And so to boldly go where no obscure lo-fi music blog has gone before: an interview with David Charleston aka Lenn9o9n. You’ve heard the music (see ‘Relining Coffins’ below) now have a sneak peek through the keyhole into the brain of the man behind it…

DG: Probably an obvious question, but where did the inspiration for the name Lenn9o9n come from?

“One after 909″ is one of the first songs he wrote as a teenager. I don’t idolize him, I just empathize with his ambitions, torment, love, anger.

DG: When did you start writing music and why?

2003. I think the Brian Eno quote on people who buy Velvet Underground records turn into musicians works really well here. At the time I had a cheap keyboard and didn’t know a single chord but had a lot of curiosity in how to recreate the sounds I was hearing. Bands like the VU, Suicide, Silver Apples helped me realize I didn’t have to be very complicated, so that helped with my confidence in not knowing anything.

DG: You move around a lot… how does the changing geography affect your song writing?

It hurts more than it helps because I’ve never been in a position these past 5 years where I saw a good opportunity to be in a band. I’ve built this wall around me with the MIDI sound and while I think it’s helped me improve my mixing skills, there is very different emotion brought out with stringed instruments and playing with other people.

DG: Crash helmet on. Hit me with your infuences.

Grew up on hip hop with the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul being the “holy trinity”. Then in the summer of 2001 I bought every Beatles, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett album I could find as well as classics like “What’s Going On”, “Songs in the Key of Life”, “Stand!”, “We’re Only in It For the Money”, “Surrealist Pillow”, “The United States of America”, “Pet Sounds/Smile”. I was 17 and in awe. It was an amazing time. Then the indie thing kicked in later that year with me finding the E6 collective, For Stars, Grandaddy.

DG: Is it true you’re going to make a full-length record exclusively around the cello? Is there any instrument you wouldn’t use?

Well, my wife still hasn’t bought that cello for me (belated bday gift)…hopefully next week. I think almost any instrument can be used. Some, of course, have no business in certain songs. Like the way Nico talked about how dreadful it was to hear those flutes in “Chelsea Girl” without her permission. And I have a have strong distaste for anything that sounds too synthy. Ironic, but take New Order…so much of their music is garbage to listen to because the whole time I just have this idea of what “Blue Monday” accomplished.

DG: How do you do what you do with a keyboard?

I hate the fact there’s a set pattern for it but most of the time the complete songs I finish are done with me on MIDI piano through garageband. I record the basic track and then just experiment from there with the final goal to scratch the piano track and have something that sounds completely different. It’s an experiment every time and takes patience/concentration. There’s a reason of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes has gotten where he has the last 7 years. He works his ass off and isn’t afraid to sit down for 14 hours straight and put his heart/soul/mind into a track.

DG: Last record in your collection you’d sell to fund a drug habit?

Someone once said that the happiest they’ve ever seen me was singing to the Beatles. The White Album. It can never be worn out.

DG: What makes you mad?

The food industry of plant gene modifications and slaughter houses, media hacks of the left and right, anti-drug/homosexual legislation, pro-lifers who won’t adopt (actually, anyone who won’t adopt), ugliness/cynics, people trapped in their religions/idealogies so far that they don’t see every human/animal life as a result of circumstance but more a part of their singular system of speciesist/classist hierarchy. The idea of evolution is the most empowering idea we can all share, besides a common respect for creation and the unknowns it provides.

DG: What makes you grin?

Loving your enemies and I’m a sucker for underdogs in sports.

DG: What’s the best song you’ve ever written?

“Leavin’ Blues”. I tried putting it on “Relining Coffins” but it didn’t work out.

DG: Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?

Beatles 1968.

DG: Shuffle your iPod – what are the first 5 songs?

Bill Hicks – There’s a Ledge Beyond the Edge
Cat Power – Cross Bones Style
Ice Cube – The Nigga You Love to Hate
Erykah Badu – Time’s a Wastin
BS 2000 (Adrock from Beastie Boys) – Ajoqueso

DG: Describe your own music in just 3 words?

Thick, layered, familiar,

DG: What’s your favourite film?

I quote Big Lebowski way too much.

DG: What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?

Probably a UFO sighting while under the influence in 2003 w/ two other friends who commented on it at the same time.

DG: Point us in the direction of a friend’s band?

Zakk Zielke has so much f’ing potential. He’s really opening himself up to so many different avenues of music. I think if he stopped right now and just decided to make an album it would be brilliant.
play #2 http://cllct.com/release/traumaqueenep

DG: Favourite line from a song?

“And we will love like a field of fire and we will go where we don’t belong.” – For Stars – Field of Fire

DG: If you could time travel, where would you go?

November, 1963 Dallas and I’d put up video cameras everywhere. Lock ‘em up for a few years. Watch the government lie to everyone and then completely destroy it’s credibility from the inside out by sending a copy to every news publication in the world.

DG: What’s your recording set-up like?

One cheap Yamaha YPT-300, a couple decent mics. Now that I have a guitar and a house, I’ll start opening up my acoustic side. Mandolin, cello, and whatever else I can fit into the equation.

DG: What are your future musical plans?

I think embracing lo-fi as much as possible. I really love that hiss of early E6 records, lost John Lennon tapes. I love home recordings and when you put a stereo effect to it by isolating each track in it’s “perfect” place the result can be magical. I’ve taken the easy way out with the piano/synths, it’s time to step up to the music I’ve cherished for so many years. 99% is guitar/string instrument based.

DG: Where can we find your music on the internet?

I really only update stuff frequently on cllct. the last link is the place i posted all my stuff from 03-07. some really disastrous stuff in there. even the first version of “alli” called “jessica” and “leavin’ blues” track i was talking about.
http://cllct.com/family/lenn9o9n
http://myspace.com/charlestonplease
http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?songs=259087&T=1639

Say hello to the newest member of the Quixodelic Collective – FailedSitcom. You may have stumbled across his unique blend of folk and electronic beats over at CLLCT, or even caught the really cool ‘Mortlake’ on DG8. But for those of you who haven’t heard of him (and even for those of you who have), I threw some pretty random questions his way to find out a little bit more.

DG – Where did you get the name FailedSitcom from?

FS – It comes from a song called “The Toss and Turn” by the rapper Pedestrian, there’s a line in it where he says: “like our lives are lines out of failed sitcoms.” I remember listening to that track on an old MiniDisc whilst standing near the sea whilst on holiday in Whitby and it kind of stuck with me ever since. It also seemed suitably self-deprecating.

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

FS – The Books – Lost and Safe

DG – Who is your favourite artist?

FS – Lynda Barry

DG – Haha. I rarely back someone I know to questions like these. I guess it’s a good sign that there are plenty of great things to discover out there. What would you say have been the been the biggest influences/inspiration for your own musical endeavours?

FS – I was probably most influenced to start producing my own music by Dan The Automator. Around the time that I was starting to listen to music I borrowed my brother’s copy of Gorillaz first album and then devoured everything he had done before, I remember being particularly into his work with Deltron 3030.

Knowing that he was the “producer” and therefore responsible for the way these records sounded was when I realised you could create music without necessarily being a musician. A lot of his collaborators, particularly DJ Shadow, were also a big influence in those early days and are certainly responsible for the hip-hop element to my music.

Nowadays my obsession with The Books definitely informs a lot of what I do, so much in fact that I often have to consciously avoid certain things to separate myself from them. I certainly aspire not only to their seamless use of samples alongside traditional instruments, but also their ability to make the experimental easily accessible.

DG – What’s the best song you’ve ever written?

FS – I’m probably most proud of Edith Blake. With it’s fragments of samples and real instruments playing off of each other, it feels like it captures a lot of things that I’d been aiming for before but never quite pulled off how I’d intended.

DG – I really love the way you fuse electronic beats with organic folk instruments. How do you go about writing a song?

FS – I like to write the lyrics first, this means that when I start writing the music I already have a feeling for what kind of structure is going to work. After that I tend to just sit down with an instrument (my guitar more often than not) and lay down some kind of melody to sing over. Everything sort of develops organically from there.

DG – It definitely seems that there are three ways to go about writing a song – the lyrics first approach, the melody first approach, and the song pops into your head fully formed approach. Would you say that lyrics are the most important part of what you do? What sort of things do you like to write about?

FS – I do think lyrics are fairly important, but I guess from a song-writing viewpoint it’s just that they just help inform the feeling of the rest of the song and where it should go. One such example is when I when I was sitting in my favourite teashop and at a nearby table a toddler was going “b… b… b…” for what felt like an impossibly long amount of time, before ending with “biscuit!” I knew I had to use it and that everything else in the track should just slip playfully around my impersonation of what I had heard him chanting.

A little while ago I made a pact with myself that I’d only write songs about things that I love, not only does this help me make the kind music that I want, but it forces me to notice how much there is in the world that I love and hopefully it makes me appreciate it more. This means that I tend to write songs about nature, small details and people that are special to me. If I feel that I’m writing about the same things all the time, I just acknowledge that I’m obsessed with these things and that I simply must embrace them.

DG – Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?

FS – I didn’t really have any when I was a teenager (my friends described by room as minimalist), but when I was younger I had a poster of Yoshi that I remember my parents getting from a petrol station.

DG – Haha, well I can kinda hear the Yoshi influence in your electronic blips and boops.

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

FS – Pretty much any brass instrument, I was part of a junior brass band when I was really young but couldn’t actually play my given instrument (the cornet). I guess I was just there to look cute at fundraisers. I really wish I’d practiced and paid more attention now.

DG – I got given a cornet too as a kid and I was terrible at it, but I also regret not paying more attention to it. Have you ever considered collaborating with people that can play brass? Or could you ever see Failed Sitcom existing in a band set-up?

FS – Whilst I would love to have brass on some tracks, I rarely go out of my way to collaborate with others.

Failed Sitcom is me living out my control freak fantasies, I know roughly how I want everything to sound so I just do everything myself. This sadly makes playing live an impossibility without either teaching other musicians parts that I hardly remember how to play myself, or relying heavily on the original recordings. I must say that neither option appeals a great deal to me.

With that being said, there has been talk of a musical project between myself and few friends. We sadly live much too far apart at the moment and rarely see each other, but I hope to see something come of it one day.

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

FS – Here goes:

Paul Giovanni – The Landlord’s Daughter
John Cale – The Endless Plain of Fortune
Tom Waits – Cemetery Polka
Electric President – We Were Never Built to Last
Hanged Up – New Blue Monday

DG – Describe your music in three words?

FS – Collage, folk, pop.

DG – “Collage”… I think that’s a brilliant description of what you do.

When did you first start writing your own songs?

FS – I guess I first started messing around with sounds about six years ago, these were mostly experiments in sampling found sounds and recording my guitar using a pair of headphones. I’m not sure if any even survive.

DG – Favourite smell?

FS – The general dampness after a heavy downpour of rain.

DG – Favourite book?

FS – The Master & Margerita by Mikhail Bulgakov

DG – Do you have any recurring dreams?

FS – Not any more, but I used to have one where I was being pulled up out of a pit of zombies in a cemetery by my brother before the rope broke. I woke up as they pulled me limb from limb, or at least that’s how I remember it.

DG – Favourite track from Daydream Generation 8?

FS – A couple of days ago it was Chakra by Tuck Son, but right now it’s Trip (To Heaven) by Maureen Sill.

DG – I’m with you 100% on both of those. You’ve heard a LOT of music on CLLCT over the last few months, and I know you’ve been asked this before, but for the benefit of people who haven’t visited it can you recommend any other musical gems they should start with?

FS – There are so many great artists and releases I’m missing, but here are a few favourites:

The Yataris – Fun Summer
Dirty Merlin – CLLCT Vol. 1
Kenny Hamilton – Good Boy
Simon Piler and The Atom Band – A DISASTER
box_ – hello special glowing world
Insomniatic – A Penny Dredful for All (…and songs to drink tea too)
Like A Villain – Flight I took to Antarctica once

DG – What’s the first thing you remember?

FS – Trying to open my third birthday present, but being unable to get through the paper so my mum opened it for me. It was Playmobil Truck.

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

FS – I use my MacBook, a simple firewire interface and record everything with a single condenser microphone. I have a few physical instruments that I can’t play particularly well (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, mandolin, ukulele and glockenspiel) and I sequence everything else in Ableton Live .

DG – What kind of drunk are you?

FS – I act appallingly and hide under tables.

DG – What are your musical plans for the future?

FS – Hopefully a new EP, it’s mostly theoretical right now but I have started writing some lyrics and should be recording shortly.

DG – Got some websites of your own we can visit?

