Sometimes love comes unexpectedly and from the unlikeliest of places. This time around, it comes from acclaimed fantasy writer and editor Jeff VanderMeer (who happens to be an old friend and former coworker of mine), who was kind enough to offer raves about "The Very Best of Spaz Rock" on his blog, JeffVanderMeer.com.
As it turns out, the track "Killer Squid" is shaping up to be a big hit in Jeff's beloved city of Ambergis. Maybe the positive response has something to do with the approach of the upcoming annual Festival of the Fresh Water Squid.
Oh, and "The Very Best of Spaz Rock's" official RPM Challenge Jukebox is now finally up-and-running, so forget about those previous download links below (those were only working versions of the mixes after all) . Instead, go check out our official RPM Challenge Jukebox to listen to and download the final version of "Volume I: Monsters of Spaz" in all its peculiar mystery.
Link: TheVeryBestofSpazRock.RPMChallenge.com
My First Multitracker (or: How I Went from Lo-Fi Hero to Hi-Fi Villain)
Part 1: Winning the Lottery
Part 2: Tangemeenie's Early Days
Part 3: Making "Faust"
Part 4: A Failure of Imagination
Part 5: Welcome Home, Baby Bear!
When I was around 16 or 17 years old, I bought my first piece of home recording gear: a brand new, then state-of-the-art Yamaha MT-120 4-track cassette multitracker.
It cost exactly $500 cash, because Tim at the music store discounted the price to the exact amount I had on hand. I'd gotten the $500 by winning the Florida Cash 3 lottery with a ticket my grandmother bought for me, playing the numbers 1,2,3--I'd gotten the inspiration to play these unlikely but ultimately winning numbers from a vivid dream I'd had about winning the lottery. In that dream, my winnings had not just been in the hundreds but in the millions--so naturally my expectations were high.
It sounds far-fetched I know, but that's actually how it happened.
Only recently, the band I'd been playing bar gigs with for the last few years (my first serious band) had broken up. Disappointed by our failure to take the world by storm, I'd been driving myself crazy trying to figure out a way to buy that multi-tracker, drooling over the display model at the music store, convinced that the ability to overdub was all that stood between me and total creative independence--and of course, all the fame, fortune and high times to come.
So to my hormone-addled, teenage mind, my implausible stroke of luck in winning the lottery cinched the matter: it was now my destiny to become a recording artist. From the moment those numbers fell until many years later, I knew this was what I would one day be. Not a rock star. Not a performing singer/songwriter. Not the front man for a band. Not even simply a musician. But a recording artist. An artist who used recorded sound as a creative medium, the way a painter uses paint, or a sculptor, clay. What more perfect way could there be to balance a love of making music with a predisposition toward crippling stage fright and shyness?
That multitracker cranked out new recordings for more than a decade, remaining one of the few constants in my various lives as a musician and songwriter. Amazingly, some of the early recordings produced with that MT-120 managed to make their way out into the world at large, finding their way onto various mix CDs and playlists, even showing up on random websites here and there. One from the early 90s, "The Boy Whose Mother Was the Venus DeMilo" shows up here and here, for instance.
The links below include MP3 downloads of that song and a couple of other recordings from an unfinished concept album I worked on briefly (until the realization that my working title, "Farewell to Arms," was an egregiously bad pun instantly crushed any enthusiasm I had for the project) when I was living in Panama City in the 90s.
These vintage MP3 files were originally featured on MP3.com in its first incarnation, back when MP3 compression was still a relatively new and obscure technology. They're encoded at 128 kbps bit rate because that was the standard bit rate for high-resolution MP3s back then. (It was the accepted dogma at the time that encoding MP3s at a higher rate would never be practical or desirable.) You'll probably also want to crank up the volume on your computer speakers to listen to these because recorded music just wasn't as loud in those days.
Some of those recordings got airplay on the local college radio station (WVFS), and we slowly and reluctantly began edging our way out into the world, playing one-off shows around town as an acoustic guitar-driven vocal duo. In our first real show as Tangemeenie, we opened for our friends in the local band "Welcome to Nagaland," some members of which would later go on to join better known bands like Mira and Iron & Wine.
