky but arguably soothing, the other creepy in a Modest Proposal sort of way.

Falling Upward

Falling Upward


This ol' tune is being hosted over at the Internet Archive.

Indeed, tho' it's hard to say for sure, I'm not so certain how long the Ovi hosted stuff (pretty much everything else here) will hold up as things seem in flux over there.

So, if you're just dropping by & have more than a few curious bones in your body, you may want to poke around while the audio players are up and the links are still good . . .

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 . . .