W0G 0016 Walls Of Genius
Ludovico Treatment - Music To Cure Your Ills
scans of the cover of Ludovico Technique, from the collection of Hal McGee, acquired directly from WoG in the 1980s
a 90-minute tape officially attributed to the band "Walls Of Genius" at the time of its release.
Buy a CD-R version on Little Fyodor's website (click on Order Stuff!!! tab)
Buy a CD-R version on Little Fyodor's website (click on Order Stuff!!! tab)
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Evan Cantor:
The title is a reference to the Ludovico Technique, a treatment for anti-social behavior in Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange. Per Wikipedia, “the technique is a form of aversion therapy in which Alex receives an injection that makes him feel sick while watching graphically violent films, eventually conditioning him to suffer crippling bouts of nausea at the mere thought of violence. As an unintended consequence, the soundtrack to one of the films — Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — renders Alex unable to listen to his beloved classical music.” You may recall that Burgess’s novel was the basis for an incredible Stanley Kubrick film version, which is one of my favorite movies on the all-time list. I remember taking my girlfriend in college (Donna Devanny) to see A Clockwork Orange at the University of Virginia repertory cinema and she was ready to walk out after the opening scene. I had to explain to her that it was only a movie, what we were seeing were only actors, nobody was actually getting raped or murdered, and that the scene was being used to set you up to be thoroughly disgusted by the protagonist. Obviously, it was very effective. So using this as the title of our release was a joke, an insinuation that listening to Ludovico Treatment would “cure” you. In March 1984, when “Lingering Household Odours” was constructed, we had already been participating in and recording what Architects Office founder Joel Haertling described as “aleatoric” musical experiments. Via this experience, plus observing the direction of the great majority of underground music-makers in the scene (call it “Cassette Culture” or “do-it-yourself”), we decided to pursue some so-called serious efforts at sound-collage and industrial music ourselves. This was because we were interested in it and we also wanted to earn more respect for what we did within the scene. We thought our maniacal stuff had an intellectual quotient, but most people didn’t understand that that was the case. So we took this 90-degree turn with our efforts and Ludovico Treatment became a vehicle for tape collage, industrial music and musique concrète. The roots of it existed already in WoG’s previous recordings, but with this one we really took off in that direction. It garnered numerous positive reviews, but was mostly overlooked at the time of release since it was so unlike most of our other, more well-known, music. We actually sold eight copies of it, traded about 24. Although the cover says “Walls of Genius Presents: Ludovico Treatment”, Ludovico Treatment is not the name of the band. We were now Walls Of Genius and would employ no more multiple band names from this point forward. I had now come up with a way to make nice cassette covers out of folded j-card inserts. For this release, I used Letraset lettering to make a very spare cover with the words “Walls Of Genius Presents: Ludovico Treatment” and “Music To Cure Your Ills”. Letraset lettering was something known to graphic artists and architects. Since my father was an architect and I had worked for him one summer, I knew about Letraset lettering. You got sheets of letters and, one-by-one, you could “rub” the letters on to another sheet of paper. It was time-intensive, but in pre-computer days, it was the only way I knew of to get such nice fonts. The actual cassette had spray-painted labels and the name “Walls Of Genius” stamped on it, as well as a stamp indicating “Ludovico Treatment” and sides “A” and “B”. The notes on the back were made with a typewriter and reduced via a xerographic photocopy machine. I had already been spray-painting sheets of cassette labels to make the tapes look more appealing. We thanked Helen Broderick and Anna Doucette for taped material on “Lingering Household Odours”. I don’t remember who Anna was, perhaps Helen’s baby. Helen allowed me to tape the sounds of the living room at her home and that’s her baby that is crying out occasionally on the piece. We thanked Claude Martz and Rick Corrigan also, “without whose generosity and cooperation (the piece) would never have been constructed”. I used Rick Corrigan’s synthesizer, which was at Claude Martz’s house, for several of the organ-sounding passages that come and go during “Lingering Household Odours”. Both were people we had met via our participation in Architects Office. Jane Carpenter was a KGNU radio-connected person who ran a machine shop in Superior, Colorado, just outside of Boulder. She allowed me to record her machines, tapes of which appeared in “Lingering Household Odours”, and then, later, we created musique concrète in her machine shop for the track “Jane’s Garage”. Little Fyodor: This may have been the first WoG release without a separate page of liner notes. Instead, the liner notes were all part of the cassette package, on the J-card. It’s also the first time we were just Walls Of Genius, not separate bands. Maybe that’s because we didn’t really record any of these pieces in a band setting per se. “Lingering Household Odours” was primarily Evan’s sound collage, that he put together over a period of time, even if he and I did sort of perform as a band when overdubbing onto it. All three primary Morons did participate on Ed’s piece, but even that was mostly Ed and we definitely didn’t feel much like a band per se when overdubbing miscellaneous madness on it, more like mad scientists or recording experimenters. Then the next three pieces were all overdub projects done entirely by me, and the last was Evan and Jane Carpenter making noise at her garage. None of this really had to prevent us from choosing band names if we really wanted to, but it had already become a bit of a stretch and a burden, and I’m sure it began to feel even more out of place with the way we recorded this tape. Plus, people (including Evan’s mom) had been urging us to choose one name so that people would know who the hell we were. What can I say, we capitulated! All that said, the front cassette cover still said, “Walls Of Genius Presents:” just as it had for previous tapes, though on the back it said “LUDOVICO TREATMENT Walls Of Genius”, finally indicating that WoG was the actual name of our project or band, not just some overseeing organization or whatever might have been implied previously…. The one person thanked on the liner notes not subsequently mentioned in my notes is Claude Martz, who played on our earlier tape Little Victor Meets Violent Vince and with whom we had become re-acquainted via Architects Office. He played a role in enabling Evan to use Rick Corrigan’s synthesizer. Maybe because the synthesizer was at Claude’s place? I believe Evan lent Claude use of his four-track reel-to-reel machine in exchange. My first personal, all by myself, four-track overdub projects appear on this tape as a result of my having worked up the nerve to ask Evan to use his four-track on my own in response to his having just lent it to someone both outside of the band and outside of the house. Evan was visibly reluctant to grant me this permission (at least in part because of a lingering distrust stemming from how I discharged my four-track operating duties during drunken Rumours of Marriage days, as reflected in Evan’s Dirt Clods notes), but grant me this permission he did, which helped me do a lot of cool stuff for WoG, if perhaps at the expense of adding to some of the growing tensions between us…. |
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
