Just the sort of thing to shake up your winter blues:

transatmospheric.com/site/the-electric-cave/

HANDWITHLEGS return with an 8-track album of new songs, a fuzzy, fucked-up fusion of electronica, bad-ass drums, and distorted vocals, all fed back and forth across a floor of effects pedals. First track ‘NYA’ is arguably one of the finest tunes to have originated from Planet HWL, so give it a spin and see what you think. It’s free to hear and download, and only buttons on itunes.

So that’s where he’s been!

Having suitably blown everyone away with last year’s whirlwind ‘Exercises In Futility’, Bobby Rogan and THE Fig Mints are back with not one, but TWO records – ‘Say Okay’ and ‘Songs For My Friends & Those Girls’. ‘Say Okay’ has been at the mastering stage for quite some time, so I’ve already had a sneak preview and a review will follow. Needless to say it is very good and a little bit different from previous Figs. ‘Songs…’ on the other hand has fallen from the sky as unexpectedly as a tiny meteor and is available for free download over at CLLCT (links below). I’ve had a quick listen and have a feeling that this might be an under-the-radar gem in the ever-expanding catalogue. Here’s what Senor  Bobby has to say for himself:

Alright, everybody! At long last, there are new Figs tracks available for purchase and download, both from the music section of the site.

Say Okay is the culmination of a year of songwriting and ridiculously tedious mixing throughout 2010. It’s been done for nearly a year now, and finally after all the mixing, remixing and monetary hangups, we’re able to bring it to you for a measly 5 buxxx! Of course I think it’s worth more, but be honest: who’s gonna pay more than 5 bucks for a DIY CD-R, no matter how fancy it looks?

Well, if you just said, “Why, I’d most certainly pay more than 5 dollars for your new songs, but thank you for being such a cheap date,” then I’ve got some news for ya. If you can scare up some more scratch, go to my Band Camp page here and buy the download with the option to donate a little more to the cause. Of course, you’ll still get the real CD in the mail; just make sure you drop a line and let me know where to send it!

Songs For My Friends And Those Girls is the newest of the new, and was written in a month or so between November and December of 2010. Not much time spent behind the wheel of this one; it mostly just spilled out of the various wounds that this past winter has inflicted, which are just now starting to heal. Read all about it at the Figs’ cllct page and download it for free in the music section.

This will be the Fig Mints farewell to cassettes and tape machines as the main recording tools. Of course, there will still be some lo-fi one offs and the like, including the upcoming releases of the two soundtracks for Zombek films that were recorded over the past couple years, but for the most part we’re going big!

So make sure you mosey on over to the music section of the site and scoop up some quality tunes for your summer.

Stay tuned, kiddies!

Thank you America!

Oooooooh – nice cover!

Plucked fresh from thefigmints.com – Bobby updates on the new record and other undertakings:

Don’t count the Fig Mints out! Say Okay has been hung up in tracking and mixing for the better part of 2010, but it’s finally done! Mastering and duplicating are the only tasks left at hand, and barring any cataclysmic event, release is slated for March of this year. Keep yr eyes on this space for further details.

In other news, there are two more Figs albums in the works this year; one of which will probably see the light of day before the summer, the other maybe by the end of the year or middle of 2012 at the latest. “Songs for my Friends” is an album of catharsis chronicling the very confusing, depressing, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, and frequently drunk late fall/early winter of 2010, and will be the Fig Mints’ farewell to cassette tapes. Yes, it’s true. We’ve gone …(gulp)… digital. You can’t expect to move forward by staying where you are, dig?

Which brings us to the next line of business. “Bad Age for the Underdog” (thanks Jason Raspa of Frogville for the suggestion!) will hopefully be the deep breath after the freak out. The beginning of better days to come, and a new take on songwriting and recording that may just yield the most polished and fully realized Figs record yet. Only time will tell, so make sure you keep on checking this space for details!

Download ‘Sweet Home Suite’ here: http://cozyhomerecords.com/08/artists/cashew-cook/

Back on the horse so let’s start at the shallow end and see if we can still swim in the lake by revisiting this old and somewhat tasty cashew nut: Cashew Cook’s ‘Sweet Home Suite’. Written and recorded in 2006, and available as a free download from Cozy Home Records, this has always been one of my favourite musical offerings from Henry Street. As soulful and humming as home recordings can get, you can just about hear the birds squabbling in the forest trees and feel the floorboards creaking beneath your bare toes while it plays. Think easy-listening for Thoreau’s great-grandchildren: acoustics and 12-strings on the porch, banjos and bottles of home brew, with a strong bright voice a million miles removed from the super-self-conscious urban consumer-kid that most of us can’t help but become when we’re not paying attention.

Jam-packed with brilliant song-writing on tracks like ‘Morning Son’ (yeah, thanks everyone for pointing out my misspelling of that one for the last three and a half years), ‘Feeling Can Remind Us’, and ‘Into The Day’, it’s never too late to go back and revisit a record that is a rolling stone of a hit in an alternative universe where substance beats style, and expression trumps pretence. Cashew Cook embodies the idea of the free-thinking songsmith, turning his back on the internet several years ago to go and be with real people and have real experiences – commendable, if a loss to the virtual community. Talk of a follow-up in 2007 never materialised into anything tangible, so for those of us who own an original CD with its handmade bark cover, and those of you who have already accidentally stumbled over this, we’re just going to have to make do with revisiting and mellowly chewing over these songs every so often, much to the universal heart’s content. For those of you yet to discover this long lost gem – well, what are you waiting for?

Listen to ‘Morning Son’:

Download audio file (CashewCook-MorningSon.mp3)

Find out more about Cashew Cook at:

http://www.myspace.com/cashewcook

A bored and drunk Bobby Rogan plays this timeless classic from his last record ‘Exercises In Futility’, and also good old Daydream Generation 1.

Fig Mints have loads of good stuff on their site including a video for shiny new song ‘What Happened To Holiday?’ – go show some love to the little guy at:

www.thefigmints.com

(*never underestimate your own popularity, dig?)

Download DEAD CANARIES

GOLDEN SOUNDS and MODERN DAY CARPETBAGGER

at http://cozyhomerecords.com/08/artists/dead-canaries/

for free

Jon of the Atom and his travelling band of musical troubadours return like migrating free-form birds with two brand new albums – ‘Golden Sounds’ a year-long continuation of the upwards musical trajectory and an epically wretched record to make, and ‘Modern Day Carpetbagger’ apparently written and recorded over ‘a long weekend reading John Wilmot’. As always I go into these recordings with my eyes closed, fully expecting the unexpected from the ‘bastard child of Beck and Brian Wilson.’

This adventure began some two years ago when Dead Canaries burst into being with the acclaimed collaborative ‘Critical Mass…’ Throughout 2008, its follow up ‘Something Else’ accidentally fell together, fusing disparate songs and sounds from different internal/external places and passing players. The question after the dust had settled from ‘Something Else’ and it became clear that something of an inadvertent masterpiece had emerged from months of recording, was… where the fuck could Dead Canaries possibly go from there?

Thankfully, this is Jon of the Atom we are talking about. Sometime in 2009 he upped sticks, left his native Ithaca and jumped on a box-car to Louisiana, where he assembled a new team of singers and musicians to help realise what we now hear as the first half of these two recordings – the immense ‘Golden Sounds’. I first heard a rough demo of this record in the autumn while Jon wrestled with band conflicts and eventually decided that he ‘hated it’ and went back to the drawing board. This early version of the record was actually pretty great… lots of backwards stuff, the same experimental take on traditional folk-pop songs from the two previous records, and random instruments galore sounding darkly golden in nature. Four months later it is redone and as usual he was right to redo it. This version of ‘Golden Sounds’ is twice as big and twice as darkly golden, the songs more intricate and ironically even more expansive, an adventure of a record that takes you by the hand and leads you underground where notes blow triumphant and voices sing in claustrophobic harmony, where freaky rolling, clunking instrumentals bind simply brilliant songs together, and anything becomes possible. Tracks like ‘Prince Edward Island’, ‘Seven Bell Peppers in a Row’ or ‘It Wasn’t Calm’ shows a maturity of song-writing, the sound of someone who knows exactly what he is doing and is doing it with technically ease. There is order in this chaos – dark and mysterious one moment, bright and gentle the next, ‘Golden Sounds’ is the kind of record that only Dead Canaries can make. Jon himself hinted at perhaps some sort of finality when he described these two records as his ‘Abbey Road’ and ‘Let It Be’, but when great things like this are going on, and when you think the boundaries can’t be pushed any further, he does it again. I guess we can only hope he keeps doing it.

‘Modern Day Carpetbagger’  suggests that he will. Where ‘Golden Sounds’ seems carefully planned and deliberate in its melodic head-fuckery, this second helping of Dead Canaries is much looser and chaotic in the way it plays out. Truthfully my iPod screen is fucked so there is no way of me telling which songs I’m listening to. One of the downsides of this is that after ‘Hunting of the Bilge Rat’ on ‘Golden Sounds’, and due to the fact that so many songs instrumentally melt into each other, I’m unable to tell where one record ends and the other begins. This is particularly challenging when it comes to writing a review. However…

It has its pluses. For a start, play these records side by side start to finish and they sound exactly like a double-album should sound. ‘Modern Day Carpetbagger’ may have been recorded in a long weekend (I find it difficult to believe that anyone could record something so emotionally potent with such technical proficiency in such a short space of time), but in many ways it is ‘Golden Sounds’ equal. ‘Karl Marx Lives In Lafayette Louisiana’ for example, is my favourite song on the two records, gear-shifting like The Beatles and punching like The Kinks. Plus anyone who heard Jane Gilmore sing ‘Honey Pie’ on the White (Christmas) Album will be pleased to hear it find a home here. Just to clarify – we’re talking about my least favourite Beatles song, a track that until now I’ve not been able to listen to without my toes squirming from the ends of my feet to hide in old brown shoes. The Fink/Gilmore and Fink/Saul vocal combinations are as creatively special as ever and from time to time on both records you hear them materialise (the acapella ‘Prince Edward Island’ for example is a stroke of absolute genius, and the reworked version of ‘Low Down Adela’ is as mighty as anything Jon has cooked up previously). The liner notes suggest that there are many other singers, musicians and songwriters at work here, but they rightly come and go like whispering ghosts, plucking things, wailing things, chiming things. What these things are and who does what is all just part of the collective conundrum that is a global orchestra of participants who are bewildered to be along for the ride, the professor conducting via satellite link-up from his basement laboratory, winking back over his shoulder at us the audience, while simultaneously bellowing ‘Clarinets blow! Girls sing! Funny little percussion thing rattle! Horns explode! Drum roll! Catchy piano melody kinda noodle along! Uke plink! Guitars strum! Here, let me throw you some weird guy talking about whale song being sent into space…’

Some records you have to tear from the imagination into reality (Golden Sounds) and some fall out like they were meant to be (Modern Day Carpetbagger). Both are great records… you should give them a try.

Here’s Bobby…

1 You can take one record to a desert island for the rest of your life – what would it be?

Probably Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand. Never get sick of it.

2 Who is your favourite artist?

Once again, I go the GbV route and say Bob Pollard

3 Favourite chord?

D for definitely.

4 Can God invent a rock that he cannot lift?

God gave rock n’ roll to ya.

5 Who did you last vote for in an election?

The only one that matters at this point.

6 Favourite fiction writer?

Don’t read much fiction, but Tolkein was the shit.

7 If you could invite 5 people to dinner (dead or alive) who would they be?

Bob Pollard, Jesus, the Buddha, Charles Bukowski, and Smally cos I think he’d get a kick out of it.

8 What pisses you off?

Pissed off people.

9 What’s the best song you’ve ever written?

We Love You.

10 One wish – what would it be?

To be able to shut my mind off at will.

11 Favourite band?

Why, GbV, of course!

12 3 websites worth checking out?

I don’t really use the web much anymore… Maybe cozyhomerecords.com, daydreamgeneration.com, and thefigmints.com. Sure, that’ll work. dictionary.com is pretty good….

13 Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?

Nirvana, Pear Jam, and Metallica. Dude.

14 When was the last time you cried with laughter?

Never got to that point. But I did throw up once. It was great.

15 If you could learn and play one instrument, what would it be?

The piano.

16 Preferred mode of travel?

Foot.

17 Shuffle your iPod – what are the first five songs that play?

Don’t got no iPod…

18 Snowballs, snowmen, or sledging?

Sledging? Like sledgehammers? Yeah!!!

19 Best gig you’ve ever been to?

The Warlocks and The Gris Gris at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC.

20 What’s the most embarrassing record in your collection?

Too many to list. Seriously.

21 Favourite drink?

Old Fashioned. That’s Bourbon, bitters and club soda… Mmmmm…

22 Drug of choice?

Used to be coke… Ahem… Like the soda, yeah… That’s it… Now it’s just good ol’ booze. Maybe psilocybin…

23 If you were an animal, what animal would you be?

Homo Erectus

24 And if you were a colour, what colour would you be?

Meh…

25 Are you good at any sports?

Nope. Well, I guess I’m pretty good at video bowling with my buddy, the Wii.

26 Last book you read?

The Art of War

27 First thing you think when you get up in the morning?

Oh fucking hell, not again…

28 Last thing you think when you go to bed?

Why?Why-why-why-why-why?????

29 Describe your music in three words?

Absolutely fucking brilliant.

30 If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be?

Someone with a lot of money, so I could pay my tuition in advance.

31 Favourite comedian?

Neil Hamburger.

32 What colour is your front door?

Brown.

33 Favourite film?

The Fellowship of the Ring.

34 A quote that stuck in your head?

“Goddammit!! Never leave a man behind!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

35 Favourite subject at school?

Probably history, or math.

36 Which actor/actress would play you in a film about your life?

Tom Selleck.

37 What music makes you want to dance?

ESG, Animal Collective, Motown, Michael Jackson before the third nose job.

38 What should they write on your gravestone?

Don’t want one. Too expensive, and it just clutters up the Earth. Y’dig?

39 How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

6,665,420,319.1314599999…

40 When did you first start writing your own songs?

Whenever I figured out what melody was.

41 What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?

My friend Johnny’s face appearing on a wall in Benny’s basement… Then it turned into Jesus. Then I said, “Jesus!”

42 Favourite smell?

Grillin’

43 Favourite sound?

Feedback.

44 Swings, roundabout, chute, or climbing frame?

Whoa, those last three ain’t part of American English, but I get the gist… Roundabout.

45 Who is your favourite Beatle?

Goddammit Smally, don’t ask me that. I don’t wanna get beat up for not saying Ringo.

46 Point us in the direction of a band one of your friends is in?

www.frogvillemusic.com

47 A YouTube video the world should watch?

48 Cats or dogs?

Dogs.

49 If you had to join the circus what would you be?

The ringmaster.

50 Favourite book?

Oh, I don’t know….

51 Have you ever been on TV?

Yep.

52 Have you ever been arrested?

Nope.

53 What songs do you (would you) sing at karaoke?

Loser, Fight For Your Right (To Party), Surrender, I Wanna Be Sedated.

54 Have you ever seen a ghost?

Every time I look in the mirror… Oooooh, creepy.

55 How do you like your coffee? Or would you prefer a wee cup of tea?

Black with sugar. And very strong.

56 Punk or Raver? Mod or Goth? Hippy or Beatnik? If you had to label yourself, what gang would you be in?

No.

57 What’s the worst job you ever had?

Gas station in Herkimer, NY. I lasted half an hour.

58 What’s brown and sticky?

Oh, don’t even get me started.

59 Do you have any recurring dreams?

Can’t say that I dream often enough to have anything happen more than once….

60 How many records have you released and which is your favourite?

Seven. I think Exercises In Futility is the best (plug plug… Buy my record!!!)

61 Where in the world would you like to go?

Scotland.

62 Favourite kind of cloud?

Altocumulus at sunset.

63 Favourite line from a song?

Wrapped in a cocoon of skintight buffoonery… Now here’s the plan. (Guided By Voices)

64 What’s the music scene like where you live?

Nonexistent.

65 Who would make up your dream band? (one singer, one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, plus one extra)

Bob Pollard, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Krist Novoselic, Mike Garguilo.

66 Favourite cover art?

In The Court of the Crimson King

67 Early bird or night owl?

Depends on my agenda, eh?

68 Which of the seven sins are you?

Sloth… Only cos I’m trying to work on getting rid of gluttony and pride.

69 Three words people use to describe you?

Quiet, nice, drunk. Two of those are totally inaccurate.

70 You have ten minutes left to live, what would you do?

Take some pills and go to sleep.

71 Do you support any sports teams?

Syracuse Orangemen basketball, yo! Go Big East!!!

71 What do you want for Christmas?

Animal liberation.

72 Favourite track from all the Daydream Generation compilations?

Don’t Ask Me Again What I Dreamt by Becky N

73 Can you cook up a storm in the kitchen?

Just made some kick ass baked shells & cheese last night… Mmmmmm….

74 What’s the first thing you remember?

A metal railing on a concrete staircase, and a question without an answer.

75 How do you go about writing a song?

If I only knew…

76 When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

Not enough hair on my head.

77 What’s the best advice you were ever given?

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” It’s become a cliche by now, but really. Think about it.

78 Do you smoke?

Sometimes I wish I never quit…

79 Tell us a joke?

How can you tell if an elephant’s been in yr cupboard? There are footprints in the peanut butter!!!

80 Pick a card, any card?

Bill Gates’ Visa.

81 One question you’ve never been able to answer?

How will I know?

82 If you could travel back in time, when and where would you go?

NYC 1982

83 Favourite philosopher?

Ah shit… Maybe Lao Tzu

84 Do you have any pets?

Ah, my lovely pit bull, Mishu.

85 Ever climbed a mountain?

Yeah. Then I got a migrane threw up. I hated it, but the scenery was grand!

86 What do you do in the real world to pay the rent?

Direct care for the developmentally disabled

87 Self-diagnosis: any psychiatric disorders?

I don’t even want to comment.

88 Favourite poet?

Jim Carroll

89 What wouldn’t you do for a million dollars?

Kill any living thing.Well, I guess unless it was a bug. Or fish, maybe but I’d have to think long and hard about that.

90 Adrenalin junky?

Nah, just the regular kind.

91 What bands have you been in?

Oh. Well… From the beginning: David’s Boys; The Chesterfield Medical Experiment; Acoustic Mayhem; The Groan-Ups; Yous Guys; The Fucking Flame; The Real Burnouts; Pinky Stink’s Problem; Arthur Rules; Electric City Subway, Euro Language Abusive, the original Utica Flower Co. (Plural Noun); Fig Mints (of Your Imagination). Probably some others too…

92 Favourite board game/computer game?

Chess, even though I suck.

93 What kind of recording set-up do you have? Equipment etc.

Tascam 488, Sony Minidisc deck, lots of outdated stuff.

94 A character you love from a book or a film?

Ted Theodore Logan

95 Who is the sexiest person in the history of the world?

Rita Hayworth

96 If you could genetically fuse two animals together what would they be? And what would it make?

I don’t fuck with nature.

97 What kind of drunk are you?

Depends on how many days running.

98 What was the first record that really blew your mind?

Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine

99 What are your musical plans for the future?

Just keep cranking, and maybe get a band together.

100 Got some websites of your own we can visit?

www.thefigmints.com and www.cozyhomerecords.com

Just some guy…

1 You can take one record to a desert island for the rest of your life – what would it be?
I’d have to make a mix-tape of all my favourite DG songs… sad, but true

2 Who is your favourite artist?
Let’s put Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin in a ring and have them slog it out.

3 Favourite chord?
C

4 Can God invent a rock that he cannot lift?
Can Santa Claus fart the colours of a rainbow?

5 Who did you last vote for in an election?
The good guys

6 Favourite fiction writer?
Kerouac’s not fiction is he? So I guess I’d have to say Dostoyevsky. With Hunter S Thompson a close second (pending a drugs test).

7 If you could invite 5 people to dinner (dead or alive) who would they be?
Paul Burnout on Bobby Fig Mint’s shoulders with one of those big jackets on (that’s one), Davyd Betchkal (two), Kris Baranovic (three), Becky Nosiara (four), Jon Fink with Hannah McLean in his pocket (five), and Tim Schram via live satellite link-up (just to keep the chain-saw at bay once the drinks start flowing).

8 What pisses you off?
Political apathy, little people with big umbrellas hogging the pavement, impatient people in queues virtually butt-fucking you, fascism racism homophobia, pretty much everything on my television, the Americanization of the UK’s workplace (brainstorming, process charts, and team-building… fuck off!), ghost-hunters and psychic charlatans, not being able to smoke… I’ll stop there. I’m getting pissed off just listing them.

9 What’s the best song you’ve ever written?
The Sometimes Song or Marvin The Mollusk

10 One wish – what would it be?
World peace every time

11 Favourite band?
The Stone Roses

12 3 websites worth checking out?

http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

http://www.cllct.com

http://theuticaflowercompany.wordpress.com

13 Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?
The Stone Roses (Fools Gold cover), a Dali print, and Juliette Lewis with her mouth open

14 When was the last time you cried with laughter?
Writing the “Moon-Mission” dialogue with Simon Piler

15 If you could learn and play one instrument, what would it be?
Sitar or glock

16 Preferred mode of travel?
On foot

17 Shuffle your iPod – what are the first five songs that play?
Neutral Milk Hotel ‘Ghost’
The Wheelies ‘The Boy Who Ate The World’
Warchalking ‘Diving Bell’
The Orange Drop ‘Fuck I’m A Rolling Stone’
Handwithlegs ‘Stumped’

18 Snowballs, snowmen, or sledging?
Snowballz

19 Best gig you’ve ever been to?
I have never been to a good gig – Brian Jonestown Massacre was okay, so I guess it wins by default

20 What’s the most embarrassing record in your collection?
Maria McKee ‘Show Me Heaven’ is pretty fucking bad

21 Favourite drink?
Tea, coffee, diet coke

22 Drug of choice?
There was a time I would have said ‘LSD’, but nowadays it’s the slightly less psychedelic double combo of caffeine and nicotine.

23 If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
Something busy. A weasel maybe.

24 And if you were a colour, what colour would you be?
Communist Red

25 Are you good at any sports?
I think I’m good at pretty much any sport. Except rugby. I fucking hate rugby. I grew up in a family of people who play sport with no real books and no real music, so that stuff is in my genes – it’s just that I choose to ignore it.

26 Last book you read?
‘How To Write A Novel’ – research to work out how not to write a novel.

27 First thing you think when you get up in the morning?
Shit this life is relentless, where are my glasses, and fuck I need a cigarette.

28 Last thing you think when you go to bed?
I love my life, oh shit here comes another idea, and fuck I need another cigarette.

