Madness Lives compilation
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WoG 0030 - Son Of Madness
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Little Fyodor:
I don’t know if there was a separate clarion call for Son Of Madness per se. Seems that there was at least some attempt to put the word out, but probably nothing as official as the catalog announcement for Madness Lives, and certainly at least some of SOM’s content is leftover from ML, though much of it clearly was newly acquired as well. We probably let people know about the new comp via correspondence, and I’m guessing some of the repeat offenders sent us brand new submissions as a result of that, though I know Jay-Co’s selection, for one, was definitely just left over from the original tape that was sent to us for ML, and he may not have been alone in that regard, though ultimately I sure as hell don’t remember now who all sent what when….
Evan Cantor:
We had so much material that we decided to do a second compilation, Son Of Madness. The modus operandi was the same as Madness Lives. The cover features four photographs I took of Andrew Brennan. Andy lived in the basement apartment at the Hall Of Genius for some time and we were all pals. On the cover, he grins knowingly and on the inside he appears to be a happy guy, then a crazed dude chewing on a cigarette, and then, finally, completely mad.
Since the booklet-assembling process for Madness Lives was such a lot of work, I opted for a fold-out approach to this one. The foldout was printed on the same nice beige paper that I had used for the Madness Lives cover. The foldout has the names and addresses of contributors and the special thanks. Even though we thanked “Cover photo of Andrew Brennan, composer, by Evan Cantor”, a number of people thought it was a picture of me.
We thanked Martha Roskowski and Tom Day for the Mag Clips submission. We thanked Bob O’Connor for the Meichenbaub tapes and Ed Fowler for Russ Stevens’ tape. These were all people who were so impressed by Madness Lives that they wanted to participate in some way with the sequel. Russ Stevens was one of the original Dirt Clods, an old friend of Ed Fowler and his submission, “Slap The Buttocks”, is a masterpiece. I don’t know who the Mag Clips were, but obviously Martha Roskowski (one of our KGNU people) and Tom Day (another KGNU person?) did and they offered us the track “Kopechne”, about the girl that Ted Kennedy inadvertently killed in a famous car crash.
LF:
The cover features various poses of our new downstairs neighbor, Andrew Brennan, who replaced the kids we tried to get evicted for blasting wall-shaking music in the middle of the night but who finally sealed their fate by almost burning the house down. Andy was the first downstairs neighbor we knew well enough to open the door between our apartments. Andy had a piano down there and we jammed with him a couple of times (with and without the piano) though none of that made it onto a WoG release. Andrew also occupied his time writing his own take on classical piano concertos via long hand musical notation. Evan even talked about using a recording of one of his pieces for Son Of Madness, but when my body English demonstrated my antipathy to the idea, he not only changed his mind but hid all of Andy’s materials as if he feared I would harm them. Evan did use Andy’s compositional notation as a backdrop for the list of names and contact addresses for the artists who did appear on the comp. Andy’s music was certainly not representative of the underground scene per se, but he certainly did embody the spirit of DIY! He sent a recording of his music to some critic once who sent back a scathing letter complaining of how sick he was of hearing “period pieces” like this or some such. Oh well, Andy loved doing it for its own sake, anyway (do NOT cue old Harry Chapin song!)….
EC:
Bob O’Connor was only nineteen years old when we met him, late night at KGNU radio. Bob was a talented musician, but he had a disestablishmentarian streak that endeared him to us and vice versa. “Meichenbaub” was him and a friend named Mike (“Mike-and-Bob”). They had made some recordings on a cassette that they called “Basement Tapes”. Their version of “Gilligan’s Island” theme was a wonderfully demented take on the famous theme song to what may very well be the stupidest mainstream television show ever. Bob liked to reminisce that he had been invited to “join” Walls of Genius one day and then told that the band had broken up the next. I stayed in touch, on-and-off, with Bob for many years. In the late 80s or very early 90s, he went to Austin, Texas, to ‘make his name’, in search of a professional music career and his songwriting really took off. He could have been writing seriously for Steve Earle or Willie Nelson. He got so good that he wanted all his “Basement Tapes” back because he was afraid somebody would use them to advantage when he hit the big time. I wouldn’t give it back and he never did hit the big time, which was tremendously disappointing for him. Alcoholic demons plagued him and they finally got the better of him when he took his own life in October 2006. I miss my old friend and think of him often.