FS – Why certainly:

http://cllct.com/art/failedsitcom

Presented before you, we have an interview with CYP2D6 in which he briefly reflects on the generation of his first EP, CYP2D6, and the human roots of creative mythology.

You can, of course, download CYP2D6 (and many other great albums, for that matter,) right here:

quixodelic-records

To learn more about the obscure movies referenced herein:

www.zerotrooper.com

And listen to more stellar music on his myspace page:

defmutedemute

And actually read the interview below these three little asterisk guys, here.

***

I am curious. How did CYP2D6 even occur in the first place?

I had been working on the [film] soundtrack to ‘Dark Island’ and I was getting really frustrated with it. They had really particular ideas about what they wanted. Soundtracks to horror films these days are a lot of synth pads. I like older, 80’s horror film soundtracks – they’re much more kinetic, you know?

I was using arpeggiators to keep a steady beat going, and I stumbled on a distortion effect I really liked. At that point, I didn’t even know which [percussion] instrument I was playing, I only could go by the sounds I heard. Actually, the whole [album] only took about twenty minutes to record.

It was a good change of pace to work quickly. I definitely build up things too hard and then I want to let it go or I want to destroy it.

Gosh, I always get upset when I hear about artists burning their early works.

See, I understand that, though. I totally understand that.

Ah, then again, I’m also worried my computer will die and I’ll lose everything I have on it.

(laughs) Yeah, that’s scary shit, man. Yeah, I know, I’m about to get a hard drive for my computer because I have all sorts of stuff in pieces.

Where did the name ‘CYP2D6’ come from anyway? I guess I know it’s a protein that breaks down toxins in the body…

Oh, it was always stuck in my head because of (a friend, who was incapable of making the protein) Erik Anderson, and I told so many people I was going to make CYP2D6. I told them I was going to keep it around as a glitchtronic moniker. Yeah, and so I’ve always had it in the back of my mind since I heard it and was looking for a good place to use it.

Where are you living these days?

Where am I living? Logan Square. It’s northwest of downtown [Chicago].

By bike, about 20 minutes. If you take the train, it’s about 30 minutes.

And in miles, it’s, uh, two miles? Wait, I can count this. I’m on 2600 and each block is an eighth of a mile… and downtown is, well, downtown is zero…. (silence) …I don’t know man, it sounds like two miles to me. How about three miles?

How do you go about building up the mythology of your various projects?

I think [mythology] is definitely taken from your life. [The film] Zerotrooper, at least, is cues taken from my relationship with Eric Lim.

I guess I don’t totally understand. Does your mythology overlay over your ‘real’ lives?

Yeah, it is overlaid over our real lives, I guess. But more than that, Zerotrooper F is the product of our overlapping perspectives, I feel. Perhaps that’s any collaborative art project. I know for sure, though, that Zerotrooper F is very specifically the result of that overlap. It’s something we’ve talked about for years. Since high school we’ve been making films, and we finally got around to making that specific story into film. Eric has always been this way – he creates his own universe out of pop culture that exists. And I felt that way for a long time, too, but I never really realized it until I met Eric.

Do you piece together your stories through preliminary drawings and writing, or to you kind of make it up as you go?

Well, I think I piece it together more than anything else.

Well, actually, I don’t know… not for recent things. Not for things I’ve done in the past year -DJOHNSMITH2000, Tycho Broham, or CYP2 – because those things are just a flicker of an idea around which I try to create as much as I can.

Ah! That really reminds me of CHIME [Collective] – take a blip of an idea and expand on it as quickly as possible.

Yeah. The more I play these days, the more I am grateful for having been in CHIME. You know, I’m not going to lie – sometimes when I was in CHIME, I was kinda thinking like, “C’mon, what am I doing, here? I wanna be a jazz jazz pianist, you know? This is just noodling for me.” That was just what I was thinking at the time, not necessarily what I feel about it now. How I feel about it now is quite different. It really did help me learn to let go – I still don’t do it 100%, but it was better for me than trying to join a standard jazz quartet.

Because honestly, jazz is dead, man. At least any jazz that’s played today – I pretty much think it’s ghost jazz. Or maybe worse than ghost jazz. I’m looking to the future. Jazz is not about being square, and I think pretty much everyone who is playing jazz is square today.

Thelonius Monk was punk rock, man. He was, like punk rock, defined.

So, no new jazz for you, these days. What have you been listening to instead?

Hmmm… Have you ever heard of Andre Williams?

No, what does he do?

This guy, to me, invented hip hop, and he doesn’t even know it. He was from the 50’s, with a really sweet, dirty bar-room jazz sound and a kinda bluesy, jazzy backup band. With really dirty lyrics, well, not like “Fuck, Shit, I’m going to touch your balls,” kinda dirty, (laughs) but more like really gross old man type lyrical content. He is a rapper, actually, and nobody knows where to place him. But he’s a rapper, honestly. He’s one of the first rappers.

That is an interesting assertion, at least. Is there anything else you’d like to say about your music or music in general?

CEEEEEEE-WHYYYYYY-PEEEEEEEEEEE

***

This has been Simon Piler reporting.

Good night, human race.

The interview of interviews? Quite possibly. Either way, this is one long and mightily interesting reads, so strap yourselves in, get comfy and dig on it.

1 How did you get into making music? 

I think I was singing little songs from a very early age, and I’m sure that my father would sing his (unaccompanied) songs to me as well, when I was very young.  My first song didn’t really have a name, and was only one line long, repeated over and over – Òwe gotta do one thing, we gotta put the lights on the Christmas tree.Ó  I was probably about 3 or 4 years old.  I remember singing it while crossing the old (now demolished) blue bridge over the Eau Claire river, near my early home in the Shaw Town area of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  It is strange to be a kid. 

My entire, ill-absorbed exposure to sheet music consisted of my stint as a trumpeter with my high school marching band.  While the more technical fineries bounced off my brain, I’m pretty sure I learned several pretty important things in the band – first and foremost, that a band is not [!] about the lead player, (which I certainly wasn’t,) but rather about the balance and blend of different simultaneous tones that made up the music.  I also had lots of practice moving in time to music.  Nowadays it  kinda works in reverse;  when I move in time my brain just spits rhythms back out.  A lot of my songs are written while I’m walking around.   

Soon enough I bought my acoustic guitar and started playing songs with two of by best childhood friends, Brendon Hertz and Joel Rorher.  We became Something About Pirates.  None of us really knew how to play our instruments, but Joel had a bass and an amp and Brendon had an cheapy keyboard of his Grandmother’s.  (I think he had taken lessons at some point.)  The best part of the whole thing, I think, was that we learned to play our instruments together, however strangely.  At first, we were really rudimentary, almost shockingly so.  At some point we had a few songs and decided it was time to try our hand at recording, and with a single computer microphone went on to record ‘Goat Farm’.  It’s a pretty bad album, but at that point,  I was hooked. 

I went to college, studied the (oh so sweet) patterns of nature and met Adam Gregory Pergament.  His poetic brilliance/madness would strongly influence the way I looked at music, and how I went about it.  By following his band, StoneFloat, I certainly learned a lot about the business of music – at first as a fan, but then carrying amplifiers, running lights, and eventually their soundboard.  Most of all, I loved the wild energy of music.  I became a passionate seeker of good environments for music to occur in.  Streets and alleys are usually alright, so I did a little busking.    

After a while, as all local bands seem to, StoneFloat broke up.  Of course, Adam wasn’t about to give up, so he focused energy on a new project, CHIME Collective.  Chime was practically a circus, but we called it a big band.  We met at the (late) Madison Center For The Creative and Cultural Arts (MCCCA), run by Jon Taylor Hannah, a free jazz musician out of the Chicago AACM.  The MCCCA  really was a nasty, boomy box of a room and it always sounded like you were playing with reverb on.  This was complicated by the fact that CHIME was huge – sometimes as many as twelve musicians would show up, though you never could really tell how many would attend..  Besides, CHIME was completely improvisational; partly, I imagine, to woo Mr. Hannah himself, or at least impress him, but mostly because we just enjoyed the freedom of flow.   

Sometimes our music was a sonic quagmire; an impossibly multilayered morass of dischord.  (To be honest, I sometimes really liked that washed out, oceanic noise…)  At other times, it clicked, and was extraordinarily metrical or funky or sparse.   I signed on with my guitar and began by playing short patterns of notes (or sometimes even single notes) for minutes at a time, as a background to the main players.  I did a lot of experiments with relative amplitude and delay during these early sessions – and I think it began some reiterative calculations that my rhythmic heart is still computing today.  This is where Def Mute comes into the picture.  He’s a splendid keyboardist, but somehow he’d always take up a seat at the grand piano in the room full of amplifiers and drums.  I absolutely loved his appreciation for the quieter members of the band, and I’d spend a lot of energy matching rhythms with him – sometimes we were really the momentum behind that avalanche-behemoth that was early CHIME. 

Around that time I had a realization – my playing had gotten stuck in a rut.  While using standard tuning, I kept on the same, boring patterns I had learned very early on.  I didn’t know any other way to do things, I suppose.  So, I retuned.  I think it was in the middle of a jam, actually, when I realized a newly-replaced string on my guitar was very out of tune (as they tend to be).  The only strange part was that I was enjoying the sound that it was making.  So, I reached up and began de-tuning the entire instrument, experimenting right then-and-there with new combinations of intervals.  That really describes CHIME best, I think – it was a sound laboratory.  And we, of course, were the Experimentalists.  Shortly thereafter, I settled on the open tuning that I’ve used ever since. 

CHIME bottomed out in the winter, when everyone in Wisconsin is glum and just trying to survive.  We dwindled to three musicians – Adam, myself, and Tom Kourakis (the wildest and most undisciplined virtuoso I’ve ever met).  As the ensemble shrunk, I found myself becoming more and more of the musical leader of the group.  I think that was partly due to my intimate knowledge of Adams words, and my understanding of how to interpret them.  We started playing as a ’sonic setting’ for modern (aerial) dance, something I will never forget – watching dancers swing and whirl to your music is probably like nothing else.  I became enormously infatuated with motion and dance – quite a bit of my music during that time was descriptive of something in motion.  (see Cattle Tracks…)  I also made enormous amounts of short recordings on cassette, worked at (the now defunct) King Club as a sound technician, and started to register thoughts on the relationship between a sound and it’s ’sonic environment’. 

That’s pretty much how I got into making the music I do today.  Yowza.  (You poor, belabored readers.) 
 

2 Where are you from and what’s the music scene like there?   

I’m from the state of Wisconsin, around the Great Lakes region of the North American Continent.  We’re a heavily glaciated place, though not currently, despite common belief.  Plenty of oak and pine, some lakes (~15,000) and lots of fresh air.  I hail from Eau Claire – it was a lumberjack town, then a tire town, but now it’s probably known for it’s computer chips, I think.  [I'm also happy to announce that downtown Eau Claire is finally bouncing back after the construction of the 'Urban Sprawl Shopping Mall' in the late 80's.  Hurrah!] 

In Wisconsin, the music scene operates at it’s maximum potential in capitol city, Madison.  Honestly, it’s rather quiet.  Madison is the kind of place that nurtures the music of human beings, which surprisingly isn’t ravishingly popular among most human beings.  Wisconsin doesn’t kick out many famous musicians, (The Violent Femmes and Bon Iver come to mind…) but I do think that Wisconsinites appreciate live music; local music.  I guess we’re a place with a lot of bar music.  (There are a lot of bars, after all…)  My time with StoneFloat and working at The King Club really shocked me into understanding that live music is still the black-market, traveling minstrel show that it used to be in the olden days, except with more electricity and drugs and publicity.  I am often startled by what people imagine a musician’s life to be like – they account for a delicious creme puff diet of fame and wealth – while they manage to forget the long hours, weather, driving (=money), equipment/venue troubles, publicity(=money) and preparation actually put into a show.  Besides, the resistance to new ideas expressed in sound can be enormously reactive and swift; especially in bars!  I think it’s absolutely necessary to understand that as a modern folk musician. 

The finest music in the upper midwest is probably made in Chicago.  (Sorry, Minneapolis…)  It’s a real pleasure to enjoy the solitude of the Northwoods and still be so close to that epicenter of music and art.  I especially love the Artists for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) group, and the related musicians – Roscoe Mitchell the foremost.  Venues like The Velvet Lounge or The Hungry Brain are special refuge for the waning sonic wanderer.   
 

