The Telepathic Unicycle

I had an interesting idea today. I will go as far to say that I think the idea itself is far more interesting than the product of said idea will be…but obviously, that remains to be seen, and I’ll leave that judgment to you.

So I have a lots of random, odd musical instruments.

And my idea is…

to record a short piece of music using each of my instruments…and post them here.

Now here is the question:

Do I record separate pieces of each instrument as solos? (option #1)

Or (option #2) do make a “process” of it and record a phrase using a guitar or something…post that, then overdub another instrument over that guitar and post that the next day…and so on and keep building over time until by the 17th post, it is either a wonderfully unique tapestry of sound, or a hideous wash of noise-mess.

I think I like option #2.

What do you think?

Of course the disclaimer is that this week is going to be the busiest week I have had in the office in quite a while so realistically, this might not happen for a month or so…

In what has turned out to be a long-running, continuing saga of “posting everything I have ever recorded” to this blog, here is yet another one. I have played for you all of my “fun-with-acid” series, so now all that remains are my multi-track machine pieces-of which there are many.

I recorded this one on my FOSTEX 4-track cassette machine sometime in late 1997, after being inspired by a Calvin Klein Obsession commercial…I think?

No, this one is not autobiographical…It is the name of tonight’s special ditty. Again, I had to really dust this one off, so I hope you enjoy it. And I can’t take all the credit for this one…this one is the result of a collaboration. My friend, D.J. Easychair (sam) helped me (M.C. Ottoman) with this one. He is the punk sorry white boy called out to in the song. That was the end of a “playful” message left on Sam’s answering machine by a big giant “playful” dude in his college dorm. It screamed at us to make it into a piece of music…so here it is, along with a beat I tapped out on my Alesis drum machine and then more fun in ACID. This one is an early one and boi, you can tell. Oh…and see if you can figure out which movie we sampled for the other random spoken words…and which songs for that matter–pretty easy. Enjoi, boi!

Here’s another one in the “from the vault” series…

I “composed” this one with a trial version of a program called Sibelius. Basically, you plot notes on a staff…you know “sheet” music. Anyway, I exported the composition as a midi file, brought it into Acid and farted around with the “sound” of the notes…played around with repetition and counter melodies…and added a beat, yo.

And, yes…when I finished it, it was 3 in the morning…a long time ago.

Goodnight.

The title says it all…

Here’s another one from my creaky wardrobe…

as in…the lion, the witch, and…weird James Joyce references…

After he exposed my secret identity, fellow bloggian, KARL recently reminded me one of the reasons why I started this site.

(Don’t worry Karl, I’m just kidding. I sincerely enjoy being exposed…ahem…I mean, I enjoy the exposure.)

Anyway, Karl brought up the original idea of posting ORIGINAL video, photos and audio…

So after a few recent posts with the youtube nonsense, here’s an oldie, but a goodie.

Crank it up!

So I just received a “brand new” copy of 666 by Aphrodite’s Child (from Amazon.com) and seriously, It is unbelievably “cool” but…there’s this:

Ok, to be fair, what do you think?Ok, ok, I’m not being fair…but there is really cool stuff on the whole (double) album…

Much like Mel Brooks’ SPACEBALLS–a parody that came out 4 or 5 years after the movies on which it was based, here is something whose lateness, comedy and relevance quotient is equivalent…




For every reason to hate the “America’s Funniest Home Videos” effect of you tube, there are probably 10 reasons to love it.

I think the following accounts for at least 3 of them.

She is so happy!




So my dad used to rave about this band all the time when I was growing up. But of course back then, I was a little snot and just assumed because it was something I never heard of AND was on a format that I could absolutely not play at the time, that it wasn’t worth my time or interest. The 8-track was proudly displayed at the top of a pile of other 8-tracks that included Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown and a Buffalo Sprinfield greatest hits of some kind…all of which I have distinct memories of pressing the button on the player that would instantly switch to one of the other tracks on the cartridge that was “already in progress.” I remember really really getting a kick out of that concept. It totally changed the concept of song order on an album. It almost pitted certain songs against each other. I am listening to “Big Shot” but if I just press this button I will instantaneously realize that I COULD HAVE BEEN listening to “My Life.” Imagine a 6-year-old kid making his own live mash-up by pressing the track buttons…now imagine him getting into trouble for monkeying with Dad’s stereo. We had an 8-track in one of our cars AND in our home stereo component system–that was as tall as I was at the time.

Having said all of that, I have no memories of hearing Aphrodite’s Child. I’m not sure if my dad felt it wasn’t suitable for my ears (there is a song that pretty much consists only of a female voice shrieking in orgasmic delight) or maybe the tape simply did not work anymore…but I never heard it until now. You Tube is quite something. They have all of your childhood memories (as well as memories you could have had) encoded in glorious low-fi pixel-vision. Anyway, I think this music is groovy. I wish my Dad played it for me back then.

And how ’bout this crazy.