LF:
Throughout the entirety of Walls Of Genius, the vast majority of decisions of any sort regarding the band and the label were made by Evan, sometimes with my input and sometimes not, and it was certainly Evan who primarily chose the sequencing of the songs on Madness Lives (and did an outstanding job!), if possibly with some degree of input from me, though if so it was likely mostly just to confirm his wisdom on the matter. Towards the end of Walls Of Genius’s first pass at existence (and Son Of Madness was the very last tape listed in our final catalog lineup), I did start to assert my own opinions more, and I especially asserted myself regarding the sequencing (and in one case the choice of material) on the first side of Son Of Madness, as a strong inspiration suddenly hit me while Evan was in the process of compiling the master tape, and I almost began to give orders. Evan reacted warily, but he saw I was onto something and mostly followed my suggestions. (“I am 100% confident of my own judgment,” he said, “and it is my judgment to listen to you!”) It just seemed to me that there was a certain pattern emerging from the submissions regarding personal and social problems that could be exploited via a certain sequencing that would highlight this. I felt vindicated when one reviewer described the tape as a bunch of people letting all their problems out via their tape recorders or some such, which seemed to at least partly capture what I was going after….
EC:
Son Of Madness opens with the Cowtown version of “Rainy Day Women”, the WoG/Cowtown collaboration described previously.
Some new participants included Dino Dimuro, a Hollywood sound engineer and Don Campau, a long-time and prominent cassette culture artist.
There were also tunes by cassette culture stalwarts Schlafengarten, Vox Populi, Bene Gesserit, John Oswald, Master/Slave Relationship (Debbie Jaffe), Problemist, Tom Furgas and Roberta Eklund (a sex symbol of the cassette culture). “Jay-Co” returns from Madness with another tune, another of those anonymous contributors who have never been actually identified. There are two Hitler related pieces, Dimuro’s terrific “Hitlerrock”, where he apes the rhythms of Hitler’s demented speeches and the crazed sexuality of Eklund’s “She Fucked Hitler”. Booed Usic (Tim Ore) offers a tune and we would later promote a performance by Tim as tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE in Denver when he went on tour in 1986. As Wally Bob Colorado, I perform a twisted country-punk take on Dusty Springfield’s “Ode to Billy Joe”, re-writing the words as “Ode to Ronnie Joe”, about Ronald Reagan jumping off the Theodore Roosevelt bridge in Washington D.C. A man could dream, couldn’t he? Where Tim Clifford got clips of “Mr. Butch”, I have no idea, but we ended the tape with clips from an interview with him and that filled out the 90-minute length.
I don’t know if there was a separate clarion call for Son Of Madness per se. Seems that there was at least some attempt to put the word out, but probably nothing as official as the catalog announcement for Madness Lives, and certainly at least some of SOM’s content is leftover from ML, though much of it clearly was newly acquired as well. We probably let people know about the new comp via correspondence, and I’m guessing some of the repeat offenders sent us brand new submissions as a result of that, though I know Jay-Co’s selection, for one, was definitely just left over from the original tape that was sent to us for ML, and he may not have been alone in that regard, though ultimately I sure as hell don’t remember now who all sent what when….
Evan Cantor:
We had so much material that we decided to do a second compilation, Son Of Madness. The modus operandi was the same as Madness Lives. The cover features four photographs I took of Andrew Brennan. Andy lived in the basement apartment at the Hall Of Genius for some time and we were all pals. On the cover, he grins knowingly and on the inside he appears to be a happy guy, then a crazed dude chewing on a cigarette, and then, finally, completely mad.
Since the booklet-assembling process for Madness Lives was such a lot of work, I opted for a fold-out approach to this one. The foldout was printed on the same nice beige paper that I had used for the Madness Lives cover. The foldout has the names and addresses of contributors and the special thanks. Even though we thanked “Cover photo of Andrew Brennan, composer, by Evan Cantor”, a number of people thought it was a picture of me.
We thanked Martha Roskowski and Tom Day for the Mag Clips submission. We thanked Bob O’Connor for the Meichenbaub tapes and Ed Fowler for Russ Stevens’ tape. These were all people who were so impressed by Madness Lives that they wanted to participate in some way with the sequel. Russ Stevens was one of the original Dirt Clods, an old friend of Ed Fowler and his submission, “Slap The Buttocks”, is a masterpiece. I don’t know who the Mag Clips were, but obviously Martha Roskowski (one of our KGNU people) and Tom Day (another KGNU person?) did and they offered us the track “Kopechne”, about the girl that Ted Kennedy inadvertently killed in a famous car crash.
LF:
The cover features various poses of our new downstairs neighbor, Andrew Brennan, who replaced the kids we tried to get evicted for blasting wall-shaking music in the middle of the night but who finally sealed their fate by almost burning the house down. Andy was the first downstairs neighbor we knew well enough to open the door between our apartments. Andy had a piano down there and we jammed with him a couple of times (with and without the piano) though none of that made it onto a WoG release. Andrew also occupied his time writing his own take on classical piano concertos via long hand musical notation. Evan even talked about using a recording of one of his pieces for Son Of Madness, but when my body English demonstrated my antipathy to the idea, he not only changed his mind but hid all of Andy’s materials as if he feared I would harm them. Evan did use Andy’s compositional notation as a backdrop for the list of names and contact addresses for the artists who did appear on the comp. Andy’s music was certainly not representative of the underground scene per se, but he certainly did embody the spirit of DIY! He sent a recording of his music to some critic once who sent back a scathing letter complaining of how sick he was of hearing “period pieces” like this or some such. Oh well, Andy loved doing it for its own sake, anyway (do NOT cue old Harry Chapin song!)….