3 What is New Radish? 

New Radish is a creative fellowship.  By this, I mean that it is a network of generative individuals; artistic, scientific, technological, and physical.  It is focused around the archive and transfer of creative information.  Basically, it is a giant stockroom/taproot of magical alchemical ingredients, computer programs, short musical videos and photographs.   I guess it came from the realization that if the ‘information class’ were more altruistic with their scraps of creative energy there would be a greater overall output of creative energy from the group.  (For the same reason that recycling or thrift-stores are a useful idea – they concentrate excess energy in a single area so that it is easier to find.)  The fun part is that anything goes with New Radish – the more it is like a piece of strange junk to you, the more likely it may be useful  to someone else.   

I can see The Utica Flower Company satisfying a lot of my New Radish goals – it’s probably just a matter of having enough space and organizing information appropriately.  That Flickr site is a great start.  As I see it developing, a Radish Fellow in Rhode Island could take a photograph today, and a Radish Lass in Great Britain could make a show-poster out of it tomorrow.  Or, you could hear your own recordings from a dentist’s appointment turning up on one of my next albums – you never know.  

4 You seem to have an endless back catalogue of records – what are they and where can they be got? Which is the best Simon Piler record to begin with? 

I really do love to record, and since I don’t play out too often my albums are the bulk of my musical process. 

My full discography is included on my myspace page (myspace.com/simonpiler).   All of my recordings are available in CD (hard copy) or electronic (MP3) formats, save for the ‘music journal’, which is only available on cassette tape.  I really hope to have the capability to distribute all of my music on cassette soon, because I’ve become quite a fan of the sound of tape.  Are other folks, too? 

You can download ’songs from home’, my latest album, from the Quixodelic Records store for free.  (Yes, FREE!  Boogie!) 

Otherwise, if you’d like to listen, you can contact me via myspace (myspace.com/simonpiler), or send an email to The Utica Flower Company – our email address is theuticaflowercompany (at) gmail.com.  CDs are send through the mail free of charge.  You can also contact me by snail-mail at our physical address: 

Simon Piler and The Atom Band

1325 S. Farwell St.

Eau Claire, WI

54701 

Just make sure you indicate what recording you’d like, and how we can get it to you - that is, provide either an electronic or physical address. 

Ah, but which recording are you best suited to?

I will be honest.  I cannot give you a very direct answer – but wouldn’t you like to decide for yourself? 

I think that ’songs from home’ may pick you up and move you.  I believe in strong winds, and I think it’s worth a listen.   

However, I’d really recommend ‘garden.’ as the best album to start with.  It is concurrent to my time spent playing with CHIME, and the indirect product of a related boom of minor recordings, my ‘music journal’.  (The music journal was sort of a running sketchbook of sounds and musical bits that I kept for reference.)  The summer that I recorded  ‘garden.’ during was a happy, carefree time for me, and the tone of the album reflects that, I think.  It’s the very essence of me at that time – sympathetic, whimsical and strange.  It is fine music for alley-listening. 

If you’d like to try a slightly darker fare, I would recommend ‘Short Score’s Album’ (also called ‘EXIT’.)  I was quite sick with pneumonia, but too stubborn to go to a doctor and living in a filthy little room in one of the snowiest Wisconsin winters on record.  In addition, I was going to school full time, running sound at night, and playing with a psychedelic garage-folk/metal band as a bassist.

The record spans the time of my sickness and some of the following recovery.  Needless to say, it deals with death, apocalypse and convalescence in a very palpable way.  I think it may be the most important record to me, regardless of its significance to others. 

In the spring of 2008, I moved out to the Great Plains of the North American continent.  It’s a truly open space, and very vast.  The volume of the space begins to act on you almost immediately as you settle there – the tips of your toes are just aware of an unimaginable depth and stillness.  The Plains are a place of wind and soil.  It is a simple place; even stark.

I worked for a bit as a field-scientist and met Scarytoes, a very friendly Texan (and subsequent member of the Atom Band).  While we were out on a work hitch I dreamt the entire setting and plot to the short play, ‘A DISASTER’, in a single night (while sleeping/sweating in the top bunk of a trailer during a tremendous summer thunderstorm at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota).  

The play is a musical (specifically, an oratorio,) and the music from the play along with the rest of the recordings I made with Scarytoes on The Plains make up ‘A DISASTER’.  It leans towards Americana and folk quite heavily – probably the most of any of my albums.  So, if you’re into drama or folk music, ‘A DISASTER’ is a good bet. 

Around the same time I wanted to release three EPs simultaneously.  It was sort of a way to laugh in the face of rigorously marketed music.  In the end, the EPs weren’t released simultaneously, but I did eventually release three: ‘theatre music EP’, ‘Test’, and what would become ’songs from home’.  [Note: Actually, none of the original recordings for 'songs from home' made the final album!  The originals were extremely loose and raw - all of them recorded on the same boombox I used to keep the 'music journal'.  Most of the tracks were short improvisations on electric guitar recorded in my childhood bedroom at my parent's home while I was visiting for my brother's high school graduation party.] 

‘Theatre music EP’ is strange. (Please don’t listen to this album first!)   It’s not for those predisposed to the law-and-order of pitch.  It IS for those who like drama, especially comedy.  It’s also for the few true clowns left in the world.  (Released Halloween, 2008.) 

‘Test’ had an alternative title – ‘Five Goddamn Love Songs’.  It is for people who like love songs but don’t know the first thing about being in love.  Do you think you are in love?  Who are in love with?  If you can answer the first question but not the second, ‘Test’ is for you.  (Released Election Day, 2008.)??

5 Who are The Atom Band?

The Atom Band cannot be found as the solution to any equation and are at best probabilistic.  In short, they are illusory.  They are the mythopoetic accompanists to my music, and consist of the few icons of tall-tale and legend that I have encountered and collaborated with over the years. 

The Atom Band is:

Brendon Hertz (Yanpa) – Atom Band bandleader and player of trumpets, flugelhorns, and keyboards.  Singer of harmony vocals.  His side projects include Jump the Wagon, a splendid Eau Claire band.   

Def Mute (Okaga) – Dr. Beat for the Atom Band.  Plays saxophones, xylophones, keyboards, and electronic instruments.  Accompanies me by shouting, whistling or waxing lyrical.  Supplies sound and video samples.  His side projects are many, but include Tycho Broham, a Chicago IDM group. 

Scarytoes (Eya) – This friendly Texan hails from the hill country – Austin way.  He acts as ‘Need-Be-MC’ for the Atom Band and plays occasional rhythm guitar or kitchen percussion.  Supplies homebrew.  He’s also necessary for our occasional bursts of clowning. 

Emerson ÒHamboneÓ Betchkal (Yamni) - Our favorite muscular drummer and bearer-of-nicknames.  Also known as Hammy, Hamster, or affectionately as Emmy.  Philosophical compatriot and supplier of emotional stability. 

Lieutenant Spark (Yata) – Our most mysterious member, principled by chaos and the unboundedness of nature.  There is a certain, distinctive probability that he is any given person at any given time.  We have reason to believe that Spark is, in fact, supernatural, and is probably drawn to most thoughtful sonic explorers of the world.   

I should also mention at this point our most beloved electricity enthusiast, Sir Matthew the Mighty, Champion of Science, First Court of The Solar Corona (Tat?).  What infamous group of tone-scientists is complete without their all-seeing engineer? 

6 You’re into making musical videos – what inspires you and how do you go about making them? 

I like to collect all kinds of creative information, and video is a rich variety thereof.  I am continually amazed by the patterns and forms of nature and how video captures those over time.  When I  manipulate video, I like to make those patterns much more apparent.   

In terms of drama, I like spontaneous, poorly-acted situations with lots of jump cuts.  (Hee, hee, hee…)  I guess I like ghost movies, too.  Sometimes we do puppet theatres, though I have never managed to make a puppet the least bit expressive.  I’d like to do some dance videos, but I have to get brave enough to ask people to dance in them and organized enough to clearly explain how I’d like them to dance.  I would also like to mention at this point that Scarytoes and I are the unofficial mythopoetic spokespeople for GLEEM toothpaste.   

When I make a video, I like to spend as little time as possible filming.  It forces me to use scraps of video, sometimes the same clips over and over.  I use a still camera to shoot all my video, which reduces the resolution quite a lot.  When I edit, I like to really speed along, and let things fall into place.  If I can edit a two minute video in less than an hour, I’m very happy. 
 

7 Your music is very lo-fi (in a spontaneous good way) – is that by design or circumstance? How do you go about capturing a song (from conception of the idea to the finished recording)? 

With honesty, the lo-fi textures of my music result partly by intention and partly by accident.  I think certain kinds of noise are very beautiful.  The ear has only such a threshold of perception, towards which information is frayed by noise.  You can use this to a sonic advantage.  True noise like a mist that partially obscures sounds.  It offers a pervasive color and texture of frequency that you can’t get from an instrument – the incorporeal blur of dream, as I see it.  Besides, isn’t randomness just delicious and creamy? 

The other half, of course, is that my recording methods are far from perfect – I record pretty much everything on cheap microphones in almost any sonic environment.  I use tape quite a lot, which is obviously noisy. 

Process is important to me because recording is (typically) the end I work towards while composing.   It’s kinda odd, then, that I spend a very short time actually recording sounds.  Instead, I spend quite a bit of time/energy creating an atmosphere suitable for creativity.  My geographic location has a huge amount to do with it, and the space where I live – both will undoubtedly draw certain repetitive behaviors, feelings, and observations from me.  I believe that we are the sum of our experiences, insofar as they remain with us for a time and change us.  So, I try hard to be aware – awake or asleep.  

Should I pick up an instrument and play it, I try to ‘tune’ my style to my mood.  If something is not sympathetic to the trajectories or patterns of my life at the time, I try to amend it, and make it better.  It is through this process – somewhat similar to the scientific process – I can slowly improve my musical description of a complicated feeling or (e)motion.  I like to record on the fly, that is, improvise, because it keeps my mind free for evaluation, not bogged down in wrote memory.  Of course, improvisation can be frustrating, because you might not be able to capture what you had expected at first.  It helps me to warm up by playing several ‘throw-away’ one minute song-sketches before recording.  (Thankee, Roscoe Mitchell.)  It also helps to have an idea for a song in your head and to knead it by walking about and singing it in all different ways (and in all different sonic environments).  It’s sort of a beautiful yeast-like subconscious consumption of a song’s harmolodic sweetness – converting it to a rising sourdough soul-bread.  Yes, time and motion can work out quite a few musical roadblocks, BUT, if I let my bread rise too long, it’ll collapse in the oven.  I like to record a song no more than a few days after ‘kneading’ it.   

Once we get the first few tracks down – usually guitar-bones or keyboards, then we add supplemental textures.  I’m usually pretty particular about arrangements.  The right mixtures of frequencies are very important, I think- they must be sympathetic to the overall feeling of the song.   I rely on Def Mute extensively for his delicacy and attention to instrumentation.  The physical recording environment is a big deal, too.  When I was recording ‘Short Score’s Album’, I built a little blanket-tent in my already tiny room to make it sound even closer.  At my current residence in Florida, the walls are stark wood – all very reflective surfaces, and so things sound a lot more roomy.   
 

8 The pure poetry of your words are really great – what are the main themes you find yourself revisiting, and what other writers do you like? 

Thankee, sir.   I certainly enjoy writing.  

Almost all of my songs are about things that I actually experienced; asleep or awake.  So I tend to write a lot about my dreams and nature.  I like to write about death, too.  Most of my poems are mystical observations, but recently I’ve spent time on much more tangible topics.  I appreciate myths, and so many of my songs end up using parallels to the old stories.   

Besides myth, I read a lot of poetry and drama.  Alfred Jarry, the ‘grandfather of dada’, comes to mind (though I’m not sure he’d fully appreciate a label like that).  I also like August Strindberg, Gary Snyder, and Sun Ra.  I can’t really discount the musical poets that I appreciate – I was hugely influenced by my friend and teacher, Adam Pergament, of course.  I also like the way that Frank Zappa writes his lyrics – they’re almost like the words to a play or opera.  Tom Marshall, the lyricist for Phish, was an early influence, as was David Bowie.  And what list of musical poets would be complete without Bob Dylan? 

To me, writing is about describing something. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of technical and scientific writing for it’s sheer clarity, and so it has influenced me as well.  Mathematics is an extraordinarily frank language, though I often have considerable trouble understanding it! 