- continued When I finished my synthesizer overdub on “Lingering Household Odors”, the showpiece track of the Ludovico Treatment cassette which takes up the entire 45 minutes plus of Side A, I didn’t feel very enthusiastic about what I had just done. My playing felt awkward, and I felt tight and uncomfortable doing it. I wasn’t letting it all hang out and just doing whatever I felt like as I usually did with WoG. Instead, I felt worried about whether I was doing it right or wrong, and it seemed I’d done at least as much of the latter. I had never before encountered this type of self-consciousness while performing with WoG. I expressed my misgivings to Evan who told me he thought my playing was very tasteful. I don’t know if it was before or after that that I also told him that this piece didn’t even feel like Walls Of Genius to me so much as it felt like -- Architects Office! His reply was, “Well -- why should THEY be the only Noise band in town!” So that told me something about what was going on. Not that that has to be a bad thing. There’s no rules for what’s allowed to inspire creativity that I know of! But it did disturb and annoy me a bit that it seemed that we were playing a bit of keeping up with the underground Joneses. A deeper aspect of this harkens back to that story about a man named Kent I started telling in my notes for The WoG Sampler!. Since we produced that shorter, 60 minutes long tape in a failed attempt to get Kent Hotchkiss to buy it for his Aeon distribution service, Walls Of Genius had indeed made a mass sale to Kent of a cassette release that WoG had in fact recorded and produced and released – only it was a tape by Architects Office! Evan and Joel Haertling had agreed to release two AO tapes on Walls Of Genius, putting WoG in the role of being the “record label” for these releases, and it was thus to WoG that Kent turned to acquire copies for his distribution business. AO being carried by WoG made sense since Evan and I were actually part of AO, at that point at least, and in our own minds at least, so the two were already intertwined and it was easy to think of AO as a “sister band” to the WoG collective or endeavor. Joel did at some point assert that AO was his own project to represent however he alone would decide, though it was far from clear when we first started playing with him that we were playing for him. Evan and I played in the first six live performances AO ever did (to the best of my memory). Joel would prepare tapes for everyone else to improvise along with, and improvise we did, with Evan on his roto-toms and the rest of us all playing various synthesizers, including me on the Sequential Circuits Pro-One I’d been using with WoG. (Joel occasionally played his French Horn, too.) Thus it was almost like any other WoG jam session except for Joel’s tapes and for being billed as AO to a live audience. During one such live jam, Evan played some abstract bits on his acoustic guitar through the PA, and I remember him pointing this out to Joel during the group playback listen and saying, “You now have a bowed instrument in your music!” Joel considered this with a thoughtful look and a barely audible, “Yeah….” Anyway, after rejecting everything else Evan had sent to him, Kent Hotchkiss loved AO and ordered 20 copies of the first WoG AO tape, Partitions. This tape (as well as the next AO tape on WoG, Dispensation, of which Kent ordered 15 copies) was 90 minutes long. So maybe that’s why it no longer seemed so necessary to Evan to heed Kent’s prior suggestion to us to release shorter tapes. Either way, Evan was definitely hoping that Kent would like this excursion into noise and more strictly avant-garde experiments -- without the “Dead Puppies” type stuff to bum him out -- hopefully enough to finally carry some actual Walls Of Genius Walls Of Genius…. Well, once again, it didn’t work. I think Kent might have cited the length again when turning down Ludovico Treatment, and if so, that didn’t entirely make sense after he had bought the 90 minute AO tapes. Evan wrote him a letter telling him that he didn’t have to keep feeding us false hopes and white lies. Kent wrote an angry letter back, bristling at the suggestion that he had in any way lied to us. Evan wrote back to Kent saying that everyone at times tells white lies and maybe they should smoke a bowl together sometime. Kent wrote back again saying that smoking a bowl sounded like a good idea and apologizing for getting mad. So the bristling was smoothed over. But I don’t remember us having any more dealings with Kent after that…. All that said, trying new things and segregating our styles, the latter being something Evan pointed out in his notes on the White Cassette, were nothing new to WoG, and while there’s no doubt Evan was trying to appeal to Kent, tape manipulation was all around us and was very much the thing to do in the musical underground at that point in time. Maybe there was something in the air, something in the cultural ether of the time, the same way everyone started to go psychedelic back in ’66 and ’67, yet musicians from that era often don’t seem to be able to articulate very clearly why they started doing that. It just seemed natural! Certainly our involvement in AO had to be a big influence on the specific method of jamming along with a prepared tape, as we did on “Lingering Household Odors”. But as I said in my own notes to the White Cassette, Ed and Evan had been using found sounds since they had started jamming together. I’m sure all the rest just helped make this tape the natural next step to take. Whatever the reasons, it was definitely decided and agreed upon that this would be our experimental and noise oriented release. Which was fine by me, my misgivings stated above notwithstanding, as I was already listening to and playing on my radio show and was very interested in some very extreme experimental music. I actually thought of myself as having the most actual personal interest in the avant-garde out of anyone in the band. Brian Kraft, who alternated with me on my radio time slot, had introduced me to Nurse With Wound, which I thought was pretty cool. I gave a taped copy to Ed, only to be told by Evan that Ed’s reaction was that I must specialize in “annoying” music! But Evan said we were making a noise oriented tape, and I was fine with contributing something in that vein and while I wasn’t privy to the conversation, Ed apparently was good with it too…. Ultimately, whatever the circumstances, this was kind of our Great Leap Forward, the start of our later or mature period, what I think we’re mostly known for. 
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Side A
"Lingering Household Odours" (Cantor)
Evan Cantor: Percussion, Synthesizer, Tapes
David Lichtenverg: Synthesizer
- recorded Friday, March 16, 1984
"Lingering Household Odours" (Cantor)
Evan Cantor: Percussion, Synthesizer, Tapes
David Lichtenverg: Synthesizer
- recorded Friday, March 16, 1984
Evan Cantor:
“Lingering Household Odours” is a nearly 45-minute tape collage conceived and constructed by Evan. It was a monumental work of mixology at the time. My notes from the mixing indicate just how complex this was.
The notes indicate recordings made on a “Sharp” and an “Akai”. The Sharps were a pair of stereo cassette decks that we used for dubbing cassettes, one at a time, in real-time. I recorded some noises (telephone busy signals) directly to the Sharp via a microphone. The “Akai” was a small, portable cassette machine and it had its own small microphone that could be plugged into it. I used it for a number of things, including putting it in my car seat next to me and driving around the block making a recording of that experience. These recordings would then have to be transferred to the reel-to-reel on the 4-track Dokorder. As the piece had to be mixed in real-time, an error would send me right back to the beginning. I had time available to do this work because I had been laid off from my job at Trust Company Of America and was collecting unemployment. Meanwhile, David, my band housemate, was still working a night shift job at Hotel Boulderado, so I was under strict notice not to make noise during the day while he slept. He was a light sleeper, so this was a big deal for him. For me, it meant that although I had a lot of time on my hands and a music studio in the living room, my hands were tied in terms of any kind of volume. Playing the electric guitar un-amplified was enough to wake up my housemate. But mixing tapes with headphones was a silent activity, so I indulged myself.