29 Describe your music in three words?
Glad it’s over

30 If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be?
Someone who lives close enough to go to a Real Burnouts gig

31 Favourite comedian?
Bill Hicks

32 What colour is your front door?
Brown with seagull poop

33 Favourite film?
Life Aquatic

34 A quote that stuck in your head?
‘All life is a circle, therefore it is the going there, not the getting there that counts’

35 Favourite subject at school?
English or Art

36 Which actor/actress would play you in a film about your life?
That guy from “American Pie” apparently

37 What music makes you want to dance?
Madchester

38 What should they write on your gravestone?
Write what you want, it’s not like I’ll be around to notice

39 How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
Dylan couldn’t even answer that one

40 When did you first start writing your own songs?
15

41 What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?
Some guy and his “multi-coloured boabey” silhouetted against a square orange moon

42 Favourite smell?
Petrol

43 Favourite sound?
The sea

44 Swings, roundabout, chute, or climbing frame?
Depends how drunk I am – sober I’d go for swings, drunk I’d stagger in the direction of the climbing frame

45 Who is your favourite Beatle?
Back to John again

46 Point us in the direction of a band one of your friends is in?
Ah too many. Click the links under The Utica Flower Company on the right…

47 A YouTube video the world should watch?
The one with the little fat kid on the rollercoaster always make me laugh

48 Cats or dogs?
Spiders

49 If you had to join the circus what would you be?
Plate spinner

50 Favourite book?
Jack Kerouac’s ‘Selected Letters’

51 Have you ever been on TV?
Once, aged 15 talking about sex

52 Have you ever been arrested?
No, but I’ve made some spectacular getaways

53 What songs do you (would you) sing at karaoke?
I sang “Common People” in a working man’s pub once. It just about started a riot. The only other one I’ll do is “Venus In Furs” just to lighten the mood.

54 Have you ever seen a ghost?
I’ve seen Ghostbusters about a thousand times

55 How do you like your coffee? Or would you prefer a wee cup of tea?
Intravenously fed to me via a drip for 18 hours a day. Black or white, as long as there’s plenty of sugar. Tea in the evenings.

56 Punk or Raver? Mod or Goth? Hippy or Beatnik? If you had to label yourself, what gang would you be in?
Geeknik

57 What’s the worst job you ever had?
Call centres just about killed me.

58 What’s brown and sticky?
Oh come on, it’s a stick of course…

59 Do you have any recurring dreams?
One weird one where I’m moving into a new house. There is always some kind of tunnel or old door I discover that leads into the depths of the building where there is a secret theatre and stage that nobody knows about. And then I wake up.

60 How many records have you released and which is your favourite?
21 I think. Probably between “I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard (Mine Died)” and “Tigermouse”

61 Where in the world would you like to go?
Back to my cloud coffin

62 Favourite kind of cloud?
Ones that meander across the sky and look a little like something else ever changing

63 Favourite line from a song?
‘I want to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free silhouetted by the sea circled by the circus sands with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves may I forget about today until tomorrow’

64 What’s the music scene like where you live?
Scottish folk. Sad old men in bars.

65 Who would make up your dream band? (one singer, one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, plus one extra)
Jane Gilmore, Bobby Rogan, Jon of the Atom, Paul Burnout, Simon Piler on sound effects and choreography

66 Favourite cover art?
I like the early Stone Roses singles

67 Early bird or night owl?
Twit twoo

68 Which of the seven sins are you?
Sloth… just show me the branch and I’ll mooch around on it all day dreaming stuff up.

69 Three words people use to describe you?
Full of shit

70 You have ten minutes left to live, what would you do?
Probably try and catch up on some sleep

71 Do you support any sports teams?
Arabs

71 What do you want for Christmas?
A sackful of time and a Utica Flower Company t-shirt

72 Favourite track from all the Daydream Generation compilations?
How can I possibly choose? The two most played tracks on my iPod are The New Wave Dirt ‘Ghost in a Photograph’, and Becky N ‘Autopilot’.

73 Can you cook up a storm in the kitchen?
With bolts of lightning and everything.

74 What’s the first thing you remember?
Going to the hospital to see my little brother when I was two. I remember eating all the grapes that we’d brought my Mum and washing my feet in a little pool in case of verrucas. No wait, that sounds like the swimming pool. I’m confused. Why would I be eating grapes at a swimming pool?

75 How do you go about writing a song?
Fumble around in search of a melody. Then desperately write some words down at the last minute on the back of scrap paper for something to sing.

76 When you look in the mirror, what do you see?
Just some guy in glasses.

77 What’s the best advice you were ever given?
To cure hiccups: breathe in REALLY slowly until your lungs are full, hold your breath for as long as possible, and breathe out REALLY slowly. Not so easy when drunk.

78 Do you smoke?
I’m trying not to. But I’m going to go for one now.

79 Tell us a joke?
See Q58.

80 Pick a card, any card?
The 8 of Diamonds

81 One question you’ve never been able to answer?
‘Smally, where exactly are you going with this?’

82 If you could travel back in time, when and where would you go?
First live reading of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’

83 Favourite philosopher?
Although I don’t particularly dig the content, I like where Spinoza was coming from. And old Santa Marx obviously.

84 Do you have any pets?
Not since our pet rock ‘Bibby’ got swept out to sea.

85 Ever climbed a mountain?
Quite a few. I love the pointlessness of it and the feeling of being so exhausted above the clouds that you can’t even be arsed to appreciate the view when you get there. I also like diving around in untouched snow fields up them while singing Beatles songs.

86 What do you do in the real world to pay the rent?
Daydream at the window

87 Self-diagnosis: any psychiatric disorders?
Where to begin?

88 Favourite poet?
Bob Dylan

89 What wouldn’t you do for a million dollars?
Too many things to list here

90 Adrenalin junky?
Ahahahaha… it’s a much more meaningful form of adrenalin that I’m into.

91 What bands have you been in?
Fade, The Wheelies, Kaleidonauts, The Painted Shuts, The Utica Flower Company, Dead Canaries

92 Favourite board game/computer game?
RISK/ProEvo

93 What kind of recording set-up do you have? Equipment etc.
Crap mic, crap pc, free software, and crap headphones

94 A character you love from a book or a film?
The Scottish Dad from ‘So I Married An Axe Murderer’

95 Who is the sexiest person in the history of the world?
Assuming Tracey is still standing after the Pollock fight, she’d be back in the ring against Nico.

96 If you could genetically fuse two animals together what would they be? And what would it make?
A fox and a duck. It would be called a dox.

97 What kind of drunk are you?
Argumentative, mischievous, and clumsy. A terrible combination.

98 What was the first record that really blew your mind?
The Stone Roses s/t on a bus in Belgium

99 What are your musical plans for the future?
Keep the mic firmly locked in the attic

100 Got some websites of your own we can visit?

http://theuticaflowercompany.wordpress.com

If you think it was easy tracking down this guy and his puppet, then think again.

1 You can take one record to a desert island for the rest of your life – what would it be?

copious maximus

2 Who is your favourite artist?

duane hanson

3 Favourite chord?

C-E-G

4 Can God invent a rock that he cannot lift?

god can do anything it wants to

5 Who did you last vote for in an election?

one of em

6 Favourite fiction writer?

anyone who writes for the observer dispatch

7 If you could invite 5 people to dinner (dead or alive) who would they be?

andy warhol, george washington, syd barrett, smally, wayne coyne

8 What pisses you off?

bits and bytes

9 What’s the best song you’ve ever written?

listen inside maybe? i don’t know i don’t play favorites

10 One wish – what would it be?

to know when i was going to die

11 Favourite band?

the monkees

12 3 websites worth checking out?

i’m sure there are plenty of them

13 Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?

mental block

14 When was the last time you cried with laughter?

daily

15 If you could learn and play one instrument, what would it be?

drums

16 Preferred mode of travel?

walking

17 Shuffle your iPod – what are the first five songs that play?

hmm, is there a way to put cassette tapes on shuffle?

18 Snowballs, snowmen, or sledging?

definitely not snowballs

19 Best gig you’ve ever been to?

maybe thurston moore trio?

20 What’s the most embarrassing record in your collection?

i’m proud of all of my embarrassments

21 Favourite drink?

utica club, magic hat #9, newcastle, whiskey sour

22 Drug of choice?

love

23 If you were an animal, what animal would you be?

spider

24 And if you were a colour, what colour would you be?

green

25 Are you good at any sports?

frisbee

26 Last book you read?

13th floor elevators bio

27 First thing you think when you get up in the morning?

what the fuck happened last night?

28 Last thing you think when you go to bed?

i’m not going to remember this tomorrow

29 Describe your music in three words?

mediocre, lo-fi, delicious

30 If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be?

bill worden

31 Favourite comedian?

showalter

32 What colour is your front door?

brown. used to be green

33 Favourite film?

head?

34 A quote that stuck in your head?

35 Favourite subject at school?

recess

36 Which actor/actress would play you in a film about your life?

daniel radcliff

37 What music makes you want to dance?

afrobeat

38 What should they write on your gravestone?

i’m with stupid

39 How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

40 or 50 years worth of roads, could just be the same one

40 When did you first start writing your own songs?

probably when i was 16, a side project of trashcan acid called the myoclonics.

41 What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?

curtains blowing in the breeze while the window was closed

42 Favourite smell?

clean air, grill

43 Favourite sound?

thunder

44 Swings, roundabout, chute, or climbing frame?

chute

45 Who is your favourite Beatle?

john

46 Point us in the direction of a band one of your friends is in?

bobby of fig mints of your imagination, jon of jon fink, rob of october terminus, tim of handwithlegs

47 A YouTube video the world should watch?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_TqlaZsWPA

48 Cats or dogs?

cats

49 If you had to join the circus what would you be?

he guy who tortures the animals

50 Favourite book?

where’s waldo

51 Have you ever been on TV?

yes, mova tv which was local television wackiness

52 Have you ever been arrested?

no, but probably should have been several times

53 What songs do you (would you) sing at karaoke?

anything by ray parker jr

54 Have you ever seen a ghost?

hmmm, weird segway, but no.

55 How do you like your coffee? Or would you prefer a wee cup of tea?

with milk and sugar shock

56 Punk or Raver? Mod or Goth? Hippy or Beatnik? If you had to label yourself, what gang would you be in?

i’d be in the badass hippie beatnik gang

57 What’s the worst job you ever had?

my current one

58 What’s brown and sticky?

dog shit flavored chewing gum

59 Do you have any recurring dreams?

yes, one where i am about to be run over by a train but wait up just before it hits every time.

60 How many records have you released and which is your favourite?

last count 14, maybe 15. they’re like my children, i hate all of them equally.

61 Where in the world would you like to go?

liverpool

62 Favourite kind of cloud?

pot smoke

63 Favourite line from a song?

“you better find yourself a worlder baby” (?) – mouse and the traps

64 What’s the music scene like where you live?

its shaken when stirred and cries itself to sleep everynight

65 Who would make up your dream band? (one singer, one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, plus one extra)

dean wareham, jimmy page, paul mccartney, hal blaine, vivian stanshall
66 Favourite cover art?

67 Early bird or night owl?

night owl

68 Which of the seven sins are you?

vanity

69 Three words people use to describe you?

handsome, super-intelligent, operable

70 You have ten minutes left to live, what would you do?

smash all my clocks and turn on npr

71 Do you support any sports teams?

the giants of new york and the devils of new jersey

71 What do you want for Christmas?

cash

72 Favourite track from all the Daydream Generation compilations?

be right where you belong

73 Can you cook up a storm in the kitchen?

only when i discreetly order in

74 What’s the first thing you remember?

the last thing i thought of

75 How do you go about writing a song?

no set way, it dictates its own way

76 When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

myself, or something else at an angle

77 What’s the best advice you were ever given?

“its not what you know, its who you know.”

78 Do you smoke?

questionably

79 Tell us a joke?

80 Pick a card, any card?

visa

81 One question you’ve never been able to answer?

this one

82 If you could travel back in time, when and where would you go?

london 1967

83 Favourite philosopher?

rob levy

84 Do you have any pets?

sort of, but i’m more their pet i think

85 Ever climbed a mountain?

no i drive around them

86 What do you do in the real world to pay the rent?

i’m a two bit can jockey

87 Self-diagnosis: any psychiatric disorders?

nope, all sunny in here

88 Favourite poet?

ol dirty bastard

89 What wouldn’t you do for a million dollars?

i wouldn’t do that

90 Adrenalin junky?

not really

91 What bands have you been in?

oh lord, short list: benards freek star, trashcan acid, avant audiophiles, myoclonics, chrome ghosts, the pipecleaner’s dick, the electric chairs, painted shuts, etc..

92 Favourite board game/computer game?

always been fond of chess

93 What kind of recording set-up do you have? Equipment etc.

tascam 8 track mixed to sony minidisk, then burned to cd on awai audio cd burner for masters and uploading

94 A character you love from a book or a film?

ferris bueller

95 Who is the sexiest person in the history of the world?

the sphinx

96 If you could genetically fuse two animals together what would they be? And what would it make?

i don’t know, but when it barks, you listen

97 What kind of drunk are you?

the best

98 What was the first record that really blew your mind?

the monkees first album, followed by piper at the gates of dawn, and trout mask replica

99 What are your musical plans for the future?

figure i’ll figure something out

100 Got some websites of your own we can visit?

www.therealburnouts.com
www.myspace.com/therealburnouts
www.cozyhomerecords.com

Somebody somewhere give that man a record deal!

1 You can take one record to a desert island for the rest of your life – what would it be?
- I suppose, ‘Pet Sounds’… In case you were wondering, my top 5 are, in order, ‘Pet Sounds’, ‘Sgt. Pepper’, ‘VU & Nico’, ‘Troutmask Replica’, ‘Forever Changes’. Obvious, I know, but they’re obvious for a reason.

2 Who is your favourite artist?
- Francis Bacon, when his work was good, it was amazing. I’d like to write a song about it some day. I can imagine it sounding like Scott Walker’s last couple of records.

3 Favourite chord?
- There are a couple of things I’ve made up which unfortunately, I’m fond enough of to include in half my songs. Not out of choice, my brain is just wired to hear certain things next. Of the obvious chords, I like 9ths. I try not to use them too much because they make everything sound too jazzy. But when you use them once in a while, especially if you use (for example) an A major 9th with a big thick E over the top… it sounds great. On piano I like C, you can let your mind wander and just go off in a drone.

4 Can God invent a rock that he cannot lift?
- A certainly hope so!

5 Who did you last vote for in an election?
- Green, I don’t care all that much, I just wanted to go as left as possible because there was alot of talk about the BNP.

6 Favourite fiction writer?
- I don’t read much fiction, I don’t feel like I’m learning anything. I really enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s ‘Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests’ (of course!) which is partially fiction.

7 If you could invite 5 people to dinner (dead or alive) who would they be?
- John, Paul, Brian, Don, George (H or M)

8 What pisses you off?
- Oh, so much. Not sleeping, it really bugs me.

9 What’s the best song you’ve ever written?
- It’s really hard to say. Because recordings never end up as you hoped they would, you can write a song and think “Christ, I’ve really done it here” and the recording just sounds flat and nothingy. By the same token, you can write a song which sounds pretty average and the recording works out really well (which is what happened with my latest song ‘Sally’s Yard’. I’m quite proud of it now that it’s recorded).

10 One wish – what would it be?
- Just a soundproof room with enough space for my stuff. Maybe with a mellotron and a couple of ribbon mics.

11 Favourite band?
- The Beatles, I can’t imagine ever giving a different answer.

12 3 websites worth checking out?
- www.myspace.com/thefallingfloors (obviously), Captain Beefheart’s wikipedia page (I check it every day with a lump in my throat half expecting it to say “1941 – 2009″), and www.lego.com

13 Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?
- Alot of Queens of the Stone Age and Kyuss and stuff like that.

14 When was the last time you cried with laughter?
- My girlfriend managed to go her entire life thinking that Chupa Chups were called Chub Chubs.

15 If you could learn and play one instrument, what would it be?
- I’d really like to be able to play flute.

16 Preferred mode of travel?
- I hate cars, I freak out on the motorway. Trains or planes I don’t mind, because any time one of them crashes you hear about it on the news, but cars crash every day.

17 Shuffle your iPod – what are the first five songs that play?
- I don’t have one. I write most songs while walking, and that can’t happen with iPods.

18 Snowballs, snowmen, or sledging?
- Both!

19 Best gig you’ve ever been to?
- Jonathan Richman, I never wanted it to end.

20 What’s the most embarrassing record in your collection?
- Paul McCartney’s song for Rupert the Bear, the sleeve is horrendous.

21 Favourite drink?
- Kahlua.

22 Drug of choice?
- Meth under the eyelids.

23 If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
- A ruff.

24 And if you were a colour, what colour would you be?
- Brown lipstick.

25 Are you good at any sports?
- None.

26 Last book you read?
- Revolution in the Head, I keep coming back to it as a reference guide.

27 First thing you think when you get up in the morning?
- Oh, Paul McCartney.

28 Last thing you think when you go to bed?
- Oh, Paul McCartney.

29 Describe your music in three words?
- Could be better/worse (I can’t decide).

30 If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be?
- Paul McCartney.

31 Favourite comedian?
- Mitch Hedberg.

32 What colour is your front door?
- Clear.

33 Favourite film?
- Duck Soup.

34 A quote that stuck in your head?
- “That woman had a fish for a head!” “Well that’s her problem”

35 Favourite subject at school?
- Art.

36 Which actor/actress would play you in a film about your life?
- Bill Murray.

37 What music makes you want to dance?
- ‘Only Seventeen’ by the Beattlettes.

38 What should they write on your gravestone?
- As long as it’s in neon I don’t care.

39 How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
- Just that one that cuts through Hulme near the Job Centre. I made it once, but I had to get the bus back.

40 When did you first start writing your own songs?
- I wrote my first song in junior school. All I remember is that I drew a picture of the Eiffel Tower at the top of the notation page, and I have no idea what I wrote because I can barely even read tab now. Maybe it was like John Cage or something.

41 What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?
- An old queen.

42 Favourite smell?
- Certain plastics.

43 Favourite sound?
- Someone else using a hair dryer, a vacuum cleaner in the next room, standing near the extractor fan at night. Those big warm mechanical sounds.

44 Swings, roundabout, chute, or climbing frame?
- Climbing frame.

45 Who is your favourite Beatle?
- Paul McCartney!

46 Point us in the direction of a band one of your friends is in?
- www.myspace.com/oldkingmusic

47 A YouTube video the world should watch?
- Search ‘Falling Floors Nexus’.

48 Cats or dogs?
- Cats.

49 If you had to join the circus what would you be?
- I’d play the calliope.

50 Favourite book?
- ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ by Brian Wilson.

51 Have you ever been on TV?
- I certainly hope not.

52 Have you ever been arrested?
- No.

53 What songs do you (would you) sing at karaoke?
- I always wanted to do ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’.

54 Have you ever seen a ghost?
- I thought I did when I was a kid, he was stood on top of a house.

55 How do you like your coffee? Or would you prefer a wee cup of tea?
- Strong, with a couple of sugars. I get headaches if I don’t drink enough coffee.

56 Punk or Raver? Mod or Goth? Hippy or Beatnik? If you had to label yourself, what gang would you be in?
- I’m Psychedelicate!

57 What’s the worst job you ever had?
- Working behind a bar. It’s like working in a bookshop, except when someone pays for a book, you have to write it yourself, quickly, and write it well. And the customer is drunk.

58 What’s brown and sticky?
- Brown lipstick!

59 Do you have any recurring dreams?
- I used to, about elephants and a mountain.

60 How many records have you released and which is your favourite?
- That all depends on what you mean by ‘released’…

61 Where in the world would you like to go?
- I love Paris, if I could speak French I’d go back there and never return.

62 Favourite kind of cloud?
- Lemonaide.

63 Favourite line from a song?
- “Fur is wonderful, fur’s not leather, furthermore I love you furever!”

64 What’s the music scene like where you live?
- I don’t see much of it. I suppose it’s much the same as it is anywhere.

65 Who would make up your dream band? (one singer, one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, plus one extra)
- Scott Walker, Jacques Dutronc, Paul McCartney, Hal Blaine, Alan Hawkshaw.

66 Favourite cover art?
- All the Philips Twen records.

67 Early bird or night owl?
- Owl.

68 Which of the seven sins are you?
- Omega 3.

69 Three words people use to describe you?
- Could be better/worse (I can’t decide).

70 You have ten minutes left to live, what would you do?
- Listen to ‘Golden Slumbers/Carry that Weight/The End’. I think I’d have time.

71 Do you support any sports teams?
- None.

71 What do you want for Christmas?
- Money to put out a record. Or a record deal.

72 Favourite track from all the Daydream Generation compilations?
- I really liked The Hoborchestra track at the start of DG6.

73 Can you cook up a storm in the kitchen?
- Toast.

74 What’s the first thing you remember?
- Losing a balloon.

75 How do you go about writing a song?
- Wait for it to happen.

76 When you look in the mirror, what do you see?
- A grey-haired old man staring back at me.

77 What’s the best advice you were ever given?
- “Just try a little bit”

78 Do you smoke?
- Do you joke?

79 Tell us a joke?
- Tell us a smoke?

80 Pick a card, any card?
- I’m sick of cards.

81 One question you’ve never been able to answer?
- “How much do you think you’ve earned?”

82 If you could travel back in time, when and where would you go?
- 1960, to see what it was like when music existed for a decade.

83 Favourite philosopher?
- Is there a non-pretentious answer to this? No, I don’t think so. I guess I’ll say Satre, it’s more relevent than Plato or anything.

84 Do you have any pets?
- George is at my parent’s house.

85 Ever climbed a mountain?
- Not physically.

86 What do you do in the real world to pay the rent?
- I work in a bookshop called Magma and I DJ at a bar called Big Hands.

87 Self-diagnosis: any psychiatric disorders?
- I hope not.

88 Favourite poet?
- Leonard Cohen I guess.

89 What wouldn’t you do for a million dollars?
- What WOULDN’T I do more like!

90 Adrenalin junky?
- Not even slightly.

91 What bands have you been in?
- I was in a couple in college, then I was a group called Horse Hair, we released a 3″ CD and a tape, both in paisley fabric. You can hear it at www.myspace.com/hosehairhorsehair

92 Favourite board game/computer game?
- Shithead.

93 What kind of recording set-up do you have? Equipment etc.
- A few shit microphones, an old 70′s desk, a digital multitrack (because I usually play everything myself), then I mix it down to 1/4″ tape on a TEAC A-3340S.

94 A character you love from a book or a film?
- Roberto Benigni’s character in Down By Law.
95 Who is the sexiest person in the history of the world?
- Serge Gainsbourg.
96 If you could genetically fuse two animals together what would they be? And what would it make?
- A human and an animal. It would make a humanimal I suppose.
97 What kind of drunk are you?
- Changes every time.
98 What was the first record that really blew your mind?
- I guess, ‘Rated R’ when I was 12. It had a pretty all-encompassing impact on me at the time.
99 What are your musical plans for the future?
- Definately keep on making records, maybe never play live ever again.
100 Got some websites of your own we can visit?
- I mentioned it already. www.myspace.com/thefallingfloors

And now we boldly go where even the brave dare not tread – the marvellous mind of Jon Fink…

1 You can take one record to a desert island for the rest of your life
- what would it be?
hmm, my desert island disc collection. Duh

2 Who is your favourite artist?
Hundertwasser and Robert Parke harisson

3 Favourite chord?
B7

4 Can God invent a rock that he cannot lift?
No, G-man O.D. can impress all the chicks, he has every growing
muscles and tiny hands to be able to still pick a flower or two!