EC:
Bob O’Connor was only nineteen years old when we met him, late night at KGNU radio. Bob was a talented musician, but he had a disestablishmentarian streak that endeared him to us and vice versa. “Meichenbaub” was him and a friend named Mike (“Mike-and-Bob”). They had made some recordings on a cassette that they called “Basement Tapes”. Their version of “Gilligan’s Island” theme was a wonderfully demented take on the famous theme song to what may very well be the stupidest mainstream television show ever. Bob liked to reminisce that he had been invited to “join” Walls of Genius one day and then told that the band had broken up the next. I stayed in touch, on-and-off, with Bob for many years. In the late 80s or very early 90s, he went to Austin, Texas, to ‘make his name’, in search of a professional music career and his songwriting really took off. He could have been writing seriously for Steve Earle or Willie Nelson. He got so good that he wanted all his “Basement Tapes” back because he was afraid somebody would use them to advantage when he hit the big time. I wouldn’t give it back and he never did hit the big time, which was tremendously disappointing for him. Alcoholic demons plagued him and they finally got the better of him when he took his own life in October 2006. I miss my old friend and think of him often.
LF:
Throughout the entirety of Walls Of Genius, the vast majority of decisions of any sort regarding the band and the label were made by Evan, sometimes with my input and sometimes not, and it was certainly Evan who primarily chose the sequencing of the songs on Madness Lives (and did an outstanding job!), if possibly with some degree of input from me, though if so it was likely mostly just to confirm his wisdom on the matter. Towards the end of Walls Of Genius’s first pass at existence (and Son Of Madness was the very last tape listed in our final catalog lineup), I did start to assert my own opinions more, and I especially asserted myself regarding the sequencing (and in one case the choice of material) on the first side of Son Of Madness, as a strong inspiration suddenly hit me while Evan was in the process of compiling the master tape, and I almost began to give orders. Evan reacted warily, but he saw I was onto something and mostly followed my suggestions. (“I am 100% confident of my own judgment,” he said, “and it is my judgment to listen to you!”) It just seemed to me that there was a certain pattern emerging from the submissions regarding personal and social problems that could be exploited via a certain sequencing that would highlight this. I felt vindicated when one reviewer described the tape as a bunch of people letting all their problems out via their tape recorders or some such, which seemed to at least partly capture what I was going after….
EC:
Son Of Madness opens with the Cowtown version of “Rainy Day Women”, the WoG/Cowtown collaboration described previously.
Some new participants included Dino Dimuro, a Hollywood sound engineer and Don Campau, a long-time and prominent cassette culture artist.
There were also tunes by cassette culture stalwarts Schlafengarten, Vox Populi, Bene Gesserit, John Oswald, Master/Slave Relationship (Debbie Jaffe), Problemist, Tom Furgas and Roberta Eklund (a sex symbol of the cassette culture). “Jay-Co” returns from Madness with another tune, another of those anonymous contributors who have never been actually identified. There are two Hitler related pieces, Dimuro’s terrific “Hitlerrock”, where he apes the rhythms of Hitler’s demented speeches and the crazed sexuality of Eklund’s “She Fucked Hitler”. Booed Usic (Tim Ore) offers a tune and we would later promote a performance by Tim as tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE in Denver when he went on tour in 1986. As Wally Bob Colorado, I perform a twisted country-punk take on Dusty Springfield’s “Ode to Billy Joe”, re-writing the words as “Ode to Ronnie Joe”, about Ronald Reagan jumping off the Theodore Roosevelt bridge in Washington D.C. A man could dream, couldn’t he? Where Tim Clifford got clips of “Mr. Butch”, I have no idea, but we ended the tape with clips from an interview with him and that filled out the 90-minute length.
Side A
Cowtown - RAINY DAY WOMEN
Problemist - THE HEART
Dino Dimuro - HITLERROCK
Mag Clips - KOPECHNE
Wally Bob Colorado - ODE TO RONNIE JOE
Evan Schoenfeld - ANARCHY IN THE U.K.
Meichenbaub - GILLIGAN'S ISLAND
Don Campau - POTATO BOWLING
Stew Art - OH NO !
Phil Milstein - TELEPHONE SYMPHONY excerpt
Schlafengarten - "I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT"
Minóy - DEATH & TAXES
Art Damaged Rodents - CONFUSION
Vox Populi - SA LAI I VANTOU
Smersh - LIFE IS A BITCH, DUDE
Cowtown - RAINY DAY WOMEN
Problemist - THE HEART
Dino Dimuro - HITLERROCK
Mag Clips - KOPECHNE
Wally Bob Colorado - ODE TO RONNIE JOE
Evan Schoenfeld - ANARCHY IN THE U.K.