9 What’s the weirdest musical instrument you’ve used on a song? 

That’s a hard one.  I’m a diehard kitchen percussionist, so I use plenty of strange percussive devices – bicycles, washing machines, keys/silverware/loose change, and my favorite; the refrigerator-shelf washboard.  Really, the weirdest ‘instrument’ I’ve used is a room full of noisy, cranked-up amplifiers, computer fans and radio static ‘washed’ clean by the noise filter in (the freeware program) Audacity.  The effect-as-programmed is quite glitchy, and the result is a beautiful, warbling, birdlike melody.  (Listen to ‘wizeen’ on the album ‘garden.’)   

I also occasionally use a cheap microphone designed to record phone conversations (illegal in some of the states, I believe).  I only mention it because it’s wonderful as a post-effect to introduce feedback into a previous recording.  Call yourself up, place the ‘tapped’ phone in front of an amplifier playing the passage of interest, and hit record.  The resulting recording with be similar to the original, but will include feedbacks at the resonant frequencies of the phone casing.  Crazy.  (If you listen carefully to ‘muse’ on ’songs from home’ you may see what I mean…) 

10 What next for Simon Piler? 

Well, I’m back to the grindstone already, writing new songs and recording them with my usual fever.  I’ve got the first threads of a new album working through the sewing-machine of my brain, and I suppose it’s only a matter of time until I produce a tangle of appropriate size and complexity… 

I’m also collaborating with Namu the Disco Whale (a cetacean out of Chicago) on a short EP – should be quite interesting, I think… It has to do with the protein CYP2D6, one of the enzymes of the liver responsible for breaking down toxins in the body.  Remarkably, it’s not present in some people.   

Probably some jumping-in-dreams and pestering Sir Matthew the Mighty into making computer algorithms for me.  Some cartoons for the Wordpress page. 

I will laugh at tree frogs because they are small and weird animals with sticky legs and arms.

Smally: So why Bob Dylan? And what is your favourite Dylan song?
Keith: Why Bob Dylan!? Because his songs make me feel something. His lyrics are set up in such a way that you think about the topic of the song even after the song itself is over. It’s amazing!

Now, my favorite dylan song in general is different than my favorite one to play. My favorite one to play is “Song to Woody.” My favorite song in general is not a profound song by any means. Its the one that gives me the most feeling. Because, Bob Dylan is pretty well known as a topical song writer. Even when he says that he isn’t or ever was. But he is also a phenominal writer of love songs. I think that “Girl from the Noth Country” is one of the best. It’sa “tell her i love her” kind of thing. It’s genious if you ask me. Which you just did

Smally: How do you pick a song to cover?
Keith: picking a song to cover boils down to a song that i like and that i can figure out how to play. It’s pretty simple. There are alot of songs that i want to play but can’t figure out the original way of playing and can’t figure out a new way. So i just say “maybe someday.”

Smally: Whatever happened to River Speak English?
Keith: River Speak English? It’s still there. It’s fermenting. Taylor and I have come along way musically since we stopped making music together. Taylor recently acuired some new equipment to do his half of the recording so we will see what happens. Maybe something amazing. Maybe something crazy. But i think it will be downright good stuff.

Smally: How long are we going to have to wait for the first original Sucks To LaLa Land record?
Keith: I’m not sure. I am working on it though. Iv’e been playing alot of shows as well as preparing to play a wedding that i have to learn a bunch of songs for. But once that is all done i can concentrate on writing and recording some new stuff. If anybody has any suggestions let me know. I play music to entertain people. I get personal satisfaction from others satisfaction. Therefore i like alot of feedback. People can go onto my Myspace and if there’s a song that they like and would want on a record they can let me know. I’s like to make the biggest impact as possible with this one. I want it to be for everyone else. Not me. I play music all the time for myself.

Smally: What kind of music are you listening to these days?
Keith: Well, i listen to all kinds of music. I love folk music, so, of course i listen to alot of it. Ive been listeningto alot of the older guys lately. Back when it as a little more simple. Just a guitar and a voice. Dave Van Ronk and Mississippi John Hurtcome to mind. Both amazing blues players. If you’ve never listened i highly recommend it.

Smally: Visalia sounds like a happening place for music – what’s going on over there?
Keith: What isn’t going on over here would be a better question. we have music acts coming through from all over the country and all over the world. Mostly small underknown groups. Some on their first tour. Some on their 50th tour. Alot of them are unsigned and the ones that are are generally on small labels. Of course, we have the big acts starting to come through now. But it’s the small ones that i like. For those of you who dont know(which i’m assuming is alot) Visalia is in California in the Central Valley. Were are almost right smack dab in the middle of the state. So, we are a perfect place to have a filler show between Los Angeles and Fresno or Sacremento or San Fransisco. That and the fact that we have Aaron Gomez and the Sound and Vision Foundation setting up our shows. It’s really amazing! 

Smally: Describe your music for anyone who hasn’t heard it
Keith: I’m not sure how. It’s a folky, Lo-Fi mess of sounds. I love vocal harmonies so i try to put some of those is as much as possible.

Smally: Is there anyone else you work with on your music projects? Could you envision someday Sucks To LaLa Land functioning as a band?
Keith: I work with alot of other musicians aon a regular basis. I’m in a band called “The Whiskey and the Devil Chaplain.” we are a folky, roots music kind of band. I play the banjo and sing harmonies is that one. I also play the Mandolin so i sit in on friends shows sometimes. As for Sucks To LaLa Land becoming a band, I’dlike to keep that as my solo thing. Maybe fo some live shows i could bring in some other musicians to fill things out. But you never know what might happen.

Smally:  How do you record and what kind of equipment do you use?
Keith: I just use the family computer right now. Sometimes my laptop. I use Sony Acid. it works well enough for what i do. I also have a Blue Snowball mic that i am in love with.

Smally: What next for Sucks To LaLa Land?
Keith:Who knows. I sure as heck don’t. The Whiskey and the Devil will be recording this summer but i’m not sure what else. Just gonna go with the flow i think.

find out more about SUCKS TO LALA LAND at

www.myspace.com/suckstolalaland

1 Ok, so let’s cut straight to the quick – what’s the difference between Uberfuzz, Rocketships of Love, and The Grosvenor Suite?

Uberfuzz is the band I started four years ago in response to there not being enough psychedelic groups in the Rugby area. Rocketships of Love was the result of me wanting to take a back seat vocally and get people I admire to sing covers of songs that I love. It is also born out of my unhealthy obsession with early electronic music like Silver Apples, Kraftwerk and early Joe Meek experimental stuff; so it’s a lot less guitar-led. The Grosvenor Suite came about through me feeling creatively knackered; so myself, my sister Kelly (Uberfuzz) and Steve Janes (Regal 3/30) started recording with Scott White (Tin Town/Elfwood Prattali). And reconstructing songs he’d written years ago. The latter is predominantly based around Scott’s skills as a songwriter and the rest of us celebrating/re-interpreting those songs.

11 Uberfuzz have made a good few records this millennium – what’s your own favorite and where can people get hold of them?

Depending on how I feel in a day, my loathing or love of an album will fluctuate so I won’t waste your valuable time with an unstable answer. At one point I was posting albums to people for free around the globe, but it became stressful and unrealistic after a while due to me printing and burning everything off too. Now, thanks to cool people like Smally you can get hold of tracks and albums through The Daydream Generation’s Quixodelic Record Store. There are also some tracks up on www.acidray.com and the fabulouswww.myspace.com/yourpsychtunes

13 Your 3 favorite songs you’ve ever written?

Again, as above, they change so drastically in my own perception that I struggle to grade their worth. I do like ‘E-Waltz’ though, and ‘Oh! Child’ sounds like I was possessed by Huddie Ledbetter for a short time. I find the writing process difficult so when I receive a melody I have to get it down and build on it quickly.

18 Favorite Beatle?

It pisses me off the way that everyone seems to be on Paul Mcartney’s ass at the moment and talk about John Lennon like he was the only cool member of The Beatles. Lennon was cool but for my money Paul kicked fucking ass! It comes from that whole bullshit ethos of when people only start to dig an artist after they’ve been on drugs or croaked it. People forget how much shit John put out after leaving the band too. Lennon put all these cool trippy psyche songs out in The Beatles, but Mcartney was the composer who could rip the guts out of a song too. ‘Oh, Darling’ is awesome, and I love his little ‘music hall’ ditties like ‘Martha My Dear’ (about his dog) and ‘I Will’. I feel Ringo gets slated too because people compare him to Keith Moon or John Bonham. Keith Richards said “If you can’t do it on one bass drum you’re not going to do it on two of the fuckers”… That says a lot about Ringo’s immense value to me. All this shit he’s been getting too, about telling fans to stop sending mail… Good! He’s also Richard Starkey, the scouser. Blind sighted reactions to people in the media are annoying as shit to me…. Phew, that’s that out of the way. To answer your question though, I like George best.

So having blown us away with “Baddest Fastest” this summer, and with rumours of a follow-up record cooking away behind the scenes, I figured it was a good time to catch up with the Head Boy who seems determined to burn the system down that is Gil De Ray. Here are the resulting 26 questions disguised as 20 for your discerning brains to digest.

1 CoDY High School – where’d you get the name from and what does it mean?

Gil: CODY stands for Come On Die Young. CODY were a gang in Glasgow that ran around the Southside near where I grew up. They were notorious. That name has had a lot of resonance throughout my life. Then last summer me and a friend, Fuzzy started talking about getting a band together. We were going to be called The Purple Ohm Eaters. So Fuzzy comes round and we’re listening to records and he pulls out an old MC5 bootleg album which was recorded live in Detroit at a school called Cody High School. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a sign. So The Purple Ohm Eaters became CODY HIGH SCHOOL…It’s a tribute I guess to the true spirit of rock n roll. Being in a band is like being in a gang. A lawless, murderous bunch of maniacs.

2 Who makes up the band and what does everyone do?

Gil: I do everything on the recordings, play guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, vocals. Everything. We have a band in place for playing live, which we haven’t done up to now…

3 Records most likely to be playing on the CHS tour bus?

Gil: All sorts really. Some old shit and some new shit, a lot of American music. Velvet Underground, MC5, Love, all the good 60’s psychedelic garage stuff. Doo Wop, Marvin Gaye, Sly, Shuggie Otis…all the way through to new bands like Magic Magic, Miniature Tigers, Crooked Cowboy & The Freshwater Indians…You wouldn’t want to get off the bus…

4 Do you gig and if so where can we see you?

Gil: Not yet but we’re working on something, maybe before Christmas, who knows…

5 You’re a prolific songwriter – where do you get all the inspiration from?

Gil: Everything really. Books I read, films I see, people I meet. Inspiration is just instinctive…you can’t really put your finger on individual moments. It just happens…Some days you wake up and you know something is ready to go. You have to listen to your heart and let it guide you and trust your instinct..

6 If you could resurrect one dead musician to be in your band who would it be?

Gil: Oh shit I’ve been thinking about this one a lot…..The first person who popped into my head was Arthur Lee. I mean I don’t think he was a particularly spectacular musician but that doesn’t matter anyway. He had an understanding like Brian Wilson, an instinct that he pursued to the end…He was just cool and the kinda guy you would want in your gang…Nobody fucked with Arthur Lee..

7 What football team do you support?

Gil: There is only one team to support. Glasgow Celtic. Hail Hail.

8 Beatles or Stones and why?

Gil: Easy, The Stones win hands down…They were cooler, had better songs, made better albums, didn’t give a shit. I don’t have any Beatles records in my collection….

9 A few months down the line how do you feel about “Baddest Fastest”?

Gil: I’m very proud of it, it happened really fast and it sounds raw. There’s a nice balance to it. There was no time to think too much which is usually good. People take too long to make albums these days. The Beach Boys were doing 3 albums a year. Record labels nowadays are strangling the life out of bands. They spend a year making a record, another year waiting for it to come out and then a year touring it. By the end of that they’re usually fucked, sick to death of the songs, mentally paralysed and unable to write…Its groundhog day x 100..

10 Where do you get the funky artwork from?

Gil: I make it myself, copying images, cropping them, putting them together with other disparate images to create something different. I guess there’s usually a Message. The artwork is important as a visual representation of elements you might find within the song. I don’t like lyrics which are overtly political. People don’t care. Its boring. I prefer to make the point more subtly and it seems easier to get that over visually..