Below are a couple of downloads of tracks we recorded during that period. I've always thought Lori delivers a haunting vocal performance on "Disappearing Ink." These were among the first recordings we ever released as Tangemeenie, although they were also released at one point under the name Nobodaddy. Like the downloads featured above, these tracks are vintage, 128 kbps MP3s, and were recorded on the MT-120.
The loss struck a devastating personal blow, following only a couple of years after my grandfather's similarly tragic death. For at least the next year, music-making took a backseat to sorting through the wreckage of my family life.
Then as all the ensuing noise and confusion settled to a manageable background din, my thoughts began turning back to one thing: That naive idea that had lodged itself in my mind almost a decade earlier when I won the lottery. The residual feelings of self-confidence and optimism that still clung to those memories proved more alluring than ever to me now.
By now, my reliable old MT-120 had become an anachronism. Cassette tape multitrackers had lost their relevance in the age of the CD. Newer digital workstations and desktop computer-based tools offered more tracks for the dollar, more flexibility, more fidelity.
The lo-fi aesthetic that had once been considered a mark of authenticity and artistic integrity in certain circles now seemed almost quaint. The world was moving on, and those particular concepts of artistic integrity were rapidly becoming obsolete.
Bands like Stereolab, Air, Heavy Vegetable, and Broadcast were in constant rotation on our stereo, alongside reality-blurring digital art-hoaxers like Senor Coconut and Negativeland, replacing our long-cherished, but now dishwater dull-sounding mix tape collections. Even many well known lo-fi artists had begun to embrace hi-fi digital recording techniques in ways that brazenly violated what had once been taboos for artists hoping to retain their "indie cred."
In large part, this was because at no previous time in history had there been so many affordable digital audio production tools on the market. Suddenly, an eight-track multitracker capable of capturing audio at 24-bit resolution--the kind of studio gear that had once sold for upwards of ten grand--could be bought for around the same price as a high-quality electric guitar.
So with part of the proceeds from my grandmother's estate (though they weren't much), I started scrounging up new pieces of musical equipment and recording gear, with the near-term goal of owning everything I would need to finally produce an album of my own.
My first major investment was in a Roland VS-840 digital multi-tracker (now out of production), which offered what at the time seemed the unimaginable luxury of a full eight tracks for overdubbing and many other previously out-of-reach features.
(Incidentally, remember zip discs? The VS-840 actually used them for storage in lieu of an internal hard disc, if that gives you any sense for just how much the device was a product of a particular point in time in the development of consumer-oriented recording technology.)
I eventually picked up another now obsolete piece of hardware to complete my new studio, a higher-end consumer sound card produced by French manufacturer, Guillemot (which at the time was billed as a breakthrough in economical, hybrid gaming/home studio platforms, before quickly becoming obsolete when a chipset design flaw prevented the release of Windows XP drivers; Guillemot has since dropped its technical support for the product, which apparently caused some longer-term harm to its reputation).
The combination of the sound card (which accepted digital SPDIF input) and the VS-840 allowed me record at full 24-bit resolution and then pipe the resulting audio into my computer without ever leaving the digital domain. And once the 24-bit audio was in my computer, I could tweak, polish and manipulate it to my heart's content.
Thus equipped, I decided to set a challenge for myself: Would it be possible to produce an album on the cheap--using only the readily available consumer grade digital recording gear I'd cobbled together--that could plausibly stand alongside bigger budget, studio releases?
With this challenge set before me, work on Tangemeenie's first album, "Faust," began in earnest, as I found myself making deals with all kinds of new devils (including countless varieties of audio editors, DirectX plug-ins, and loop-based composition tools)--in other words, all the tools of studio trickery I scoffed at in my days as a lo-fi purist.
Finally, after many months of recording, editing, looping and tweaking, the album was finished. And while "Faust" ultimately didn't turn out to be as polished and hi-fi as a big-budget studio release, it sounded better than an album produced using such cheap recording gear was expected to sound.
It was originally supposed to be a concept album: the soundtrack for a film within a film, as composed by the film's protagonist, an aging, film soundtrack composer whose successes followed after a Faustian bargain he inadvertently struck while on a bad acid trip. "Faust" was intended to be an artifact from an imaginary film, an occasionally campy soundtrack composed by a man coming psychologically unraveled as one fact in his life after another is shown to be a lie.