5 Who did you last vote for in an election?
The one with the lever

6 Favourite fiction writer?
Scott Tompson
7 If you could invite 5 people to dinner (dead or alive) who would they be?
Sitting Bull, 16 year old Jesus, barely legal Betty Davis, Howard
Hughes, and 66 Brian Wilson

8 What pisses you off?
Being walked into. Or hit by cars, is a new thing that pisses me
off. I also don’t like when people try to hand me a flier about being
green, and then I say no, and then they fallow me to my bike telling
me if i go i can win a bike, then i say fuck off, and they start
yelling at me.

9 What’s the best song you’ve ever written?
Something, still don’t believe it

10 One wish – what would it be?
Time travel, or power of machineless flight

11 Favourite band?
Dick Scabby and the Yeast Infections.

12 3 websites worth checking out?
http://www.dacapomusicexchange.com/ (the old site was better, but the pictures are still there)

http://cartoonoveranalyzations.com/2009/02/20/diagnosis-donald-duck-suffers-from-ptsd/

http://www.old-picture.com/indians/Indian-Costume.htm

13 Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?
It was a Pearl Jam Vitalogy poster of a side show act with a guy who had a snake rapped around him. I might have bought that at the first real rock concert i went to.

14 When was the last time you cried with laughter?
hmm, can’t say i know

15 If you could learn and play one instrument, what would it be?
Piano like Scott Joplin and Beethoven piano sonatas

16 Preferred mode of travel?
Bicycle, or dream

17 Shuffle your iPod – what are the first five songs that play?
1. It’s the Best Thing For you-Alexander Spence
2. Nobody’s Fault but My Own-beck
3. I’m Yours, You’re Mine – Morphine
4. Force Field-Beck
5. Weed Green Yard-The October Terminus

18 Snowballs, snowmen, or sledging?
Sledging?

19 Best gig you’ve ever been to?
Ween played for 6 hours one night. It was like a party that Ween
played. They were talking to the crowd and giving out cigs and beer.
Then, a show I played with Meghan Geiss and Sgt Dunbar. When we
played, it was a house party, I was sure that the goal was to break
through the floor. I was excited and nervous it would happen.

20 What’s the most embarrassing record in your collection?
Avril

21 Favourite drink?
Coca Cola

22 Drug of choice?
I guess its caffeine, or sprouts.

23 If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
Panther, or a tiger. Or a human

24 And if you were a colour, what colour would you be?
I am a blue, I’d like to be a green

25 Are you good at any sports?
hj?

26 Last book you read?
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I am reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat right now.

27 First thing you think when you get up in the morning?
Not again

28 Last thing you think when you go to bed?
not again

29 Describe your music in three words?
Dustbowl surf rock

30 If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be?
Someone with a big private boat on the ocean

31 Favourite comedian?
Brian Regan, mitch hedberg, Louis C.K.

32 What colour is your front door?
hmm, grrreean?

33 Favourite film?
Ed Wood

34 A quote that stuck in your head?
You have your ROAD bike one the side WALK -Jonathan Fink

35 Favourite subject at school?
History

36 Which actor/actress would play you in a film about your life?
The one that is one film away from suicide

37 What music makes you want to dance?
Off the Wall-Michael Jackson

38 What should they write on your gravestone?
Like a bird on a wire

39 How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
6

40 When did you first start writing your own songs?
6 years old

41 What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?
A rubber band, I saw a needle wink it’s eye

42 Favourite smell?
so many smells to keep life going. Coffee, bbq, vagina

43 Favourite sound?
well played clarinets

44 Swings, roundabout, chute, or climbing frame?
Chute or climbing frame

45 Who is your favourite Beatle?
Paul (fuck you all, John was an asshole too)

46 Point us in the direction of a band one of your friends is in?
Real Burnoutsd, October Terminus.

47 A YouTube video the world should watch?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=B1IME451NDY&feature=player_embedded

48 Cats or dogs?
Cats

49 If you had to join the circus what would you be?
One armed carnie

50 Favourite book?
dr. seuss oh the places you’ll go

51 Have you ever been on TV?
unfortunately

52 Have you ever been arrested?
unfortunately

53 What songs do you (would you) sing at karaoke?
My Way-Elvis

54 Have you ever seen a ghost?
Seen 1, heard another

55 How do you like your coffee? Or would you prefer a wee cup of tea?
Latte or Oolong tea

56 Punk or Raver? Mod or Goth? Hippy or Beatnik? If you had to label
yourself, what gang would you be in?
Punk, Mod, Beatnik

57 What’s the worst job you ever had?
Making pizza’s at a childrens pizza restaurant. Employees stole food all the time and I would have to remake it. The boss was a cunt, he never did a thing

58 What’s brown and sticky?
Sugar Daddy

59 Do you have any recurring dreams?
I had one once

60 How many records have you released and which is your favourite?
10ish, Something Else by Dead Canaries

61 Where in the world would you like to go?
Spain, New Zealand , to bed

62 Favourite kind of cloud?
clouds that look like giant breasts full of milk

63 Favourite line from a song?
and she likes to go down on me and I like to go down on her too.

64 What’s the music scene like where you live?
I dont see it, but it has zydeco in it

65 Who would make up your dream band? (one singer, one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, plus one extra)
Steven Small, Luke Human, me, Meghan Geiss, Katie Saul

66 Favourite cover art?
The original idea for I Do Not Currently Own a Spaniard, or the one we used

67 Early bird or night owl?
Early Bird

68 Which of the seven sins are you?
Probably Envy

69 Three words people use to describe you?
Piece of blank

70 You have ten minutes left to live, what would you do?
I have always wanted to get hit by a bus full of unsuspecting little kids.

71 Do you support any sports teams?
nope

71 What do you want for Christmas?
A wooden clarinet

72 Favourite track from all the Daydream Generation compilations?
Like Brownish Skies-Fig mints

73 Can you cook up a storm in the kitchen?
Yup

74 What’s the first thing you remember?
bad stuff, bad wall paper, fake laughs

75 How do you go about writing a song?
It sort of just happens

76 When you look in the mirror, what do you see?
It always changed. I don’t believe it

77 What’s the best advice you were ever given?
Dont fuck with me punk!

78 Do you smoke?
nope

79 Tell us a joke?
A guy goes to a halloween party with out a shirt, socks, shoes, or a hat. The host says you need a costume, the guest says, I have one,
the host asks, What are you? He responds, I am a premature
ejaculation, I came in my pants! BAZING!

80 Pick a card, any card?
this one

81 One question you’ve never been able to answer?
Dad?

82 If you could travel back in time, when and where would you go?
France, 1780

83 Favourite philosopher?
Marx. Being in the Southern U.S. I felt like saying Jesus. I took a
class in the north, and the teacher was a priest, and we talked about
Jesus, and he said Jesus was just copying everyone else of the time,
and nothing special. So Jesus

84 Do you have any pets?
Louis, Fry, and Beck. There are songs about all of them

85 Ever climbed a mountain?
In a car

86 What do you do in the real world to pay the rent?
Nothing

87 Self-diagnosis: any psychiatric disorders?
Dysthymia at this point

88 Favourite poet?
Leonard Cohen

89 What wouldn’t you do for a million dollars?
can’t say, sure could use that money right now

90 Adrenalin junky?
Arnold Layne-I needed a piece for my Halloween costume. It was fun

91 What bands have you been in?
Ages of Green, Fun with Boxes, The New Wave Dirt, Dead Canaries, Kaleidonauts, Hoborchestra

92 Favourite board game/computer game?
Monopoly

93 What kind of recording set-up do you have? Equipment etc.
Mbox Protools and reason. Couple mics and a digital hand held stereo Tascam

94 A character you love from a book or a film?
Nancy Clutter

95 Who is the sexiest person in the history of the world?
Napoleon, or Cleopatra

96 If you could genetically fuse two animals together what would they
be? And what would it make?
Don’t mix the colors, I like them that way.

97 What kind of drunk are you?
angry

98 What was the first record that really blew your mind?
Thriller by Michael Jackson is the reason I am who I am.

99 What are your musical plans for the future?
shhhh

100 Got some websites of your own we can visit?
myspace.com/deadcanaires
cozyhomerecords.com

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s the chainsaw-wielding Godfather of Lo-Fi and the man who made this all technologically possible, pulling the computer strings behind The Daydream Generation, Cozy Home Records, Transatmopheric, and many others. Also he makes a beautiful racket himself with projects like HANDWITHLEGS, and again, many others… it’s THE Tim Schram.

1 You can take one record to a desert island for the rest of your life – what would it be?
-It would have to be a mix

2 Who is your favourite artist?
-Justin Broadrick
3 Favourite chord?
-Any

4 Can God invent a rock that he cannot lift?
-Yes, he enjoys toying with us apparently

5 Who did you last vote for in an election?
-Obama
6 Favourite fiction writer?
-Philip K Dick

7 If you could invite 5 people to dinner (dead or alive) who would they be?
-Philip K Dick, Carl Sagan, Arthur C Clark, Isacc Asimov and Jesus

8 What pisses you off?
-Callousness
9 What’s the best song you’ve ever written?
-Couldn’t say

10 One wish – what would it be?
-That the world be invaded by extraterrestrials
11 Favourite band?
-4 way tie between Tom Waits, Gangstarr, the Melvins and Justin Broadrick

12 3 websites worth checking out?
-www.cozyhomerecords.com / www.mixedtape.us / www.doihaveswineflu.org/

13 Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?
-Godflesh/Helmet/Skinny Puppy/Gangstarr/Beck/Dead Kennedys

14 When was the last time you cried with laughter?
-The last time I was visiting Paul Burnout, Arthur Rules & Bobby Rogan were there too. I have pictures

15 If you could learn and play one instrument, what would it be?
-Piano

16 Preferred mode of travel?
-Train

17 Shuffle your iPod – what are the first five songs that play?
1. Mission of Burma – SSL 83 (from The Sound The Speed The Light)
2. Clint Mansell – 3 Year Stretch (from MOON o.s.t)
3. Three Mile Pilot – Year of No Light (from Another Desert, Another Sea)
4. Hal Blaine – Hallucinations (from Psychedelic Percussion)
5. Zach Hill – Dark Art (from Astrological Straits)

18 Snowballs, snowmen, or sledging?
- I assume you mean sledding,
19 Best gig you’ve ever been to?
- Melvins, this past september, as part of my drunken bachelor party

20 What’s the most embarrassing record in your collection?
- Im not embarrassed by any
21 Favourite drink?
-Jameson & Water on the rocks
22 Drug of choice?
- the Weed

23 If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
-And elephant

24 And if you were a colour, what colour would you be?
- #81b176
25 Are you good at any sports?
-No, but I enjoy frisbee

26 Last book you read?
-Podkayne of Mars, Robert Heinlein

27 First thing you think when you get up in the morning?
-”I really wish I didnt have arthritis at 30″

28 Last thing you think when you go to bed?
- Traveling through Space, did I lock the doors?

29 Describe your music in three words?
Creepy, Percussive, Reverb

30 If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be?
-Rush Limbaugh, and I’d kill myself
31 Favourite comedian?
-George Carlin

32 What colour is your front door?
-Green
33 Favourite film?
-Blade Runner

34 A quote that stuck in your head?
-blank

35 Favourite subject at school?
-Architectural Drawing

36 Which actor/actress would play you in a film about your life?
-I truly dont know

37 What music makes you want to dance?
-60 garage rock
38 What should they write on your gravestone?
-”DEAD”

39 How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
-37

40 When did you first start writing your own songs?
-Age 16

41 What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?
- http://www.urlesque.com/2009/09/22/glamourpuss-the-enchanting-world-of-kitty-wigs/
42 Favourite smell?
- Popcorn
43 Favourite sound?
- An empty steel dumpster

44 Swings, roundabout, chute, or climbing frame?
- I’m guessing a climbing frame is your way of saying a Jungle Jim?

45 Who is your favourite Beatle?
-Never really listened to them (I know, I know)

46 Point us in the direction of a band one of your friends is in?
-THE REAL FUCKING BURNOUTS www.therealburnouts.com

47 A YouTube video the world should watch?
-Maybe not the world, but my clients: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY

48 Cats or dogs?
-Cats
49 If you had to join the circus what would you be?
-A clown drummer
50 Favourite book?
- Childhoods End, Arthur C Clark

51 Have you ever been on TV?
-Yes

52 Have you ever been arrested?
-Yes, 3 times

53 What songs do you (would you) sing at karaoke?
-None. I dislike karaoke

54 Have you ever seen a ghost?
-I dont believe in them

55 How do you like your coffee? Or would you prefer a wee cup of tea?
-A cup of black tea, then an iced coffe

56 Punk or Raver? Mod or Goth? Hippy or Beatnik? If you had to label yourself, what gang would you be in?
-Punk Asshole

57 What’s the worst job you ever had?
- Personal Assistant

58 What’s brown and sticky?
-Glue

59 Do you have any recurring dreams?
-All of my dreams that I can recall are always nightmares

60 How many records have you released and which is your favourite?
-Wow, released or recorded? 19 Albums are available to the public. Probably near 100 recorded

61 Where in the world would you like to go?
-Australia

62 Favourite kind of cloud?
-Sparse ones

63 Favourite line from a song?
- “I got a gun the size of a black hole, I shoot planets” RZA (it’s all about the delivery, not my favorite, but the 1st one that came to mind)

64 What’s the music scene like where you live?
-I live in the country, so there is NO scene, but I work in NYC, so I get my fill of whatever I want

65 Who would make up your dream band? (one singer, one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, plus one extra)
-All clones of myself, I think we’d work great together
66 Favourite cover art?
-Ministry “Filth Pig” always cracks me up

67 Early bird or night owl?
-Both, depends on the day

68 Which of the seven sins are you?
-None

69 Three words people use to describe you?
-When I asked, I was told “Shut Up”

70 You have ten minutes left to live, what would you do?
-A drink, a smoke and a kiss from my wife

71 Do you support any sports teams?
-Katie Burnouts’ Roller Derby team

71 What do you want for Christmas?
-My garage to be sheet-rocked

72 Favourite track from all the Daydream Generation compilations?
-Kind of cheating, since I played on it, but THE DROWNED COMMITTEE “She Says”

73 Can you cook up a storm in the kitchen?
-If I try

74 What’s the first thing you remember?
-Riding in the back of my mothers chevy nova in 1983, laughing hysterically

75 How do you go about writing a song?
-Most of the time, I record the beats and then make up the rest

76 When you look in the mirror, what do you see?
-An Angel (wink wink)

77 What’s the best advice you were ever given?
-”You can do anything”
78 Do you smoke?
-I am trying to quit, down to one a day…

79 Tell us a joke?
-This is the only joke i ever remember & I’ve told it thousands of times: “A skeleton walks into a bar, he orders a beer, and a mop”

80 Pick a card, any card?
-I dont play cards

81 One question you’ve never been able to answer?
-”What do I smell like?”

82 If you could travel back in time, when and where would you go?
-To see some motherfuckin dinosaurs
83 Favourite philosopher?
-None

84 Do you have any pets?
-A very obese cat named Rejinald, he has AIDS and he like to brush his teeth (seriously, ask Bobby)

85 Ever climbed a mountain?
-Yup

86 What do you do in the real world to pay the rent?
-I am an Interactive Designer at a large media company in NYC

87 Self-diagnosis: any psychiatric disorders?
-Who knows
88 Favourite poet?
-Not a big fan of poetry

89 What wouldn’t you do for a million dollars?
-Kill a baby
90 Adrenalin junky?
-Sometimes

91 What bands have you been in?
-More than 10

92 Favourite board game/computer game?
-Risk

93 What kind of recording set-up do you have? Equipment etc.
- 24″ imac w/ Cubase Studio Pro, Alesis FW 16, akai MPD controller, studiophile B monitors, two drumsets plus triggers, 3 drum machines 12 toy keyboards, a room full of percussion stuff, a bunch of sheet metal, 9 condenser mics, my friends bass & guitars & amps, a 2000 watt PA, 1987 roland JUNO, a tons of stuff really…

94 A character you love from a book or a film?
-Wall-E

95 Who is the sexiest person in the history of the world?
-Who knows

96 If you could genetically fuse two animals together what would they be? And what would it make?
-An elephant & a bat. It would be an elebat.

97 What kind of drunk are you?
-silly & rambunctious
98 What was the first record that really blew your mind?
-Beck, Stereopathetic Soul Manure

99 What are your musical plans for the future?
-To never ever stop playing music

100 Got some websites of your own we can visit?
-Go to www.timschram.com, links to a bunch of my sites are there
- Show quoted text -

Download it for FREE today

here

Listen to SET YOUR SENSES FREE from THE REAL BURNOUTS “Copious Maximus”:

Download audio file (TheRealBurnouts-SetYourSensesFree.mp3)

I was recently asked to list my five favourite bands of all time and quickly reeled them off – The Stone Roses, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, The Beach Boys, and The Real Burnouts. Most of you will have heard of the first four, but not so many of you will be aware of the fifth. I mean this list sincerely, and include The Real Burnouts not for gimmick, nor for some kind of pretentious alternative musical one-upmanship, but simply because each of them at some stage have made music that changed my life. If The Roses ripped my head open with their indie anthems and The Beatles saved my brain with a song-writing masterclass, if The V.U took me somewhere dark I never knew existed, and The Beach Boys showed me the stratospheric heights that melody and harmony can reach, then The Burnouts showed me that there was a whole other world to discover, beyond the radio stations and shiny music magazines, happening on the bedroom floors and in the secret basements of the universe. This experimental and reassuringly original psychedelic band from Utica, New York, made music sound alive again by kicking down the doors of possibility in their grotesque painted masks and goofy hipster clothes, with twisted words and unpredictable tunes. From the first time I heard their druggy anthem “Set Your Senses Free” (as revalationary as  experiencing mind-altering psychedelics for the first time) I pretty quickly discovered that nothing was what I’d always assumed it had been, and nothing could ever be the same again. It really is an epiphany to discover that the songs and sounds that actually matter the most are rarely on the radio or television, nor do they frequent the shelves of your local independent music store, or get magically handed to you when you least expect it. The music that actually matters you’ve got to go out and find for yourself.

Whether any of us like it or not, a revolution has smashed through the heart of the music industry at the turn of the 21st century. The tidal wave of recording technology is as important a change for creative culture as the youth revolution of the 1950s were. Now it is possible to cut out the corporate middle man and go straight for the jugular of open ears. Now, the budget-less bedroom bound songwriter can record their ideas and share them with an audience on the other side of the globe within a matter of minutes. Now, the means of production in the form of four-tracks and software programmes are affordable (even free) to anyone who has something to sing about. You can design your own covers, sell downloads, or mail your own CDs. You may not make a living from it, but even in that there is a purity, honesty, and fire in the DIY recordings of this generation. Undoubtedly there always has been, but never before have we been able to capture and share it with each other so easily. I can’t speak for you, but I know myself whose thoughts and experiences I’d choose to listen to if it came to a choice between the decadent rock-star writing from a air-conditioned tour bus that eventually stops at some clinical beach-house, or the people like us who struggle and sometimes succeed, who try to make sense of the world around us from the battle-scarred terrain that is the front-line of actuality. The Real Burnouts in that sense are perhaps fortunate to find themselves in the thick of the wave that finally broke the dam, because this is the kind of band that record company executives could lose a lot of sleep over. As well as being musically brilliant, they can also be frighteningly different (the first time I heard their name mentioned on an internet forum, someone wrote “The Real Burnouts scare me”), and even to this day I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment. These guys are the unwitting pioneers of a time when Lo-Fi became not just the preserve of the sixties garage band, but a movement in its own right. They were there as wasted teenagers trading home-made cassettes on the streets of Utica in the mid-90s, and although the recordings are infinitely more sophisticated, it is still the same principle over a decade later – just a much bigger street. With podcasts and collectives, social networking sites and rapidly shifting advances that cater directly to how the artist wants to be heard rather than how the corporation wants to package a commodity, it is hard to see this revolution failing. The death knell of the vacuous celebrity has been well and truly sounded, and though the world can’t hear it yet, the heroes of a tomorrow a long way from today, will not be pretty poster puppet youths with fuck all to say, or winners of talent shows regurgitating elevator music. The heroes will be bands exactly like The Real Burnouts.

I’ve pestered the creative driving force (Paul Burnout) for the last couple of years to put a record like “Copious Maximus” together. There’s a Utican cardboard box in my bedroom containing every available Burnout record to date (most of these are available through the brilliant little Cozy Home Records). It’s a gargantuan back catalogue – from the twin giants that are “You Won’t Know Until You Find Out” and “Transparent Mirror”, through early offerings with wonderful names like “The Penis and Vagina Syndrome”, or “It’s Not All Hot Chocolate”, right through to the insanely magical “A Lull In Void”, and more recently the subtle and relatively melancholy “Post-Show, Post-Traumatic, Ultimate Mundane”, and “(In) A World Not Unlike Your Own”. With a bit of searching, a few clicks of a mouse, a well-intentioned word to the right people or a little loose change, anyone who digs this band as much as I do shouldn’t find it difficult to assemble the entire collection. The things is, that the first time I ripped through the records back to back I was struck by how many Burnouts songs were missing from them. Tracks like the aforementioned “Set Your Senses Free”, or the spiky psych-punk “Girl You’re The One For Me”, the goofy pop of “Psychological Sacrifice”, sixties-tinged anthems like “Be Right Where You Belong” and “Whenever Will I See You There?”, even the more off-the-wall efforts like the spoken “Wild Sarsaparilla” – all of them seemed to be curiously missing in action. If anything, the scale of lost tracks is perhaps testament to the band’s prolificness – barely a year goes by without a new offering, and a natural consequence of this is that some songs get left behind, fall by the wayside, or just about vanish into the aether forever. Paul himself explained where they’d gone – “to me they were all bits and pieces that didn’t quite fit on albums, and others, to me, were too good compared to other songs on albums to be used”.

Two years of pestering later and here they all are. A 34 track collection of the finest and strangest Real Burnouts recordings that didn’t make it onto the records, hand-picked from the cutting room floor. “Copious Maximus” is lo-fi home pop’s accidental answer to “The White Album”. A coherent collection of songs recorded over four years of arguably “golden age” Burnouts, like a jigsaw of several puzzles that mysteriously piece together. The psychedelic riotry of the band format (all your favourite Burnouts are represented – Luke, Bobby, Katie, Dustin, and Pat) goes hand in hand with the more introspective poetic ramblings. Alternative versions, collide with undoubted hits, drums and synthesisers burst into flame, and everybody wakes up the morning after wondering what the fuck has just happened. Don’t get me wrong – this music isn’t for everyone. It isn’t always obvious, and if you don’t get it the first time around, then chances are that no amount of working at it is ever going to get you there. But for those of you like me, who have been blown away by the honesty, originality, and pure experimental expressiveness of this band in the past, then this is a must have recording. Forty years ago today The Beatles released “Abbey Road” and just about everyone knows it. Forty years from now the chances are that The Real Burnouts will still be a cult group beyond the periphery of the canonized musical pantheon. The great records of our generation are like fleeting gems that flare for a short while before burning out in your brain, to be discovered many years later in tattered old Utican cardboard boxes. So dig well before it burns out.