For this piece, I assembled recordings of alarm clocks, a drive around the block with the Akai in the car seat, a stapler, telephone busy signals, radio broadcasts, odd material on records like a guy preaching about “nobody, the atom!”, a dishwasher, and machines in Jane Carpenter’s machine shop. All of this was overlaid on one long recording of daily life with a baby in Helen Broderick’s living room, likely made with the Akai, since it was portable. Helen lived in a flat near Boulder High School in a neighborhood that was subsequently completely razed to make a playing field beside the school in the name of flood mitigation. In many ways a paean to all the noises and sounds of everyday life, the piece is also a “found sounds” experiment. I was always one to hum along with the rhythm of machine sounds, windshield wiper blades, and the rhythms associated with the elements of everyday life. This piece took those household sounds and put them front and center, elevating the quotidian to the level of art.
Everything was on 4 different tracks, which allowed me to fade in and fade out as necessary, adjust tone controls and to pan liberally for stereophonic effects. I didn’t use any splicing of tape, for two reasons. One was that I didn’t really know how to. The other was that I had had bad experiences in the past with recording techs who were enthusiastic about cutting and clipping tape. In 1976, the recording of the one concert that Dreamer Easy played at Old Cabell Hall on University of Virginia campus was ruined by the use of a tape that had been spliced backwards. Dreamer Easy was an all-original King Crimson-soundalike band that I dropped out of college in which to play bass for a semester. This experience was part of my growing frustration with spacey recording engineers and one of the reasons I had obtained my own 4-track reel machine in the first place.
I included musical sections recorded on Rick Corrigan’s Roland (a polyphonic synthesizer) in “Lingering Household Odours” because I wasn’t keen on the 100% abstraction utilized by Architects Office’s more random “aleatoric” approach. David and I were probably already at odds with A/O’s prime mover by this time regarding the percussion and musical elements we introduced performing with Architects Office. In March of 1984, this piece was constructed shortly after Joel Haertling ruined recordings of the Festival of Pain (February 1984) by whispering the words “Architects Office” repeatedly into the microphones, but prior to live A/O performances that included WoG personnel in April 1984. So we were still friends at the time this piece was constructed.
Little Fyodor:
“Lingering Household Odors” was pretty much all Evan. All I did was overdub a synthesizer part throughout, at Evan’s behest. As mentioned above, I wasn’t especially comfortable with my part, largely because I sure am no keyboardist, and yet I was playing more like one than ever before for this, and the context was much more serious sounding than ever. I believe I played the synthesizer at the same time that Evan played his roto-toms, pretty much as we had been doing with AO, only without several other synthesists all going at it simultaneously. Being the only synthesizer player contributed to the sense I got that suddenly every note mattered….
The second “found sound” you hear, after the prank phone call, is a recording of a University of Virginia NCAA Tournament basketball game. Rick Carlisle misses a foul shot (despite being Virginia’s best foul shot shooter!) but Indiana misses their last second shot and Virginia grabs the rebound, so VIRGINIA WINS! I may have been listening to this game anyway since my interest in the basketball team of my alma mater UVa (where Evan and I had met) had yet to wane, as it did fairly soon after this. UVa was good at basketball but sucked at football, so I was mostly into basketball until Ed got me into the Broncos. It was only a few years ago that I found out Rick Carlisle had an actual NBA playing career backing up Larry Byrd and has since become an NBA head coach. But WoG has immortalized him missing a college foul shot! I like that….
Evan borrowed the use of the Roland synthesizer of Rick Corrigan, whom we had met both through Charlie Verrette and Architects Office, for this piece. Rick’s synthesizer was polyphonic and had a lusher sound than my piercing, whiny thing, and you hear it making some of the dizzying, spacey sounds near the beginning while I’m making slow sweeping, sireny sounds on mine. Then I come in with my farting attempts at leads as Helen Broderick’s kid makes various kiddy sounds and the theme of a simultaneously scary yet mundane afternoon daydream is established. I definitely wondered why Evan chose to explore this theme and it certainly seemed possible that it was it was mostly just a function of what he was able to get his hands on, like stuff he recorded off the phone, recordings made by Helen of her kid(s) at home, plus various tapes he found at the library, which were mostly a lot of older stuff, actors reading old books and dramas and a speech by JFK, etc. I wondered at the time what the “relevance” was of all this dated stuff, which certainly wasn’t part of the current media (or political) environment in which we lived, the lampooning of which was the point of much of the use of tapes in the underground, but the old stuff sure did help create this musty far away feeling. It makes me almost queasy with a sense of time out of place, like an acid trip that strips you of your rational understanding of where and when you are, and everything seems listless and empty. Was this an experience or perspective Evan was fascinated with? He never indicated anything of the sort to me. Closest thing I could cite was his saying once in college that the closest he’d ever come to a “bad trip” on LSD was in the rarer moments when it made him look at everything around him and think was all just so boring…. He also told a tale of tripping on a cold camping trip and thinking he’d reached nirvana but found it wasn’t very pleasant….
Looking at Evan’s notes, I’m duly impressed with all the work he did putting this together! It’s almost symphonic the way he arranged it all. My synthesizer playing gets crazed at times, and I was never sure if that’s what the piece really called for, but it’s what I knew, so that’s what I did, at least part of the time. Other times I awkwardly played, um, ostinatos? Well let’s say rhythmic repetitions, or attempts thereof. I was feeling it out as I went along. Like most of WoG, it was a one take deal. I guess that improvised duet of ours did keep things rolling amidst the woozy, languid background, albeit occasionally spiced by the likes of a rock ‘n’ roll riff or a series of Tarzan yells….
The weather report portion is very nice and would seem to reflect a more ongoing and recognizable media meme, one that’s a lot more part of people’s ongoing realities than the other stuff, more than most people would probably want to admit, in fact! The cacophony of mundanity of that portion is actually a rather good metaphor for daily life. It’s so out of context to hear Leonard Nimoy reading out of some old book. Then we hear more of Evan playing Rick Corrigan’s “nice” sounding synthesizer, in a downright musical manner. Then it fades away which accentuates the tapes again. This seems a continuation of the “practice” Evan had fading the found sounds up and down against the music on the White Cassette. Another symphonic like attribute was the repeated motif of one-way phone calls. Which also made for another metaphor: no connection!
Part of the problem I always had with this piece was just the way I personally felt while playing on it. I wonder if I smoked any pot before that session? I always feel a lot more creative energy for improvising when I’m stoned, which, oddly enough maybe, it took a while for me to figure out. The way I remember feeling about playing on this recalls for me the way I feel trying to improvise while unstoned. Hard to believe such a state was ever attained at the Hall Of Genius, but I’m sure it sometimes happened….
The piece approaches its conclusion with Evan back on Rick’s Roland, playing a sad and scary sounding motif that fades away as Helen’s apartment recording returns briefly one last time only to be cut off abruptly, and it’s over.
I wish I knew exactly who Anna Doucette, thanked in the liner notes, was. She may have been Helen Broderick’s offspring, but if so, I wonder if that makes her the child recorded naturalistically making various utterances in Helen’s apartment throughout the piece or the older sounding child recorded knowingly reading stuff from books or stories she wrote a couple of times….