Needless to say, this concept wasn't exactly clear to most reviewers or listeners. Lori and I had previously released a CD-R only release under the title "The Movie." But this clue, too, didn't exactly drive the point home.
Co-released under our own imprint and the Animal World Recordings label, "Faust" sold out of its initial small pressing quickly and got generally good reviews. A critical consensus formed almost immediately: Lori was a star, her voice, to paraphrase one enthusiastic reviewer, sounding like a space age siren song, luring hapless spaceships to their doom.
But all along, Tangemeenie had been more an idea than a band. In a complete failure of imagination, our focus had been exclusively on recording. So when touring became the inevitable next step soon after the release of "Faust," and we were invited to perform in a label showcase at the 2002 CMJ Music Marathon, we suddenly realized we had no idea how to pull it off.
How could Lori and I perform all those layers of overdubbed parts alone? We couldn't use midi sequencing and samplers because we didn't own any samplers, and for that matter, we didn't really have the technical know-how. And could we ever be truly comfortable on stage, pressing buttons and merely singing along to drum machines, karaoke style?
Despite years of experience performing in live bands, I'd never played in a band with anything besides a more conventional guitar, bass, and drums set up. And Lori's background as a vocal major at the FSU's music school hadn't prepared her to put together a live, two-person electronica act.
On the other hand, we couldn't go back to playing our old acoustic sets now, with the expectations we'd set with the release of "Faust."
It seemed the only practical solution to our dilemma was to bring outside musicians into the fold. What happened next is a long, complicated story with a very messy ending, so I won't go into all the details here. But the long and short of it is this: the band we originally formed to tour as Tangemeenie spun off into a completely new project before we ever went on the road. (Meanwhile, Lori and I still played at CMJ, but with only Lori on keyboards, me on guitar, and an additional bass player; and the performance turned out to be a train wreck.) The new group, which took the name "Pocket Novel Mystery," went on to record one album ("Eight Days in the Life of Grace")--and then broke up almost immediately after the album was finished.
(Incidentally, the track "Her Favorite Records" which later made its way onto "Eight Days..." was originally released as an acoustic Tangemeenie song on a CD-R-only release we sold at live shows.)
The new line-up toured regionally and even made a short-lived attempt to record a second album. But it had already started feeling like a lost cause by then; Lori and I weren't really doing much more than going through the motions, and we knew it.
When Lori became pregnant with our son Ander in December 2005, we finally disbanded Pocket Novel Mystery once and for all. At the same time, I began spending more and more time working in my project studio at home in the evenings, learning how to use new digital audio production tools and techniques, dabbling and experimenting as I retooled my studio yet again.
My latest studio set-up eliminates the need for an external audio capture device and moves everything into the desktop environment. Piece by piece, I've rebuilt my desktop computer over the intervening years to better meet the needs of desktop audio production--replacing the motherboard, upgrading the processor, replacing one hard drive and adding another; even replacing the case and power supply. There literally isn't a single original component left of the desktop computer I used when "Faust" was produced.
The first finished track I produced using my new desktop studio set up (actually, I still used my VS-840 for capturing the drum parts because I had to record them at a remote location) is one named "Clueless" that I wrote and recorded shortly after the original line-up of Pocket Novel Mystery dissolved, but before we'd put together the new line-up.
Much later on, when Lori and I decided it was time to resurrect Tangemeenie, "Clueless" became the first track we considered using for our forthcoming new album, "The Gilded Age." It didn't make the cut for a variety of reasons, not least of which being its sound quality (which isn't terrible, but falls far short of the other tracks on the new album). Here's a high resolution download of that track:
Now with work on "The Gilded Age" nearly finished, it's impossible not to reflect a little on what a strange trip it's been since I got that first multitracker.
Part 2: Tangemeenie's Early Days
Part 3: Making "Faust"
Part 4: A Failure of Imagination
Part 5: Welcome Home, Baby Bear!
Winning the Lottery
When I was around 16 or 17 years old, I bought my first piece of home recording gear: a brand new, then state-of-the-art Yamaha MT-120 4-track cassette multitracker.It cost exactly $500 cash, because Tim at the music store discounted the price to the exact amount I had on hand. I'd gotten the $500 by winning the Florida Cash 3 lottery with a ticket my grandmother bought for me, playing the numbers 1,2,3--I'd gotten the inspiration to play these unlikely but ultimately winning numbers from a vivid dream I'd had about winning the lottery. In that dream, my winnings had not just been in the hundreds but in the millions--so naturally my expectations were high.