11 Chinese, Indian or Chip Shop Takeaway and if so what dish?

Gil: I love Crispy Duck and Dim Sum but I don’t like Chinese with MSG in there, I love Indian food but you need to be careful, a lot of places have it swimming in oil…I like my food to be clean, simple and fresh…Being Scottish I love Fish ‘n’ Chips but that’s a treat every now and again. Overall I guess I eat more Indian food than any of the others…

12 Coolest thing you ever saw?

Gil: I saw Sun Ra play in New York totally by accident. I was walking past a little jazz club and the sandwich board outside said ‘live tonight, sun ra and his intergalactic arkestra’. I couldn’t believe it. The place was tiny and the gig was awesome. I sat at the front watching Sun Ra lead the band, he never played a thing, he just pointed at the musicians and off they went…It was nuts, they had fire eaters dancing through the crowd and the band were selling t shirts after the show. I’ve still got that t shirt too…

13 You wrote a book – what’s it about and will anyone ever get to read it?

Gil: Yeah I hope so. I’m turning it into a script so maybe one day people can see it too…Its called ‘Baddest Fastest’ and it’s a story of growing up, making music, being in a band. Its set in 1990  and centres around the explosion of ecstasy and acid house and the positive effects that had on music, society in general and for the character in the story especially. I wanted to tell a positive drug story. Its not always a slippery slope into heroin addiction, jail and depression. We don’t normally see that and It happens to be true in many people’s experiences, not just my own…

14 What made you start writing songs?

Gil: Shit I don’t really know. It was just an insatiable urge.. I had no choice..

15 If you were going to recommend one film what would it be?

Gil: Right now I’d tell everyone to watch “Zeitgeist Addendum” its free to watch online at www.zeitgeistmovie.com

16 You’ve got a really positive attitude about how to approach music that seems directly rooted in negative experiences of the music industry – care to discuss and potentially help out any kids who might make the same mistakes?

Gil: Well I’ve made records in previous incarnations for amongst others Sony, EMI, Universal as well as a lot of Indie labels. The music industry doesn’t have a lot to do with music, that’s always been the problem. It’s a hard, heartless, wild stab in the dark. People making music need to be protected from it.

17 What’s Earth Calling Music all about then?

Gil: Ah what a seamless link. Earth Calling is something me and a friend who is a music lawyer have set up to help other artists. We both have first hand experience and want to use that to help who we can. At the moment we are working with Magic Magic from Boston, USA…

18 Your relatively recent trip to the US – what was that like?

Gil: It was fantastic. We went to see Magic Magic and hang out with them. I love that band and those dudes are just naturally, effortlessly cool…I love them…They’re going to be big!!

19 In the vaguely remote possibility that you had a life before this one what might you have been?

Gil: A political assassin…

20 What next for CoDY High School?

Gil: Super New Nashville Fuzz. The new album is almost ready. Some gigs. More writing….more everything!!! More more more….

 *You can download CODY HIGH SCHOOL’S “BADDEST FASTEST” from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of this site, for FREE. It’s fucking well worth it.

1 Seed

Smally: “Seed” originally began as just that – a seed of a line that I had stuck in my brain that “the apple bites back”. One afternoon round about the mid-point of writing the record I had a bit of time to kill so I wrote and recorded a song called “The Apple Bites Back” – it wasn’t really meant as a Tigermouse track, more a stupid little song to fill some space with all the music you can hear on “Seed”, and layers of vocal melodies singing throwaway lines like “I think this time I bet you wish you’d bought bananas”. I sent it to Kris really just to show him what I’d been up to, so it was a bit of a surprise when he turned it around and re-wrote the words and vocals from the ground up and sent it back to me. It was also at this time that the recurring theme of starting an imaginary country on that very real floating island of plastic rubbish in the Pacific Ocean arose and so that’s what it’s about. Actually, “Seed” was probably one of a couple of turning points for me during the process of making the record – a kind of “woah… we might be onto something here” moment. I really like the way it sounds like a head-on collision between two very contrasting styles of songwriting (Wheelies Folk-Pop and Warchalking Indie-Rock) and creates this strange, but hopefully worthwhile fusion of sounds. Kris’ lyrics frequently knock me out and “Seed” has some real nuggets like “I guarantee our immigration policy will be lazy” (even though I was initially convinced he was singing something along the lines of “I’ll get the tea on…”).

Kris: This song was the first of many turning points in the process.  I tried the intro with a couple different songs, and it worked best with this one.  The original was really good, I was taken by it immediately.  In retrospect, I should’ve lifted more of the melodies from the original.  The vibe was a bit revolutionary in the original (possibly because its rare for me to have drums anymore), so an introduction to the country idea seemed appropriate.  This record is chocked full of small ideas that explode into palatial ideas.  Every one of these started as a kernel in our respective hard drives.  This was how to start this record.  As I recall, Smally referred to this as a very Wheelies song.

Note: the details of our new country were hatched in the midst of studying the effects of globalization.  It was for the most part an off the cuff rant that began as reaction to futility that sought to be radically pragmatic.  We are a strange lot.

Smally: I think when I described it as being “a very Wheelies song” it’s more with reference to the drum loop and chord structure of the original idea. I’m still relatively obsessive about trying to work out what can be done from a continuous major three-chord structure as so many of the songs that I love from the 1960s seem rooted in that. The finished article is a lot less Wheelie by nature – particularly because of Kris’ lyrical take on the opting out idea. One of the things I really like about this collaboration is that it’s forced us both out of our comfort zones – for me to try and figure out how to become part of that “epic-acoustic” Warchalking sound (answer: multiple piano tracks), and for Kris it’s getting stuck in the gum of melodies that are perhaps more playful than the usual gravity of what he needs to transport his songs. That was really what I was driving at with the “Tigermouse” title, this contrast of styles – the tiger of “surly” and intense Warchalking tunes, and the throwaway mouse of Wheelies nursery rhymes (behind just about every song I ever write is the semi-conscious impulse to try and write the next “Yellow Submarine”, or a song that kids can sing on the school bus). Probably more than any other song on the record, “Seed” captures that contrast.

2 I Made A Cape

Smally: Being exactly 4000 miles apart (from Cape Girardeau to where I live in Fife) the process of collaboratively writing songs is a tricky one – I mean, you can’t just sit down with a couple of guitars and say “What do you think of this idea?” So at the beginning, together we recorded some 20 plus “sketches” of melodies with improvised words and traded these to see if there was anything that could be developed beyond the raw idea stage. In actual fact, very little of this opening exchange is left on the finished album (curiously “Cape” and the following 2 songs by accident rather than design originated at this stage). I think we quickly worked out that there was simply too many good ideas and it needed either one of us to commit to one of these and run with it – at this level at least, making this record was very easy in that we trusted each other’s instincts and even at this late stage have yet to have the seemingly obligatory bust-up over creative direction. From my sketched ideas I ran with the melodies that would go on to form “Cape”, dug up an old bridge from something I’d sung a long time ago that didn’t work and added a new chorus. This old version of “Cape” – like a couple of other songs on Tigermouse – dealt with issues surrounding growing up in suburbia, and attempting to transcend the somewhat pathetic heartache of teenage relationship break-ups. Kris then latched onto the unintentional coincidence of the “Cape” in the song’s title and begged me to let him re-write it (he grew up and lives in Cape Girardeau). Since he’s a much stronger poet than me, I obviously said “aye, too right… go for it”. And thus this split version of it was born, thankfully minus some of the worst bongo playing from yours truly that you very nearly heard and including far more profound and beautiful observations like “why do I keep all this shit around?”

Kris: I love the chorus of this song to no fucking end.  I couldn’t touch it.  “I got an education, it just keeps me up at night” is quite possibly the truest statement I’ve ever seen written down, and it makes me laugh because Smally always downplays his writings skills.  The music is particularly cool.  All the instrumentation is Smally; I wouldn’t change any of it and couldn’t improve on it if I tried, even the now-absent bongos.  All I said was “You gotta give me the verses”.  It was perfect for the time, as I hit one of those points where I was at odds with my environment.  The main idea was here was this sleepy little town, and the more I dwelt in it the more I realized I was changing it.  Over the course of several years I found many tear downs and rebuilds occurring every few years or so.  Its a song about self creation.  I still wonder why I keep half this shit around.

Smally: Wow, I never knew that all the instrumentation was me – how come it sounds so puny when I mixed it all down to begin with? The “education” line is something I wrote and used a long time ago round about the “Oh Happiness” Wheelies album, but I can’t even remember which song it was on (if any). A lot of the words I end up writing are from this perspective of a younger and very mixed-up self, completely alien to the same sleepy suburban town that Kris ends up singing about. It wasn’t that I was particularly odd, it’s just that there wasn’t too many twenty-somethings walking round the estate I grew up in wearing flares and a parka jacket. I draw a lot on the past simply because I feel like it’s somehow more interesting or relevant to sing about fucked-up times as opposed to the position I’m lucky enough to have stumbled to now, which is essentially an incredibly quiet and happy life. I’m glad we did the split on this one and my clumsy verses were replaced, even though I still don’t have a clue what he’s singing about spiders and fruit. Funnily, the first time I ever played this finished version to Linz she shrieked – there was a spider spinning down from the ceiling directly above her at the same time she was listening to the spider line.

Kris: Ha!  The line is “Planted seed and as it grew the thrifty fruit it bore attracted spiders”, and refers to the beginnings of projects I had started (the seeds), the progress made in those projects, which wasn’t particularly stunning due to the size of the pond (the fruit), and the neighbors and denizens that kept circling around the blossoming of those projects (the spiders).  I like starting from big images and narrowing the focus from there.

3 Invisible Strings

Smally: This is one of my favourite tracks on the record. I wrote it early on around the same time as “679″ with first-thought best-thought lyrics around the idea that if everyone and everything had a string running from them/it throughout their life how tangled up and interconnected we’d all be. I thought there was something in it but I wasn’t convinced Kris was convinced and there were times I thought it might end up on the scrapheap of ideas. Thankfully it didn’t – he went back to it right near the end and re-wrote with new words (as always an improvement) some brilliant harmonies and a couple of completely new sections. The instrumentation we use on the record is limited, but thanks to our shared love of multi-multi-tracking and layering a lot of the songs still manage to sound very busy, so there’s something about the more stripped back acoustic feel of “Invisible Strings” that is a welcome shift of gears. Or maybe its just the absence of my amateur un-Manzarek keys.

Kris: One of the major pitfalls in this project was a lot was sketched out over the course of the summer, during which I was taking classes.  So as this flurry of ideas would get bounced back and forth across the planet, some things got tabled as there was no place to put it at the time.  They got shoved into the next available slot and as things got sorted they’d get the proper attention.  I take songs in batches, that way I can power through a couple and feel some sense of accomplishment.  There was never anything wrong with this song, there was just no room in my brain at the time.  I’m glad Smally stayed on me because this one became one of the more playful songs on the record.  I ended up stealing the chorus from another song he’d sent initially that I liked and did a different version of (which I never finished and he never heard).  I like this song because it makes each of us do things we don’t normally do.  Its really easy to find a middle ground in uncharted territory.

Smally: Well that’s another thing I never knew, I thought Kris wrote the chorus melody as I don’t ever remember writing it. When it’s time to write a record I usually spend two or three weeks sketching very loose ideas for melodies, filling up a little mp3 player with a tiny shitty microphone, and then start cutting these back to the ones I think might go somewhere. We’re talking hundreds of melodies here, most of which get binned and forgotten. Even at the next stage where it comes to recording slightly more definite (but still improvised) versions for whoever I’m working with, there is still a lot of perceived deadwood that gets cut. On saying all that there was really only two other finished songs that we cut because the record was running too long – “The Last Kiss” – more of which in a bit, and “Looking Back”. “Looking Back” was one of the first songs we did, and the first of us mixing up the formula for writing, me taking one of Kris’ ideas and writing words and a chorus. It’s about a guy who drowns on an acid trip and is by by own admission not the greatest work of poetry I’ve ever produced, but I’m sure it’ll raise its awkward head again, somewhere sometime. Back on the subject of “Strings” – someday I plan to sing this on a beach beside a burning fire and I’m going to belt out “As nature runs amok we’re always stuck with cleaning up”… I love that line, much deeper than what I had before, which was stuff like “There’s a boy for every girl if that’s what it takes to make the world seem a little bit better not quite so tough/ But if boys are not the thing for you there’s something else to alleviate the blues like another girl or a couple of cats so cool”. Oh dear.

Kris: Yep, this is intended to be a campfire song.  I dunno if its a GOOD campfire song by any stretch, but that was the aim.