“Lingering Household Odours” is a nearly 45-minute tape collage conceived and constructed by Evan. It was a monumental work of mixology at the time. My notes from the mixing indicate just how complex this was.
The notes indicate recordings made on a “Sharp” and an “Akai”. The Sharps were a pair of stereo cassette decks that we used for dubbing cassettes, one at a time, in real-time. I recorded some noises (telephone busy signals) directly to the Sharp via a microphone. The “Akai” was a small, portable cassette machine and it had its own small microphone that could be plugged into it. I used it for a number of things, including putting it in my car seat next to me and driving around the block making a recording of that experience. These recordings would then have to be transferred to the reel-to-reel on the 4-track Dokorder. As the piece had to be mixed in real-time, an error would send me right back to the beginning. I had time available to do this work because I had been laid off from my job at Trust Company Of America and was collecting unemployment. Meanwhile, David, my band housemate, was still working a night shift job at Hotel Boulderado, so I was under strict notice not to make noise during the day while he slept. He was a light sleeper, so this was a big deal for him. For me, it meant that although I had a lot of time on my hands and a music studio in the living room, my hands were tied in terms of any kind of volume. Playing the electric guitar un-amplified was enough to wake up my housemate. But mixing tapes with headphones was a silent activity, so I indulged myself.
For this piece, I assembled recordings of alarm clocks, a drive around the block with the Akai in the car seat, a stapler, telephone busy signals, radio broadcasts, odd material on records like a guy preaching about “nobody, the atom!”, a dishwasher, and machines in Jane Carpenter’s machine shop. All of this was overlaid on one long recording of daily life with a baby in Helen Broderick’s living room, likely made with the Akai, since it was portable. Helen lived in a flat near Boulder High School in a neighborhood that was subsequently completely razed to make a playing field beside the school in the name of flood mitigation. In many ways a paean to all the noises and sounds of everyday life, the piece is also a “found sounds” experiment. I was always one to hum along with the rhythm of machine sounds, windshield wiper blades, and the rhythms associated with the elements of everyday life. This piece took those household sounds and put them front and center, elevating the quotidian to the level of art.
Everything was on 4 different tracks, which allowed me to fade in and fade out as necessary, adjust tone controls and to pan liberally for stereophonic effects. I didn’t use any splicing of tape, for two reasons. One was that I didn’t really know how to. The other was that I had had bad experiences in the past with recording techs who were enthusiastic about cutting and clipping tape. In 1976, the recording of the one concert that Dreamer Easy played at Old Cabell Hall on University of Virginia campus was ruined by the use of a tape that had been spliced backwards. Dreamer Easy was an all-original King Crimson-soundalike band that I dropped out of college in which to play bass for a semester. This experience was part of my growing frustration with spacey recording engineers and one of the reasons I had obtained my own 4-track reel machine in the first place.
I included musical sections recorded on Rick Corrigan’s Roland (a polyphonic synthesizer) in “Lingering Household Odours” because I wasn’t keen on the 100% abstraction utilized by Architects Office’s more random “aleatoric” approach. David and I were probably already at odds with A/O’s prime mover by this time regarding the percussion and musical elements we introduced performing with Architects Office. In March of 1984, this piece was constructed shortly after Joel Haertling ruined recordings of the Festival of Pain (February 1984) by whispering the words “Architects Office” repeatedly into the microphones, but prior to live A/O performances that included WoG personnel in April 1984. So we were still friends at the time this piece was constructed.
Little Fyodor:
“Lingering Household Odors” was pretty much all Evan. All I did was overdub a synthesizer part throughout, at Evan’s behest. As mentioned above, I wasn’t especially comfortable with my part, largely because I sure am no keyboardist, and yet I was playing more like one than ever before for this, and the context was much more serious sounding than ever. I believe I played the synthesizer at the same time that Evan played his roto-toms, pretty much as we had been doing with AO, only without several other synthesists all going at it simultaneously. Being the only synthesizer player contributed to the sense I got that suddenly every note mattered….
The second “found sound” you hear, after the prank phone call, is a recording of a University of Virginia NCAA Tournament basketball game. Rick Carlisle misses a foul shot (despite being Virginia’s best foul shot shooter!) but Indiana misses their last second shot and Virginia grabs the rebound, so VIRGINIA WINS! I may have been listening to this game anyway since my interest in the basketball team of my alma mater UVa (where Evan and I had met) had yet to wane, as it did fairly soon after this. UVa was good at basketball but sucked at football, so I was mostly into basketball until Ed got me into the Broncos. It was only a few years ago that I found out Rick Carlisle had an actual NBA playing career backing up Larry Byrd and has since become an NBA head coach. But WoG has immortalized him missing a college foul shot! I like that….
Evan borrowed the use of the Roland synthesizer of Rick Corrigan, whom we had met both through Charlie Verrette and Architects Office, for this piece. Rick’s synthesizer was polyphonic and had a lusher sound than my piercing, whiny thing, and you hear it making some of the dizzying, spacey sounds near the beginning while I’m making slow sweeping, sireny sounds on mine. Then I come in with my farting attempts at leads as Helen Broderick’s kid makes various kiddy sounds and the theme of a simultaneously scary yet mundane afternoon daydream is established. I definitely wondered why Evan chose to explore this theme and it certainly seemed possible that it was it was mostly just a function of what he was able to get his hands on, like stuff he recorded off the phone, recordings made by Helen of her kid(s) at home, plus various tapes he found at the library, which were mostly a lot of older stuff, actors reading old books and dramas and a speech by JFK, etc. I wondered at the time what the “relevance” was of all this dated stuff, which certainly wasn’t part of the current media (or political) environment in which we lived, the lampooning of which was the point of much of the use of tapes in the underground, but the old stuff sure did help create this musty far away feeling. It makes me almost queasy with a sense of time out of place, like an acid trip that strips you of your rational understanding of where and when you are, and everything seems listless and empty. Was this an experience or perspective Evan was fascinated with? He never indicated anything of the sort to me. Closest thing I could cite was his saying once in college that the closest he’d ever come to a “bad trip” on LSD was in the rarer moments when it made him look at everything around him and think was all just so boring…. He also told a tale of tripping on a cold camping trip and thinking he’d reached nirvana but found it wasn’t very pleasant….
Looking at Evan’s notes, I’m duly impressed with all the work he did putting this together! It’s almost symphonic the way he arranged it all. My synthesizer playing gets crazed at times, and I was never sure if that’s what the piece really called for, but it’s what I knew, so that’s what I did, at least part of the time. Other times I awkwardly played, um, ostinatos? Well let’s say rhythmic repetitions, or attempts thereof. I was feeling it out as I went along. Like most of WoG, it was a one take deal. I guess that improvised duet of ours did keep things rolling amidst the woozy, languid background, albeit occasionally spiced by the likes of a rock ‘n’ roll riff or a series of Tarzan yells….