It sounds far-fetched I know, but that's actually how it happened.
Only recently, the band I'd been playing bar gigs with for the last few years (my first serious band) had broken up. Disappointed by our failure to take the world by storm, I'd been driving myself crazy trying to figure out a way to buy that multi-tracker, drooling over the display model at the music store, convinced that the ability to overdub was all that stood between me and total creative independence--and of course, all the fame, fortune and high times to come.
So to my hormone-addled, teenage mind, my implausible stroke of luck in winning the lottery cinched the matter: it was now my destiny to become a recording artist. From the moment those numbers fell until many years later, I knew this was what I would one day be. Not a rock star. Not a performing singer/songwriter. Not the front man for a band. Not even simply a musician. But a recording artist. An artist who used recorded sound as a creative medium, the way a painter uses paint, or a sculptor, clay. What more perfect way could there be to balance a love of making music with a predisposition toward crippling stage fright and shyness?
That multitracker cranked out new recordings for more than a decade, remaining one of the few constants in my various lives as a musician and songwriter. Amazingly, some of the early recordings produced with that MT-120 managed to make their way out into the world at large, finding their way onto various mix CDs and playlists, even showing up on random websites here and there. One from the early 90s, "The Boy Whose Mother Was the Venus DeMilo" shows up here and here, for instance.
The links below include MP3 downloads of that song and a couple of other recordings from an unfinished concept album I worked on briefly (until the realization that my working title, "Farewell to Arms," was an egregiously bad pun instantly crushed any enthusiasm I had for the project) when I was living in Panama City in the 90s.
These vintage MP3 files were originally featured on MP3.com in its first incarnation, back when MP3 compression was still a relatively new and obscure technology. They're encoded at 128 kbps bit rate because that was the standard bit rate for high-resolution MP3s back then. (It was the accepted dogma at the time that encoding MP3s at a higher rate would never be practical or desirable.) You'll probably also want to crank up the volume on your computer speakers to listen to these because recorded music just wasn't as loud in those days.
- The Boy Whose Mother Was the Venus DeMilo Part I
- The Boy Whose Mother Was the Venus DeMilo Part II
- Georgia Nightclubs
Tangemeenie's Early Days
When Tangemeenie first began to come together years later, that old Yamaha workhorse was still fully operational. Lori and I even used it to produce a handful of our earliest recordings (under various names we adopted and quickly discarded for various reasons, like "Nobodaddy," "Dakota Ring," and "Blue Star Highway").Some of those recordings got airplay on the local college radio station (WVFS), and we slowly and reluctantly began edging our way out into the world, playing one-off shows around town as an acoustic guitar-driven vocal duo. In our first real show as Tangemeenie, we opened for our friends in the local band "Welcome to Nagaland," some members of which would later go on to join better known bands like Mira and Iron & Wine.
Below are a couple of downloads of tracks we recorded during that period. I've always thought Lori delivers a haunting vocal performance on "Disappearing Ink." These were among the first recordings we ever released as Tangemeenie, although they were also released at one point under the name Nobodaddy. Like the downloads featured above, these tracks are vintage, 128 kbps MP3s, and were recorded on the MT-120.
Making "Faust"
Then my grandmother died unexpectedly while Lori and I were in Germany on our honeymoon visiting my mom.The loss struck a devastating personal blow, following only a couple of years after my grandfather's similarly tragic death. For at least the next year, music-making took a backseat to sorting through the wreckage of my family life.
Then as all the ensuing noise and confusion settled to a manageable background din, my thoughts began turning back to one thing: That naive idea that had lodged itself in my mind almost a decade earlier when I won the lottery. The residual feelings of self-confidence and optimism that still clung to those memories proved more alluring than ever to me now.
By now, my reliable old MT-120 had become an anachronism. Cassette tape multitrackers had lost their relevance in the age of the CD. Newer digital workstations and desktop computer-based tools offered more tracks for the dollar, more flexibility, more fidelity.