Meichenbaub - GILLIGAN'S ISLAND
Don Campau - POTATO BOWLING
Stew Art - OH NO !
Phil Milstein - TELEPHONE SYMPHONY excerpt
Schlafengarten - "I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT"
Minóy - DEATH & TAXES
Art Damaged Rodents - CONFUSION
Vox Populi - SA LAI I VANTOU
Smersh - LIFE IS A BITCH, DUDE
LF:
The first track, a cover of a famous Dylan song of course, could almost have been Walls Of Genius as it was basically Evan and I backing up Peter Tonks. But everything Peter did was Cowtown, and that was fine with us as it gave us yet another chance to sort of go “incognito” and be on another track on our own compilation without it being overtly known. There was also a gal on this track from down the block who served us drinks and made bluesy orgasmic groans. “Potentially volatile element” was something Peter himself was called in a Westword article on him written by Roxanna Alday, who also wrote a Boulder Daily Camera article on WoG. Peter performed lead vocals and Dylanesque harmonica. Some of our good ol’ WoG-esque mania may have been overdubbed….
Problemist was the baby of William Davenport who published Unsound Magazine and is currently making a film on the current lives of people who were featured in that zine. He also put on a show we played in San Francisco in the summer of 1985. This piece got the comp moving in a disturbing tone. Editor's Note: View additional materials for the Language is the Enemy program in San Francisco
Dino Dimuro is a longstanding and very talented DIY’er, but I think this piece was very unique for him in its use of a found sound source, that being Der good ol’ Fuhrer himself! (This exemplified exactly the kind of both experimental yet goofy tangent we were hoping to elicit from people!).
Mag Clips were reportedly a tongue-in-cheek side project of some successful indie band, though we were never apprised of exactly who it was, in which everyone had to play an instrument other than what they played in their successful band. Our source or go-between for this material, friend and KGNU deejay Martha Roskowski, may have also participated in it too, I’m not sure. We were given a tape with several selections and Evan originally wanted to use their slightly evil take on the old soft-rock standard, “Windy” which certainly would have been a good choice (you know how we like covers!), but at the last second I convinced Evan to use “Kopechne” instead, just because it seemed to better fit the brainstorm of a sequencing vision that was in the process of coming to me. I mean, y’know, Hitler to Kennedy, right? Evan relented to my suddenly confident idea mania.
And then of course old Ronnie Reagan took his proper place alongside this array of leaders in the form of Evan’s strategically altered cover song (on which I played drums!), extending his penchant for skewering of dear leader.
Our new pal Evan Schoenfeld did a simultaneously ironically quaint yet appropriately anarchic “Anarchy in the UK.” Ironically, Evan, our own Evan that is, was also doing a folkie type version of that same song in some of his solo repertoires (he opened the very last Walls Of Genius performance with a set as this Wally Bob Colorado), albeit without the tape cuts, collage and coughing….
Meichenbaub were a local (Boulder) duo made up a of a personal folkie friend of Evan’s named Bob O’Connor and Bob’s musical novice accomplice, Mike, whom Bob once told me often scared him with his naïve unpredictability…. (Bob has unfortunately taken his own life in recent years….)
I think “Potato Bowling” was the very first we ever heard of one of the great cassette/DIY champions of all time, Don Campau. Don is as dedicated to the archiving cause as Hal and Hal’s archive of us includes material first posted on Don’s own endeavor to document as much as possible of the entire Cassette Underground at The Living Archive of Underground Music. Don has been equally avid as a recording artist who is one of the few cassette scenesters I have known to continue making DIY music for many years past the cassette era. As I say, I’m pretty sure this was the first or pretty close to the first we had ever even heard of him at all, when we received his submission, and we were lucky to get a wacky sound collage oriented piece since, much like Dino above, most of Don’s material is a lot more song oriented and not always nearly so wacky either (though in both cases still very good!)….
So yeah, after those politically contentious (albeit amusing) pieces, we were shipwrecked with bozos on a deserted island and then getting addicted to cocaine and now it’s time for Stew Art’s “Oh No!”, which was just Oh No! about just about everything! And the telephone symphony excerpt was a second exclamation point to it all! And what can you say to a bunch of telephones harassing you but “I Don’t Wanna Hear About It”?
Schlafengarten was a precocious newcomer to the underground, trying hard and succeeding at making a name for himself with the help of his friends the Psyclones.
Then more Minóy, who mostly created his own strange and unique type of soundscape, but appropriately applied his previous submission to vomiting mainstream cultural commentary and this time applied it to existential inevitability. Minóy was widely admired in the underground and his demise a few years ago was widely mourned.