The weather report portion is very nice and would seem to reflect a more ongoing and recognizable media meme, one that’s a lot more part of people’s ongoing realities than the other stuff, more than most people would probably want to admit, in fact! The cacophony of mundanity of that portion is actually a rather good metaphor for daily life. It’s so out of context to hear Leonard Nimoy reading out of some old book. Then we hear more of Evan playing Rick Corrigan’s “nice” sounding synthesizer, in a downright musical manner. Then it fades away which accentuates the tapes again. This seems a continuation of the “practice” Evan had fading the found sounds up and down against the music on the White Cassette. Another symphonic like attribute was the repeated motif of one-way phone calls. Which also made for another metaphor: no connection!
Part of the problem I always had with this piece was just the way I personally felt while playing on it. I wonder if I smoked any pot before that session? I always feel a lot more creative energy for improvising when I’m stoned, which, oddly enough maybe, it took a while for me to figure out. The way I remember feeling about playing on this recalls for me the way I feel trying to improvise while unstoned. Hard to believe such a state was ever attained at the Hall Of Genius, but I’m sure it sometimes happened….
The piece approaches its conclusion with Evan back on Rick’s Roland, playing a sad and scary sounding motif that fades away as Helen’s apartment recording returns briefly one last time only to be cut off abruptly, and it’s over.
I wish I knew exactly who Anna Doucette, thanked in the liner notes, was. She may have been Helen Broderick’s offspring, but if so, I wonder if that makes her the child recorded naturalistically making various utterances in Helen’s apartment throughout the piece or the older sounding child recorded knowingly reading stuff from books or stories she wrote a couple of times….
Side B
- "Proxy War (Critic's Pick)" (Fowler)
Ed Fowler: Guitars, Manipulated Vinyl
Evan Cantor: Vocals
David Lichtenverg: Synthesizer, Vocals
- "Industrial Daydream" (Lichtenverg)
all instruments: David Lichtenverg
- "Taps" (Lichtenverg)
all instruments: David Lichtenverg
- "Porcelain God" (Lichtenverg)
all instruments: David Lichtenverg
- "Jane's Garage" (Carpenter, Cantor)
Jane Carpenter: Bridgeport, Harrison Lathe, Air Compressor, Scrap Metal
Evan Cantor: Scrap Metal
- "Proxy War (Critic's Pick)" (Fowler)
Ed Fowler: Guitars, Manipulated Vinyl
Evan Cantor: Vocals
David Lichtenverg: Synthesizer, Vocals
- "Industrial Daydream" (Lichtenverg)
all instruments: David Lichtenverg
- "Taps" (Lichtenverg)
all instruments: David Lichtenverg
- "Porcelain God" (Lichtenverg)
all instruments: David Lichtenverg
- "Jane's Garage" (Carpenter, Cantor)
Jane Carpenter: Bridgeport, Harrison Lathe, Air Compressor, Scrap Metal
Evan Cantor: Scrap Metal
“Proxy War (Critic’s Picks)”
Evan Cantor:
We forced Ed to do something and this is what he came up with. He even mixed the piece, a one-time only experience, although I suspect that David and I had as much to do with the composition as did Ed. The manipulated record effect had been used once, briefly, by us on the track “Bozos Return” (White Cassette), but here it is the prime focus, creating an unusual effect that strikes me as the viewing of life on earth through a distorting lens. Voices well up like the cries of lost souls in Purgatory. This is almost the soundtrack of Purgatory itself, or a live video-feed of an Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. There is terrific use of the stereophonic effect achieved by panning. Foghorns from the deep recesses of the id blare out, voices run through a digital delay moan, call out and whine, and there is even a burst of evil laughter. The piece peters out with manipulated vinyl to a cut-off.
Little Fyodor:
I also wish I remember more of Ed’s methodology for “Proxy War (Critic’s Pick)”, and there’s only so much I can tell you about his frame of mind in deciding to do this beyond what I said above, that it was made while known and agreed upon that this would be an abstract and noisy release. I do know that this piece involved a lot of records that Ed brought over to the Hall of Genius and then played in some “manipulated” fashion. I believe they may have been played off center so that they wiggled around on the turntable. I’m pretty sure that’s what he did with a record by a local night club performer with the surname Nunez or thereabouts for the “Bozo’s Return” bit on the White Cassette (or showed Evan what to do with it if Ed didn’t actually “spin” it himself at that time), so this may have been more of the same, except with a great variety of records, one succeeding the other, and I think he may have run them through his Echoplex as well. I recall him trying real hard for some sort of seamless transition between each record, such that the transition wouldn’t be noticed as such, maybe he was turning the volume up and down so that you never heard any one record start or end at full volume, or the needle hitting the record. I believe he managed this throughout except for one time in the middle when he goofed and a record got started while at full volume and he rolled his eyes in an, “Oh man, I screwed that up!” type manner, but me and Evan thought no one would ever notice. I believe I could hear his “error” at the time cause I knew what to look for, but listening to it now, God only knows where it is!
Anyway, so he laid down one track of this manipulated vinyl craziness, and then we just jammed along with it on the other tracks, with Ed playing very effected guitar, most likely through his Echoplex and maybe through an octave divider since it sounds so low pitched, and me playing synthesizer and then me and Evan screaming vocals through the Echoplex. All this was Ed’s idea. He just asked us to jam along with this crazy manipulated vinyl and we did, without much of any goal in mind except to go apeshit, knowing that it would all be part of this great fuzzy blob of insanity. I’m sure the title was his idea. He liked very random titles, like the band name, Fabian Policy. I had fun doing my synthesizer track cause it basically didn’t matter what I did and I just made all the crazy sounds I could come up with! Fittingly, it all ends with the sound of a turntable needle being lifted off a record. Although this action had transpired many times throughout the piece, I believe, as alluded to above, that Ed made a point of not letting this sound be heard until this point, when it was probably recorded intentionally as a statement of what had been going on (though I can’t foreswear the possibility that it was an accident that was left in)…. I should add regarding Ed’s motivation that he had probably just found that records sounded cool when played off center and thought this was a way of being noisy/arty but silly both at the same time! Experrrrrrrrrrrrrimental music based on records played off center to sound ridiculous! And then just anything else (ridiculous?) we felt like throwing on top….