Smally, 17th August 2009

Find out more about The Real Burnouts at: www.therealburnouts.com

Get more Burnouts recordings here: www.cozyhomerecords.com

www.therealburnouts.com

Why not take some time out of your busy lives and click on the link above? Disappear down the rabbit hole of The Real Burnout’s universe, with news about a shiny new record – (IN) A WORLD NOT UNLIKE YOUR OWN – videos, words, pictures, and the expected unexpected, you’ll be reluctant to ever climb back out again.

Jon of the Atom kindly takes time out from his action-filled secret life as a musical superhero and tells us all about the latest great offering from DEAD CANARIES – “Something Else” (FREE to download from your cheap and spookily cheerful QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE above).

The lion’s share of this album was down when I decided to write and record a song a day, hoping that after a couple months, I’d have enough songs to point a stick at.  I was in a lull.  I had started I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard against my will, but was glad I had done it, however the comfort of finishing Critical Mass was gone.  So I had nothing to write and no comfort in that.  Something Else also contains a couple orphan songs that were too good to let go of.  Like “Song For #6” may have been the first song.  The title came from the fact that there is always something else.  This album is no exception to the fact that I have a muse and cannot escape from writing about her; it is in fact something else.  Even Critical Mass was done in an effort to not write about her. 

1. Going For A Ride Today- This song was much longer, but it bugged me.  I cut it down after a fall out with the person it was about.  It works better and builds up the cycling element.  Also, there were 2 other songs that were based around Elvis and Roy Orbison that were cut, leaving “Black Hole” to sound out of place!  Go discord!
2. My Pump Caught In My Trouser Leg- A part of the original Going from a Ride that sounded better on it’s own, and the segue is a calliope from Yankee Stadium, the last Boston/ New York game in the old stadium.  Not an important fact, just that’s where it’s from.
3. Something Else- A friend called during recording of one of the clarinets, and the song starts with her message.  The faulty bass wiring can be heard through out, but it sounds good.  The opening verses lyrics were recorded at Bus Stop Studio in Liverpool NY.  The song is little more than it sounds.  It’s to the point.  I was told that everyone has this moment about someone.  Dan came and put down the drums last minute and made the song.
4. Shortest Hour of the Day- This was a cover of a song written by Paul Burnout and Smally Wheelies, however, I had the song so long that I for got to note that!  I don’t think they’d mind.  The lovely Chelsea Hogan put her pipes on this one, thank god.  It would be a different song.  This was another orphan that needed a proper home.
5. Song For #6- The music for this song was written why watching The Prisoner so I named it for #6.  My myspace said, “Who is #1” for a while, but that means something else these days (there it was again!).  The lyrics were inspired by Smally’s original try at writing lyrics for the song.  He ended up having written the first line, then I took over by placing photos in place of paintings and something else took over.
6. Kim’s Unfinished Ride Home- A woman from Maine demanded, “Write a song for me!” and I did.  I don’t think she ever heard it.  It took me awhile to decide it was in fact finished, but the title meant something else too.  There’s a Simpsons quote at the end of the song, and that’s a clue as to what the title means.
7. Doli Lemon- Rob Levy wrote a song we called Doli Lemon, it was really titled Dilemma, and so I wrote a song that was supposed to be about the Doli Lemon, only I ended up not liking it so much rather quickly.  Meghan Geiss recorded the Drums around the time of The New Wave Dirt’s Elephant’s Tap Dance Recital, so I wrote a new song around them.  I prefer this one, but time will tell. 
8. Something- This song was I believe the official first for Something Else.  I recorded into a dictation machine from the 70’s and wrote it down later.  I didn’t write the last line but Katie (beautiful voice heard on this song) pointed out that it sounded like “Plastic Jesus” so she wrote the last line.  This might be the best song I ever written.  It is about moving on and being positive.
9. Nothing Else- Conversely, this is the regression into old habits.  This song was inspired by, but not about, riding passed a friend’s home and ringing my imaginary bicycle bell.  I had the music from “My Pump Caught…” and thought I’d write the song over that, but forgot that the music was sad and a bit unpleasant, the improvised lyrics, recorded on my camera while I recorded the main guitar, are unpleasant as well.
10. Vindaloo Was Her Name- Vindaloo has become my favorite Indian food and there is a song by the Pussy Willows that they sing, “Vindaloo was her name, she will never dance again”.  I had a crazy dream that I would learn to play the oboe well enough to put down a lead part, but luckily gifted saxophonist (Colin Gordon) was right next door one day and he did it for me.
11. Never Tinker With The Gear Shifter- was done to put in an apothecary box and when you opened a drawer it played.  Charity Burger asked me to create music for her art, it fit in the box pretty well.
12. Tim’s Banjo Story- Tim Kotch asked me to work on a song that he said he might not use.  I finished it, he didn’t want it.  Right before I finished Something Else Tim asked for the song, and it was interweaved in the other songs, so I just made a new version for The Hoborchestra.
13. How & When- A Tim Kotch song, one of my favorites, if I had to choose, which I can’t!  Katie Saul again sings and Dan finished it up for me.
14. Nothing- This song was on my enemies list for most of the production, I’m not sure if I like it even now.  I had a dream that I was in a hospital bed and I was waking up and there was a Beatles song playing, not a real Beatles song, but John Lennon was singing.  Then George came on and the music dropped out and his voice got really echo-y, like Paul in “Lovely Rita” and George sang “less stuff from the stores, less stuff for your drawers.” 
15. Who Knew? – Total frustration over wanting and hoping.  Longing and pining.  I was trying to write a Townshend, but the only the Who-ish about this song is the title.
16. Black Hole- I wrote this song in 1996 and the original out version of this album it worked better, but it was the perfect ending and couldn’t be compromised by bullshit.  The refrain at the end is “Something Else” with out the vocals, fuzz bass or noise.  If I had known…

DEAD CANARIES

Something Else

DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE FOR FREE: here

Full tracklisting:

1 Going For A Ride

2 The Pump Got Caught In My Trouser Leg

3 Something Else

4 The Shortest Hour of the Day

5 Song For #6

6 Kim’s Unfinished Ride Home

7 Doli Lemon

8 Something

9 Nothing Else

10Vindaloo Was Her Name

11 Don’t Mess With The Gear Box So Far From Home

12 Tim’s Bajo Story

13 The Hoborchestra’s How & When

14 Nothing

15 Who Knew?

16 Black Hole

(C) + (P) Dead Canaries

A Cozy Home Record, 2009

This much anticipated follow-up to 2008′s brilliant “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things” is available to download from today from our little musical curiosity shop. “Something Else” has been available for a couple of months over at Cozy Home Records, but we know how pressed for time your average surfer-collector is, and this record is that great that we collectively decided to host it here as well. I’ll save babbling on about it here and instead just post a review I wrote a while back for a magazine we just couldn’t get off the ground:

I guess you’d have to live with and probably even sleep with the new offering from Dead Canaries for a month before passing serious judgement on it. But as it happens I don’t have a month, and even if I did I want so badly to stand in its corner and shout about how great it is after only a handful of listens, that I don’t think I could wait that long. It was with the same excitement that I bought the long-awaited second Stone Roses album that I eagerly followed the breadcrumbs back to the Cozy Home record store where the second Dead Canaries record “Something Else” was waiting for free download. It never even crossed my mind that I’d be as disappointed as I was when I first heard “The Second Coming”, simply because Jon of the Atom and his musical friends seem to have been chemically inoculated from making a bad record. From The New Wave Dirt to JOTA solo projects and onto last year’s critically-acclaimed underground Dead Canaries debut “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things”, it’s been an upwards audio trajectory, conversely going irretrievably deeper into the rabbit hole of musical possibility. Whoever said that there is nowhere original for guitar music to go has obviously not been fortunate enough to stumble over the same  aforementioned breadcrumbs.

Smallie Wheelies

& Paul Burnout.

The first time I finished listening to My Own Personal Summer of Love, I said to myself, “This is not an album made by experts.”

The second time I listened to it, I realized, “No, it is an album made by people.” And right then, I realized it was exactly what I wanted.

With each additional turn in my CD player, I love the recording even more – In no short part for the emotional weight it carries. The songs are saturated with sorrows, but not dour. At best, they are reflections of change and mental struggle – the gentle, restive ballad ‘Delphi’ involves the suicide of a friend, ‘Raskolnikov’ personifies living clouds of dark dream in terms of Dostoyevsky’s greats, and ‘What A Waste’ (my personal favorite) sings like a deliberate, majestic march to the grave. The rolling, repetitive songs wash a full polyphony of phrases over the listener; each wave punctuated with that familiar, reedy, Scottish tang. After a while, it’s hard not to sing along.

At times the rhythms are truly spectacular (see ‘Casablanca’) as underwritten by Paul’s steady and expressive drumming. Every tune has a different texture: the stage-setter, ‘At The Bus Stop’ is laced with tinkly bells, and ‘Elephant Teapot’ fizzes like a wind-up toy turning circles. As is to be expected from a Personal Summer of Love, some of the songs (mainly ‘Animals’ and ’66’) channel a throwback, psychedelic vibe – chock full of fuzzy guitars and antiphonal, echoing harmonies. Though it’s apparent that the musicians have a deep respect for The Sixties, it is also true that they relive the standards of the decade in a starker, worried light. In the title track, Smallie sings, “It was the summer of love and I was so broke I walked everywhere and the world was weight on my mind so I cut my hair.” If Love is all The Painted Shuts need, then they certainly seem wary of it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this album, in reflection, captures the present as well. The dream-like fog of the recordings makes it easy to overlook the emotional significance and immediacy they contain.

This is new psychedelics.

In other words, it’s a problem concerning bread.

The taste and texture of homemade bread may be shocking after eating bleach-white pre-sliced for your whole life, but the homemade deliciousness of this album is beautifully strange enough to make anybody come back for a second helping. The joy of small imperfections and raw, real emotion contained in each earful is truly sustaining. And, maybe, just maybe, this catchy revolution will rip through your brain.

Simon Piler

Seriously, just do yourself a favor and download this album from Cozy Home Records, already!

www.cozyhomerecords.com

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”

- Eugene Delacroix

The boundaries of home recording equipment have been removed for quite some time. Long gone are the days of four-track cassette machines and bouncing; the art of scotch-tape over the protection tabs on Michael Bolton tapes given as gifts from far removed relatives because the store was closed seems almost lost. Digital interface, non-destructive editing, primitive pitch correction, and a galaxy of on-board effects at “reasonably affordable” prices makes analog craft boxes seem archaic and knucklish. The mix tape is gone, the mp3 era as arrived, and the wake created a great wind that set the lo-fi dream ship to sail into the great abyss we call “The Island of Forgotten Toys.”

Or so it was thought.

The latter half of this decade has seen a rejection of this silly idea. While digital recording is nifty and allows for a palette far beyond the capacity or need of many modern musicians, its missing the charm, the soul of tape hiss and natural distortion, the blood of bobbles in the takes, the mistakes that make a song human, the warmth that makes a song honest. This is not necessarily a new idea. Guided By Voices did it way before anyone thought is was cool. Lately bands the likes of the Black Lips and Wavves have been poking out of the mire and grabbing the affections of many purists and old-schoolers. For every group noticed for doing something “new” there always lies a subculture that understands the principles as well or better than the flagships that give it awareness. Fig Mints (of Your Imagination) is a shining example of a band that not only has had a solid grasp of this new ‘old’ sound, but have been at it for several years, culminating to this record, “Exercises in Futility”. It’s from this frame of reference the title is apt.

On the surface this album is unbridled and unkempt. Things are slightly out of tune or minutely out of key. Instruments are pegged and microphones are flattened out by the immensity of the sounds that pummel them. This is the future, ladies and gentlemen. Like track 2, A Change of Season, this record is the sonic equivalent of skipping class with your friends and mocking the world as it toils around you. Its unbounded and focused, yet is fenced by morals and codes that culture seemed hasty to forget. These songs call for normalcy in the midst of hurry, with the understanding that often the express route to normalcy can include a level of self-medication, most clearly represented in the opening track, The Well-Worn Road. What may be most striking about that particular song as well as the rest of the record is its consciousness. The Fig Mints are well aware of what they’re doing, much to our benefit. We are all entrenched in a field of voices, and “Exercises in Futility” sets up camp and is perfectly content to stay where it is and wave to the passing cars.

This is not a complicated record. The songs are ushered and unrelenting, moving like freight in the night. Guitars are towing ever further, yet are not overpowering. Even the solos are conservative and well shaped while commanding and necessary. The understated and restrained rhythm section plants its grooves like furrows in black soil, emerging from its toil to bomb the universe into bending at its every whim. All the while the vocals talk you through, calming and inciting, and always in the drivers seat. The range of the album is great, yet cohesive. Its tantric nature easily takes the mood from darkly introspective (Strung Out Sentries) to warmly reflective (the Stooges-esque My Days At University). The movement of the record as a whole resembles the behavior of a house party. At first all talk is intimate and the ideas are big, the songs are pointed and relaxed, often without drums. As the room fills up, songs like Undead Idea Mines convey a letting go, an acceptance of our own weirdness and the weirdness of others. Further down the line, as the room gets looser, the vibe descends into a lo-fi fuzz fest of whirl and rock and roll, particularly with Don’t Stay There and Its All I Can Do (To Stay Awake).

Down and dirty Ariel Pink kids will love this record. Black-shirted rock kids will love this record. Literate post-secondary astronauts that have learned to enjoy poverty will love this record. “Exercises in Futility” is eerily relevant and strongly appropriate for its time and season.

Wilford Benevolus
Junior Rock Analyst and Amateur Spokesperson for the League of American Wheelmen, Intl.

For more info on “Excercises In Futility” go to: www.cozyhomerecords.com

Out Now!

Here it is! Two years, two states, one retrospective outtakes EP, and five relocations after “Hugs and Smiles” hit the virtual shelves, Fig Mints are back with “Exercises In Futility”!

At the moment, the album is available only through mail orders for $8. Suffice to say, it’s worth it. The songs are his best yet, and it’s been reported that Bobby is only interested in breaking even with the money that he spent putting it out, so show some love and email bobby@cozyhomerecords.com for info on how to buy a copy, or just send your name and address with the payment to:

his seventh record (counting the EP featured in the DG store)

On Saturday, 28th March.

Physical copies of the new album “Exercises In Futility” will be available

in a limited pressing of 100 featuring a full color booklet

including lyrics. Each will be hand numbered and feature a

hand-made collage, found picture, or photograph

by Bobby.

Go to the show, or email bobby@cozyhomerecords.com

to order.

The album will be available for free download (minus booklet and artwork) on Tuesday, 7 April. Details to come later.

Out Now!

The long awaited follow-up to 2008′s “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things”, Jon of the Atom leads an ensemble cast of lo-fi experimentalists on the cool as fuck audio adventure of “Something Else” - jangling toy keys, drawled harmonies, kicking live drums, and exploratory soundscapes. A little bit of something else for everyone for FREE download over at www.cozyhomerecords.com

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

Fig Mints is the brainchild of Bobby Rogan (real name “Pinky”), a band name that he flippantly coined to make fun of himself recording without a band, and he’s been reluctantly stuck with ever since (“I had this idea to mix instrumental versions of my songs and do a self-styled karaoke with each “band member” having a part in the act that was prerecorded and very self-deprecating”). Unofficially coming into existence in the Spring of 2004 after moving into the actual Cozy Home on Henry Street, Utica NY – Bobby was inspired by the music and madness of that “scene” to start recording the songs he’d been writing, teaching himself how to play the drums and bass, and attempting to write lyrics “that weren’t sappy”. The last four years have been productive with 5 official Fig Mints full-length records recorded on 100% analogue cassette (“Tascam 488 all the way, baby”) being released through Cozy Home Records – How’dyer Day Go? (2004), Enjoy It While You Can (2005), Bad Choice Brigade (2006), Is It Today Already? (2006), and Hugs & Smiles (2007). All 5 records are available for free download at www.cozyhomerecords.com More recently Fig Mints released “The Passionate Understanding” via our own Quixodelic Records, a 7-song collection of unreleased tracks recorded between 1999 and 2005.

Over the years, Bobby has honed a very distinctive style combining elements of indie guitar pop, experimental punk, and American psychedelics – a style that he frequently attempts to break free from but thankfully never does, describing it as sounding like “someone trying to sound like Guided By Voices but failing miserably”. Quirky intelligent lyrics combined with this spikey and sometimes fragile pop-punk sound have become trademarks of Fig Mints recordings, influenced initially by like likes of Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and latterly by Bob Pollard, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and Syd Barrett.

Although the majority of Fig Mints recordings are written, recorded and produced exclusively by Bobby for live shows he often enlists the help of several Cozy Home crew members including Paul, Luke and Dusty from The Real Burnouts, as well as Jenny Penny, Cashew Cook, and J. Schnitt. Likewise Artie Lester, Paul or Dusty Burnout and Jenny Penny have helped on the records “when I needed an extra bit of something”. As one of the accidental driving forces behind Cozy Home Records over the last 5 years Bobby has frequently been involved in writing, producing, and playing with a seemingly neverending list of bands and deviants such as The Real Burnouts, The Fucking Flame, Pinky Stink’s Problem, The Chesterfield Medical Experiment, The Utica Flower Company (et al.), and Travel Labyrinth.

After a relatively short and perhaps unproductive spell on the road, Figs is in the process of relocating back to his Utica roots where it is fully expected that at the very least he will continue writing ”a song a month” and complete the most recent record he has been working on. There appears to be no definitive plans for either the immediate or long-term future of Fig Mints other than “to make music until I run out of ideas. Hopefully I die before that happens, cos I’d be bored to death otherwise” – how can you not dig an attitude like that?

Find out more about Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination) at:

www.myspace.com/figmints or www.cozyhomerecords.com

“The Passionate Misunderstanding”

That’s what I should have called “Hugs and Smiles”. It was a phrase uttered by my good friend Alan while talking indirectly about a situation that was happening in my life at the time, the gory details of which I have only shared with one other person. This situation was well documented in, though at times obscured by the language of the lyrics in most of the songs on “Hugs and Smiles”. I was too chickenshit to call that album “The Passionate Misunderstanding”. I though that the person that I wrote most of the songs about would find it offensive… Or something. I honestly regret that decision, and have ever since I put out my last album.

And so this EP, I guess, is about regret. These are fragments of a bygone era that I have been trying to revisit ever since learning how to write rock songs.

War In Space was recorded in Mom’s Basement sometime in 2000 or so. Trying like hell to emulate Beat Happening, this was the first song I ever recorded that had lyrics (more precisely, the first song that I had the balls to actually sing on).

Front Porch/Cars Passing was recorded sometime in 1999 in my bedroom. Originally called “A Misguided Attempt At A Wednesday”, I had an idea to put out a 7-song EP, writing and recording one song a day for a week. I lost interest on Thursday, the intro of which mistakenly (but fortunately) can be heard fading out at the end of this song.

Light 100s is a direct and unabashed reaction to discovering Sonic Youth. If reading into SY’s genesis, one will inevitably become familiar with at least the name Glenn Branca, as two of the members were regular contributors to his performances. After reading about Branca’s multi-guitar symphonies, and before ever hearing a note that the man recorded, I wrote this song, comprised of 12 guitar tracks recorded on my little four track. I attempted a cigarette-themed album called “Camel: The Album”. This is the only surviving piece.

What A Day is about feeling stuck, bored, and lonely. One winter I found myself drunk, missing my friends, disgusted with society and desperately needing to get laid. And there you have it.

My Dreams Are Boring:  I don’t dream. And when I do dream, mostly it’s about regular, everyday shit. I lived through a period of time around 2004 or so when I dreamed every night and had an almost constant and unshakable feeling of de-ja-vu. So I wrote this song, which really is not about that specifically. That’s just the inspiration.

Requiem For My Puppy Dog:  One night in 1999 or so (maybe 2000, but no later), I found my dog Pepper lying on the floor, breathing heavily. I couldn’t get her up to walk and knew that she wouldn’t make it through the night. I couldn’t deal with it, so I convinced myself that she was just tired and went to bed. I woke up and found Pepper dead the next morning, and realized that her last moments were spent alone and terrified because I chose to ignore my own intuition. I buried her in the back yard, and wrote this song immediately afterward. I’ll never regret anything more than going to bed that night, and still cry when I think about it.

They’ll Be Here Soon (Full Moon):  This is an account of a booze-soaked, acid-influenced freakout that happened a few years ago with my friends. One night on a full moon, we decided (as we have in the past and will in the future), to go up to the Valley View Golf Course in Utica, NY and howl (literally). The Real Burnouts had been doing this since they were kids, and I had only accompanied everyone a few times before this night. I brought my tape recorder, and got whatever I could on tape (I’m the one who tried to push the bench over, but found that it was bolted to the ground). The fact that the recording ended up underneath all that backwards music is the result of not knowing what the fuck else to do with the sounds… I thought it was just what the song needed after playback.

You can download THE PASSIONATE MISUNDERSTANDING at the Quixodelic Record Store (the “Store” link at the top of the site), find out more about Fig Mints at www.myspace.com/figmints - download Fig Mints records for free at www.cozyhomerecords.com

Out Today!

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

The Passionate Misunderstanding

In association with our brothers & sisters & weird cousins twice removed at www.cozyhomerecords.com we’re grinning to present a seven-song slice of history available to download at your free & easy Quixodelic Record store right now so you can hear how it all began…

JUST CLICK ON THE STORE LINK AT THE TOP OF THIS SITE

Out Today

It was a difficult decision whether to include this in the store, particularly as there are several VERY great records there already that are much more deserving of the attention. But for what it’s worth here’s my contribution to the summer of the DG EP to keep that stone a-rolling, a retrospective Wheelies collection called “The Wheelie” pulling together my own highlights from a year of recording and five albums released in full at www.cozyhomerecords.com during 2006/07. It’s hiss-ridden, lo-fi mediocrity, but sometimes strange kids dig that kind of thing, plus it’s been remastered by the elusive Bubbasmooth so it’s as good as The Wheelies are ever going to get.

You can download it for FREE from the Quixodelic Record STORE at the top of this site.

Or not. I dinnae mind either way.

Much more spectacular musical adventures will follow shortly…

Well the likelihood of anyone ever being interested enough in The Wheelies to interview us is slim to non-existent, so I figured as a vain and probably pointless alternative  I’d talk to myself about the songs that make up the most recent (and most complete) of a long, long line of retrospectives…

1 KEEP MOVING This was the opening song on the “Cosmonaut” album, originally intended as a solo album for the failed Cozy Home box-set “The Troof Above Your Head” – where I’d deliberately instigated a challenge to my fellow Cozy Homers to write and record a full-length album so that all of them could be simultaneously released on Christmas Morning 2006. At this point I was spending a lot of time looking after my two year old son and sometimes I’d play him really simple childlike melodies on the keyboard so as we could dance around the  living room. So originally “Keep Moving” was an instrumental joke song until one afternoon while dancing around with the little guy on my shoulders I started to sing “A finger, a thumb, an arm, a leg, a nod of the head keep moving” along with the music. I guess this itself is a by-product of watching a lot of kid’s television that winter. The idea of “Cosmonaut” was that it was going to be a concept record around Alexander Trocchi’s idea of “the cosmonaut of inner space”, so I twisted the lyrics to suit. At a primitive level it’s about moving through this inner space in circles based on Nietschze’s concept that “All life is a circle therefore it is the going there not the getting there that counts” and the feeling of being trapped in your own head, thus the repetition of the images and lines and the contrast between being stationary while still moving. It’s probably one of my favourite Wheelies songs in spite of the crudeness of the keyboard sounds and the fact that at this stage I still didn’t even know I could pan sounds on the recording software I was using. It’s also one of the rare occasions when the Spiritualized influence of building layers of melodies and sounds has actually worked for me.