The lo-fi aesthetic that had once been considered a mark of authenticity and artistic integrity in certain circles now seemed almost quaint. The world was moving on, and those particular concepts of artistic integrity were rapidly becoming obsolete.
Bands like Stereolab, Air, Heavy Vegetable, and Broadcast were in constant rotation on our stereo, alongside reality-blurring digital art-hoaxers like Senor Coconut and Negativeland, replacing our long-cherished, but now dishwater dull-sounding mix tape collections. Even many well known lo-fi artists had begun to embrace hi-fi digital recording techniques in ways that brazenly violated what had once been taboos for artists hoping to retain their "indie cred."
In large part, this was because at no previous time in history had there been so many affordable digital audio production tools on the market. Suddenly, an eight-track multitracker capable of capturing audio at 24-bit resolution--the kind of studio gear that had once sold for upwards of ten grand--could be bought for around the same price as a high-quality electric guitar.
So with part of the proceeds from my grandmother's estate (though they weren't much), I started scrounging up new pieces of musical equipment and recording gear, with the near-term goal of owning everything I would need to finally produce an album of my own.My first major investment was in a Roland VS-840 digital multi-tracker (now out of production), which offered what at the time seemed the unimaginable luxury of a full eight tracks for overdubbing and many other previously out-of-reach features.
(Incidentally, remember zip discs? The VS-840 actually used them for storage in lieu of an internal hard disc, if that gives you any sense for just how much the device was a product of a particular point in time in the development of consumer-oriented recording technology.)
I eventually picked up another now obsolete piece of hardware to complete my new studio, a higher-end consumer sound card produced by French manufacturer, Guillemot (which at the time was billed as a breakthrough in economical, hybrid gaming/home studio platforms, before quickly becoming obsolete when a chipset design flaw prevented the release of Windows XP drivers; Guillemot has since dropped its technical support for the product, which apparently caused some longer-term harm to its reputation).
The combination of the sound card (which accepted digital SPDIF input) and the VS-840 allowed me record at full 24-bit resolution and then pipe the resulting audio into my computer without ever leaving the digital domain. And once the 24-bit audio was in my computer, I could tweak, polish and manipulate it to my heart's content.
Thus equipped, I decided to set a challenge for myself: Would it be possible to produce an album on the cheap--using only the readily available consumer grade digital recording gear I'd cobbled together--that could plausibly stand alongside bigger budget, studio releases?
With this challenge set before me, work on Tangemeenie's first album, "Faust," began in earnest, as I found myself making deals with all kinds of new devils (including countless varieties of audio editors, DirectX plug-ins, and loop-based composition tools)--in other words, all the tools of studio trickery I scoffed at in my days as a lo-fi purist.Finally, after many months of recording, editing, looping and tweaking, the album was finished. And while "Faust" ultimately didn't turn out to be as polished and hi-fi as a big-budget studio release, it sounded better than an album produced using such cheap recording gear was expected to sound.
It was originally supposed to be a concept album: the soundtrack for a film within a film, as composed by the film's protagonist, an aging, film soundtrack composer whose successes followed after a Faustian bargain he inadvertently struck while on a bad acid trip. "Faust" was intended to be an artifact from an imaginary film, an occasionally campy soundtrack composed by a man coming psychologically unraveled as one fact in his life after another is shown to be a lie.
Needless to say, this concept wasn't exactly clear to most reviewers or listeners. Lori and I had previously released a CD-R only release under the title "The Movie." But this clue, too, didn't exactly drive the point home.
Co-released under our own imprint and the Animal World Recordings label, "Faust" sold out of its initial small pressing quickly and got generally good reviews. A critical consensus formed almost immediately: Lori was a star, her voice, to paraphrase one enthusiastic reviewer, sounding like a space age siren song, luring hapless spaceships to their doom.
A Failure of Imagination
At first, the album didn't draw much attention outside of the online indie music press of the day, but what attention it did receive initially was, if not always as glowing, at least generally positive. And day by day, "Faust" quietly gained momentum.But all along, Tangemeenie had been more an idea than a band. In a complete failure of imagination, our focus had been exclusively on recording. So when touring became the inevitable next step soon after the release of "Faust," and we were invited to perform in a label showcase at the 2002 CMJ Music Marathon, we suddenly realized we had no idea how to pull it off.