Art Damaged Rodents are evidently the work of Madness veteran Eric Iverson, and I hope I don’t have to explain how his piece “Confusion” fit in here! Hey, brain trouble is art! Works for me….
Vox Populi hailed from France (hey, we’ve gone international!) and took a more electronic and arty dive into craziness.
And then the whole side finishes up with Smersh chanting “Life Is a Bitch, Dude” which I thought appropriately summed up the whole comically miserable shebang of a side of music quite nicely….
The first track, a cover of a famous Dylan song of course, could almost have been Walls Of Genius as it was basically Evan and I backing up Peter Tonks. But everything Peter did was Cowtown, and that was fine with us as it gave us yet another chance to sort of go “incognito” and be on another track on our own compilation without it being overtly known. There was also a gal on this track from down the block who served us drinks and made bluesy orgasmic groans. “Potentially volatile element” was something Peter himself was called in a Westword article on him written by Roxanna Alday, who also wrote a Boulder Daily Camera article on WoG. Peter performed lead vocals and Dylanesque harmonica. Some of our good ol’ WoG-esque mania may have been overdubbed….
Problemist was the baby of William Davenport who published Unsound Magazine and is currently making a film on the current lives of people who were featured in that zine. He also put on a show we played in San Francisco in the summer of 1985. This piece got the comp moving in a disturbing tone. Editor's Note: View additional materials for the Language is the Enemy program in San Francisco
Dino Dimuro is a longstanding and very talented DIY’er, but I think this piece was very unique for him in its use of a found sound source, that being Der good ol’ Fuhrer himself! (This exemplified exactly the kind of both experimental yet goofy tangent we were hoping to elicit from people!).
Mag Clips were reportedly a tongue-in-cheek side project of some successful indie band, though we were never apprised of exactly who it was, in which everyone had to play an instrument other than what they played in their successful band. Our source or go-between for this material, friend and KGNU deejay Martha Roskowski, may have also participated in it too, I’m not sure. We were given a tape with several selections and Evan originally wanted to use their slightly evil take on the old soft-rock standard, “Windy” which certainly would have been a good choice (you know how we like covers!), but at the last second I convinced Evan to use “Kopechne” instead, just because it seemed to better fit the brainstorm of a sequencing vision that was in the process of coming to me. I mean, y’know, Hitler to Kennedy, right? Evan relented to my suddenly confident idea mania.
And then of course old Ronnie Reagan took his proper place alongside this array of leaders in the form of Evan’s strategically altered cover song (on which I played drums!), extending his penchant for skewering of dear leader.
Our new pal Evan Schoenfeld did a simultaneously ironically quaint yet appropriately anarchic “Anarchy in the UK.” Ironically, Evan, our own Evan that is, was also doing a folkie type version of that same song in some of his solo repertoires (he opened the very last Walls Of Genius performance with a set as this Wally Bob Colorado), albeit without the tape cuts, collage and coughing….
Meichenbaub were a local (Boulder) duo made up a of a personal folkie friend of Evan’s named Bob O’Connor and Bob’s musical novice accomplice, Mike, whom Bob once told me often scared him with his naïve unpredictability…. (Bob has unfortunately taken his own life in recent years….)
I think “Potato Bowling” was the very first we ever heard of one of the great cassette/DIY champions of all time, Don Campau. Don is as dedicated to the archiving cause as Hal and Hal’s archive of us includes material first posted on Don’s own endeavor to document as much as possible of the entire Cassette Underground at The Living Archive of Underground Music. Don has been equally avid as a recording artist who is one of the few cassette scenesters I have known to continue making DIY music for many years past the cassette era. As I say, I’m pretty sure this was the first or pretty close to the first we had ever even heard of him at all, when we received his submission, and we were lucky to get a wacky sound collage oriented piece since, much like Dino above, most of Don’s material is a lot more song oriented and not always nearly so wacky either (though in both cases still very good!)….
So yeah, after those politically contentious (albeit amusing) pieces, we were shipwrecked with bozos on a deserted island and then getting addicted to cocaine and now it’s time for Stew Art’s “Oh No!”, which was just Oh No! about just about everything! And the telephone symphony excerpt was a second exclamation point to it all! And what can you say to a bunch of telephones harassing you but “I Don’t Wanna Hear About It”?
Schlafengarten was a precocious newcomer to the underground, trying hard and succeeding at making a name for himself with the help of his friends the Psyclones.
Then more Minóy, who mostly created his own strange and unique type of soundscape, but appropriately applied his previous submission to vomiting mainstream cultural commentary and this time applied it to existential inevitability. Minóy was widely admired in the underground and his demise a few years ago was widely mourned.
Art Damaged Rodents are evidently the work of Madness veteran Eric Iverson, and I hope I don’t have to explain how his piece “Confusion” fit in here! Hey, brain trouble is art! Works for me….