“Industrial Daydream”
LF:
My Pro-One synthesizer has this crude programming feature that lets you program a pattern of notes and rests. Its crudeness prevents you from programming anything with anything but the most stilted and robotic rhythms. I was fooling around with this feature and found a pattern I liked with a patch I thought sounded really cool and especially hellacious when run through my flanger. I believe I had been fooling around with this for a while, before the serious/noisy assignment came down the pipe, but that assignment made this an ideal idea to record and make something out of. I heard in my head a higher pitched, kind of child-like part to go along with it, and I worked out a pattern and patch to match what I was hearing, and overdubbed the two on top of each other, just letting them both run for a few minutes, and not worrying that the two patterns didn’t synch up at all. I kind of liked the feel their random overlapping created. I was a little dismayed that not all of the notes of the higher pitched part were always audible while the lower pitched part played, but oh well. I couldn’t get the highest notes to be heard consistently without the less high notes being too loud, so I had to settle. Then I overdubbed a slide whistle part, cause I liked playing slide whistle. My plan for the slide whistle was to slowly build up to a crescendo by the end, but I kind of ran out of things to do and ended up wigging out earlier than I was supposed to, kind of peaking too soon. But for whatever reason, I didn’t do it over and just kept that part. I faded the synthesizers down toward the end and allowed the wigging out slide whistle the final say. I wanted the fading out of the languid synth parts to give extra emphasis to the wigging out of the slide whistle which I then cut off abruptly mid wigging. I’m not sure if I realized before right now that I attempted to repeat this effect post-WoG on a Little Fyodor piece called “Oh God I Feel Like Shit” in which I faded out a rhythm part and faded up a crazy guitar part I asked Ed to overdub before cutting him off abruptly. Back to this here piece, I called it “Industrial Daydream” to represent the contrast between the two synthesizer parts, one ominous and ogrely and the other lackadaisically whimsical, like walking around in an aimless, nonchalant daze amidst a bleak construction site or worse. Maybe the slide whistle represents some unpleasant reality lurking in the background until asserting its inevitable intensity at the end….
EC:
David made good use of the synthesizer here. Note that we are now listing him as “David Lichtenverg” as opposed to his given family name, Lichtenberg. Only David can say why he desired this. He’s got some great synthesizer swells going on here, punctuated by a lead slide whistle. The synth sounds very ominous and serious, but the slide whistle is, of course, completely whimsical.
“Taps”
LF:
I had been fascinated for a little while with very alternative percussive devices, like balls bouncing and coinage shaking. One of the sounds might be a paper towel roll. I liked the sound they made when banged on counters or tables, and you can tap them in distinct beats or dribble them in multi beat fashion, like they’re just vibrating. I might have been influenced for this by a track by a cassette band called XPosed 4Heads, who did one song with a bouncing ball for a rhythm track. I pointed the song out to Evan and told him to listen to the rhythm, and he just called it “erratic,” so I explored this fascination of mine on my own. At one point I wind up a wind up toy and let it run. I’m afraid I cannot recall all the little things I banged and bounced and whacked and fluttered! Listening to it now, I believe I hear a partly filled Coleman fuel canister that I was banging on with something, maybe a kitchen utensil, as I tilted the canister at various angles to get different sliding tones. At the very end I try to establish a short lived rhythm on something before ending it all with some falling change! This one’s called “Taps” for all the tapping and such I do; it might be represented on the reel boxes where Evan wrote “Lichtendubs” right after “Industrial Daydream”.
EC:
David’s all-percussive vehicle, this sounds like a symphony of improvised percussive devices. He is likely tapping on a number of things to produce the effects, hence the title. We had discovered that very quiet sounds placed close to a microphone could produce tremendous effect.
“Porcelain God”
LF:
The previous two tracks were recorded on the same reel as Ed’s “Proxy War (Critic’s Pick)”, so we know they were all recorded at about that same time. “Porcelain God” was recorded on a separate reel, a reel apparently mostly dedicated to my own personal work, and originally titled as “Wind & Water” (maybe Evan’s name, since it’s his handwriting). It appears in between the original recording of “Cheap!”, which was released on a much earlier tape, and “Impressions of Denver”, which appeared on a tape four catalog numbers later, so there’s no telling for sure when this one was recorded, or at least started. I believe I at least finished it up for this release. “Porcelain God,” heh. That’s a toilet, in case you didn’t get it! I was fascinated with the sound of our running toilet, go figure. So I recorded it and it also inspired me to make some other sounds along with it, some at different tape speeds, making them sounding lower or higher on playback as the case may be. Some of this may have just been practice or fooling around without regard to what was concurrently recorded on the other tracks. One of the sounds may have been a vocalization right close up to the mike to see what effect I could get….
EC:
This very short piece features water and wind sounds along with a kind of caveman growling sound. Some Fyodor squealing emerges from one side of the stereophonic mix with dripping water on the other.
“Jane’s Garage”
EC:
“Jane’s Garage” was my foray into musique concrète. We ran Jane Carpenter’s machines and jingled-and-jangled scrap metal of all kinds in her shop to produce a very abstract musical piece, but musical nonetheless. Jane was given co-author credit with Evan and she is credited for performing on a “Bridgeport, Harrison lathe, Air Compressor and scrap metal.” Evan performed simply on scrap metal. This is machine music if ever there was such a thing. There is a lot of turning on-and-off of machines, getting the different tones of the engines and the whine as they wind down. We are obviously applying scrap metal to the lathe to produce all kinds of grinding, shrieking and squealing machine sounds. The jangling of piles of scrap metal sound like bells. The air compressor provides its own unique whooshing sound.
Jane’s machine shop was located in what is now called “old-town” Superior, Colorado. At the time, the “old-town” was all there was of it and it was just a tiny little rural town out in the country with no services. Now it is surrounded by an enveloping sea of suburban development and shopping centers, just to the east of Davidson Mesa, the summit ridge of which forms the southeast rim of Boulder Valley. You can’t see all this development from Boulder because it’s just over, behind and below, the rim of the mesa. Jane Carpenter moved to Salida, Colorado, some years ago, and I ran into her there once, but we are not in touch.
LF:
So, you say you want Industrial Music? Well, Walls Of Genius is gonna give you INDUSTRIAL MUSIC!! And what better way than to record the machines at a genuine machine shop? We knew Jane Carpenter through KGNU, she probably participated in the old time country music show there or did her own morning folk music show. She lived in a nearby town called Superior that, despite its proximity to Boulder and Denver, was somewhat of a little, dinky country town back then, without any town supplied running water even, I think. Today, it’s overrun with a huge, modern condo complex…. Jane had a machine shop that she made something at that she sold, I presume, to make a living, I also presume. I wish I remembered what they made there, maybe Evan does. Anyway, being the logical sort that he is, Evan saw this as a good opportunity to make industrial music and thus asked Jane if he could make a recording there and Jane obliged. Evan later told me that Jane said it never sounds like they made it sound that evening when they were using it for its actual usual industrial purpose and as a matter of fact, they usually tried to keep the machines as quiet as possible! But the machines were turned into instruments for “Jane’s Garage” and employed to make NOISE! (Title an obvious reference to Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage”)
Evan Cantor:
We forced Ed to do something and this is what he came up with. He even mixed the piece, a one-time only experience, although I suspect that David and I had as much to do with the composition as did Ed. The manipulated record effect had been used once, briefly, by us on the track “Bozos Return” (White Cassette), but here it is the prime focus, creating an unusual effect that strikes me as the viewing of life on earth through a distorting lens. Voices well up like the cries of lost souls in Purgatory. This is almost the soundtrack of Purgatory itself, or a live video-feed of an Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. There is terrific use of the stereophonic effect achieved by panning. Foghorns from the deep recesses of the id blare out, voices run through a digital delay moan, call out and whine, and there is even a burst of evil laughter. The piece peters out with manipulated vinyl to a cut-off.