2 EVERYBODY DREAMS ABOUT SOMETHING This is probably the nearest thing to a perfect Wheelies “pop” song. If you were going to force these songs into a box then they would be somewhere between low-fi pop, low-fi folk, or low-fi psych. At times I get madly possessed with the idea of writing “one truly great song” even though I know that a copious amount of luck is required when you start with mediocre songwriting skills and brutal musicianship, so a lot of what I write is geared towards that. Late at night when everyone is in bed, quietly strumming chords and murmuring melodies in search of something. When I’m in a writing phase I’ll record at least 3 sketchy ideas on a portable MP3 player with either the guitar or piano. Then, when I’m ready to record I’ll go back through the hundreds of ideas cutting out the rubbish and leaving only the garbage. During the recording of an album I continue to write at night and sometimes if an idea is good enough it’ll be recorded straight away. “Everybody Dreams…” is one of those songs. I seem to remember having a melody in my head and being hunched with the guitar over the MP3 on the living room floor at 2am virtually whispering it out. I recorded it in one go the following day. Out of part-laziness and also the technological inability, I usually settle for the first and occasionally the second mixdown of a song. It tends to be weeks later that I really notice all the blemishes – the horrible sounding keyboard towards the end, the fact that I miscalculated the lyrics and had to improvise the third verse, the way the vocals go out of sync in the final verse. Actually I’m as sloppy lyrically as I am technically – time (or lack of) plays a massive part in these songs. Usually songs are written and recorded on the run via stolen minutes, and a lot of the time I find myself scrawling Kerouacian “first thought, best thought” words on the back of envelopes and scrap paper just to have something to sing.

3 THE DAY THAT I PLAYED GOD I guess there are two dimensions to this one. On one hand its a blatantly obvious  pisstake of religion (if I had to say I was something I’d say I was Buddhist-Atheist or Atheist-Buddhist even though both can be the same thing). But at a more subconscious level it indirectly hints at my involvement and orchestrating role in The Daydream Generation (www.daydreamgeneration.com). Like “Everybody Dreams…”, this track is taken from the album “Strange Kid In A Daydream” written in the weeks immediately following the first ever Daydream Generation compilation between March and May of 2007. That first compilation was a chaotic process and I was struggling to get my head around the idea of being responsible for promoting all these great bands that kindly gave their songs away in exchange for some promotion. It was one thing to put the compilation together, but a much tougher challenge to do justice to the music and switch people onto what we’d done. Hence lines like “Smally, Smally help me please/Give me something to feel at ease/I tried to help but I think I sneezed and started a third world war”. On the subject of lyrics my favourite lines from this one are “I woke to the sound of a marching band going past me on the beach/The Devil was blowing an old conch shell…” – I think this is somehow related to me being wasted many years ago on Silversands beach in the middle of summer and there was a Salvation Army band playing, looking and sounding completely out of context. From time to time I go through phases of writing “story-songs”, usually surreal, dreamlike, unplanned and “The Day That I Played God” probably epitomises that style. It’s also probably worth mentioning the percussion element of this song and in particular the crappy little toy drum that I borrowed from Smally Jr for “Strange Kid…”. To go with the baby maracas, toy harmonica, and kid’s tambourine. Weirdest percussion I’ve ever used? Probably a shaving brush on a plastic tennis racket.

4 THE SOMETIMES SONG So you know that “one truly great song” I’ve been trying to write? Well I never wrote it, but I think this is going to be as close as I’m ever going to get (particularly from other people’s reactions to it). Is it my favourite Wheelies song? Probably. I wrote it for “Cosmonaut” and with the self-imposed pressure of getting a record written and recorded in 6 weeks, the songs were pouring out of me. I wrote “The Sometimes Song” late one evening sitting on the couch, the melody took five minutes and the words took another five, seemed to fall out of me as if the song was already written and just waiting to be discovered. The recording itself is pretty grim and not helped by the fact that I was missing a string on the guitar and too broke to buy a new one through the duration of “Cosmonaut” – probably why a lot of that record is very heavy on the keys. I always feel like when I record a song that it’s not in it’s true form – I mean, I hate singing, and playing music, but I love songwriting, so I usually end up preferring to hear cover versions of Wheelies tracks. I’m still waiting to hear someone cover this but hopefully sometime. The song itself is broken into three sections, the first deals with the fragility of being and the body, the second is about getting dumped, and the third is about being poor. I like to try and find and then write about positives hidden in dark situations, the fear of things, the memory of how I stumbled through depression and came out on the other side. “Sometimes that’s just the way it goes…” I guess is the logical answer to the impossible question that is “Why?”

5 I’VE GOT A GOOD FEELING Another one from “Cosmonaut”. Like I said, when I started out on that record I had it in mind to very loosely tie it around the idea of “the cosmonaut of inner space”, but halfway through the idea of  The 17th Floor began to appear through several of the songs. In that sense “I’ve Got A Good Feeling” is a suicide song – a guy climbs up onto the 17th floor of a building and jumps out of a window. In this instance as he jumps he sees a girl behind him and she in turn sees him and there is an explosion of connectivity between them, like they have always been fated to meet. And yet, at the point when they do he’s halfway out of the window plummeting to his death, and the entire song (at an overly long six minutes plus) is framed within those few seconds of realisation. I guess it’s black comedy, him dangling from her fingers changing his mind about wanting to die, then her letting go and changing her mind about it as he falls away. Ah, there’s really so much in this one that I could sit here all day writing… The song itself is so full of technical fuck-ups that it’s not funny. Ropey vocals, badly played improvised keys (Ray Manzarek I am not), levels all over the place. It’s one of those songs that I’m almost embarassed to play to people, and yet there’s something I like about the descending main vocal line that makes it bearable for me to listen to it. 

6 OH HAPPINESS Perhaps more than any other this song defines the year in my life that these were all recorded in. It was written over the course of a sunny May day, initially sitting in the garden with the guitar while Linz and Dylan buzzed around me, then later playing it in the living room and Linz put her head around the door and sang the repeat line of the chorus for a laugh. It made the song for me, so I forced her at psychological gunpoint that weekend to record it. On the original version it ended with us laughing as she pointed out that it sounds like I am singing “Oh a penis!”  and me going “Aw no! Fuck!” with the realisation she was write. This is the only track from the album of the same name that I’ve chosen for inclusion, for a number of reasons. The first is simply that “Oh Happiness” is technically a shambles: I’m thinking about The crap £60 guitar, no panning of sounds, and the very audible fuck-ups that litter it. At the time it was a one-off record – I hadn’t written or recorded anything for 9 years after “Simple Songs For Complicated People”, and so I wasn’t taking it very seriously. After so long away from writing songs it was more of an explosion of ideas than anything else, and there was no sign of songwriter’s block or struggling to find melodies. In that context it was probably the most enjoyable of all The Wheelies albums to record irrespective of how bad it sounds, and at the centre of it all “Oh Happiness” reflects pretty accurately how I was feeling, both about the music, and about my life.

7 THE 17TH FLOOR As mentioned previously, “The 17th Floor” was a recurring theme on the “Cosmonaut” album. Originally this started as a guitar song, then I added the piano, and later cut the guitar out, which is why the vocals sound too loud (I never went back and fixed it). Like “I’ve Got A Good Feeling” it’s another suicide song, this time the protagonist jumping and landing in a tree where he survives in a physical sense, but dies a spiritual death that leaves his mind “shining in the sky with the ghosts I left behind standing smiling in a neverending line”. I like to think of this as a positive outcome. Actually one of my favourite Wheelies cover versions is “The 17th Floor” as performed by Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination). I was trying to record some of these songs live on the guitar and when I played this one it sounded very like a Figs song, so I asked Bobby if he wanted to cover it, which he did, and the results were pretty special. Well worth checking out if you can find it. Initially I hated the lines about the ambulance sirens sounding like ice-cream van chimes, but I’ve grown to quite like them over time.

8 THE WORLD IS FUCKED I was doing a lot of what we now call “mining” – surfing the Internet in search of bands and individuals that might fit with the Daydream Generation project, and this song was a response to the desperation I felt doing it. The thing was, that it felt like most of the MySpace pages I visited belonged to EMO kids, each one trying to outdo the other with their narcissistic woes and attempts to shock from a safe distance. Not only did it make feel like a old 31, but it didn’t exactly fill me with confidence about the future. And so I wrote “The World Is Fucked”. The verse melodies (seriously out of vocal reach to a point where it sounds hopelessly garbled) were lifted from another Wheelies song “Love It”, which in turn was taken from the bridge section on “Anybody’s Guess”. It’s a tune that I love but for some reason can’t seem to do justice, so hopefully someday someone will sing it as it was supposed to be sung. So yeah, in the spectrum of Wheelies songs, this one is a philosophical monster where humans are neurotic dinosaur puppets taking photographs.

9 STRANGE KID IN A DAYDREAM This is the title-track from the last of the 5 albums I put out during that year. The drum loop I stole from a free loop site, and I took out the main guitar to help it sound more chaotic and different. Essentially it’s about my teenage years, coming last in the waster pumpkin growing competition (though I never wore the winning pumpkin on my head as promised) – mine grew mouldy on the window sill or rolling dice like I did when I was a kid playing imaginary football games that I invented to escape the real world. It’s one of those attempted wisdom songs, trying to sing to others like me, but it probably only sounds wanky and bullshit. Nice tune though I think.

10 WHEN THE MORNING COMES This song originally appeared on “Cosmonaut” but the inevitable by-product of rushing writing and recording and mixing is that sometimes you end up with a song that doesn’t quite live up to it’s potential, so this version was re-recorded for “Strange Kid…”. It probably developed from me playing the piano (keyboard) and getting the chorus and then realising that it fitted in with the original verses (I always hated the original’s chorus which seemed completely removed from what I was actually singing about). Round about this time I was listening to a lot of External World and one of the things I loved about it was the mad percussion sounds, so for this I dug out every pot and pan and rhythm making instrument I could find in the house and put them all on the living carpet in a big line, worked my way round them as the song played. It probably didn’t work that well. The song itself is simply a sweet hymn to being relatively useless.

11 BEAUTIFUL BONES At the turn of the year (06/07) I was asked via The Cozy Home to write a song about a for a student’s art project where they intended to make a vinyl record featuring several bands singing about dinosaurs. I don’t think that record ever materialised, but if it did then it didn’t feature “Beautiful Bones”. My choice of dinosaur was the Supersaurus, and I wrote this throwaway song about a cartoon paranoid dinosaur called Danny. I don’t know where or why I got the idea to somehow frame it in a mock-live setting (possibly regret that I can’t play live – you’d need to put me in a binbag and force me to play at gunpoint, so intense is my nervous disposition in front of crowds of people). Anyway, the mock-live thing didn’t sound half as good in reality as it sounded in my head and the canned laughter is erm, excruitiatingly bad. For a while I considered and re-considered keeping the line “He thought he had bum cancer” in, especially as Linz was telling me she hated that line. But if you can’t laugh in the face of tragedy, then what can you do? So I kept it in.

12 GO One of only two songs to make it onto this from the second album “Wake Me Up When It’s Over”, “Go” is a pretty personal song about something I won’t go into here. “Wake Me Up…” was really a reaction to the  interest show by Cozy Home after “Oh Happiness” – I bought a keyboard to compliment the crap £60 acoustic guitar, and miraculously managed to persuade two of the original Wheelies (Thomas and Martin) to head over to my house by the sea for a day to help out with the songs. I was a bit paranoid about this song sounding too “soft” when I wrote it, but I guess at the end, that’s just me. There are a lot of mistimed instruments on this song, and its the only time the toy harmonica features on The Shite Album – considering I can only play one tune on the moothie, you’re not missing much. There is also a much more psychedelic cover version of “Go” on The Real Burnouts “A Lull In Void” available to download for free at www.cozyhomerecords.com – that record is one of my personal favourites so to have somehow helped with it is a real priviledge.

13 MORNING STAR 07 Recorded for the “Respun” album in January 2007, “Morning Star” originally appeared on “Simple Songs For Complicated People” back in 1997, when I locked myself in a room for 20 something blazing hot summer days to write and record a full-length Wheelies record. By the time I reached “Respun” I was probably reaching a point of songwriter’s burn-out for the first time since I’d picked up the guitar in March of the previous year. It kicked off in the weeks after “Cosmonaut” when I felt like I was still on a writing high and had more songs in me, but the brain ran out of gas pretty quickly. Stuck for something to sing, I picked a few old tracks from a decade previous that I figured I could do better, and “Morning Star” was one of them (hence the “07″). This song actually is the soundtrack to one of the most unique experiences in my life – see Glencoe , September 1997, 4 friends, a pan of psychedelic sausages and a multi-coloured boabey. I’ll not bore you with the details, but let’s just say I had some kind of religious epiphany. The updated version on here perhaps has lost some of the original magic (somehow feeding an electric accordian backwards through a distortion box didn’t quite seem to work this time), but it’s an important song nevertheless and features some interesting backwards scratch drums. Actually a simple Casio keyboard beat going backwards.

14 SO LONG I’ve written a lot of “last songs” in my time. Much the same as I’ve smoked a lot of “last cigarettes”. It’s a concious decision, like leaving a farewell message (or well done) message for anyone who makes it through an entire Wheelies album intact. “So Long” is probably as close as I can get to the perfect Wheelies goodbye, in particular the line “when this stuff is inside of you better get it out”. In actual fact there is no real reason why you should like these songs since they are simply an excorcism of something inside of me, an urge to create that has to go somewhere. Soon enough it won’t be channelled into music, but something else instead. At the time when I was recording this for “Wake Me Up…” I intended it to be like a “Her Majesty” at the end of the record, only I left a couple of minutes with the words “Take it away Slight” for him to play one of his legendary laserbeam guitar solos on, but for one reason or another he never got round to doing it, so I cut the line and faded it out. So not only is it a fitting end to The Wheelies, but it is also a pretty great reflection of why it ended, and probably why it should have ended a lot sooner than it did. And actually it dawns on me as I’m writing this, that this really is The End. It’s been a long, comical, magical, and excrutiatingly painful journey. Thanks to everyone who has supported the band, and laterally me, thanks for downloading the records, and for the kind words of support. Sook the bools.

You can download “The Wheelie” from the Quixodelic Record STORE link for FREE at the top of this site.

The Wheelies formed in the summer of 1994 when 4 childhood friends perhaps foolishly decided to try their hand at making music. The original line-up – Thomas Slight (lead guitar), Steven “Smally” Small (vox), Ali Wright (bass) and Craig “Moppy” Moyes (rhythm guitar, bongos, black bullets and whistling) were originally from Fife, but began recording and writing when they moved to Edinburgh after leaving school. The band name was chosen by Thomas in a rare moment of creative inspiration after a TV programme from their childhood called “Chorlton & The Wheelies”.

During the winter of 1994, while living a life of beatific depravity at Edinburgh’s West Preston Street, they hired a 4-track recorder and made ”The Wheelies Forever EP”. Fusing their shared love of The Beatles, Shoegaze, Madchester, Motown, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs and Heavy Metal it was a brutally awful debut that in reality sounded nothing at all like how they imagined it to sound in their heads. The record was met with some kind words from people that didn’t have the heart to tell them how awful it was, and no critical acclaim whatsoever.

Undeterred, Smally continued to painfully learn how to play 3 chords on the guitar in his vodka-fuelled quest to write “just one great song” and the band hooked up with telepathic record producer Ruchir to haphazardly forge a new batch of songs in the Spring of that year, wasting hours trying to convey that they wanted “Beatle-esque trumpets” not “Shampoo-ad pan-pipes”. On an almost daily basis they obsessively captured song ideas on a portable cassette recorder that had survived from the early 1980s, at times so wasted that they were incapable of even pressing the record button. A collection of these 4-track recordings and portable cassette adventures started kicking around in May of 1995 called “Groovin’ On Up In The Sun”. Arguably even worse than their debut, ”Groovin’…” showed the first signs of the band concentrating less on writing serious songs, and more on recording comical (and in the cold light of morning, probably not so comical) psychedelic mishaps, sound experiments and general goofing around.

In the summer of 1995 the band The Wheelies congregated at Ruchir’s baking hot flat along with apple-munching drummer Gav Hill of Edinburgh band The Modest, to record “Freewheeling” – 8 mostly improvised tracks . It would be the only time The Wheelies would ever play or record with a drummer, and in the words of Smally “If we had known that then, well then we maybe would have made more of it”.

In April 2006 the band got together again, assisted by Nice David of Edinburgh band The Blob on guitar and recorded “The Grassmarket Recordings EP” at a grubby Grassmarket flat on a recently purchased 4 track of their own. The 4 songs they produced – “She Loves Liverpool”, “The Yahs”, “Spaceman” and a shameful cover of “Give Peace A Chance” were perhaps a high-point for The Wheelies. The songs were still terrible, but at least they had a laugh making them – “The Yahs” in particular, with the four friends mucking around on two microphones without music has become something of a cult classic on the London underground electronic scene thanks to a 2006 remix by Chris McLaughlin entitled “The Yahs (On Smack)”.

Back in Fife during the summer of 2006, Ali, Smally and Thomas recorded “Rubba Kola” – a 40-track cassette featuring half-baked song ideas and snippets of wasted conversation, on the aforementioned portable tape-recorder. In the autumn of that year Ali and Smally lost the plot completely and recorded the woeful ”Wild Lettuce Recordings” in a garage at Dalgety Bay. These two cassettes are arguably some of the worst-known recordings ever made in human history.

Summer of 1997 saw the first official full-length Wheelies record – “Simple Songs For Complicated People”. While Thomas and Moppy were adventuring in Amsterdam, and Ali was working full-time with a collapsed lung in Burger King, Smally resolved to work out how to use the 4-track and locked himself in a bedroom for 21 days, writing and recording 2-3 songs a day from scratch. Ali would come over in the evenings and help out with the songs, and it also saw the appearance of their cartwheeling friend Martin “Jose” Gillanders on Wheelies records for the first time, playing guitar and singing backing vocals.

Winter of 1997 and into the early part of 1998 saw the last of The Wheelies recording as a band. A collection of various tracks recorded on 4-track at various locations in Divit, Fife were thrown together on the woefully titled “These Are The Songs That Threatened To De-Louse America”. Smally made several unreleased backwards and experimental keyboard recordings in the spring and summer of 1998, but the tapes have now long since been lost (and hopefully will never be found). And from there The Wheelies seemingly vanished completely. Smally stopped writing songs, Ali began work on a solo project entitled “!” penning incredible lo-fi acoustic classics like “I Only Love You When You’re Dead”, “The * Are Aliens”, and ”Summer Haze” that would never be released, Moppy hooked up with Glasgow band The People finding for the first time in his life a serious outlet for his musical ambitions, and Thomas after one final guitar duel at a New Years party in 1999 gave up playing completely.

In 2004 Aliwheelie undertook the near impossible task of compiling “The Shite Album” retrospective - wading through spools and spools of tape and “some of the worst quality recordings ever made” and getting them onto a 3-disc collection of some of the best (and worst) bits of this “unique collaboration”.  ”The Shite Album” was perhaps the single greatest motivating factor in Smally’s attempt to resuscitate the band in early 2006. He described how he listened to the discs one night and felt like he couldn’t leave the legacy of The Wheelies sounding like that. Immediately after he bought a £60 acoustic guitar, and gathered up as many toys of his 2 year old son that he could find that would make a noise, and set about writing and recording “Oh Happiness” and “Oh Happiness Recordings” between March and May of 2006. Aliwheelie contributed 3 bass parts and 2 songs (“Hold My Hand” and “I Only Love You When You’re Dead”) to the project and co-wrote “About Love”. Smally was also helped out by Mrs Smally (backing vox) and his 15 year old nephew Rhys who played banjo and guitar on a couple of tracks. Originally the album was to be called “The Goat With The Golden Cock” after an improvised song was misheard by Moppy while hiding out one weekend away in the north of Scotland, but wisely it was retitled at the last moment, and the golden-cocked goat on the cover was quickly swept under the carpet.

During the summer of 2006 The Wheelies hooked up with Utica record-collective Cozy Home Records (www.cozyhomerecords.com), and the miniscule attention that “Oh Happiness” generated inspired a swift follow-up called “Wake Me Up When It’s Over”. For the first time in nearly a decade 3 Wheelies (Smally, Thomas and Martin) got together to write and record several songs. Grand plans to make the record as great as they could quickly fell apart over the following weeks, and in Septmber of 2006  Smally completed the rest of the album on his own. This in turn led to an attempt to record solo under the name “Cosmonaut”, coinciding with a challenge to his fellow Cozy Home comrades to write and record an album in the six weeks leading up to Christmas 2006 and for them to simultaneously be released on Christmas day as part of the Cozy Home box-set “The Troof Above Your Head”. The box-set never materialised, but 9 records in total appeared on Christmas morning, including The Wheelies “Cosmonaut” after Smally reconsidered yet another attempt to finally kill The Wheelies once and for all. “Cosmonaut” was accompanied by another out-take album called “The Bright Side” featuring some twenty other songs recorded in that six week period.

The Wheelies released two more albums in early 2007 – “Respun” (January) and “Strange Kid In A Daydream” (May) – both were technically Smally solo albums in all but name, although “Respun” saw a collaboration track with Jon of The Atom called “I Did Acid With Caroline” – this was to be the start of what would later become the Kaleidonauts recording project. As well as these two, there was also two other out-take albums – “On The 8th Day…” and “Strange Kid Recordings”, and a backwards album of selected Wheelies songs that was made with The Amalfi Glow called “YLFNOGARD” loosely based on the life of a backwards dragonfly.

Now in the summer of 2008 The Wheelies are due to release a retrospective covering the year from May 2006 to May 2007 called “The Wheelie” – Smally remains non-committal whether this will be the last official release under the name The Wheelies, and he suspects that the rest of the band probably couldn’t care less either way. Meanwhile, Moppy continues to make great music with The People – after their acclaimed second album “Desire, The Devil & The Ghost”, they are intending on going back into the studio in the near future to record a double-album. Martin is playing with Fife band Shaved Goldfish, writing songs and continuing to cartwheel. Both Aliwheelie and Thomas remain in musical exile and it is still unclear whether Ali’s solo record “!” will ever see the light of day. Smally continues to work on various collaboration projects – releasing “The Utica Flower Company” with fellow Cozy Home comrades The Real Burnouts, Fig Mints, and Arthur Rules in early 2008, and he is also planning a follow up to Kaleidonauts debut record “I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard (Mine Died)”. Elsewhere he recently finished a record as part of The Painted Shuts to be released through Cozy Home as soon as they can get some artwork together, and is currently close to completing an as yet untitled collaboration project that he thinks might be “pretty fucking good”.