Vox Populi hailed from France (hey, we’ve gone international!) and took a more electronic and arty dive into craziness.
And then the whole side finishes up with Smersh chanting “Life Is a Bitch, Dude” which I thought appropriately summed up the whole comically miserable shebang of a side of music quite nicely….
Side B
Bene Gesserit - NO MORE ACTION
B. Srahka & Ken Clinger - PRIVATE LAUGHTER (Go Debbie Go)
John Oswald - DOG MESSAGE
Booed Usic - BEFORE AND AFTER
The Simpletones - AND GIVE ME
Globin Treeflip - HAVE YOU SEEN POTRZEBIE?
John Wiggins - PARTICLE MUSIC excerpt
Cool & The Clones - RUSTY GO FREE
Johnny J. & The Diversatones - MIAMI
Jay-Co HONKY HONK
Tom Furgas - QUIET
Master/Slave Relationship - ONE NIGHT LOVE AFFAIR (FM DUB)
X-Ray Pop - REVERS
Roberta Eklund - SHE FUCKED HITLER
R. Stevens - SLAP THE BUTTOCKS
The Jazz Trio - BASEBALL BAT
Mr. Butch - excerpts from interview
Bene Gesserit - NO MORE ACTION
B. Srahka & Ken Clinger - PRIVATE LAUGHTER (Go Debbie Go)
John Oswald - DOG MESSAGE
Booed Usic - BEFORE AND AFTER
The Simpletones - AND GIVE ME
Globin Treeflip - HAVE YOU SEEN POTRZEBIE?
John Wiggins - PARTICLE MUSIC excerpt
Cool & The Clones - RUSTY GO FREE
Johnny J. & The Diversatones - MIAMI
Jay-Co HONKY HONK
Tom Furgas - QUIET
Master/Slave Relationship - ONE NIGHT LOVE AFFAIR (FM DUB)
X-Ray Pop - REVERS
Roberta Eklund - SHE FUCKED HITLER
R. Stevens - SLAP THE BUTTOCKS
The Jazz Trio - BASEBALL BAT
Mr. Butch - excerpts from interview
LF:
My sequencing brainstorm only lasted through Side A (and I wouldn’t claim to have chosen the sequence for everything on that side, but definitely most of it), so Side B was likely back to our usual MO of Evan making the decisions, sometimes with my input.
And what better way to start off than with the spry and happy sounds of Bene Gesserit, who were from Belgium and put out their very own compilations, including a series called Insane Music for Insane People (probably the first of many parodies of the Cramps’ album title I’ve seen over the years; my band is playing a local festival called the Angry Music for Angry People Festival this very weekend!), and I think we may have appeared on one or more of them, or maybe at least Architects Office (with us on it) did. (Yeah, I think one “bone” between us and AO was that some Evan/Fyodor era AO appeared on an Insane comp without Joel letting us know.) Anyway, they were from Belgium and very active in the scene and a lot of their music sounded somewhat the same but it was all very nice to listen to and we were proud to feature some of it.
Ken Clinger, who appeared on Madness Lives, is with Don and Dino among the most avid and prolific DIY musicians our scene produced, and is still going at it today, the last I heard….
Hey, dig 22 seconds of John Oswald of Plunderphonics fame, a couple of years before he got that famous….
Booed Usic was the brainchild of one tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (yes, that’s what he asked(s!) to be known as, at least when he wasn’t asking to be known as Tim Ore, which made his home town of Baltimore a sexual advertisement for himself, and there may have been yet other names too…), a continuously confounding character whom I saw perform and show films to a small but attentive audience at the University of Colorado just a few years ago and also performed at a disaster of a show at a Denver art gallery that Evan organized immediately after the Walls Of Genius breakup, which may have discouraged Evan from further underground activities for at least a while. Well, we didn’t know about any of that future yet, and we included this spoken word plus generally abstract sound piece though we cut it short to help get everything to fit, which Tent (for short) complained about because he said the piece posed a question and then offered an answer but we cut him off before he got to that latter part, so it was a question with no answer (as it was supposed to have), but he was cool about it and didn’t make any big shtink….
I believe The Simpletones may have been an alternate incarnation of Xposed 4Heads. Certainly played a similarly mock macho brand of rock ‘n’ roll.
Globin Treeflip was some wacky person(s) who befriended us and I don’t know if I ever saw the name anywhere else but we sure loved him (them?). Why not when they were unabashedly unashamedly silly and even chanted or sang “Madness Lives” on both their submissions! (Well, “Madness Lives 2” for this one, guess they didn’t know the name yet, just that we were doing a follow-up.) Everyone singalong: “Wherever you may be, you can even climb a tree….”
I assume we’re hearing more of the same grouping of John Wiggins’s highly technical abstract sounds that we heard on Madness Lives. It kind of comes across as intellectual ultra quirk, and there’s even a sound that sounds a bit like a dog barking. Or am I high?