Little Fyodor:
I also wish I remember more of Ed’s methodology for “Proxy War (Critic’s Pick)”, and there’s only so much I can tell you about his frame of mind in deciding to do this beyond what I said above, that it was made while known and agreed upon that this would be an abstract and noisy release. I do know that this piece involved a lot of records that Ed brought over to the Hall of Genius and then played in some “manipulated” fashion. I believe they may have been played off center so that they wiggled around on the turntable. I’m pretty sure that’s what he did with a record by a local night club performer with the surname Nunez or thereabouts for the “Bozo’s Return” bit on the White Cassette (or showed Evan what to do with it if Ed didn’t actually “spin” it himself at that time), so this may have been more of the same, except with a great variety of records, one succeeding the other, and I think he may have run them through his Echoplex as well. I recall him trying real hard for some sort of seamless transition between each record, such that the transition wouldn’t be noticed as such, maybe he was turning the volume up and down so that you never heard any one record start or end at full volume, or the needle hitting the record. I believe he managed this throughout except for one time in the middle when he goofed and a record got started while at full volume and he rolled his eyes in an, “Oh man, I screwed that up!” type manner, but me and Evan thought no one would ever notice. I believe I could hear his “error” at the time cause I knew what to look for, but listening to it now, God only knows where it is!
Anyway, so he laid down one track of this manipulated vinyl craziness, and then we just jammed along with it on the other tracks, with Ed playing very effected guitar, most likely through his Echoplex and maybe through an octave divider since it sounds so low pitched, and me playing synthesizer and then me and Evan screaming vocals through the Echoplex. All this was Ed’s idea. He just asked us to jam along with this crazy manipulated vinyl and we did, without much of any goal in mind except to go apeshit, knowing that it would all be part of this great fuzzy blob of insanity. I’m sure the title was his idea. He liked very random titles, like the band name, Fabian Policy. I had fun doing my synthesizer track cause it basically didn’t matter what I did and I just made all the crazy sounds I could come up with! Fittingly, it all ends with the sound of a turntable needle being lifted off a record. Although this action had transpired many times throughout the piece, I believe, as alluded to above, that Ed made a point of not letting this sound be heard until this point, when it was probably recorded intentionally as a statement of what had been going on (though I can’t foreswear the possibility that it was an accident that was left in)…. I should add regarding Ed’s motivation that he had probably just found that records sounded cool when played off center and thought this was a way of being noisy/arty but silly both at the same time! Experrrrrrrrrrrrrimental music based on records played off center to sound ridiculous! And then just anything else (ridiculous?) we felt like throwing on top….
“Industrial Daydream”
LF:
My Pro-One synthesizer has this crude programming feature that lets you program a pattern of notes and rests. Its crudeness prevents you from programming anything with anything but the most stilted and robotic rhythms. I was fooling around with this feature and found a pattern I liked with a patch I thought sounded really cool and especially hellacious when run through my flanger. I believe I had been fooling around with this for a while, before the serious/noisy assignment came down the pipe, but that assignment made this an ideal idea to record and make something out of. I heard in my head a higher pitched, kind of child-like part to go along with it, and I worked out a pattern and patch to match what I was hearing, and overdubbed the two on top of each other, just letting them both run for a few minutes, and not worrying that the two patterns didn’t synch up at all. I kind of liked the feel their random overlapping created. I was a little dismayed that not all of the notes of the higher pitched part were always audible while the lower pitched part played, but oh well. I couldn’t get the highest notes to be heard consistently without the less high notes being too loud, so I had to settle. Then I overdubbed a slide whistle part, cause I liked playing slide whistle. My plan for the slide whistle was to slowly build up to a crescendo by the end, but I kind of ran out of things to do and ended up wigging out earlier than I was supposed to, kind of peaking too soon. But for whatever reason, I didn’t do it over and just kept that part. I faded the synthesizers down toward the end and allowed the wigging out slide whistle the final say. I wanted the fading out of the languid synth parts to give extra emphasis to the wigging out of the slide whistle which I then cut off abruptly mid wigging. I’m not sure if I realized before right now that I attempted to repeat this effect post-WoG on a Little Fyodor piece called “Oh God I Feel Like Shit” in which I faded out a rhythm part and faded up a crazy guitar part I asked Ed to overdub before cutting him off abruptly. Back to this here piece, I called it “Industrial Daydream” to represent the contrast between the two synthesizer parts, one ominous and ogrely and the other lackadaisically whimsical, like walking around in an aimless, nonchalant daze amidst a bleak construction site or worse. Maybe the slide whistle represents some unpleasant reality lurking in the background until asserting its inevitable intensity at the end….
EC:
David made good use of the synthesizer here. Note that we are now listing him as “David Lichtenverg” as opposed to his given family name, Lichtenberg. Only David can say why he desired this. He’s got some great synthesizer swells going on here, punctuated by a lead slide whistle. The synth sounds very ominous and serious, but the slide whistle is, of course, completely whimsical.
“Taps”
LF:
I had been fascinated for a little while with very alternative percussive devices, like balls bouncing and coinage shaking. One of the sounds might be a paper towel roll. I liked the sound they made when banged on counters or tables, and you can tap them in distinct beats or dribble them in multi beat fashion, like they’re just vibrating. I might have been influenced for this by a track by a cassette band called XPosed 4Heads, who did one song with a bouncing ball for a rhythm track. I pointed the song out to Evan and told him to listen to the rhythm, and he just called it “erratic,” so I explored this fascination of mine on my own. At one point I wind up a wind up toy and let it run. I’m afraid I cannot recall all the little things I banged and bounced and whacked and fluttered! Listening to it now, I believe I hear a partly filled Coleman fuel canister that I was banging on with something, maybe a kitchen utensil, as I tilted the canister at various angles to get different sliding tones. At the very end I try to establish a short lived rhythm on something before ending it all with some falling change! This one’s called “Taps” for all the tapping and such I do; it might be represented on the reel boxes where Evan wrote “Lichtendubs” right after “Industrial Daydream”.
EC:
David’s all-percussive vehicle, this sounds like a symphony of improvised percussive devices. He is likely tapping on a number of things to produce the effects, hence the title. We had discovered that very quiet sounds placed close to a microphone could produce tremendous effect.