4 My Generation

Smally: Of all the songs, “My Generation” has come the furthest and the strings of who did what and why are so tangled that it’s strange to even try and pick them apart. Basically it began during the last Kaleidonauts album when I wrote a song almost identical to this one in melody called “Pettycur Bay”. It was lyrically very weak, so I re-wrote it under the title “Dead Canaries” as a song about the project I was involved in at that time. Jon of The Atom who was writing the Kaleidonauts record with me was musically burning out at the time with me firing loads of song ideas at him, so it got dropped. As far back as August 2007, Kris and I had been talking about making a record together, maybe writing 4 songs each and contributing backing vocals to each other’s songs. When Kris got roped into the original Kaleidonauts record (Spaniard) and sang on “Roll It Up” and “For A Girl” I think it became apparent that it was going to be something a lot less straightforward and a lot more collaborative, each of us playing to our particular strengths. I dug up “Dead Canaries” to see what he thought of it, and he re-wrote the music and lyrics. In hindsight I probably should have left the words the way they were, but when I sang my version I changed some of the lines to try and reflect my own take on it so the finished version is an almost 50/50 mix of his words and mine. Kris then re-sung the main vocals, before I added backing tracks and keys. So what you end up with is this acoustic ballad take on “My Generation” (I called it that because I liked the idea of folk expecting to hear a Who cover-version, and getting something completely different), with both of us contributing at virtually every stage along the way.

Kris: This held one of the rare contention points during recording.  I had been playing a lot of shows with younger kids (strangely, it’s easy when you’re 28), and a lot of them were really good.  Here I was in my late twenties finally figuring out how to write songs and here were these college freshmen coming up with really clever ways of making music.  All I could think about was where I’d be if I started on that level.  So I made the song about that. My argument was we have to look to the kids to understand how to adapt with culture-changing technologies because people older than us offer little help; his argument was after painstakingly sifting through piles of kids’ recording, a frightening amount of them were deriving their music from already derivative sources and I must’ve found some diamonds in the rough.  Thinking about it, he was pretty much right.  All those kids I saw were from WAY out of state, working their way around the country on whatever funds got put in the hat.  Nobody around here has ever heard of the influences these kids were using.  The result became how people our age have to keep an eye on both horizons. The generation referred to is any generation that has to adapt faster than their parents, which I figure covers about 3 so far.

Smally: Yeah, I have a quite cynical view of young people today. That’s not to say that I’m an old bastard, or that there’s not exceptions to the rule (there most definitely are – take for example bands like The Shivas, or individuals like Dylan Gough), but by and large I find the whole fashionably unfashionable EMO thing just a bit depressing. It really comes from working on The Daydream Generation, and from the same feelings that caused me to write “The World Is Fucked” on the last Wheelies album. Doing the DG thing involves a lot of surfing on MySpace not just looking for bands, but also trying to find individuals who might like what we’re doing. I remember pretty vividly this horrible feeling of trawling seemingly page after page of nihilistic kids trying to outshock each other. I guess I got lucky when I was in my mid-teens as it coincided with the Madchester scene with bands like The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, and shoegaze acts like Ride and Chapterhouse – and all of that music opened doors to the golden era of The Beatles, The Stones, The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, The Kinks etc. Kris’ original take on “My Generation” I felt complimented too heavily the next generation coming through behind us, but at the same time I really identified with what he was saying about us being lost between the burned bridges of our failed hippy forefathers, and the enviable position of a youth that takes the technological changes of the last 20 years in their stride (as opposed to being caught up in the blizzard of advances like we have). I guess that’s why I threw in lines about faulty parachutes and taking pictures on your phone to somehow try and make sense of whatever the fuck has just happened to us. Not that I own a phone, but that’s another story.

Kris: Returning to collegiate study has brought my opinions a bit closer to Smally’s.  At first I was surprised, then I recalled how awkward and ambiguous the late teens-early twenties phase was for me.  Granted, my collateral damage was less severe than a geometric haircut and super-tight black jeans, but I hung out with people with a lot of facial piercings and flannel shirts, so its not that it disappoints me, its just hard to watch kids fall in the same traps my generation had.  I own a phone, but just barely.  I got it last August out of spite.

5 I’ll Be Your Pavement

Smally: This one’s the other of the two best songs I wrote. It was a melody I had kicking around on my mp3 recorder for months before one afternoon when I had a bit of time to kill I wrote some proper words just for something to sing. It’s funny the way it works out sometimes – you write something you really like but when it comes to the crunch it just doesn’t work, and less frequently on the flipside you write something that really shouldn’t work, but it does. The song is a semi-fictional take on being a teenager, there are lines that are really me and there are others that are simply flights of imagination. The bridge melody is an alternative take on a melody I’d already used on “Pepperland”, which at the time I wasn’t thinking was going to end up on the record as well. It’s quite a repetitive track in terms of music with the guitars and piano, but I like the way it’s the same 3 chords right the way through and still manages to underpin several different vocal melodies.

Kris: This was one I didn’t have to do much to. The music was rich enough, contained its own vibe, and the words were very much Smally.  I lean towards minimalist lyrical structuring that emphasizes using less to say more; Steven uses lengthy and vivid lines that rope into a massive mosaic.  This song was a massive mosaic, so for me to change anything would’ve wrecked an already excellent song.  I agree that the repetition is what makes this song work.

Smally: I had to read that bit twice, get up, go away and think about it to figure out what’s being said. My initial response was on the contrary, that Warchalking tend to be far weightier, and poetically ambiguous, whereas my lines tend more often than not to be very unreal, a cartoonlike exaggeration of ideas. Actually I think what’s being said is the way we phrase things with me cramming words into a line? The thing is, I once read something about how Bob Dylan sought some kind of artistic mentoring and it led him to the revelation that he was using too many words that were redundant and unnecessary to convey what he was thinking. The thing about that though was that this lyrical epiphany coincided exactly with a point where I completely turned off from what he was doing (ie. as far as “Blonde On Blonde” and little to love beyond that). So I consciously choose not to be analytical when I write, just to “get it out”. Hence why I occasionally find myself playing songs about crashing imaginary mopeds with a 2 pence piece (that you can hear rolling around at the very end).

Kris: I’ve heard it broken down that there are two kinds of writers: those that tell a story, and those that paint a picture.  Smally and I do both, but using different approaches, so I guess I’m saying there are two more: Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  Smally likes to layer.  Could it be considered redundant?  Depends on how you like your stories painted.  Its like driving down the same street for a week.  First couple of drives you notice some consistencies, but after enough time those fade in with the trees and you begin to notice the intimate life of the place.  You see the habits of the residents, the personality that exists in thirty second bursts that truly define character.  Its a lot more in sheer mass, but its alive.  It breathes.  I’m more of a side street writer.  There’s a lot less to see, but the things seen are more direct tellings of what ’s going on.  The front of the house is the face we try to put on ourselves, even though the strings are visible.  Its the fights and the bath robes in the back yard that are dead giveaways.  There’s no masking that.  I used to write big, descriptive lyric sheets that set a scene and lived in it a while, but I could never remember all the words.  I cut it back out of simple pragmatism.

6 Let’s Start A Country

Smally: I think more than any other (with the exception perhaps of “Seed”) “Country” reflects Kris’ talent for hearing/visualizing potential in something that was originally mediocre at best. I wrote the song after a couple of emails back and forth about my urge to go and start a country somewhere, incorporating some of Kris’ ideas (tomatoes, stoning, that floating island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean). It wasn’t great to be honest, but he redid the music – a simple guitar line that reminds me of the Pale Blue Eyes era Velvet Underground – and brand new words, including gems like “our flag will float free on a pile of debris that keeps growing”. He sang this second much stronger version of it (I loved it), and against my better judgement I reluctantly added a new set of vocals that have since been incorporated into it. As I write this, “Country” is the last of the songs awaiting completion as we’re waiting on a Jane Gilmore vocal track that Kris thinks will complete it – so I’m looking forward to hearing that if it materialises. I think of all the tracks “Let’s Start A Country” really defines what this record is and how we made it – a throwaway idea from me poorly executed, Kris picking it up off the ground and extracting anything worthwhile from it, sending it back to me for additional work, then finally back to him for all the technical arrangement. I just really hope that its as good to listen to as it was to make it.

Kris: This song wound up complex.  It started fairly straight forward.  It was the main vehicle for the country idea we’d tossed around, but we already had three or four tunes that were acoustic-driven campfire songs.  So I tried a single tremeloed guitar as a carrier, and shot for an anthem.  I don’t know if its an anthem or not.  We managed to sucker Jane in on this one as well.  She added a nice layer on an already dense group of voicings.  One of the major points in this record is that Smally is far better at carrying a primary melody than I am, whereas my strength is in harmony and texture.  Initially I had the lead, but when Smally sent his tracks the better judgement was to have him lead. The motivation of this song went for two directions: one as a voice of frustration.  You can only talk about the problems of the world for so long; at some point you have to introduce an alternative of some sort.  If the world is so wrong, then what should be right?  The second, when thinking about fundamental flaws in political and economic establishments, its easy to get overwhelmed by the complexity of the whole thing.  There are so many methods and opinions, and not all of them are necessarily wrong, just incongruent at a global level.  If you wanted to correct all the absurdities in the human condition, you have to be willing to be equally absurd.  A squad of people living on the Pacific trash heap living on fish and singing drunken chant songs while dancing naked around a fire seemed crazy enough to make sense.  This is the next step in human evolution.

Smally: So since I wrote this originally the song got done, and Jane sang on it, and it was as good as Kris imagined it would be I think. I hope sometime he digs up that original version of him singing it on his own though, I’ve heard it goes down well in front of a rabid coffee shop audience and seeing as you’d need to put me in a binbag and force me onto a stage at gunpoint, the chances are I’m never going to experience what it feels like to sing about trading hash and tomaytoes to anyone but my own shadow. The next step in human evolution? Hmm I don’t know about that one – I have a feeling the personality types that would be attracted to such a project would not translate well to the more practical aspects of survival on a floating heap of plastic junk in the Pacific Ocean. When I was 19, me and the rest of The Wheelies took every item of furniture from every room in our flat and built a giant cube we planned to live in from then on. We lasted about 14 hours, it got grim real quick once we started to sober up and ran out of things to smoke. I see real parallels between the “Pepperland” of our imaginations and that misadventure. Actually the original idea of a country I had was that it would exist only in imagination. I mentioned this to Linz once and she said “For fuck’s sake, are you ever going to grow up?” Haha.

Kris: Come to think of it, I’ve got enough pipe dreams lying around to float in an ocean and live on.  I’ll be saving that for “Let’s Start A Country 2″…

7 679

Smally: For a long time this was going to be the opening track on the record, until Kris came up with “Seed”. I preferred “Seed” as an opener to be honest, and when he added that lifted fade-in from the final song “Pepperland”, it really confirmed it was the right song to kick the record off creating a symmetry between the start and the end. “679″ was one of the first songs I wrote from start to finish specifically for Tigermouse (or “ww” as we were calling ourselves at that point). Prior to that I think we’d only done “My Generation” taken from an old idea, and “Looking Back”. I was pretty pleased with “679″ when I wrote it, feeling like it encapsulated a lot of what I do and how I look at my involvement in The Daydream Generation, and it was also the beginnings of the starting a country idea that increasingly became a part of the whole album. My liking for it has diminished over time, but I think it might be as much to do with the fact we went on to write even better songs (as well as over-listening to it). It was called “679″ by my three year old son when I played it to him and was stuck for a title. I don’t have a clue what it means.

Kris: This tune was one of my favorites in that there wasn’t much actual writing to do.  It was done.  The trick was to fill it out and make it pump blood.  This was at the top of the playlist for a very long time, partly because it was one of the first batch to be finished and was the crown jewel, for sure, and partly because this was the song where we started to get a focus on where the record was gonna go.  I’ll fess up, we robbed the Beatles blind on this one.  At least I did.  And the Beach Boys.  Fucking Brian Wilson…

Smally: Well I never intentionally robbed The Beatles and if I did then I can only apologise – would be nice if someone could point out which Beatles song we’ve ripped off, but if it’s just the sound then that’s cool – if you’re going to try and sound like anyone then I can’t think of anyone better to try and sound like. Since I wrote the first time around about “679″ we remixed it, brought it back to it’s original lo-fi roots and consequently I think I really like it again.

Kris: Its not that we’ve robbed anything specific.  We’ve stolen technique, which since I last checked wasn’t subject to copyright law.  And thank fuck for that, otherwise I’d be screwed.