Cool & The Clones played crazy jazz, though you might also even possibly say “traditional” “free music”, scratching and blowing and sustaining and squeaking, going every which way. Eventually the sax has to wig out, and wig it does. It was good to have some of that kind of stuff on there. We liked being connected to that.
I think “Miami” was an unusually “intense” piece for Johnny J. (could have fit in with Side A!) and, if I recall correctly, it was actually released on his own personal cassette release (possibly under a different name?) which I had been playing on my radio show a good while before it was considered for Son Of Madness inclusion.
And then oh, OH, it’s time again for Jay-Co. More uber irreverence from that enfant terrible fantastique. As I said previously, this was left over from Jay-Co’s initial enigmatic tape of contributions to Madness Lives, but it was too good to leave out! They even laugh at themselves!
Tom Furgas, whom I had just begun to hear more of (with Tom and Don Campau and Schlafengarten and some others, this tape actually served as a bit of a preview of the next guard of hometapers who would take over after we quit…), turns Jay-Co’s clamor upside down with “Quiet”, a carefully constructed excursion into abstract noise dynamics and, um, quiet….
Master Slave Relationship was Debbe Jaffe, Hal McGee’s partner in the band Viscera (“Who Is This One” on Madness Lives) and the cassette label, Cause And Effect. Both of them weren’t afraid to get pretty way out there. Noise and echo and voices and a dark buried electronic melody….
X-Ray Pop wasn’t just French but very French, am I right? They did such good quirky stuff on a cassette release I have of theirs that I wondered why I was bothering doing that kind of thing. This piece is a little more on the dramatic side of things. Very proud to have had them on our comp….
Roberta Eklund was a friend of Hal’s and Debbie’s. They were all joining in on cassette letters to us for a while. Some were even, um, (blush) um, nevermind…. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Yeah, that’s what they want!
Russ Stevens was a friend of Ed’s, one of the old Telethon party crew. Probably had no connection with what we knew of as the cassette underground scene except for this. But he did this, he recorded his own song on a cassette, just cause he wanted to. What’s more cassette underground than that? Well, that, and singing about biting hind parts! I remember seeing him at Marsha Wooley’s house watching football games and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes….
The Jazz Trio sound like Fingers Nucleus and have the same contact address. Hmmm. They do a very important and ominous sounding brand of wackiness….
And finally, someone sent us a tape of this street person who could be captured on tape saying nutty things. Evan edited down his favorite two or three lines. Words to remember Son Of Madness by….
My sequencing brainstorm only lasted through Side A (and I wouldn’t claim to have chosen the sequence for everything on that side, but definitely most of it), so Side B was likely back to our usual MO of Evan making the decisions, sometimes with my input.
And what better way to start off than with the spry and happy sounds of Bene Gesserit, who were from Belgium and put out their very own compilations, including a series called Insane Music for Insane People (probably the first of many parodies of the Cramps’ album title I’ve seen over the years; my band is playing a local festival called the Angry Music for Angry People Festival this very weekend!), and I think we may have appeared on one or more of them, or maybe at least Architects Office (with us on it) did. (Yeah, I think one “bone” between us and AO was that some Evan/Fyodor era AO appeared on an Insane comp without Joel letting us know.) Anyway, they were from Belgium and very active in the scene and a lot of their music sounded somewhat the same but it was all very nice to listen to and we were proud to feature some of it.
Ken Clinger, who appeared on Madness Lives, is with Don and Dino among the most avid and prolific DIY musicians our scene produced, and is still going at it today, the last I heard….
Hey, dig 22 seconds of John Oswald of Plunderphonics fame, a couple of years before he got that famous….
Booed Usic was the brainchild of one tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (yes, that’s what he asked(s!) to be known as, at least when he wasn’t asking to be known as Tim Ore, which made his home town of Baltimore a sexual advertisement for himself, and there may have been yet other names too…), a continuously confounding character whom I saw perform and show films to a small but attentive audience at the University of Colorado just a few years ago and also performed at a disaster of a show at a Denver art gallery that Evan organized immediately after the Walls Of Genius breakup, which may have discouraged Evan from further underground activities for at least a while. Well, we didn’t know about any of that future yet, and we included this spoken word plus generally abstract sound piece though we cut it short to help get everything to fit, which Tent (for short) complained about because he said the piece posed a question and then offered an answer but we cut him off before he got to that latter part, so it was a question with no answer (as it was supposed to have), but he was cool about it and didn’t make any big shtink….
I believe The Simpletones may have been an alternate incarnation of Xposed 4Heads. Certainly played a similarly mock macho brand of rock ‘n’ roll.