Sook the bools.

Smally: This song was originally recorded a long time before the concept of an album had entered our heads, probably as far back as March of 2007. Jon sent me the music and asked me to “Caroline” it. After I did the original vocals it gathered dust in our gmail accounts, but in September while trying to put together a “Daydream Collective” for the Daydream Generation I dug it up and sent it onto Warchalking to see if he could add some backing vocals. The song itself is about being able to collaborate on records like this over great distance and the breaking down of geographical boundaries, the bench existing in multiple places at the same time. There’s something pretty amazing about being able to make music like this on either side of a giant ocean, but all the time there’s still the feeling that it would be better to be able to sit down on a bench together and just be. It’s not so much a love song, more a song about love – the conclusion being that were it smokeable, then it would be the best drug of all.

Jon: This here was a tune that just wasn’t working out for me.  I couldn’t sing what I wanted so I shipped it off to the Small man.  I like to believe that when I mentioned that in Europe there are benches that are older than the colonies was the inspiration for the lyrics.

Sunshine Songwriter

Smally: In December 2007 I realised that I hadn’t written a Wheelies record for quite a long time, so I took a day off from real life and attempted to record an entire album in one day. I managed 10 songs and the album was called “7 Hours”, but of the 10, there were only 5 that I was happy with. Over the course of the year Jon and I had been talking about making a collaboration together (JOTA with Smally) – we already had Roll It Up, Caroline, a couple of songs that didn’t make it onto the album (Suspended Animation, and Alternative Ending) and an alternative version of Moths from the one that appeared on Dead Canaries “Critical Mass” album. Added to that there was a handful of cover versions we’d each done of one another’s songs from the previous year. I sent him the 5 songs and asked him if he wanted to rework any of them for the collaboration. At the time I didn’t really expect him to like them enough to want to rework them all, but “Sunshine Songwriter” was the first one he finished. It’s really just a utopian love song for Yoko. Our life is pretty much like this. With the exception of the billboards.

Jon: I don’t remember where this one started, but right around the time that I felt it coming together it started to sound like Neil Diamond doing a Johnny Cash.  That’s when the rockin’ electric guitar & the clip clop percussion came in.  Now we have our favorite Scot’s man riding off into the sunset, like John Wayne in The Quiet man.

For A Girl I Never Kissed

Smally: Here’s another one from the “7 Hours” album. At the time I sent them away to Jon I also played them to Warchalking to see what he thought of them. He liked this one enough to ask to rework it, did the guitars and backing vocals from scratch and sang a version of it with a head-cold, which he later asked that we scrap. So I resung it and played some piano and forwarded it back on to Jon to work his magic on it. It’s really just a fictional account of a boy digs girl scenario under a cloud of mental illness. A lot of the time I’m working under very strict time restrictions when I’m writing lyrics. Usually I’ll build up a catalogue of melodies and song ideas on my MP3 player over the course of a couple of months, and prior to recording I’ll cut these down to the ones I like the best. Unfortunately I keep forgetting to leave much time for the words – for “7 Hours” I had nothing written down when I got out of bed that morning, so a lot of the time it’s like I’m writing against the clock and just have to run with whatever comes out. “For A Girl…” is one of those songs.

Jon: My job seemed simple & obvious.  George Harrison it up.

The Idiot Crying

Smally: While Jon was busy breathing life into the 5 songs from “7 Hours”, I was back writing new ideas. The format for us collaborating up until that point had either been for him to send me backing music and me to write the song over the top, or for me to write the song and send him the individual tracks for him to pick apart and redo. By this point it was pretty clear that we were going to make more than the “mini-album” we’d been imagining up until then. I thought it might be interesting and hopefully produce another couple of songs that the album needed to play him some of the ideas stored on my MP3 player to see if there was anything he liked worth working on. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to get the files off the MP3 player onto my pc so instead I recorded about 17 very loose ideas with improvised words very quietly one night when all the Smally’s were safely tucked up in bed, and sent him the 12 I liked the best. At the same time he was working on “Hammer & Sickle” and arranged for Jane Gilmore to sing the last verse. I was so blown away by her voice that I asked him to try and fix it for her to sing one of the ideas. Which they did. Obviously this one’s a song about the environment – when I was writing it I had it in my head that I wanted to write something as great as “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Of course it turned out nothing like that, but its amazing proof of what a great singer can do for a mediocre songwriter.

Jon: I thought it would add some great texture to have Jane on the right & I on the left.  That’s about it.

Our Back Garden

Smally: This was another one of the “ideas” from the 12 I recorded for Jon. I’d been mucking around with it for a couple of weeks and one night started playing it to Yoko. Now it’s a rare occurence for her to sing along with anything I ever play so when it happens, I start to figure that I might be onto something. If it hadn’t been for that, then this song could so easily have gone the same way as the other 10 “ideas” that never became anything. I can’t for the life of me remember what we were originally singing, but through the laughter I started to sing “39th Bridge Street Song” and then “Happiness Runs”. I wrote the words later that night looking out at our back garden, which really does look sad and overgrown. As the song grew from there with Jane and Jon singing, and Jon doing some strangely great instrumentation it started to look like a producer’s worst nightmare, but somehow he managed to get it sounding as good as it did in my head the night it came alive.

Jon: The guitar & vocals were switched to make these two fit better.  Something went wrong here.  I lost it.

Smally’s Dream #3

Smally: Well this is really just a tradition I picked up from Bob Dylan, and “Bob Dylan’s Dream”. I originally wrote “Smally’s Dream” for the Wheelies “Cosmonaut” album, but cut it as it wasn’t great. I then did a “Smally’s Dream #2″ for the “Strange Kid In A Daydream” album, and so I recorded a “Smally’s Dream #3″ for “7 Hours”. The chords and melody were very similar to #2 before I wrote it so I was hoping it would sound like a continuation, rather than just the same song. The end of the song is from another Wheelies song called “Maybe” that I recorded for “Strange Kid…” that also didn’t work out, but I liked the melody and thought the two ideas worked ok together. Essentially it’s just the narration of a dream, no more, and no less.

Jon: I think during the recording of the ukulele I started hearing the war & the bass line.  This song is a great example of how I work.  Layers, as I’m doing one I hear what the next will be.   There was a great dilemma at the end when I couldn’t figure out how to end it.  I sent it to Tim Kotch to let him deal with it.  He was also stumped.  Then after awhile I fell asleep for about 5 minutes at around 2am.  Then I got up & finished it.  With a very hot mic for the Jew’s Harp.   You can hear the headphones as I get up to stop the recording.

Caroline

Smally: This was the first collaboration between me & Jon recorded as far back as January 2007. At the time I was writing and recording The Wheelies “Respun” album, but I’d come up against a rare case of writer’s block. To try and get myself out of it I asked around Cozy Home Records to see if anyone had any old instrumentals that they’d not been able to finish or use, that they could let me write a song for. 3 of the collaborations from there ultimately went on to form “The Utica Flower Company” album, but the process of this song was far different in that Jon requested the individual tracks back from me to mix them himself. It was a smart move – I’ve never really had the ears or imagination or equipment or technical knowledge to arrange songs in a way that maximises their full potential, whereas he’s got a natural talent for it (as hopefully this album proves). When he first sent the track he forgot to delete the file name and so it came through as “I Did Acid With Caroline”. I figured this was as good as any subject matter to sing about. What he didn’t tell me was that the music was his attempt at a cover of a Daniel Johnson song of the same name, so it’s since been reduced to simply “Caroline” to try and avoid any confusion. That bit about leaving your shoes at the front door and jumping from an upstairs window to try and land in them I took from one of those old LSD urban legends and it’s got one of my favourite lines on the whole album in it : “I was wondering who the fuck is Caroline?”

Jon: There was too much of a good there here to hear behind a kind of boring song that had nothing to do with me.  So I stowed it, then when the offer came, shipped it.

Hammer & Sickle

Smally: Another of the songs from “7 Hours”. Actually this one was the last I recorded that day. I had 15 minutes left before the Smally’s came home and had gone through most of the best ideas from the MP3 player, so I made this one up on the spot, chords and words. I even started to write a third verse which began “And when they try me for murder…” but I realised I was running out of time and scrubbed it. I’d been playing that old folk song “If I Had A Hammer” for a laugh the week before, so that’s obviously where it had come from, combined with the fact I’d joined the Communist Party a couple of days before. It doesn’t really do justice to how I feel about financial inequality and that poverty exists, but it’s a start.

Jon: This song needed to be American all the way.  Tim Kotch went above & beyond on his part.  Katie Saul & I recorded the middle section live in my room.  Half way through Louis & Phillip knocked over a mirror, a loud crash was recorded, but we kept going.  The ensuing terror was recording & you can hear Katie say “Oh my god.”  This quagmire comes together at the end with Jane Gilmore brilliantly walking by singing.

Moths At The Bug Zapper

Smally: Jon sent me the original “Moths At The Bug Zapper” as an instrumental from the Dead Canaries “Critical Mass” album that he was working on as his contribution for the Daydream Revolution 3 compilation. The first time I heard it I heard this vocal melody and for the next couple of days it was driving me nuts – I literally couldn’t listen to that instrumental without hearing the unsung vocals in my head. So for fun I sang some improvised words and sent him it to see what he thought. He ok’d me singing it but told me if I was going to write words then they had to be about “people like moths around the glitter ball at a nightclub” or words to that effect. So that’s mainly what the song is about, mixed in with the idea of loving someone unnatainable, like a light that you can help flying towards and in the end destroying yourself. Actually it’s two songs in one – the split vocals are both singing their own thing so if you read every odd line or even line it makes a bit more sense. Sort of. There is a version of this on “Critical Mass” but it’s half-vocals, and half-instrumental – this version here is the full vocal take and stripped back.

Jon: The music was recorded & forgotten about for about a month.  After found I never felt it was done.  Smally insisted that I not use his vocals, but it felt done with them, I couldn’t not have them there.  For Critical Mass I really wanted the music to tell the story, so I cut the vocal track down.   There is really great stuff that was left out, so I’m glad we did this.  Also, I was really disappointed this guitar track was lost on Critical Mass, so I stripped this one down.

Marvin The Mollusk

Smally: “Marvin…” was the last song written for the album, and really was only supposed to be like a little hidden acoustic track that played at the very end, probably a bit like “Her Majesty” from The Beatles “Abbey Road” in the style of Dylan’s “Dont Think Twice It’s Alright”, but obviously it grew legs and became a lot more than that. It’s also the first time I’ve ever specifically written a song for someone else to sing (Jane), which was quite a challenge in itself, especially all the fretting concerning what if they don’t actually like it? Fuck knows how we got around to the subject, but when I was thanking her for doing a great job on “The Idiot Crying” the subject of molluscs came up, so I figured I’d write something about that. I was also reading a lot about Moby Dick at the time when I wrote it, so there’s some of that mixed up in it too. Fate and molluscs – a couple of weird bedfellows for you. Originally this was called “Marvin The Mollusk’s Blueprint To Happiness” after a philosophical “blueprint” I tried to write once many years ago. The “Jackson Pollock” reference is a nudge to the record cover that we’re currently using. The further this album has gone on, the more the strange synchronicities have begun to spin around us – I mean you didn’t really think Marvin was a simple story about a Mollusk did you? The actual melody itself is a combination of two songs I wrote previously but never recorded called “Tommy Mears” and “I’ve Been Smoking Since I Was Five”, and the idea that one day we might write a song that sounds old enough to be on a Wes Anderson soundtrack.

Jon: At this point, I needed a break, but Marvin is special, so I needed to give it a proper go.  It needed to be nautical & dream like.  The accordion was recently acquired in Utica NY after playing with Sgt Dunbar in Albany.  The media has made me thing that accordions sound nautical so I added that for the low end.

The Brilliance Of Being Alive

Smally: This was the 5th of the five songs that made it from the “7 Hours” album and the second last I recorded that day. Again, like “Hammer & Sickle” it was written with the clock ticking, and the words were the first thing that came into my head. It’s not even so much that I was thinking at the time that it would be interesting to write a happy death song, it’s just that this is how I genuinely feel about it. It probably has its roots in old Buddhist books that I read a long time ago, and one line I remember was something along the lines of “dying is as natural as taking a shit, but you don’t worry about taking a shit do you?” Add to that my fear of flying and this is what you get.

Jon: This one was Smally’s idea.

 With a collection of 4 songs he’s contributed to previous Daydream Generation compilations being made available to download as “the playground EP” today, I figured that it’s as good a time as any to find out a little bit of everything I wanted to know about Michael Crowther, the brains behind it all.

Smally: Well first and foremost I suppose I’ve got to ask why The Playground? And who is Mixmaster Migity?Mike: well why any band name at all? I have a hard enough time naming my songs, if were to reference anything it would be “the world is your playground” im a life experience junky. try me ive already done it.(Mixmaster Migity is) yours truly, a name given to me by my friends who really inspired me to make it this far with my music in the first place. much respect to Reggie Hollywood and Dj Ice Cold, can I get holla? they were my first unofficial basement band members mentors, mentals.Smally: One of the things I love most about your music is the atmosphere of the songs – it reminds me of The Beatles circa “All You Need Is Love”, like you’re recording in the middle of a party. Can you describe the process of how a Playground song gets from your head onto a recording?Mike: wooo doggy dats a doozy.  well my process changes as I change. record in bedrooms, don’t add lots of reverb (actually none) just lots of tracks. some times I write a melody in my head while driving my car or doin something menial and american then I whistle or sing that melody all the way home to my guitar or what ever and try and figure it out. but I like to think of song writing as completely out my control, meaning that ifyou let your subconscious do most of the work. as for the recording process now days I have one mic and my DI box set up at all times to catch ideas if need be. I usually chop the song together then I get reallyloopy on blue betties and belly burners and try to perform my little heart out. its really all about performance. its also a battle between recording andwriting, cause if you record some thing to soon or too late the feeling is lost. some songs need to be record while you write and some songs you want to wait until theyre fully baked.Smally: It makes for a very unique sound – who are your biggest influences? What ingredients go into the Playground melting pot?Mike: thats a good one, lots and lots of music.  the obvious sixties and seventies bands, Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Cash, Zeppelin, the velvet underground and Lou reed, Grateful Dead, Nick Lowe,  David Bowie,Beach Boys… any and all Motown music.. theres alot of daniel johnston influence probably more than any one else. lets just start a list I guess.  newer bands,  MGMT, LCD Soundsystem, Dr. Dog, Spoon ( I looooovvve  Spoon) Of montreal, Grandaddy (not so new but still one of greatest of all time). Kings of Leon, Spiritualized, Spaceman3. The Shins. alright I missed so many but theres a bunch of shit i listen to , Im a fan of all types of music even rap and country.Smally:  Yeah, you can definitely hear all that diversity coming together in your songs – sometimes it sounds like some weird organic psychedelic hip-hopconcoction. Can you ever see yourself going or experimenting with electronic instruments? And is there any genre you can’t stand?Mike: Yeah im actually a huge fan of electronic music and electronic instruments, I just pick and choose where to use it is in my music. I did start a track with the Cardboard Man but we never finished it, he’s  a hip hop artist in minneapolis here. if there is a genre i don’t like its because of the people who listen to it not the music itself and boastful rap music makes mesick. the message of a song shouldn’t be ” Im gonna change the world rite  after I get my mansion and mercedes, Im the best there ever was and I deserve the world because of it”  how many of these “Best there ever was” rappers can there be, you’d think just one. and if you really are the best you shouldn’t have to tell your listeners, they would just know, ya know?Smally: How did you get into writing your own songs?Mike: well it took a very long time, I didn’t know how to sing or didn’t know I could sing until I was 20 (24 now) so I wrote my first song then. I had been playing guitar and mandolin for a few years but never really got the hang of song writing, I always thought I would be a good band member/ multi-instrumentalist but never thought I would be the front man in a one man band. at the time all my friends started to write songs and recorded to a four track. this was a very hazy period in my life not exactly sure what or why, needless to say I didn’t have the life skills to really make some jive ass turkey nah mean.Smally: You mentioned “Blue Betties” and “Belly Burners” before – do you think drugs are conducive to writing great music, or does it sometimes get in the way?Mike: I was only half  serious im more of a coffee and cigarettes kinda guy, and a hopeless pothead. My hard drug years are mostly behind me. I think weed is good for writing and performing but everything should be in moderation other wise it is a definite obstacle. no one does really great work when ten feet deep in shit. so I try and stay away from the hole. its fun to dip your toes in every once in a while though.Smally: I think the daydream generation is very much a coffee, cigarettes and hopeless pothead scene, most folk are past the fry your head early 20s and now trying to make sense of it by writing songs. You used to frequent the now sadly defunct Brian Jonestown Massacre forum and I can remember a few times you being a cheeky monkey and rubbing folk up the wrong way. Where are you virtually hanging out now?Mike: im a myspacer , but I try to pop into forums every once in a while and stir things up. one thing you’ll notice about the truly avid forum junky is that they are complete assholes. apparently Intellectually superior, yet emotional stumped and creatively nonexistent people. they have lots of opinions but honestly, whose listening to them in the first place cause there just critics. those who can do, those who can’t teach. I think there are a lot of teachers in the world and not enough doers.Smally: What’s the music scene like where you are? Are you an island in an ocean, or just a drop in the sea?Mike: Minneapolis is notorious  for having tons of bands and artists floating around, Dylan, Prince, The Replacements, and now Tapes and Tapes, The Hold Steady, Cloud Cult etc. but there’s not a lot of money floating around for it at-least rite now. we are an indie rock city though and I like it very much. It seems like everyone in this city is working towards blowing the scene up here and its exciting to be apart of, even though know one knows who I am. Its just nice see so many people working for no money but love what they do.Smally: What can we expect from The Playground in the near future?Mike: a six song EP is in progress, It should be ready in about 2 1/2 to 3 months. I am working on it with my friend Oathman Smihi. we jive. we are in a drummer conundrum at the moment but that seems to be a minor set back cause its gonna be sweet. I think it will be excellent or bodatious or something radical well just have to wait and see.Smally: Oh yeah, and I’ve always meant to ask – How is The Playground spelled? Playground, PlayGround, or PlaygrounD? I’ve never been sure but have never got round to asking.Mike: neither have I, for some reason I mix upper and lower case letters at random with my handwriting so im going to say for today that its “the playground” all lower case letters just like e.e. cummings ya know.Smally: Well thank fuck we got that sorted out – so you can spell it however you want? I like that. Well, I guess that’s it – thanks for taking the time out of your crazy existence to answer these questions. Finally how about “what will your musical epitaph be?”Mike: “welp! I made it this far now all i have to do is decompose” prolly a country tune with lap steel and dogs hollowing in the background.Listen to “Come Out And Play” from “the playground EP“available to download for free at the dgRECORDS link at the top of this page:

Download audio file (1-04 The PlaygrounD - Come Out And Play.mp3)

Or find out more about the playground at:

www.myspace.com/mixmastermigity

For fans of the original Cozy Home transatlantic collaboration there’s a new site covering “The Making Of…”, previously unheard tracks, printable artwork, full lyrics, and of course the incredible Jan Breakroom narrative in full.

Watch that space for a future Daydream Generation project… THE UTICA FLOWER COMPANY might not be as fictional as it sounds.

http://uticaflowerco.googlepages.com

post show post traumatic ultimate mundane

Every revolution needs an army. It needs its foot soldiers on the front line making music for the love of it. It needs its Generals behind the scenes, strategically shifting computer files into place so that when the big waves breaks we are ready to surf it all the way. And it needs its figureheads. The Real Burnouts have been heroically putting out albums from a basement in another dimension for over a decade. You can’t emulate them because you are never quite sure what you have just heard. You can’t second guess them either because they are already ahead of the game and out of sight. And you definitely can’t compare them to anyone else, because this is music made on its own terms, building its own box and singing along inside of it.

But put a gun to my head and I’ll call it “Psychedelia”. That sea of sound treading a mighty fine line between pretence and liberation. You can cut the genre with a knife. On one side you have the kids who grapple with a presence, learning from and trying to advance what has gone before. On the other you have isolated occurrences like this – music that just doesn’t belong anywhere else, where kaleidoscopic imagery leads the charge and the rest just seems to fall into place effortlessly behind it. The Real Burnouts are one of those rare breed of bands who aren’t trying to be cool, they simply just are one of the coolest things you could ever accidentally discover. Of course there’s no guarantee that you’ll “get it” – the first I ever heard of them was on a music forum, where someone had posted “these guys scare me”. Make no mistake, anyone familiar with the great and accessible songs that litter their MySpace page such as “Set Your Senses Free”, “I Put It Down”, “Burnin Up My Mind” or “Mother Mother Mother” would be mistaken to think that these are representative of the body of work. They are but the edge of the rabbit hole. It’s when you dig a little deeper then that’s when the fear kicks in.

“Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane” is the amazing title for their latest offering. It’s been a while since “A Lull In Void” was made for the ill-fated Cozy Home box set in December of 2006, and given the historically prodigious output from planet Burnout, it only seemed like a matter of time before a new record would fall from the sky.  Make no mistake though, fans of previous sprawling musical schizophrenic masterpieces “Transparent Mirror” (2005), and “You Won’t Know Until You Find Out” (2006) are in for a surprise. On the flipside, genuine Burnout fans who have grown to expect the unexpected, would be disappointed with anything less. If you’ve been switched on this last year then you might have sensed the direction the record was travelling. Well let me tell you, that if you think you knew what you were getting, then most likely you’d have been wrong. Surprisingly, only one of last three contributions to The Daydream Generation compilations, “Adreneline Hormone” appears on the album. There is no sign of either the sixties-NY-art-scene “Whenever Will I See You There?”, or the mind-blowingly comic slice of strangeness that was “Wild Sarasparilla”. Nor is there a place for arguably one of their catchiest songs, the pop brilliance that was “Psychological Sacrifice (I Think I Look Pretty Good Without One)” which appeared on a previous Your Psych Tunes compilation. Instead of the patchwork insanity of the last 3 albums, it would seem that they have finally succumbed to making an album that coherently runs from start to finish, with a shimmering brilliance of songs seemingly designed for what’s left of your head on sunny Sunday mornings, dust swirling in the rays that flow between the gap in the curtains you’ve drawn on the waking world.

The biggest criticism of “Post Show” is that at 9 songs long, that just when you are getting sucked in and acclimatizing to structure and sound, that it is over. First listen it’s a pretty good record that happens without ever truly setting you on fire. Second listen it’s a fucking great record that runs so much deeper than you first thought. Third listen and you’re well and truly stuck down the aforementioned rabbit hole. The formula is simple: understated electric guitars, great drums, and a vocal/lyrical hook. The equation generates a pop melancholy that works wonders on songs like the opening “I Do Not Want What Another Man Has”, or on “Adreneline Hormone”. By that third listen you finally hear the great songs rising to the surface like old friends – the pop-psychedelic of “I Think I Found The Way Down” , or the druggy simplicity of “Forever Change Me”, and arguably the finest moment on the whole album, the kookily amazing “Until You Know Who Came Along”. The only time the guard slips and the continuity breaks revealing the old Devil-Levelled Burnouts is on penultimate track “I See You” – telephonic leering vocals burning holes in your ear-drums.