8 4000 Mile Dream

Smally: The origins of this song can be traced as far back as November 2007. I spent a day writing and recording an unreleased Wheelies record from scratch called “7 Hours” – 10 songs, 5 of which went on to feature on the Kaleidonauts “Spaniard” record. This one was called “Holy Smoke” about a kid in a tribe who’d “run out of matches and nicotine patches and ideas baby”, but it was all verses and I always felt like there was something seriously missing from it (eg. a chorus). After the initial “sketching” phase at the beginning of Tigermouse, and while Kris was struck down with tonsilitus I was hitting a seemingly endless vein of songs and wrote the “if this is a dream” part, patching the two melodies together. Over previous records I’ve worked on I’ve fallen into a tradition of writing “Dream” songs and this was initially #4 in the series. I changed all the words around based on some nonsensical dreamlike storyline where the protagonist like the real Descartes is holed up in a tin shack thinking, along with his Russian friend (Dostoyevsky) lamenting the fact his bike has been stolen by Atticus Finch (To Kill A Mockingbird). The bike stuff I wrote with Kris in mind as he’s a keen cycler and thankfully he liked the song and redid the music, with me adding some keys at the end. It’s got one of my favourite lines I wrote on the record – “Fucking Atticus Finch is out riding around on my bike!”. I don’t know why I like it so much, but I do. The title comes from a dream I actually had – I’d been obsessively thinking about a name for the project and woke up one morning with “The Bespin Black Lotus Basement Band” in my head. I dropped the “Bespin” bit from fear of being rumbled as an unconscious Star Wars geek.

Kris: The music on this was fun in that its got a gallop, and I love playing songs that gallop.  I can’t count how many times I’d sung the Atticus Finch line in the shower, attempting to mimic the accent horribly.  I identify with the Atticus in the dream as he’s a cycling nutter, drinking his beers and singing songs at civilization, harassing poor Descartes lovely slump with ideas like “If nobody’s watching, then you can do what you want.”

Smally: Haha, yeah Kris’ British accent – it was actually pretty great but sounded probably as comical as it is for me to sing “tomaytoes”. He also sang the “fucking Atticus Finch…” part with this beautiful spit of what sounded like sincere pissed-offness in the role of someone whose bicycle has been chored, but with me singing too it kind of gets lost. Again since writing what I did before this song got renamed and is now called “4000 Mile Dream” as we had to get it in somewhere. While I was trying to think of a title for the record I went onto the internet and on a hunch calculated the distance between Cape Girardeau and the beach I live on in Fife Scotland. It was near enough 4000 miles exactly (4000.38) which I thought was kind of spooky. I’ve told a couple of people about it but I usually just get blank looks – I’m like “Yeah, but it’s 4000 miles exactly… not 3999 or even 4001…” It’s amazing enough though that you can find people on the other side of the world on a different continent and make records that sound like they’ve been written in the same room… if you could sniff it, it would smell like a revolution.

Kris: None of my people are all that impressed by the neatness of the geographical distance either.  And, unfortunately, I’m a conscious Star Wars geek, so I suppose I’m grateful we didn’t go with “Bespin Black Lotus”.

9 Oh No

Smally: For a change I don’t really have much to say about this one. I wrote it about two-thirds of the way through the record and it was relatively straightforward, initially called “I Hope You Kept The Receipt”. I wanted to write something that sounded like it had been lifted off The Beatles “Rubber Soul”, but as Kris pointed out to me “we overshot Rubber Soul and landed in Abbey Road”. Not nearly as great obviously, but you see where I’m coming from. After I’d sent all the tracks away to him to mix and replace guitars and add vocals I think we both knew that “Oh No” was missing something, and so arranged for the brilliant Jane Gilmore to help out with some vocals. As great a job as she did, I still think this song is missing something, but at the same time I figure that the more we add to it and mess around with it, the worse it could potentially get.

Kris: I agree.  This one lacks the magic.  But I can’t get rid of it.  Jane did awesome.  We ended up prodding her for another take, and wound up using both.  I love how her voice fits in with our mess.  Makes it classy.  And she gave the song a new depth.  I think ultimately this song was a casualty of a mad period for me.  I may have tried too hard and it wound up a little short on the pop we wanted to give it.  On the other hand, its a really honest song.  An aspect of music I’ve always enjoyed is it always asks you to put the best, or worst, or whatever you’re feeling immediately to work.  Its like working a life lesson out on paper, because whatever you make that song about becomes an aspect of you or your past that you have to constantly revisit time and time again.  You work through you shit, like it or not.  The words were so genuine.  You get in these relationships, and there are times when you can’t just trade out for a new one.  This has been a lesson I’ve struggled with.

Smally: Another one that got a makeover after I’d written about it here. I thought a lot about this song in the build-up to the record coming out, trying to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle so to speak. In the end I asked Kris to turn the reverb down a notch to hear what it sounded like stripped back. The version on the album is the stripped back version and I’m much happier with it – I agree completely about Jane’s input and have written several times how amazing her voice is. As a singer she’s like some kind of maverick racing driver taking staggering chances that more often than not find combinations of notes that sound very original and melodic. In other words, thank fuck for Jane.

Kris: I’m still amazed she helped out.  This record was a total sausage fest prior to her contribution.  Thanks Jane.

10 To A Concerned World

Smally: This one is more of a Kris-song than any of the others on the record. It was one of the sketches he recorded at the beginning and I really liked it, imagined at the time it turning into this Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young type long rolling guitar song. The lyrical content of the song was helped along by some conversations we were having about America’s place in the international community and its insular political view of the world. I was trying to explain how electing a Democratic president at the next election is perhaps even more important to the rest of us than to America itself. All the people I virtually meet from the USA are great people and very switched on, so I counter my bewilderment that they would allow the election and then re-election scummy $-fixated right-wing Republican scumbags by ripping them about the state of America. It must have struck a chord with Kris. It was really great to hear this song growing from the ground up, with layers and layers going on each time I heard updated versions. Like getting to watch a songwriter or sculptor at work. I added some pretty basic keyboard parts and some backing vocals that hopefully he liked. I doubt he would tell me even if he hated them mind you. With every record I’ve been involved in there’s always the ambition to write some political songs and actually say something, but I usually retreat back to the simplicity of druggy love songs… Tigermouse was no exception, just this time I had a running mate to do all the important dirty work.

Kris: Political songs are always hairy.  Part of the problem is you immediately date the song.  Another part is its really easy for people to misinterpret any of the messages you try to convey.  Take Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”.  Smally was my gauge on this one.  One of the neat things about working with him is he’s a terrible liar, even though I’ve never actually spoken to him directly.  If it was too preachy, he’d say so, but he didn’t, so here we are.  The concept is as such:  “Dear World, many Americans understand that there are things immediately impacted by what happens here.  It’s fucked up, we know it, but understand that this is a strange place.  There are a lot of very loud voices.  There are a lot of interests.  Trust that we are not all idiots.  We’ll get there.  Please don’t stop criticizing from the outside as that’s the only way we can change things in here.”  I think that’s simple.  Maybe not.  The discussions we had on the impact the US had on the rest of the world were great in that here was a voice from outside explaining what were stepping on, which is quiet information round these parts.  Smally got really intense on me for a minute, and it had a lot of impact.  This was the response.  As for his additions, I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.  What he put in was perfect.  They serve the song brilliantly.

Smally: I think the rest of us know that America is not a nation of idiots, but it was horrifying enough to see Bush elected a second time to not exactly be filled with confidence. I mean, this election should be treated like a War. If people are saying to you “All politicians are the same”, then they’re just trying to make you feel bad about giving a fuck. It’s difficult to gauge what kind of impact an Obama presidency would have, but all the signs point to a dramatic improvement, or at the very least an attempt to improve things for the whole rather than the individuals at the top of the social ladder. In Kris’s words, it’s time to start throwing stones at “the old white men on the thrones”.

Kris: One thing that can be gleaned from the last few elections is that there is a growing mob unhappy with the US’s current direction.  57 million people voted against the Bush presidency, and mind also that half the people in this country don’t vote at all.  This year we’ve got a bunch of highly motivated people that really want to steer the ship for a while versus a bunch of confident people that have been steering for a while.  Paradigm changes don’t happen overnight, but the worse things get the more motivation there is to make the switch.  I dunno, I partially feel bad for taking a side, as taking sides limits you to the options available within that side, and straddling the fence allows you to be more objective.  On the other hand, I personally, ethically, and logically disagree with most of the dominant stances my government has taken.  Its become time to pick sides in this country, unfortunately.  Believe it or not, this election has become war on many levels.  We’re about two degrees away from taking to the streets, and I fear a McCain election may go as far a three degrees.  Then again, that’s what I thought last election, and it seemed crooked as hell where I sat.

11 The Somewhere Song

Smally: This is the first of what I feel are the two best songs I wrote for the record (though now with Kris contributions not necessarily the two best songs on it). I wrote it really late one night strumming some chords while I was waiting for some files to upload that I was sending to him for mixing. Very occasionally you pick up a guitar and a whole song comes out completely intact, words and everything – a lot like “The Sometimes Song” that I wrote for The Wheelies, so the title is an unsubtle nod towards that. It’s essentially about a relationship breakdown, or the strains of long-term relationships, so I’m hoping that somewhere there’s going to be somebody who hears this and knows exactly what I’m singing about. I recorded it all in one takes the following day before shipping it off and for a long time it hung around the project like a weird little rain cloud of unfinished business. Irrespective of how Kris feels about the atmospheric guitar parts he added to complete it, I really love it and think it makes the song, like what he’s done carries the melody and lets the song just be what it is. At times it sounds spookily lo-fi orchestral and that small guitar line in the middle of the song is one of my favourite musical melodies on the whole project.

Kris: I’ve begun to come around on this song.  I’ve been in so many bands with really creative guitar players, so I judge what I come up with based on that example.  To my ears it sounds like a terrible attempt at mimicry.  It is a good song, but in the hands of a competent melodic guitar player it could’ve been great.  This, along with Blood Music and Oh No, was in a batch of intensely personal songs Smally was shipping me at the time, so much so that it felt like a sin to change any of it.

Smally: Just to clarify about the “intensely personal” part. The reality is far from this “we used to be friends/ but sometimes it ends” – every relationship has its highs and lows and mine is no exception. There are elements of daydream license in pretty much every song I ever write, some are complete daydreams, others (like this) grow from the ground but are very caught up in the moment and still have a whole lot of sky in them. Music has a lot of different functions, but for me the most important is using it as a tool for communicating something. Going back to something Kerouac wrote about attempting to externalise these feelings for the sake of getting to know each other is that if we didn’t do it, it would be “a travesty turned on ourselves”. So that was the thinking behind it – write something that other people might possibly relate to. Walt Whitman told me when I was about 18 to “Delve! Mould! Pile the words of the earth! Work on age after age, nothing is to be lost…”

Kris: I should clarify as well.  I use ‘personal’ in that the song describes some fragile emotions, and the particular wording used to express those emotions was very profound.  I saw a rewrite as potentially damaging, and chose not to dabble.

12 Blood Music

Smally: Like a lot of the songs, “Blood Music” has been on a bit of journey to get to the final version. To begin with, it was one of Kris’ sketches that he recorded at the outset. I really loved the verse melodies and wrote some words, and a chorus and an outro for it originally called “Blood Music”, but then later changed to “The Last Kiss” from the subject matter of the song. Over the course of time two versions of the song emerged – one a ballad called “The Last Kiss” with my music, vocals and words, and the other was this much more guitar-driven version called “Blood Music” based around the new structure I’d written with Kris’ singing, words and music. He seemed to think that it was a tough call between the two for which should go on the record, but for me it was a no-brainer – again, lyrically this is at a whole other level and obviously struck a chord with the whole Don Quixote-Daydream theme. One of the last contributions I made to the record was to attempt to write some keyboard tracks for “Blood Music” and spent 3 long nights at it, tearing what little hair I’ve got out trying to find sounds and melodies that would fit. In the end I said to myself “fuck it” and sent Kris everything I’d attempted (some twelve tracks of sprawling piano, multi-delayed glockenspiel and so and so on) and let him figure out how to put it all together. Which miraculously he managed.

Kris: Probably the most collaborative song on the record.  It bounced back and forth so much and evolved so dramatically that it almost became a dare to twist it a little more each time it showed up in the inbox.  Smally’s original lyric set was really intense and personal.  I was worried about compromising the gravity of it.  When I rewrote his version, I was fully prepared to scrap it completely.  Granted, I did sweeten the pot with the interpretation of the Quixote story; intimacy is hard to compete with.  And the fucking keys…he sends a link saying he had a few piano tracks, twelve or so, and that I could use whatever I wanted.  I was thinking that it was twelve little spots that laid over each other, no huge deal.  I open it and its twelve four minute piano tracks.  I had to walk away from this one for a few days just to wrap my head around twelve unique piano melodies and how it was at all possible to make them work.  All of them.  I think because he had gone to such an unfathomable length, I felt obligated to justify the effort.  And I wanted to see if it could be done.  I think I cut and pasted on this song for all of eight hours.