“Porcelain God”
LF:
The previous two tracks were recorded on the same reel as Ed’s “Proxy War (Critic’s Pick)”, so we know they were all recorded at about that same time. “Porcelain God” was recorded on a separate reel, a reel apparently mostly dedicated to my own personal work, and originally titled as “Wind & Water” (maybe Evan’s name, since it’s his handwriting). It appears in between the original recording of “Cheap!”, which was released on a much earlier tape, and “Impressions of Denver”, which appeared on a tape four catalog numbers later, so there’s no telling for sure when this one was recorded, or at least started. I believe I at least finished it up for this release. “Porcelain God,” heh. That’s a toilet, in case you didn’t get it! I was fascinated with the sound of our running toilet, go figure. So I recorded it and it also inspired me to make some other sounds along with it, some at different tape speeds, making them sounding lower or higher on playback as the case may be. Some of this may have just been practice or fooling around without regard to what was concurrently recorded on the other tracks. One of the sounds may have been a vocalization right close up to the mike to see what effect I could get….
EC:
This very short piece features water and wind sounds along with a kind of caveman growling sound. Some Fyodor squealing emerges from one side of the stereophonic mix with dripping water on the other.
“Jane’s Garage”
EC:
“Jane’s Garage” was my foray into musique concrète. We ran Jane Carpenter’s machines and jingled-and-jangled scrap metal of all kinds in her shop to produce a very abstract musical piece, but musical nonetheless. Jane was given co-author credit with Evan and she is credited for performing on a “Bridgeport, Harrison lathe, Air Compressor and scrap metal.” Evan performed simply on scrap metal. This is machine music if ever there was such a thing. There is a lot of turning on-and-off of machines, getting the different tones of the engines and the whine as they wind down. We are obviously applying scrap metal to the lathe to produce all kinds of grinding, shrieking and squealing machine sounds. The jangling of piles of scrap metal sound like bells. The air compressor provides its own unique whooshing sound.
Jane’s machine shop was located in what is now called “old-town” Superior, Colorado. At the time, the “old-town” was all there was of it and it was just a tiny little rural town out in the country with no services. Now it is surrounded by an enveloping sea of suburban development and shopping centers, just to the east of Davidson Mesa, the summit ridge of which forms the southeast rim of Boulder Valley. You can’t see all this development from Boulder because it’s just over, behind and below, the rim of the mesa. Jane Carpenter moved to Salida, Colorado, some years ago, and I ran into her there once, but we are not in touch.
LF:
So, you say you want Industrial Music? Well, Walls Of Genius is gonna give you INDUSTRIAL MUSIC!! And what better way than to record the machines at a genuine machine shop? We knew Jane Carpenter through KGNU, she probably participated in the old time country music show there or did her own morning folk music show. She lived in a nearby town called Superior that, despite its proximity to Boulder and Denver, was somewhat of a little, dinky country town back then, without any town supplied running water even, I think. Today, it’s overrun with a huge, modern condo complex…. Jane had a machine shop that she made something at that she sold, I presume, to make a living, I also presume. I wish I remembered what they made there, maybe Evan does. Anyway, being the logical sort that he is, Evan saw this as a good opportunity to make industrial music and thus asked Jane if he could make a recording there and Jane obliged. Evan later told me that Jane said it never sounds like they made it sound that evening when they were using it for its actual usual industrial purpose and as a matter of fact, they usually tried to keep the machines as quiet as possible! But the machines were turned into instruments for “Jane’s Garage” and employed to make NOISE! (Title an obvious reference to Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage”)
review as printed in the seventh Walls Of Genius catalog, A Tale Of Two Twits
LUDOVICO TREATMENT is Walls Of Genius' most far-reaching foray into the realm of NOISE. The showcase piece, "Lingering Household Odors", is an atmospheric sound collage that brings you to the inner dimensions of mundane reality, pitting the crys of children against the squeals and grunts of synthesized sound. "Proxy War (Critic's Choice)" pits modern electronics against the disaffected voices of songs from the past. The rest of the tape uses both familiar and unfamiliar sounds ranging from half-filled water bottles to manipulated tape loops--Visit your local Machine Shop for exact identification!
- description from the sixth Walls Of Genius catalog, The Bane Of The Buffoon
- description from the sixth Walls Of Genius catalog, The Bane Of The Buffoon
Review of Ludovico Treatment by Jerry Kranitz at Aural Innovations, January 2004:
Ludovico Treatment: Music To Cure Your Ills is a 2-CD reissue of a cassette release from 1984. CD 1 is a single 47 minute track that features WoG's more experimental sound collage interests. The disc opens with a wandering space wave, percussion and voice samples of kids playing. Various bleeps and burps pop in which adds a playful video game feel to the proceedings. I enjoyed the part where a little girl tells a story while the video game synths dance about, mommy offers a kid a graham cracker, a marching band is going on the television in the background, and table-top percussion encourages the electronics to groove. And amidst all the noodling we hear a lot of really cool electronic space bits, some of which reminds me of what Alien Planetscapes were doing around the same period. And it's all quite fun when combined with the kids screaming, whacky bleeping synths and whatever strange shows happen to be on the television.
CD 2 follows in the same exploratory avant-garde vein, the opening 25 minute track being a highlight with lots of quirky noodling sci fi sounds, cavernous space atmospherics, and oddball voice samples. It's an interesting mixture of serious deep-in-space soundscapes and sound sample zaniness. Just imagine a collaboration between Tangerine Dream circa 1973 and the Residents (lots of Eskimo influences to be heard here) and you'll get something like this. This is pretty cool stuff. A high kosmiche factor but with a solid sense of humor. The other lengthy track on CD 2 is quite different with WoG taking us on a visit to a construction site or machine shop where jackhammers and other industrial strength tools are going full blow... but later in the piece seeming to do so at an intentionally designed rhythmic pace. Interesting.
Ludovico Treatment: Music To Cure Your Ills is a 2-CD reissue of a cassette release from 1984. CD 1 is a single 47 minute track that features WoG's more experimental sound collage interests. The disc opens with a wandering space wave, percussion and voice samples of kids playing. Various bleeps and burps pop in which adds a playful video game feel to the proceedings. I enjoyed the part where a little girl tells a story while the video game synths dance about, mommy offers a kid a graham cracker, a marching band is going on the television in the background, and table-top percussion encourages the electronics to groove. And amidst all the noodling we hear a lot of really cool electronic space bits, some of which reminds me of what Alien Planetscapes were doing around the same period. And it's all quite fun when combined with the kids screaming, whacky bleeping synths and whatever strange shows happen to be on the television.
CD 2 follows in the same exploratory avant-garde vein, the opening 25 minute track being a highlight with lots of quirky noodling sci fi sounds, cavernous space atmospherics, and oddball voice samples. It's an interesting mixture of serious deep-in-space soundscapes and sound sample zaniness. Just imagine a collaboration between Tangerine Dream circa 1973 and the Residents (lots of Eskimo influences to be heard here) and you'll get something like this. This is pretty cool stuff. A high kosmiche factor but with a solid sense of humor. The other lengthy track on CD 2 is quite different with WoG taking us on a visit to a construction site or machine shop where jackhammers and other industrial strength tools are going full blow... but later in the piece seeming to do so at an intentionally designed rhythmic pace. Interesting.
