I’ll try to make this as brief as possible. After a conversation with Bobby (Fig Mints) I was going to challenge Anton Newcombe (BJM) to an album writing competition – see who could write and record one from scratch in the fastest possible time. Fortunately I checked myself before hitting the send button on the message I tapped out, but I then got to thinking that maybe someone else in the Cozy Home would be up for the same challenge. After speaking to PB (the real burnouts) this then morphed into an idea that whoever was up for it would have 1 month exactly to write and record an album from scratch… starting 25th November and whatever comes out of it, being available for public consumption on Christmas Day. Maybe if enough of us are up for it, then we could package all the albums together in psychedelic wrapping paper, something nice for our grandparents to listen to when they’re blasting on their Christmas morning bong. OK, so they might be train wrecks of rushed albums (mine will be anyway), but you never know… maybe collectively the project will produce one or two amazing songs. A month might be pushing it, so I’m just going to start today. Only rules are that it all has to be original material with the exception of cover versions of fellow Cozy Home artist’s songs, to keep raising the collective profile. Maybe this idea is well wide of the mark and I’m going to be in it on my lonesome, but either way its cool. I’m not gonna beg, but let’s make this a Cozy Home Christmas to remember.

All the best brothers & sisters

Smallywheelies (November, 2006)

I can just about remember writing that. The reason it is such a blur I guess is because it was a very weird and creatively manic winter. I’d not been involved with the collective for long before I posted the invitation on the MySpace page (three months to be exact) and was still a relative stranger in their predominantly Utican midsts. If getting invited into the Cozy Home was the physical equivalent of shuffling in a happy daydream lost down a strange musical street and hearing a voice like a stoned Woody Allen yelling over from a porch “Hey you! Yes you! The guy with the songs and nowhere to go…”, only to discover the weirdest scenes of musical debauchery within the house itself, then me suggesting the Psychedelic Christmas project was nothing short of standing up in the middle of a packed smoky kitchen of wasted strangers and suggesting we go rob a bank together, wearing matching uniforms glued together out of bin bags and bottle tops.

Fortunately I wasn’t as wide of the mark as I thought I was. Over the following weeks I was genuinely surprised to see the list of potential contributors growing as the idea caught on and animated discussion began to break out out like virtual chicken pox on the old Cozy Home blog page. I tuned in daily to find out who was recording what and how they were doing it, and about how we could get all the recordings together into a single box-set and what it would be called. In a whirlwind of packaging debates and tales of incontinent 8-tracks, the project was collectively titled “The Cardboard Box Set: The Troof Over Your Head” (thanks to Rob and Justin), and like excited kids who just couldn’t wait until Christmas morning the completed records began to appear.

First out of the blocks was Jon of the Atom with the musically schizoid sound-adventure that is “An Off Day For The Jew’s Harp Christmas Caroler”, where beautiful odes like “Requiem For Luc Dominique” sat side by side with derranged instrumentals like “Machine Guns Over Christmas”. As I grinned my way through a record that in hindsight sounds like a cartoon weight-lifter flexing his melodic-experimental sound muscles before lifting the giant mass of Dead Canaries “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things” onto his shoulders, news of other recordings began to filter through. Dusty Charts promised the atmospheric-acoustic soundscapes that would be the brilliant “The Lights Are Blinking”, and Rob Levy announced that he was involved in no less than four records for the cardboard box.

Finally when the dust settled on Christmas morning 2006 and Tim had no doubt typed his fingers to the bone and technologically pushed his brain to the limit, the twelve completed records that made up the project appeared like magic on the Cozy Home site for all to hear. The full list of albums were: Handwithlegs (Tim Schram) “Nightlife”, The Wheelies (Smally) “Cosmonaut”, Travel Labyrinth/External World/Rosy Gnomes (Rob & Judy Shimmin) “Ruins of the Zoo/ Orbiter To Arbiter/ Noisy Rooms”, Steel Wool (Justin Grotelueschen, Ariel Rejman, Rob Levy, Judy Shimmin) “Pastures of the Platinum Lamb”, Jon of the Atom (Jon Fink) “An Off Day For The Jews Harp Christmas Caroler”, The Real Burnouts (Paul Burnout) “A Lull in Void”, Dusty Charts (Dom Gagliano) “The Lights Are Blinking“, Fig Mints of Your Imagination (Bobby Rogan) “Is It Today Already?“, and Blunder (Justin Grotelueschen) “The Cooking Show“.

In the greater scheme of things, twelve separate bands/artists writing and recording an album each in a month and coordinating them to be released simultaneously on the same day is perhaps a only minor achievement. But the real brilliance of the project was not in the realisation of an adventurous idea or even the sum of parts, but in the parts themselves. At the time I remember feeling amazed that we’d collectively pulled together under the same invisible roof, but it is now only with hindsight two years down the line, revisiting and listening to the records that I can hear how special a lot of those recordings were. Of course there are too many to list here but “A Lull In Void” to this day is my favourite Real Burnouts album, a psychedelic lo-fi assault on your ears that blows through your brain like a man-made hurricane, and Bobby Rogan has previously said that “Is It Today Already?” is his own favourite Fig Mints album (“I actually still listen to that one when I’m by myself, which I don’t usually do after a couple of weeks of an album being finished”). From a personal point of view, my own “Cosmonaut” album was not only the most enjoyable of all The Wheelies records to make, but battling on with a broken guitar I wrote arguably the best song I’ve ever written (“The Sometimes Song”).

So the dust settled, and it stayed settled. In the communal afterglow of our recording endeavours, we took the foot off the gas and went back to doing what we do best and The Cardboard Box Set was seemingly forgotten about, 600 black CD sleeves no doubt lying at the bottom of a drawer at Rob Levy’s house. Our ambitious plans to package it and produce fifty copies was unfortunately (unlike the music)  a collective step too far. I’m not begrudging the fact – far from it. When I wrote that post on the Cozy Home MySpace page I didn’t even think anybody would take any notice let alone start ripping through bin-bags glueing beer bottle tops like buttons to their tattered sleeves. Like I said, the music – and the simple fact that we made it – was enough for me. Until just before I sat down to type the first word of this article, in my head it was called “The Cardboard Box Set That Never Was”… but I changed my mind. I went back to those records and the message boards and I found myself thinking “Fuck… that was a shame we never got round to making that”.

So I went and made it myself. Here it is:

And it made us feel like this:

It took me four hours over two days to assemble it and at the time of writing this I’ve got 67% of the records downloaded and burned onto discs and fully intend to keep going until I have all twelve together where they were made to be. It’s an amateur job at best minus a couple of essential tabs that create precarious holes at the bottom, and I’ll confess that it took two attempts to make the fucking box; but at least now “The Cardboard Box Set: The Troof Over Your Head” exists, and will be carefully passed down through generation after generation of Smally’s (assuming my rushed glueing lasts, and CD players don’t become obsolete) who will marvel at the dark twisted world of Handwithlegs, or the psychedelic cacophony of the various Rob Levy projects, and maybe even they will hear a bit of themselves echoing down through the corridors of time as Great-Grandpa Smally sings about “working for the minimum wage”. So I finished what I started, what we made reality and all that’s really left to ask now is…

…anybody up for another box set this summer?