How could Lori and I perform all those layers of overdubbed parts alone? We couldn't use midi sequencing and samplers because we didn't own any samplers, and for that matter, we didn't really have the technical know-how. And could we ever be truly comfortable on stage, pressing buttons and merely singing along to drum machines, karaoke style?
Despite years of experience performing in live bands, I'd never played in a band with anything besides a more conventional guitar, bass, and drums set up. And Lori's background as a vocal major at the FSU's music school hadn't prepared her to put together a live, two-person electronica act.
On the other hand, we couldn't go back to playing our old acoustic sets now, with the expectations we'd set with the release of "Faust."
It seemed the only practical solution to our dilemma was to bring outside musicians into the fold. What happened next is a long, complicated story with a very messy ending, so I won't go into all the details here. But the long and short of it is this: the band we originally formed to tour as Tangemeenie spun off into a completely new project before we ever went on the road. (Meanwhile, Lori and I still played at CMJ, but with only Lori on keyboards, me on guitar, and an additional bass player; and the performance turned out to be a train wreck.) The new group, which took the name "Pocket Novel Mystery," went on to record one album ("Eight Days in the Life of Grace")--and then broke up almost immediately after the album was finished.
(Incidentally, the track "Her Favorite Records" which later made its way onto "Eight Days..." was originally released as an acoustic Tangemeenie song on a CD-R-only release we sold at live shows.)
Welcome Home, Baby Bear!
When the original line-up of "Pocket Novel Mystery" imploded, Lori and I were determined not to repeat our mistakes with "Faust" by letting ourselves be diverted from promoting "Eight Days..." We felt we'd sacrificed too much at this point not to at least try to promote the new record. So we continued performing on our own under the name Pocket Novel Mystery with a new line-up for another year or so.The new line-up toured regionally and even made a short-lived attempt to record a second album. But it had already started feeling like a lost cause by then; Lori and I weren't really doing much more than going through the motions, and we knew it.
When Lori became pregnant with our son Ander in December 2005, we finally disbanded Pocket Novel Mystery once and for all. At the same time, I began spending more and more time working in my project studio at home in the evenings, learning how to use new digital audio production tools and techniques, dabbling and experimenting as I retooled my studio yet again.
My latest studio set-up eliminates the need for an external audio capture device and moves everything into the desktop environment. Piece by piece, I've rebuilt my desktop computer over the intervening years to better meet the needs of desktop audio production--replacing the motherboard, upgrading the processor, replacing one hard drive and adding another; even replacing the case and power supply. There literally isn't a single original component left of the desktop computer I used when "Faust" was produced.
The first finished track I produced using my new desktop studio set up (actually, I still used my VS-840 for capturing the drum parts because I had to record them at a remote location) is one named "Clueless" that I wrote and recorded shortly after the original line-up of Pocket Novel Mystery dissolved, but before we'd put together the new line-up.
Much later on, when Lori and I decided it was time to resurrect Tangemeenie, "Clueless" became the first track we considered using for our forthcoming new album, "The Gilded Age." It didn't make the cut for a variety of reasons, not least of which being its sound quality (which isn't terrible, but falls far short of the other tracks on the new album). Here's a high resolution download of that track:
Now with work on "The Gilded Age" nearly finished, it's impossible not to reflect a little on what a strange trip it's been since I got that first multitracker.
The Very Best of Spaz Rock: Download It Now for Free
Well, I almost lost my mind and destroyed my marriage in the process (not really, but it did put a bit of a strain on the old personal life), but the RPM Challenge entry I've been working on since Friday, February 13th is now completely complete at last, and can be heard in its entirety over here at our profile page on the RPM Challenge website. [Actually, since the time I originally posted this, it's come to my attention this is no longer true.]You can also download the entire completed album here (a zipped file) in MP3 format for free.
Considering it's a last-minute product of pure noise rock improvisation spazziness, I couldn't be more pleased with how musical and polished sounding it all ended up being in the end.
Here's the final track listing, in order:
01 - Killer Squid
02 - Immortal Jellyfish
03 - Troll Under the Bridge
04 - Baby Big Foot
05 - Demon Clown
06 - Chupacabra
07 - Frankenspaz
08 - Cerberus
09 - Creeper
10 - The Thing (Of Beauty)
Enjoy!
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