Reviewing a record by a band like The Real Burnouts is probably about as complex as it gets. It would be far too easy to hang this one on situational hook of “maturity” like some inevitable growing up record. But at the same time it is unquestionably more of a complete “record” than what has gone before, and for those of you expecting another fix of prototypical Burned Out audio insanity, well then I’d recommend you look elsewhere. But if you want to hear an album treading the edge with pinpoint words like “I’m stumbling through the solar system just getting stoned” and “I hope I die before I grow mould”, then this one’s for you. If anything, as its title subtly suggests, “Post Show…” is the sound of the morning after the night before, an introspectively mellow daze of words and melodies. In both meaning and texture it is a 30 minute snapshot of what’s going on inside the mind behind the music – the elusive Paul Burnout – who sings you songs from the very bottom of his brain. And as he does, you can clearly visualise him in the box of a basement, lost behind the drum-kit with a smirk on his face (see “The Story Of The Real Burnouts” on You Tube for essential viewing and evidence). A year on from “A Lull In Void” and retrospectively that album suddenly sounds like it was some kind of charged pinnacle of madness, punctuated with great and often disturbing sounds like that pull you in all directions, some miniature masterpiece that leaves you wondering if this music is low-fi by design or necessity. Yet at the time I remembered feeling like it was just about too insane to comfortably digest. With “Post Show…” you know that the sinking-in period could possibly take as long, but that when it does that you’re going to go back to this record again and again and again.

Every revolution needs an army and with bands like The Real Burnouts on our side, we might just stand a fighting chance.

You can download POST SHOW POST TRAUMATIC ULTIMATE MUNDANE for FREE at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

Or find out more about The Real Burnouts at http://www.myspace.com/therealburnouts

When I was a kid there was a cartoon on TV called “Mr Benn”. He was the quintessential suburban British man, pleasantly non-descript in his bowler hat and High Street suit. To escape the monotony of his uneventful day-to-day existence, he frequented a fancy dress shop where “as if by magic the shopkeeper appeared” (complete with a purple fez). Mr Benn would select one of the many costumes – a spaceman, a knight, a roman soldier – and would step through the changing room doors into alternative worlds of each costume and invariably the epicentre of incredible adventures. Now you’re probably wondering what the fuck this has to do with a Tofu Delux record? Well, let me tell you – I’m Mr Benn, and Tofu Delux are the shopkeeper (minus the purple fez I think).

I was minding my own business, hustling together the latest Daydream Generation compilation when a track called “Spin Spin Extend” landed in my mailbox. I’d never heard anything like it before – a dreamy reverb drenched construction stacking interstices of instrumentation and harmonic spacey vocals like a psychedelic teetering tower of sound. So much did it fire the fuse of curiosity that I followed the vapour trail of colour back to the Cozy Home Records store and downloaded “Bear Claw” in its entirety, and perhaps unbelievably for FREE.

“Spin Spin Exend” is a pretty decent snapshot of what to expect from the full-length record, but thankfully it’s by no means the only point where it peaks. In sticking with the Mr Benn metaphor, if this album was a costume then it would be a technicolour jumpsuit glued togther with wild bird feathers, weird flashing LEDs, and colourful frayed threads. The world you enter through the changing room door of your headphones is one of kaleidoscopic brainscapes, textural, explorable, and easy to get lost in if you feel like disappearing into your own mind for a while.

To get the full story of Tofu Delux you need to rewind a year to early 2007 when a message from Cozy Home HQ asked me to check out their latest band. The songs on their MySpace page were good and bristling with possibility, but they didn’t quite live up to the reputation of the “Barret-esque live shows that blow you away”. Fast forward a year to the present day and it’s like comparing a blossoming stalk to a crazy big fruit tree. I’ll let you walk the rest of that analogy home yourself.

It’s tricky to pick out highlights on such an adventurous project that is so obviously meant to be heard as a whole, rather than a sum of parts. “Bear Claw” is full of songs (even song titles) that cut through styles and ideas as often in the thick of the action as the transitional spaces inbetween, running into each other, imitating each other, fading and bursting like mad kids under a winter sun. For every great “song” song such as ”New Years Day” or “Children In Color” duly dipped in the effects bucket and hung out to dry, there is a healthy spattering of atmospheric instrumentals, or a sonic explosion like the brilliant “Trail Way Path”, and sinister orchestral soundtracks like “Mauk Boz” or “Centipede Wakes The Sun”. It might be a diversely rich album of musical textures, but at the same time it’s a big old melting pot and a seamless adventure of stages in flux that like I said demands to be devoured whole rather than in tasty bite-sized chunks of individual song.

Listening to “Bear Claw”, not only does it blink like a neon sign to show that all is well with the future of music, but if you listen close enough it’s possible to make out the unmistakable potential of a new young sound growing up from the ground. This is the kind of album that will inspire it’s peers to try and push their boats out a little further and take chances with their songs. It’s roots are firmly planted in the guitar experimentation of the 1960s, but it draws on the technologies of the present, fusing the two into something electronically psychedelic and organically chaotic. Here is a place where synthetic strings go hand in hand with drum & bass beats, where samples loop around unidentifiable flying objects of sound, and where choirboy singing soars across random bursts of backwards strangeness. Components that on paper should have nothing to do with each other interlock, mixing like oil paints and explode in your ears.

When you finally resurface on the other side of “Bear Claw” and hang your trashed jumpsuit back up on the rack, the first impulse is to go back and hear it all over again. With a little time and dust, the adventure becomes more familiar, the paths of the journey more negotiable, but still you feel like there are things you have missed that somewhere in the future you’re going to love hearing. And soon as that familiarity kicks in you find yourself telling as many people as you can about it, all the while at the back of your mind wondering where else Tofu Delux can take you…

You can find out at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

or listen to the new DG single “Spin Spin Extend”:

TOFU DELUX – Spin Spin Extend

Download audio file (Tofu Delux - Spin Spin Extend.mp3)

or find out more about them at http://www.myspace.com/tofudelux

The Utica Flower Company is not a florist. Its more a transatlantic, transcendental shipping company, hauling sunshine by the cubic ton from shore to shore. As a dare, I recommend reading their myspace page ( www.myspace.com/theuticaflowercompany), as the description is quite possibly the most accurate translation of how a record sounds textually.       The company was established only a year or so ago as a result of writers block.  The product stems from four different sources exchanging sound files and absolutely having their way with them.  Four gardeners, fourteen tracks, do the math.  This proto-60′s psychedelia hook-fest is relentless in the pursuit of color, scent, and arrangement.  Its a modern exercise in lifting Velvet Underground weights with pop rock/hip hop loop form and pose.  Vocally layered deep and instrumentally thick, it sweeps through the aisles of flora, bumping and rubbing and thinking dirty thoughts the whole time. ‘Sha-la-lee’s’ are dropped with near-reckless abandon, and heavily effected rounds hang like vines in the ether.       Big, straightforward rock tunes like “Only Robots Don’t Like Music” and “She Comes Around” punctuate the record, anchoring its heady themes found in “The World’s Smallest Invention”.  Explorations in heroin rock “Dead Flower” map the shady corners of ‘White Light/White Heat’.  Simple stem axioms sprout leaves and petals on “Crash & Vanish”, blooming into Oasis-huge soundscapes.  Groove factory “Desolate Location” ropes out to ground and root this collection of skyward-bound plumes.  “Look At You Run” is possibly the clearest example of the Mama’s and the Papa’s sunny California influence.  The capstone “Jars of Sunshine” ends the record on a fat rock note.  An end to the tour of the factory floor.       The perpetual vastness is the strength and weakness.  While the melodies are sprawling and complex, any strong lyrical movements are buried within dense layers of instrumentation and back line voices.  There are no anthems.  Its gorgeous but inedible.  As an ambient album, that’s what should happen, but its hard not to wish for handles to grasp.  No pints will be drank to these songs, but these songs will play while pints are drank.       As summer approaches, the Utica Flower Company opens wide the doors of nature’s emporium with this self titled debut. They’ve crafted an essential sunny day album, opening the windows wide and letting the fresh breezes in.  Clear a space on the table, this one’s a centerpiece.Review by BarneyYou can download THE UTICA FLOWER COMPANY for FREE at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

Since the first ever Daydream Generation compilation was haphazardly shoved into existence in March 2007, the 3 questions I’ve been asked the most are: 1. Do you want to buy some Viagra? 2. Can we be on the next compilation? and 3. What is Cozy Home Records? The answers to 1 and 2 are quite simply “no” and “probably yes” (in that very specific order, before I start getting bombarded with performance spam and the song contributions all dry up). But the answer to question 3 is not so straightforward. Since I’ve been involved with the Cozy Home for the last couple of years, I should be in a better position than most to answer it, but the truth is that even after digging all this time, some definitive answer or definition remains as elusive as it was when the spade of my brain first hit the earth of Cozy Home history. This project is a lot of things to a lot of people - even to work out something as simple as how it all began, you have to battle back through a cloud of drink and noise and musical bed-hopping and hallucinogens some thirteen years to 1995. So for all that I’d love to answer the third question with “to tell you the truth, I still don’t really know myself”, I guess that would be something of a cop-out. At the very least I’m owe you an explanation of why I still don’t know, and undoubtedly I’m owing the Cozy Home itself to make a serious attempt at straightening up and unravelling it.Let’s start with the obvious – what could anyone find out about it by digging around on the internet? You perhaps already know the iconic imagery of that house on Henry Street Utica (the actual Cozy Home), or the blue 4-track recorder that previously graced the website and MySpace page. Maybe you’ve even read their website mission statement that reads that they are:“Originally based in Utica, New York, Cozy Home Records is a collective of like minded people, places, and things functioning more as a street team for the unheard, rather than a practical conventional record label. ALL COZY HOME RECORDING ARTISTS ARE UNSIGNED. Our sole goal is to promote the artist, for there is power in numbers-depending on who is listening at any given time. Our influences come from all over the world, but most can be found in your own backyard, no not over there, over THERE! so come and hear the hiss of a dozen lost souls dying to break free while preaching to the choir…since 1997-we’ve been here, where have you been?”

But beyond that the Cozy Home is something of an enigma. Ok, so we know it’s a record collective, but really, what’s it all about? Well, like some musical jigsaw puzzle the best place to start is at the very beginning, a double-edged corner piece, and the hopefully the rest will follow from there.My understanding of the origins had always been thrown together in my imagination from snippets of virtual conversation I’d had with various Cozy Home crew members over the last two years. Something I’d been led to believe was that it had all started when a couple of teenagers (Luke Humann and Robert Levy) from Utica NY had started labelling tapes they were making with the name “Cozy Home Records” and that it had grown organically from there with friends and other local kids making music joining in. One of the recurring motifs you quickly discover when you get past the myriad mad band names is that behind it all there are actually only a couple of handfuls of individuals pulling the strings. Whether a fortuitous coincidence of geography, a product of some kind of invisible societal reaction, or simply an inevitable by-product of the idea of such a record collective being possible, these individual mavericks run like quicksilver through this story. Each individual seems to have multiple identities, and most of the bands you’ll find listed on their site are comprised of composite members – it’s perhaps this healthy and genuine collaborative element that sets what is going on here completely apart from your average coming together of bands under a record label title. But if Mr. Jones’ head would be reeling as he tries to unpick the knots, I decide to go straight for the jugular and email both Luke and Rob with the questions that most need answering. I heard nothing back from Luke, but Rob was kind enough to clarify that

“…it was really just Luke who started it, and then me and Paul (Burnout) also put the label on tapes we made, but it was really still Luke’s invention. Actually Paul intermittently put stuff out on his label “Milk and Water”. The initial projects were Arthur Rules, Bernard’s Freek Star, The Burnouts (later renamed The Real Burnouts), The Myoclonics, and Psi-Deffect.”

He goes on to list bands like Trash Can Acid, Sentic Forms, The Avant Audiophiles, and various Tim (Schram) projects as being part of this first phase in the collective’s development.In the second phase he describes how this initial cassette-orientated free-for-all between close friends developed into a more organised and self-conscious entity where the core group decided what was not and what was worthy of Cozy Home inclusion. This stage sees a whole host of new names appearing for the first time – The Fucking Flame, Nozomi, Crookedfoot/Handwithlegs, Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination), The New Wave Dirt, Travel Labyrinth, Tora Bora Cave Complex, Takashi, Allan Cook bands and others.

In the third phase – the “freewheeling” phase – he describes how people start talking like it’s a communal collective, rather than something where a core group tightly controls it, but still with trepidation of bad stuff getting in. Perhaps understandably by this point, the web is so wide and tangled that there are simply “too many projects to mention them all”. Rob describes how people are now starting to say things like “this is a collection of friends” which implies that it is not selective anymore, and that the freewheeling nature together with a few ambitious projects causes us to “get off our asses and do more of our music… so it’s a good thing”.

Rob Levy

Perhaps it’s too easy to parallel the three phases of Cozy Home Records with the technological developments of the last 11 years, but very loosely it would seem that each step mirrors the move from self-made cassettes, to self-burned CDs, and finally to the new digital age of downloads. The intimacy of the earliest manifestation gives way to a mobilised community, and finally a visible figurehead of a de-centralised international movement or “street team for the little guy”. And I guess in a roundabout way that’s where I come in…My own “band” (I use this word very loosely) The Wheelies first got involved with Cozy Home in the summer of 2006. I won’t bore you with the back-story here, except to say that it was 12 long years filled with fucked up misadventures in the desert of creation, and that our integration into the collective was pretty much the only reason why I made five records in the space of a year, instead of one. I wrote and recorded “Oh Happiness” between March and May of 2006, at the same time finally finding my feet and getting slowly sucked into the limitless vortex of artistic possibility that is the World Wide Web. For a laugh we set up a nostalgic Wheelies MySpace page and I killed the seconds between telephone calls at my lousy call centre job getting hooked on the now sadly defunct Brian Jonestown Massacre forum. In particular I took a great interest in a post entitled “Local Bands” and over the course of a few days I went through page after page of recommendations. Of all the bands mentioned the one that blew my brain clean out of my skull was The Real Burnouts. I recognised the name from the first Psylocibin Sounds CD, and somebody had posted (perhaps seriously) that “these guys scare me”. After a first fix of this uniquely low-fi brand of psychedelia, I felt inspired enough to message them to say how much I loved their songs. This in turn triggered an ongoing dialogue with Paul Burnout, and eventually culminated with him asking me if The Wheelies would be interested in becoming a part of the Cozy Home. My first impressions of it were… well, mind-boggling if I’m being honest. In fact it was probably as mind-boggling to me as the idea that anyone would be able to hear some redemptive qualities in the sounds of The Wheelies. For a start there was something deeply strange, almost alien about the names of the bands featuring in their online store – Handwithlegs, Fig Mints, Travel Labyrinth, The New Wave Dirt, Platinum Limb. After happily agreeing to sign on the dotted imaginary line, I was quickly welcomed into the fold with a message from Bobby Fig Mints that read “welcome to the Cozy Home… don’t shit in the nest”.As beautiful as it was having stumbled around in the musical wilderness for so long to finally find some people that were as weird as me, the immediate personal benefits the relationship afforded was dwarfed by the bigger picture concerning what these people had been – and were continuing – to collectively be. Here was a compound of groups and individuals existing completely independently from the capitalist machinations of the music industry as I knew it. The idea of each band voluntarily promoting and on many occasions creatively contributing to what each other were doing was like someone lighting a catherine wheel in my head. Not only was it the first time I’d heard of such a collective, but it was also the first time I’d come across the words “low-fi” being used as something to be celebrated rather than something to be ashamed of. The law of averages suggests that Cozy Home is not one of a kind, but in the context of its longetivity, and durability over the last decade adapting to the changing world of music technology, while retaining its distinct anarchic identity, I think it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to find anything quite like it out there. The reality is that irrespective of what it becomes, what it has been stands as the perfect blueprint for anyone out there who is looking for an alternative to the rat-race of flogging yourself to the highest bidder or howling in the void. Kids take note: fuck the corporation, form a collective and be a part of something – like Nietschze said “All life is a circle, therefore it is the going there, not the getting there that counts”.And so you see that without the Cozy Home there would be no Daydream Generation and I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this. The DG compilations originally were conceived as a compilation of Cozy Home bands, but for one reason or another grew arms and legs and another head, kicking the doors open to anyone who was like us, and a lot of people who are nothing at all like anyone you’ve ever met before. This open door policy might be in stark contrast to the exclusivity of the original Cozy Home concept, and both approaches have their pros and cons, but ultimately when the record plays we’re a part of the same movement and process creating an alternative road to a place where there is always someone listening. And if this really is a revolution, then the first shot was fired when some kid printed the words “COZY HOME RECORDS” on a cassette he made.So that’s how it feels to fall in with these people during the “freewheeling” phase – a time when not only have the collective been transplanted from the actual Cozy Home on Henry Street, but also have geographically relocated to an area of space that anyone can discover. The story of Cozy Home Records as a symptom and agitator of revolutionary change might be more relevant than ever in 2008, but the backbone and roots of the story can be found only in its beginnings and how it grew from there. Given my limited perspective I couldn’t think of anyone better than the guy who got me involved in all of this to begin with, Paul Burnout, and put the questions to him that I couldn’t even begin to answer myself:

Paul Burnout

Smally: How did you personally get involved and do you remember how other people came to be involved?Paul: Cozy Home Records was Luke’s creation. We were in a band called Trashcan Acid and we needed a name that sounded legit to put on our tape. Then Rob, who was previously in Bernards Freek Star had a tape of his own material called Psi-Deffect that he wanted to put out. Then soon after that came The Myoclonics and The Burnouts and Fun With Boxes, the whole thing was just really natural. We were all friends, and we weren’t out to make money or rip each other off.Smally: Can you remember much about the first few years, what it was like, who the main bands were, what you were up to?Paul: Well we would all kind of play in each other’s bands and turn up at each other’s shows. Later on we would pack up our stuff at the club at 2am and head to the famed Cozy Home studio where there would be a dozen people waiting for us drinking beer on the porch already smashed. We were our own scene. There weren’t any other bands that were in to what we were doing. They didn’t like us. We were scary. I recall there was always grass around, mushrooms, acid, beer and we were seldomly sober. At the time there was The Burnouts, Trashcan Acid, The Avant Audiophiles, and Fun With Boxes.Smally: How did it move across onto the internet?Paul: We were really big into tapes and we thought that was going to be our thing. It was easy for us to make the art and dub the tapes ourselves. We were like, “I’m never gonna burn fucking CD’s.” And then everything changed. Fucking boom boxes stopped being made with tape decks. Sound quality was becoming an issue. And we found ourselves in the situation where we had to learn how to burn CD’s. We were like old bastards trying to program a VCR, but eventually we got it. And then the next logical step was the internet. Tim and Rob helped get everything started with the cozyhomerecords.com and then the MySpace page. It was same thing as handing out our tapes at show, except the whole world could hear what we were doing, in theory. Smally: When did you start being responsible for getting other folk involved on the Net?Paul: We learned that the internet was like a giant looking glass, where not only could you hear us, but we could also see you. We were never really looking for anyone though, we were too selective, and we had our group, but sometimes fate happens, and you wind up meeting the foreign version of yourself. If it didn’t happen through the internet, it probably would have happened at the bus station.It’s weird, but it was only after I started to write this and follow the hash-cake crumbs back to the source that I realised how important a part Luke Humann played in all of this.

Luke Humann

If it’s true that there would be no Daydream Generation without the Cozy Home, then it also appears from what both Rob and Paul have said that there would be no Cozy Home without Luke. So if there’s anyone to blame, or pat on the back for this mess (depending on where you’re standing) then it’s ultimately him. And because of this I went and pulled a few strings and finally got in touch with his attorney who recounted the following responses to the questions I proposed he answer:1 When was the Cozy Home formed?Luke: 1995, with release of The Cocksuckers “demo tape,” then Trashcan Acid “live” in 1997, and then Psi-Defect “Horselessness” also in 1997. 2 Who formed it?Lucas Humann, one of the guiding lights of The Cocksuckers and later Benard’s Freek Star, Trashcan Acid, Avant Audiophiles, The Fucking Flame, etc.3 Where did the name come from?Well, we used to record at my parent’s house, and they were very supportive, which leant itself to a cozy atmosphere. (Hence the name).4 Why did it form?To promote musical terrorism through lo-fidelity recordings of myself and my friends’ psychedelic, adolescent terror trips. 5 What have been some of the highlights in the Cozy Home history?You gotta be kidding me. Riding on a Macy’s day float with Bill Worden and Vic Vetters.6 What are the plans for the future?Have everybody else take it over cause i’m too lazy to do it myself. By it i mean the world. And by everybody else, i mean the wonderful artists on the Cozy Home stable of stars.You’ll be glad to know that we’re nearly there now, but we’ve come this far and it would be impossible to spin this story without a few sentences concerning the role of Tim Schram. It’s too easy to dismiss the idea of a collective having their own website as an essentially uninspiring necessity of presenting what you do and connecting with your audience. All of the artists at Cozy Home may be unsigned, but perhaps the most important word in that sentence isn’t the most obvious one. Take it from me and a year of experience in the subject – artists are notoriously difficult to motivate and virtually impossible to co-ordinate. We travel through our lives at greatly differing speeds, some of us burn effortlessly fast, some of us plod slowly, and most of us have a tendency to disappear and resurface at apparently random junctures depending on the urgency of other life matters. As the interviews with Rob, Paul and Luke have shown, the link of a tight group of talented friends has long since been replaced by the tangled interplay of sometimes seemingly disparate projects. Instead of friends, it is now the friends of friends and sometimes even complete strangers who label their records as “Cozy Home” with pride. Throughout this fog of kaleidoscopic confusion while the key characters have drifted in and out, it’s been Tim who has sat behind the Cozy Home wheel. He hosts the site. He built a store (twice). And he kept the ship sailing at times when everyone else was hibernating – for several years. This website has never been an ordinary website – it was always an electronic pulse that signalled that there was still something there, even when fuck all was happening.

Tim Schram

And now dear reader who has indulged me this far, now we are finally back in the now. 2008 and Tim has clocked out to go and run his “Cozy Home space station” – www.transatmospheric.com, dealing with the hi-fidelity end of this cubist spectrum that was accidentally sewn. In his place is perhaps the only person who can keep the ship afloat in its present form – Bobby Rogan. Arguably the only one of us who seems to be in touch with every band who has ever been involved, for the last month he’s worked until his fingers bled and his eyes popped out of his head, filling up the shiny new Cozy Home store at www.cozyhomerecords.com.