Smally: Haha – yeah those keyboard tracks. That was painful. Anything longer than five minutes sitting at a piano and not managing to come up with a melody and I start to get very frustrated. Normally I’ll just press some keys and something happens but with “Blood Music” I pressed a whole load of keys and a whole load of happenings never really happened at all. Factor into that the fact I really wanted to do a good job because I loved the song so much… oh man, it was a nightmare. But all’s well that end’s well. I can’t even imagine how brutal it must have been unpicking all those knots of melodies I’d been tying. Just to clarify again – “The Last Kiss” was not a personal song at all. I drew on elements of a break-up a long time ago, but by and large virtually all of it is fictional with the exception of “some story standing on some stairwell”. I hated the lyrics of that one, so the Don Quixote reworking was like the original daydreamer charging in at the last minute with a chamber pot on his head to save the day.

13 Pepperland

Smally: I thought I had an hour to write and record a song one sunny Sunday afternoon, but the house was invaded some 40 minutes earlier than anticipated (as you will hear). Rather than sink into a songwriters sulk, I battled on regardless never really thinking that this would be something useable on the finished record (hence why it sounds so ragged), but when I mixed it down the end of the song somehow seemed as fitting as any way to finish the record. To be honest I think Kris has indulged me by putting this track on here, particularly as all of the original tracks were lost in a computer meltdown so it’s a brutal Smally-mix as opposed to a shiny Warchalking-mix. But in a way I’m glad we used it as Smally Jr has been something of an invisible and occasionally audible part of the Tigermouse songwriting process – one of the reasons behind me writing “The Apple Bites Back” (Seed), being with me when I wrote “679″ and naming it, and he also named this one too. Immediately after putting the mic down he pulled on his plastic rollerskates and shouted “Off to Pepperland!” I thought this was a funny little mix of Peter Pan’s “Neverland” and The Beatles “Sgt Pepper”, and somehow seemed like an apt name for the mythical country we’d been singing about. Hence as well the DG5 cover with the flag that has the middle-finger, a symbol we’re also using for The Daydream Collective – designed by a friend of Kris’ at our request – that flag (at least in my head) is the flag of Pepperland, and why I can’t help but grin when I sing “tomaytoes” on Country. For a few minutes I considered proposing that we call the album “Trees Will Whisper To The Sun And His Face Will Shine On The Children Who Play In The Places Only They Know Exist” after a line from this song. In hindsight I’m glad I didn’t.

Kris: TWWTTS&HFWSOTCWPITPOTKE would’ve been the most advanced album title out of the many we had proposed.  Spirits were definitely down on this song towards the end.  As the only song I didn’t have individual tracks to, we had been saddled with the demo version to overdub and massage as much a possible.  It still sounded markedly different, no matter what was done.  Smally’s computer had taken a dive over the summer, so I was under the assumption that the originals were gone, and we had discussed pushing it as far to the end as possible as a bonus track.  Then, through some feat of providence, the original tracks turn up, Smally puts some finishing vocals on it, and all of a sudden its one of the coolest spots on the whole thing.  What started as the last song because it never got off the ground became the last song because it was a great closer.

Smally: I’m glad I found the tracks and Kris could remix it as the version we were going to use just didn’t sound quite so. Every computer I’ve ever owned has let me down at some point, mainly under the weight of the DG music and songs I record, so when it started to meltdown, I saved only the stuff that was outstanding (I think at the time this was “Pepperland” and “Pavement”) – then when I went back to retrieve them all the individual tracks were scattered all over the PC and had to be found and reordered. I’m pleased with the finished thing considering it was melodically improvised and the words were written in about 2 minutes. I added the “Love/love/love” parts as a throwback to “The Somewhere Song”, which itself was a throwback to “Roll It Up” on the first Kaleidonauts record, which in turn was ripped straight from The Beatles obviously. That one’s deliberate, like a nod in the direction of songwriting masters. OK, I’ll leave it at that, I’m away to go rollerskating on the pavement.

www.myspace.com/janegilmore

1 What inspired you to start writing your own songs?

Jane: Bob Dylan, hard to pin-point

2 What are your favourite albums?

Jane: That’s tough. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? by Of Montreal (going to a concert for them Nov. 1st!), definitely Graceland by Paul Simon, Odelay by Beck, and I’m going to cut myself off at Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie

3 What instruments do you play?

Jane: I play the guitar technically, but my vocal skills far surpass anything I do on that.

4 If you could be an inanimate object for a day what would you be?

Jane: Um… probably a book or a camera, but I’d have to be a high quality book or camera.

5 How do you feel about your last record (“Knowledge Is Dangerous” free to download at our store)?

Jane: Mixed feelings. When you’re recording with a crappy $30 mic, it’s not like it’s easy to get the exact sound you’re looking for, that said, you always have a few songs that you’re thinking, “Man, I killed that one! (in the good way)”

6 What’s the first word that comes into your head?

Jane: Pineapple (I’m making Pineapple-coconut loaf cake next week)

7 Who are your biggest musical influences?

Jane: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Martha and the Vandellas (the first kind of really good music I ever got into was Motown in about the sixth or seventh grade on a family trip to the Grand Canyon), Neutral Milk Hotel, and probably more recently several female (usually)acoustic artists (Mirah, New Buffalo, Kate Nash, etc.)

8 How does it feel to be a “voice for hire”?

Jane: First of all, that implies I’m getting paid. I have mixed feelings like I’m not wholly involved in the record enterprises and all the creative juices, but hopefully that will be amended in the near future.

9 What’s the story with mollusks vs philosophy?

Jane: They’re both great, but biologists I have found are often quite pretentious and have their minds set on “proving” things that are really inferred so recently I have been getting into more theoretical methods of discovering truth. So right now, I’m double majoring in both, but it might just be a matter of time before I dump mollusks. I haven’t really, REALLY decided yet.

10 What are your favourite films?

Jane: Anything Wes Anderson, especially The Royal Tenenbaums. Anything Jeunet, especially Amelie, quite the inspiration for my life. I guess V for Vendetta even though it’s pro-terrorism, it was well done and pretty libertarian.

11 Who are you voting for in the US election?

Jane: Why must we mingle things as pure as music with things as dirty as politics? I’m writing in Ron Paul

12 What makes you happy on a shitty day?

Jane: Plato, Emilyn Brodsky, Mark Twain, Dr. Nina Mikhalevsky

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

Jane: Probably Dr. Nina Mikhalevsky IF I had to. I’m perfectly content with me

14 Flying kites or building sandcastles?

Jane: Definitely the former. For a budding marine biologist, I really hate the beach. I mean, the water’s cold, sand gets blown really hard against your body, and you get burned… always.

15 If you weren’t a legendary singer/songwriter what would you be?

Jane: I think your premise is wrong. First of all, I am not a legendary singer/songwriter, nor is it my main desire to be so. I will end up in the end as a 1. Malacologist, 2. Philosophy professor, 3. Entrepenuer

16 What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Jane: Live the philosophical life with integrity (arete) and examination (paraphrased) from Dr. Nina Mikhalevsky

17 What was the last gig you went to?

Jane: Um, if you mean for me, that would be never, at least really. I did perform Ben Kweller’s “Lizzy” at a talent show in 12th grade which started one of the most disastrous romances of my life. Otherwise, I went to an Islands concert in DC in May.

18 How would you describe your music to anyone who hasn’t heard it before?

Jane: Acoustic Cynicism, Vulcan Sterility

19 Who’s your favourite Beatle?

Jane: N/A! I don’t really like any of them. If I really, really, really had to choose, I would say George Harrison because he seemed to be most down to earth, however, I refuse to evaluate the actual truth value of that statement.

20 What next for Jane Gilmore?

Jane: Open a bakery in the mid-west because college is a waste of time and application is more important than multiple guess and because baking is so satisfying. But before that, I will live the Thoreau/Walden lifestyle at some point. I will never cease, hopefully, to evaluate myself, reasonably and objectively (of course, how can we count on that?)

With THE ORANGE ALBUM appearing for free download in the Quixodelic Record Store today, I thought you might want to know a little bit more about the band behind the music. So I chased and caught up with the original Acid Cowboy and put the questions to him: 

Smally: Alright Marc – what happened to you? March 07 I heard Acid Cowboy and some curious little experimental instrumentals… a year later and you’ve turned into some psych rock&roll monster band that are going to blow everyone’s brains out of their skulls? Where have you been and how did it get to this?Marc: Didn’t really realize what was happening. I met up with a friend from college Will and we started a band.  He brings the pop, I bring the psychedelic, and it feels great.  He loves the Beatles, I love Pink Floyd, so we get along pretty good.  We feel each other’s fire.Smally: Pink Floyd in particular is a very audible influence – apart from them and The Beatles what other bands/musicians would you say have influenced your sound?Marc: Well we are influenced by all sorts of stuff really.  Some other cool stuff  we are into are Funkadelic, the BJM, Kraut Rock, the Band, the Stones, Aphex Twin, Spacemen 3, Robyn Hitchcock, the Olivia Tremor Control, Ween …. Etc etc…Smally: What’s “The Orange Drop” and who makes up the band – what instruments do you play, who does what?Marc: The Orange Drop could have very well been the Orange Drops because we certainly could have eaten more than one.  Once in a blue moon there was a very potent batch of acid that came in an orange mint dropper.  Fun times were had, an 8-lane highway was crossed in the middle of the night… blablablaAnyways there’s 4 of us; myself and Will write the songs, play guitar and sing.  John plays the bass and the keys.  Ben is the drummer.Smally: We’re about to host “The Orange Album” in our Quixodelic Record Store – its quite simply an incredible record, profound, musically adventurous, and a complete riot of psychedelic sounds? When did you record it? How easy was it to put together?Marc: We recorded it, along with the Atlas LP and the Talented Friends EP in the past year.  And I guess it wasn’t too difficult to put together.  A few arguments here and there, nothing too terrible; we tend to be fairly reasonable.  We record everything ourselves…A few love songs, a few desperate ones… before you know it there’s an album.Smally: You guys are quoted as saying that in the future you want to be “the biggest band in America” – I fucking love that attitude and completely believe it’s possible. But how are you going to achieve it?Marc: Subliminal Messaging. And sound terrorism.  And Martha Stewart brand morning glory seeds.Smally: Where are you from and what’s the music scene like there? Is there a particular scene you’re part of, do you play live? What are The Orange Drop like as a live band?Marc: The Orange Drop met in New Jersey.   And we are much more electric as a live act than on record; we improvise a good bit; a 3 minute song on the album might be a half hour journey live. We have played live but not as the new lineup.  We have been practicing a set which will be ready soon enough.  The new band is so much better than what you can hear on our current album(s);  we are already on our way to recording another one and this is IT… men in suits will be lining up with their checkbooks in hand…and if you are in the tri-state keep your eyes opened for us.  Smally: What’s your own personal favourite Orange Drop song?Marc: Ah that’s a tough one and it changes all the time.  Retrogenerica and Soul Damage for right now; those are the most fun to play live.Smally: You got any groupies yet?Marc: Well… we have hot friends… and they love us.Smally: If you weren’t aspiring musicians, what else would you be?Marc: Probably treethuggers; hippy by name, gangster by trade…  this is a US only thing, I don’t believe people in the UK have friends that listen to the disco biscuits and think that their bedroom is bleeding red and evil spirits are saying to leave.    Smally: Yeah I cant speak on behalf of the rest of the UK but I’m completely lost with that. What’s a treethugger and what’s a Martha Stewart Morning Glory Seed while we’re on the subject? You Americans are weird haha.Marc: A treethugger is an interesting breed.  Half tie-dye hippy, half gangster rap thug.  You can usually find them in the parking lot of Disco Biscuit shows…. What’s a Disco Biscuit you ask?  They claim to be a band, but it’s really a poor excuse for ecstacy heads to meet up and rip each other off on a few pill.  For some reason this kind of shit is extremely popular around here, and if you live on the East Coast, chances are you have a dozen friends that are into this crap. And… morning glory seeds can be a powerful psychedelic when you ingest enough.  I have personally never tried it because of the terrible vomiting that follows.  Martha Stewart brand seeds can be found in most major stores in the US; those happen to have a coat of poison on the outside.. resulting in even more vomiting than usual.

You can find out more about The Orange Drop here:www.myspace.com/theorangedrop

or listen to “Retrogenerica” in the Singles section on this website.