Globin Treeflip was some wacky person(s) who befriended us and I don’t know if I ever saw the name anywhere else but we sure loved him (them?). Why not when they were unabashedly unashamedly silly and even chanted or sang “Madness Lives” on both their submissions! (Well, “Madness Lives 2” for this one, guess they didn’t know the name yet, just that we were doing a follow-up.) Everyone singalong: “Wherever you may be, you can even climb a tree….”
I assume we’re hearing more of the same grouping of John Wiggins’s highly technical abstract sounds that we heard on Madness Lives. It kind of comes across as intellectual ultra quirk, and there’s even a sound that sounds a bit like a dog barking. Or am I high?
Cool & The Clones played crazy jazz, though you might also even possibly say “traditional” “free music”, scratching and blowing and sustaining and squeaking, going every which way. Eventually the sax has to wig out, and wig it does. It was good to have some of that kind of stuff on there. We liked being connected to that.
I think “Miami” was an unusually “intense” piece for Johnny J. (could have fit in with Side A!) and, if I recall correctly, it was actually released on his own personal cassette release (possibly under a different name?) which I had been playing on my radio show a good while before it was considered for Son Of Madness inclusion.
And then oh, OH, it’s time again for Jay-Co. More uber irreverence from that enfant terrible fantastique. As I said previously, this was left over from Jay-Co’s initial enigmatic tape of contributions to Madness Lives, but it was too good to leave out! They even laugh at themselves!
Tom Furgas, whom I had just begun to hear more of (with Tom and Don Campau and Schlafengarten and some others, this tape actually served as a bit of a preview of the next guard of hometapers who would take over after we quit…), turns Jay-Co’s clamor upside down with “Quiet”, a carefully constructed excursion into abstract noise dynamics and, um, quiet….
Master Slave Relationship was Debbe Jaffe, Hal McGee’s partner in the band Viscera (“Who Is This One” on Madness Lives) and the cassette label, Cause And Effect. Both of them weren’t afraid to get pretty way out there. Noise and echo and voices and a dark buried electronic melody….
X-Ray Pop wasn’t just French but very French, am I right? They did such good quirky stuff on a cassette release I have of theirs that I wondered why I was bothering doing that kind of thing. This piece is a little more on the dramatic side of things. Very proud to have had them on our comp….
Roberta Eklund was a friend of Hal’s and Debbie’s. They were all joining in on cassette letters to us for a while. Some were even, um, (blush) um, nevermind…. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Yeah, that’s what they want!
Russ Stevens was a friend of Ed’s, one of the old Telethon party crew. Probably had no connection with what we knew of as the cassette underground scene except for this. But he did this, he recorded his own song on a cassette, just cause he wanted to. What’s more cassette underground than that? Well, that, and singing about biting hind parts! I remember seeing him at Marsha Wooley’s house watching football games and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes….
The Jazz Trio sound like Fingers Nucleus and have the same contact address. Hmmm. They do a very important and ominous sounding brand of wackiness….
And finally, someone sent us a tape of this street person who could be captured on tape saying nutty things. Evan edited down his favorite two or three lines. Words to remember Son Of Madness by….
EC:
The Son Of Madness cassette itself featured labels that had been fashioned from extremely dirty Gestetner mimeograph pages. These were the pages that resulted when you changed out the ink in the machine (or at least, so I recall). These copies had text indicating “Son Of Madness” and sides A & B.
The Son Of Madness cassette itself featured labels that had been fashioned from extremely dirty Gestetner mimeograph pages. These were the pages that resulted when you changed out the ink in the machine (or at least, so I recall). These copies had text indicating “Son Of Madness” and sides A & B.
EC:
I would like to take a moment to thank all who participated who haven’t yet been mentioned in my notes: What Goes On, Arms of Someone New, Weiner & Beelzebub, Johnny J & The Diversatones, Theatre of Ice, Master Bedroom Music, Artless Time, Peter Catham, Globin Treeflip, Comstock Feigenbaum & Raffel, John Wiggins, Stew Art, Phil Milstein, Art Damaged Rodents, B. Srahka, John Oswald, Cool & the Clones, X-Ray Pop, The Simpletones, and the Jazz Trio. I wish I had more to say about each, but I simply don’t. It’s not a matter of there being nothing to say, it’s just that I don’t remember anything more about them. I offer them my apologia!
I would like to take a moment to thank all who participated who haven’t yet been mentioned in my notes: What Goes On, Arms of Someone New, Weiner & Beelzebub, Johnny J & The Diversatones, Theatre of Ice, Master Bedroom Music, Artless Time, Peter Catham, Globin Treeflip, Comstock Feigenbaum & Raffel, John Wiggins, Stew Art, Phil Milstein, Art Damaged Rodents, B. Srahka, John Oswald, Cool & the Clones, X-Ray Pop, The Simpletones, and the Jazz Trio. I wish I had more to say about each, but I simply don’t. It’s not a matter of there being nothing to say, it’s just that I don’t remember anything more about them. I offer them my apologia!