Bobby Rogan 

It’s the digital coming of age of Cozy Home Records – the cassettes have long been consigned to the bottom of cardboard boxes, and even the discs have taken a seat on the back burner. Every one of the records you can find there are FREE for you to download and discover – from the infectious punk/pop of Fig Mints, to low-fi psychedelic legends The Real Burnouts, from the mad musical science of Dead Canaries, to folk fuck-ups The Wheelies, from Dusty Charts shoegazing masterclasses, to the anarchic pop experimentation of Tofu Delux , and from one shamanic Rob Levy recording project, to another shamanic Rob Levy recording project. It’s just about all there, and what’s not there yet will hopefully be there sometime in the not too distant future.I hope in some way this probably over-long article will have somehow lit the fuse of curiosity and you’ll take a little time to go visit the new site and download if not all, then at least some of the records there. Ask me and I’ll tell you that I still don’t really know what the Cozy Home is, but I’ll tell anyone who is still listening that the revolution has happened, and is still happening as you read this - it wasn’t televised, but it was recorded every step of the way. The future of Cozy Home is in the NOW, yet almost perversely its future is also its past, a diverse and rewarding collection of DIY records playing back to the mid 90s to be discovered and downloaded and chewed over by generations of fucked up kids to come. Perhaps they will still be digging it long after the Cozy Home itself has collectively faded from existence, and that house on Henry Street has crumbled to the ground. But it’s survived this far, and I guess you could argue that it’s been a step ahead this whole time, so it would seem that there’s no reason to believe that the universe will be any less Cozy anytime soon.To celebrate the launch of the new site and store Cozy Home Records have put together a promotional compilation featuring tracks from Tofu Delux, Platinum Limb, Dusty Charts, Fig Mints, Whoopin Cough Jonny, External World, Dead Canaries, The Utica Flower Company, Electric City Subway, Periwinkle Periscope, The Fucking Flame, The Real Burnouts and The Wheelies. You can download “IMPLIED FUTURE HISTORY” directly from the Cozy Home site for FREE –

www.cozyhomerecords.com

Or take a few clicks to befriend the Cozy Home at www.myspace.com/cozyhomerecords

Who are, or what is, Dead Canaries? More, and less, than a band, Dead Canaries is a multi-musician project. “Anyone is welcome to contribute anything,” was Jonathon Fink’s steering philosophy. Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things is a transatlantic collaboration between Fink of Jon of the Atom, Smally the Windmill Chaser (Steven Small of The Wheelies and captain of The Daydream Generation), Chelsea Hogan (of Dirty Spoons w/Fink), Jane Gilmore, Meghan Geiss (of New Wave Dirt w/Fink), Aldonza Lorenzo, Linzi (Mrs. Smally), Old Kinderhook, Dan Pardee (of Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned), and Tim Kotch (also of Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned). I’m not entirely sure whether or not any two artists (the Smally’s excluded) were in the same room at the same time during the recording process, but with Fink at the helm the collaboration has resulted in an intriguing, intelligent, and downright beautiful 53 minutes of surprising melodic juxtapositions and richly textured layers of sound.

The album opens with the songs for flying things, which have an airy, layered, light feel about them – full of bells and intricate guitar work that jingles like twinkling stars or wind up music boxes. On repeated listenings, some of the songs of flight have a slight Eastern, opium den, trippy feel. After a brief, musical intermission that explores inanimate and immobile objects, Critical Mass takes the listener into the world of crawling things, where the bells and melodies of the flying things’ songs give way to the click-clacking sounds of clocks and heavier, more prominent guitar work, grounding the latter set of songs in the territory of crawling things on time-bound terra firma. The record is made whole with a “Song for the Swimmers,” for the aquatic among us, and then it comes full circle closing with “Norman & the Dragonfly,” a tune that unites flying things with crawling things.Critical Mass is deeply visual, as though it was composed as a film score. It also causes a bit of acute synesthesia in its listeners – sounds have colors, moods, and even actions associated with them. “Crows Over King Street” feels like what a scene of the regal black birds circling and perching on a ledge at the moment of someone’s final breath would sound like. Maybe it’s the eerie addition of what sounds like a Theremin that brings on a somber tone – or it could just be my overactive imagination. “Lamentations of a Penguin” is a lovely little waltz of a song that easily lends itself to visions of the flightless birds bemoaning their condition. It’s sad and beautiful like a waltz can be.The crawling things have their own visual soundtrack too. “The Spider’s Song” is an intricate piece that weaves a web of classic rock, with guitar work that sounds like it could be a lost track from an early Neil Young album. “It’s a Crab’s Life” evokes the scurrying about of a crab, at first peaceful and plodding about its domain then ending in a mad dash to outrun a trapper and avoid becoming dinner. Does the crab win? You’ll have to listen and decide for yourself.Other exciting tracks for me include “Tree Sloth Finding Food” and “Moths At the Bug Zapper,” even though they are completely different. “Tree Sloth” is a mildly cacophonous spoken word piece that briefly calls to mind that “Sunscreen” spoken word/song that Baz Luhrmann performed a while back blended with Mark Renton’s “Choose Life” monologue from Trainspotting (probably because the selected text was read by Small, a Scotsman). I’m not going to ruin the coolness or fun of the song here by revealing what is being read in the background. Again, you have to listen and learn.Addendum: Since writing this review, I have developed a ridiculous fondness for “Crickets Chirping (Thank My Stars),” a lovely little waltzy, country-psychedelic tune if such a genre exists. Actually, that’s the rub — the whole album is one lovely work altogether that makes picking out single songs sort of like choosing your favorite kitten in a litter.Finally, “Moths At the Bug Zapper” is another tune that makes use of the basic waltz timing, but here it is a love song instead of a lamentation. Chicks will dig this tune, and college radio stations would probably choose it as the first single (though “Crickets Chirping” and “The Spider’s Song” are also singles contenders). “Moths” is pure loveliness.One of my favorite aspects of Critical Mass is that a lot of thought was put into song titles, the order of the songs, and the overall structure of the record. Critical Mass is a whole work, and, similar to a novel in its narrative structure, it offers the listener a sense of resolve to record’s tension.The album is a complex, exciting, and bold musical experiment. Sure it can be enjoyed casually while doing stuff, but it shines when you take the time to sit back and actively listen. The layers begin to shift, and the lightly fuzzy psychedelic tone gives way to thoughtful vocals. The more I listen, the more I hear, and the more I enjoy Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things.Written by Jonathon Fink, Tim Kotch, Robert Levy, Steven Small, and Brian Wilson, Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things can be filed under folk/psychedelic/rock/wonderfully other worldly.Available for FREE download, so get clicking.Tara Nicole Brown

Happy days for the Daydream Underground - together with our good friends at Cozy Home Records, we have great pleasure in introducing the latest manifestation of the mad musical scientist that is Jon of the Atom, in the form of DEAD CANARIES “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs Crawling Things”. This truly extraordinary aural adventure that we’ve been talking about for what seems like a lifetime can be downloaded from the dgRECORDS link at the top of this page for FREE.

You know what to do

The Real Burnouts”Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane”2008 Cozy Home RecordsI know Paul Burnout personally. As a matter of fact, I consider him to be among the very small handful of people that I consider to be good friends. This is why I’m reluctant to review his new album. As I listen to it now, though, I think “Ah, fuck it. He deserves his due.” So here it is.For starters, the name of the album pops out at you and demands your attention before you even put the disc on. As stated before, I’ve known Paul for a while, and from the many times that I’ve seen him after a show, I’d say that “post traumatic ultimate mundane” is the best way to describe the general mood of the whole band after stepping off of the stage; Paul having rendered himself voiceless and all Burnouts without exception exhausted from their all-out performance and disappointed with getting ripped off. Again.The album starts with the traditional Burnouts sound:  An electric guitar tuned askew and plugged directly into the mixer, achieving a dry, jangly sound that is unique to this band. As the other instruments come into the mix, it’s quite apparent that Paul has been paying close attention to production, and deftly utilizing his new setup of eight recording tracks as opposed to four. Guitars swirl and drums pop crisply with cymbals washing perfectly in the mix. A living testament to the fact that tape recording is far from dead, Paul gives us a reason to lift up our Tascam machines and sound the call to battle against all that is digital. The thing that I enjoy most about the Burnouts, and have since the beginning, is the honesty in the music. No metronomes, no cut and paste editing, and many times entire songs consisting of take one from each track. Mistakes are made, and sometimes obvious, but these little goofs ultimately amount to the crown jewel of each track, boldly and proudly proclaiming that human beings really can make good music. And it doesn’t have to be perfect to be brilliant.Lyrically, Mr. Burnout again proves why his music never disappoints. The most lyrically introspective album since “Transparent Mirror”, Paul hits us with bits of 20/20 hindsight like “starry-eyed and full of pride/I should’ve known how it would go/I should have just stayed home” and tongue-in-cheek references like “I hope I die before I grow mold” in the song “I Don’t Want What Another Man Has”. The single “Adrenilene Hormone” (typo intentional), which has been featured  on the Daydream Generation Vol. IV, begins with a wonderfully dreamy bit of guitar work, tapping the fretboard to give the song a popping, chiming foundation for Paul’s uplifting brand of quiet psychedelia. One of the few lighthearted songs on this album, it’s a touching tribute to love as a drug that many have attempted, but few have really succeeded in making interesting. The song “Superficial Touch” may become Paul’s latest sleeper hit, while my personal favorite track, “I See You” is an obvious goof. Mostly improvised, it showcases Paul’s gift for coming up with psychedelic pop weirdness at the drop of a hat… Or roach or empty can of Utica Club, or whatever he may feel like dropping at any moment.In conclusion, buy “Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane” by The Real Burnouts. But only if you like dreamy melodies, shoegaze song structure, and an all around good feeling after listening to an album. And who doesn’t like that?-Monty Leuthausen

Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane

available at www.cozyhomerecords.com sometime soon

Smally: Ok, firstly where have you gone? Your MySpace page has recently disappeared? Why? What are you up to?Bobby: My page has gone the way of the hippies and hell’s angels. Still around as an idea but virtually invisible. I think all the junk mail and friend requests from random bands just looking to feel more important was my altamont. I very rarely use the internet, but I found myself on myspace, just goofing around doing nothing for hours every day. Then I talked to Jenny Penny’s sister, Melissa and she told me how free she felt after deleting her page. Let’s just say I was inspired… I’ll probably be back when I finish my next album, but I’m going to limit my usage. For now not having a page suits me just fine, though.

Smally: Yeah I can understand the distraction element – but if anyone is interested in hearing more of your songs after downloading one of the DG compilations where should they go?Bobby: As of now I’m going to start offering my albums for free as downloads. Well, as soon as the new Cozy Home store gets set up, anyway. I’ll plug the website now… www.cozyhomerecords.com. So go there. Well, not you, Smally. I mean the theoretical cats who may be reading this interview after it gets to where it’s headed. Not to say that you, Smally, shouldn’t go there… I just meant… Ah, fuck it.Smally: It’s been a few months since you released your last album Hugs & Smiles – in hindsight how happy are you with it?Bobby: I’m pretty pleased with it. I’ve listened to it a few times since it was done, and there’s quite a lot I would change, but them’s the breaks, as they say. All in all a few songs I’m really quite proud of amidst a mess of botched equalization and shaky continuity. But no one has complained, so why worry?Smally: Any hints at where your music is going next? Radical departure or more of the same? Are you working on new material just now, and if so what’s it sounding like?Bobby: Well, that I’m not sure of. I always try to do something drastically different from what I had done previously, but it all ends up sounding the same in the end. Especially lately. Like I’ve been working on six songs for the past three months and I’m on the verge of scrapping them all cos each one either sounds like something I’ve done before, or just plain shite. But then again, I’ve gone through phases like this in between each album, so maybe this means I’m onto something… Or maybe I really have lost it this time. We’ll find out when I’m finished with the next thing, I guess…Smally: So for anyone who hasn’t stumbled across the magic of your music, they’ve got quite a lot of recordings to get through, where do you think they should they start, which album? Which is your own favourite album, and which is the most accessible?Bobby: Magic? Well, if you say so… I’d say that the best place to start is probably either “Bad Choice Brigade”, or “Is It Today Already”. “Bad Choice Brigade” cos it’s my singles album. That is to say, the album that could most easily be turned into ten singles and put on the radio, like The Cars’ self- titled album. I’d say that one is probably my best as far as the general quality of songwriting goes. “Is It Today Already” is my best production and mixing job, although nobody really got it. I personally think that overall that one is my favorite, cos it sets a mood. I actually still listen to that one when I’m by myself, which I don’t usually do after a couple of weeks of an album being finished. God, I love to talk about myself. I should be famous.Smally: On the subject of fame, don’t you think that it would damage one of the strongest features of your songwriting – the gritty, clever lyrics? And on the subject of lyrics, what would you say are the recurring themes? What do you use as inspiration to write words? Bobby: Gritty and clever… I like that, thank you. Truth is, I usually have no idea what I’m writing about until I’m done. Not to say that my lyrics don’t mean anything… It’s just that I attach a meaning to them when they’re all out in front of me and I can figure out what I was trying to say. As far as fame goes, I don’t know. I’d like to be famous, but that’ll never happen. And if I was famous, I could do whatever I wanted, so if I was hard up for material, I’d probably just put out a radio-friendly crapfest that would make me a million dollars and then get all Brian Wilson until I retire… Recurring themes… Well, being miserable, feeling anxious, and not being sober are pretty commonplace. I write love songs, too. I usually write as if I were lecturing myself on something that I don’t like about myself. It’s pretty grim, but the ends usually justify the means. As far as inspiration, I like to listen to albums that I like while being distracted. Bob Pollard’s songs are great for doing this… I’ll eventually misunderstand a lyric in such a way that I can build a whole song around the idea or image it creates… I should mention that I didn’t mean to compare myself to the Cars earlier. They were much better than me. As for them with Todd Rundgren, I’m not sure about that yet…Smally: What’s your favourite line or lines that you’ve ever written?Bobby: Off the top of my head, it’s a toss up. Either “you might find your brittle little mind cracking up before it’s time’s up, and you without the glue” or “there’s a fantastic fantasy behind the awkward silence/reality triumphs and weighs you down again”. It’s really quite a lot of fun to write words that sound well together. I should have studied linguistics…Smally: How do you record? What equipment and instruments do you use? How has this changed over the years?Bobby: I record onto cassette tape. I’ve evolved from a tiny little Tascam four track to a really big Tascam eight track. I use microphones and shit too.Smally: Haha, thanks for that, very expansive. One of the things I’m curious about is that your music always has a very punky and organic feel to it (even when it’s experimental) – are Fig Mints ever going to go electronic, embracing modern computer technology? Or do you think using sounds that translate easily to live performances are essential to your musical identity? Bobby: I don’t know. I think it would be a huge pain in the ass to have to go out and acquire all the equipment that would be necessary for me to record digitally. Not to mention I prefer working with cassettes. As far as my musical identity, I never give much thought to that. The more you give away about your identity, the easier it is for it to get stolen. So don’t ever ask me for my social security number again. I have no idea what that was supposed to mean… forget it, what?Smally: You produced the last two Jenny Penny albums earning you the tag of the Cozy Home’s “Phil Spector”. How was that? What kind of producer are you and can you see yourself working in that role again?Bobby: Phil Spector, eh? Is that something that you just came up with, or is this a common opinion? Is it too soon for a get away with murder joke? Probably. Hey, a hung jury is a hung jury, and I wasn’t there, right? Anyway, yeah it’s fun. I like not having to deal with the pressure of writing songs. And Jenny has such an amazing talent for songwriting that she shouldn’t have to deal with the pain in the arse that is recording and mixing, so I set her up, and she knocks me out. Kismet, right? Personally, I love it and hopefully I’ll be able to do it more often with other people. Actually, I recorded and produced Jenny’s sister’s album. Her name is Big Mimi and the title is “It’s On”. I don’t know what’s up with the release, but it’s out there, and it’s a good, fun listen. Toe Tag is another one that I helped with. Alan “Cashew” Cook and Jenny’s brother, Mike are an improvisational metal band called Toe Tag and I recorded and produced (with Alan’s genius ears guiding me) a one-off album from them. It was fun. I recorded Jenny’s first album, too, for the record.Smally: It’s something I just came up with. But it’ll stick. Any ideas where people can get their hands on the recordings you mentioned? Any tips for would-be producers you can pass on from your experiences? Bobby: I got the Toe Tag stuff. I’ll try to get it put up on the Cozy Home page for free download as long as it’s okay with the band. As far as Big Mimi goes, it’s all up to her, but I’ll keep everyone posted… As far as tips go, I’d just say play it all by ear and don’t try too hard. Not that my advice is worth anything. I ain’t no Dave Fridmann or nothing… Smally: The Utica Flower Company collaboration project recorded last year is soon to be released through Cozy Home – are you glad that’s finally getting to see the light of day?Bobby: Yes. Definitely. I think it should’ve been out by now, but that’s what happens when your dreams outweigh your wallet, eh? We did have some grand plans for it, and hopefully we’ll get a real deluxe version out there, if only just for the four of us. But anyone interested is encouraged to donate money to the cause. Or at least give a shout to let us know if anyone would be interested in buying a physical copy with a big booklet and great artwork, so we’ll know it’s not going to be a waste of money.Smally: It seems to be an almost integral part of Cozy Home Records that the various bands and artists musically bed-hop and morph into other bands from time to time. What other projects/bands have you been involved in? Bobby: Well, since joining the Cozy Home, I’ve played guitar in the Fucking Flame, bass in The Real Burnouts, wrote instrumentals for the aforementioned UFC, teamed up with Artie Lester for a couple of live shows, and helped him out on some Arthur rules recordings. I’ve also been one half of Euro Language Abusive and one third of Electric City Subway. It’s pretty fun to do that sort of thing. Anything to make music and share some of the responsibility of making it sound good.Smally: Its hard to ignore the fact that thanks to the internet there’s a whole new world of music available for people to discover, a low-fi revolution. What bands are you listening to, or have you been listening to recently that you could recommend? How does it feel to be a part of this revolution?Bobby: I’m quite happy and grateful to be part of something. Like I know that at 27 I’ve done more creatively than many people will in their entire lives. Whether or not anyone outside of the circle will ever care is ultimately irrelevant in my opinion… As far as bands that I’ve been listening to, I can’t really mention anything that isn’t typical, so I’ll skip that one. I don’t like to drop references, anyway. And besides, I feel so overwhelmed by the internet, I only use it for email nowadays… I will say that I’ve always been a pretty big fan of one of the DG bands, the Wheelies. Ever heard them? Pretty psychedelic, you should give ‘em a listen.Smally: Haha, cheers for the plug. It’s as subtle as a sledgehammer blow. So low-fi aside, who are the bands and what are the songs or albums that really made you want to start writing your own music?Bobby: Oh, I don’t know… Probably Sonic Youth and Guided By Voices… I can’t really say for sure, but I often find myself listening to Bob Pollard’s songs and thinking “wow, my next good song should sound exactly like this.” Wait, didn’t I say that I didn’t want to drop references? Oh well, you tricked me…Smally: Were you musical when you were a kid? In a school band or play any other instruments? Bobby: Nah. I was too busy smoking weed and listening to lame grunge bands.Smally: You recently moved out of your hometown of Utica – how has this affected your music?Bobby: I really have no idea. I’ve been quite uninspired lately. Living in a “hip” area is boring. And when it’s not boring it’s straight up annoying. Everyone is just so bloody obvious and not nearly as interesting as they seem. Or maybe that’s just me being the miserable cynic that I know I am. Goddam I feel like Charles fucking Bukowski.You can listen to and download Fig Mint’s “Three Cheers For Good Cheer” from the album “Bad Choice Brigade” on the Daydream Generation 4 compilation – available from 7th March 2008.

The metamorphosis from indie-rock to something resembling a mad musical scientist can be carefully traced from the kooky folk of early Jon Of The Atom albums, through the honed indie-rock of the brilliant New Wave Dirt album “The Apple” (Cozy Home 2006), into someone who sounds like he is inventing rather than writing songs, with sounds that would have turned Brian Wilson’s head circa 1967, organically insane and melodically marvellous.

So being the curious pioneering community that we are, I figured it was about time that we worked out what the fuck has actually happened here. Who are Dead Canaries? Where did This Is Not Jon Of The Atom go? And Jon Of The Atom too for that matter? What does it all mean and where the fuck is he going next? Fortunately he not only replied to the following six question interview, but we got a lot more than we bargained for with a copy of the latest Dead Canaries EP \u0026quot;Thanks For Nothing You Gutless Prima Donna\u0026quot; which you can download here for FREE:1 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE NEW WAVE DIRT AND JON OF THE ATOM?Jon of the Atom is me. I started using the name Jon of the Atom when I was watching the movie Ed Wood every night for about a year. It comes from “Bride of the Monster” origanally titled “Bride of the Atom”. I’m not gone, but I the style of recording, much like Ed’s directing style, of one take & then move on is something I’m no longer doing. I was 17 when Jon of the Atom became my handle & I felt like I just needed something else. The New Wave Dirt was a band with Meghan Geiss that was proving to be more frustrating then fulfilling, so I ended that.2 WHO OR WHAT ARE DEAD CANARIES? WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM?Dead Canaries came about when I was riding my bike in the summer of 06. There were about 20 or 30 dead, what I’m told are yellow finches, but I maintain that they were canaries, on the side of RT. 20 in New York. I was listening to Elizabeth Cotton & Woody Guthrie as I rode & was thinking about mining. Everyone out of the mine! As for who are Dead Canaries, it’s any one that I can wrangle in to playing on these albums.3 CRITICAL MASS HAS BEEN RECEIVING A LOT OF POSITIVE ATTENTION – HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT ALBUM NOW?I feel like it’s done, brought to temperature & ready for consumption by the masses & boy, is it tasty!4 FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT HEARD YOUR MUSIC BEFORE HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR SOUND? WHO ARE YOUR INFLUENCES ETC?My favorite descriptions would be Radiohead singing Motown, or Brian Wilson & Beck’s bastard child. Others in that list of potential parents would be: woody Guthrie, Elizabeth Cotton, Syd Barrett, nirvana, social discomfort, anything involving Robert Levy & Smally Wheelies makes it’s way into my sub conscience as well as playing music with Meghan geiss for the past decade. belle & Sebastian, the beatles, Alexander Spence, ween, neutral milk hotel, the microphones, Tim Kotch. The kids in the hall & the constant struggle to get laid. This list goes on & on. Oxygen has also been important influence in my musical life.5 THANKS FOR NOTHING – TELL US A BIT ABOUT IT – WHAT’S IT ABOUT? YOU’RE GIVING IT AWAY AS A FREE DOWNLOAD, WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT WHETHER MUSIC SHOULD BE FREE OR COST MONEY?First, yes I think music should be free. Thanks for nothing is & was not intended to have a physical form, but for me if there is music I really love I like having the album to hold & explore it. If there is music you are content to not have the album, why pay for it. & If your happy with shitty mp3′s that sound like they are coming out of a pop can, good for you.Thanks for nothing -the title came from someone being very upset with me. That was a comment he left me. I thought it was great & this music is just to air some grievances I have for someone that will not speak to me. This shit weighs me down so I needed to get it out some how. These songs have been kicking around in my head for a while.6 WHAT ARE YOUR FUTURE PLANS FOR JOTA, DEAD CANARIES ETC.?ead Canaries perfume. Lingerie. An E True Hollywood Story. Scented toiletries. A feature leangth musical based off Franz Kafka. Sex with famous people. Maybe one day a physical band that plays shows & tours, but that ones just cloud talk.

DEAD CANARIES – Thanks For Nothing You Freak Out Prima Donna EP

download for free from here