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.

Not To Say now on Bandcamp

Last Shiny Thing now on Bandcamp

Circa '07 collection of instrumentals and songs. Includes glockenspiel, Alesis Air Synth, feedback (no surprise there), Nashville tuned acoustic guitar, slide whistle, kalimba, Yamaha VSS-30 mini sampler, sleigh bells and such.

Not Brite now out on Bandcamp

Ghosts Of New Jerusalem -- now on Bandcamp

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.

Time Capsule on Bandcamp

Uncross on Bandcamp

Uncross is just out on Bandcamp.

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.

Ovi Share is dead

Long live Ovi Share . . .



Originally Twango, it was bought by Nokia and became Ovi. For about two years it was the repository of most of my recordings old and new. Songs, instrumentals and field recordings, all posted here.

Then Ovi sidled away from hosting MP3s and anything afterward has been posted on Soundcloud, or Box, or DivShare or archive.com.

But for almost three years after, up until this past 30 May or so, every MP3 posted to Twango/Ovi continued to he hosted there. Nearly five years: not bad for the interwebs.

So an upraised glass to the ghosts of Twango and Ovi Share. Thanks.

And you'll see maybe more than a few of these empty white spaces where an Ovi embed used to be.



Perhaps fewer as time goes on.



Each a spot to spill a glass in memory of all that doesn't last.

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 . . .

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.

As of 30 May, Ovi Share Nokia is over

This means a bulk of the audio posted here will be gone by late spring.  Unless.

This is a sleepy blog now, with most of the current action going on the so-called annex on Tumblr.  Not sure when or if I'll reup the dead links. 

Given the odd environment online re hosting, audio sharity and whatnot--wherein whole domains get nuked whether or not files are indeed posted by their creators/copyright holders (um, any nosey visitors dropping by--this is my stuff I'm posting), it gives one pause.  The so-called cloud seems a noxious gas.

If I do reup, I'll try to simply replace old links/embeds with new, and leave the posts are they are but without pesky dead links.  And if so, I'll announce it's having been done.  Till then . . .

ye olde J-card

audible and otherwise

Much of what's going lately is ad hoc and such.

And posted here.

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.

Gone--video

Music video of Gone.