| Experimental Album | 2001 |
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(reviewed by Robert Grazer)
HIGH POINTS: In The Mind Of Syd Barrett, Kennel Jam II, Cheezballs, A Tribute To Drawers. LOW POINTS: The Twelve Days Of Vietnam, The Persistence Of A Beat, Music Sucks.
I know you aren't really supposed to review your own work, but this is supposed to be posted on October 1, 2001, one year after I sent in my first silly comments to John McFerrin beginning my involvement in this Web reviewing community. So today I've decided I'd review something a bit different. This is the only attempt at a musical release I've ever done, and while it lacks an official name I've figured that due to the nature of the recording Experimental Album suits it well. Now, this review may be a little pointless overall since there’s no way that anyone besides those directly involved who will ever hear this album, but I'm hoping it will be fun for me to write and you to read so let’s try it anyway.
This album started as a random idea between my friend Jason Kray and myself one afternoon, where we thought we'd put our lack of talent together and see what we came up with. Now, I play no instruments other than a few guitar chords and some very basic piano. Jason plays a little bit more guitar than I do, but his abilities are still quite limited. Though many different ‘instruments’ were used, most of the work was played either by myself on a little thirty-dollar Casio keyboard or by Jason on an acoustic guitar. We took up our tools and a little tape recorder and tried to come up with sounds that actually seemed good.
My original idea for this release was to make it a quadruple album, filled with endless filler and jams, but shortly into the recording it became quite obvious that we didn't have nearly enough ideas to pull that task off, and we ended up with a total of less than half an hour of music. If you want to call it music, that is. There’s very little in the way of actual melodies or songs on here. Instead we created a world of crazy sounds, attempting to at least somewhat form an atmosphere for the listener. How well did we succeed? Let’s see.
To open up out album was our own sick version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” which doesn't do much other than serve as an intro, but I guess it shows a little bit what the recording is like. The first real song here is also in my opinion the best one, a collage of keyboard sounds we call “In The Mind Of Syd Barrett.” It’s a collection of every psychedelic sound I could find on the keyboard, from planes and sirens to a haunting nursery section and deafening phone sounds. I think it’s a great success, as I love listening to and thinking that maybe that was going through Syd’s head when he penned the songs on The Piper At The Gates of Dawn. Er, actually no. I just find it to be an entertaining and diverse collage of sounds that for some reason worked together incredibly well for all of it’s seven plus minute length.
Jason’s favorite on the album goes to “Cheezballs,” a short flatulent sound clip tat apparently had landed on his computer somehow and we'd discovered it a few weeks before. We thought it would fit in well with the rest and we were right, of course, being the geniuses that we are. I disagree with him on it being the best song, though, since it’s way too short (a whole three seconds) to be truly enjoyed, but if I'm in a silly enough mood I don't mind it at all. We also recorded “A Tribute To Drawers” and “A Tribute To Drawers (demo version)” which was based all around the sound of me opening and closing drawers for several minutes.
We messed up on the first try, but it was good anyway so we labeled it the demo version and proceeded to record the real version after it. Besides just the opening and closing of the drawer there was a steady Latin melody the keyboard was playing for us while Jason noodled around on the guitar a little bit. I'd occasionally throw in a silly random comment to try to keep the track interesting, including pretending to slam my finger in the drawer. All in all, the track is another winner, even if there are two versions of it.
We also recorded two versions of “Kennel Jam,” the first of which had nothing to do with me as it was just Jason playing the guitar and guest musician Jack Williams (and, yes, that’s an alias) dragged a drum stick across a dog kennel. The first of these two jams is good, but unfortunately short, and in the end it just seems to come and go. In the second of these jams I took up the role of ‘kennel player’ so it was naturally a more interesting piece. Well, that fact that it’s about five minutes longer didn't hurt either. It had everything you could want, a solo from me, simple guitar lines from Jason, a few quick notes from the keyboard and my very own rip-off of Queensryche’s “Anarchy-X.” In the end it’s probably the closest that we come to actually making real music and it ranks as a true highlight on Experimental Album.
There are however, a few tracks on here (other than a pointless untitled filler track featuring some crazy line form me and “Excerpts From Rise Of The Triad,” which is a recording of myself playing the classic FPS game for a couple minutes) that aren't just lesser tracks on the album; they are some of the absolutely worst songs ever written. “The Persistence Of A Beat” is a long and boring track where I tried to duplicate the electronic success of “In The Mind Of Syd Barrett,” but failed miserably. An interesting lyrical concept comes through on “Music Sucks” where Jason and I made little jokes about several genres (with lines like “I'm psychedelic, look at me, because I'm the king of LSD” and “I sing reggae, look at me, I can worship Bob Marley”), but it’s completely ruined by Jason and myself singing, which is much worse than anything you can imagine.
The worst offender, though, and again partly because of the vocals is “The Twelve Days Of Vietnam,” as solo piece for our guest musician Jack Williams. Now, he plays less guitar than either Jason or myself so he just strummed an open chord the whole time while singing his own offensive version of “The Twelve Days Of Christmas” returning to the line “And a sniper in a palm tree” over and over. His singing voice is even worse than my own, absolutely destroying any wit that came in the lyrics. It all adds up to a song that I can't listen to without both laughing and feeling sick at the same time.
But for the most part the highlights make up few big mistakes here. I can give it a decent score since I do enjoy listening to it every now and them. Sure this is due in large part it the fact that I made it, but it’s the release has launched what could be a career in experimental music for me, which I think is good enough. We did have a few other ideas planned that never amounted to much (“A Day In The Park” and “Acoustic Death Metal Suite” for starters) and maybe we'll be able to work those into something later on. As for now I've been throwing around a few ideas in my mind, not sure what to do with them so maybe there is a future for me. As far as this recording goes, it was more fun to make than to listen to.
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COMMENTS
This band sucks. And its leader is a pompous, egotistical shithead who has no grasp of melody.
J/K :-)
BTW, I have indeed played Rise of the Triad, and ai must say that it did have a stellar soundtrack. To truly appreciate it though, you needed to have a wavetable MIDI board? Remember the good ol' DOS days of the Sound Blaster Pro? Doesnt qualify. That had a Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesizer which was SOMETIMES able to approximate actual instruments. However, if you were lucky enough to own a wavetable sound card, man, what catchy tunes that game had! Wavetable, for those interested, uses actual musical instrument samples stored either on the card in RAM/ROM, or on your hard disk, then are sustained, pitch modified, etc to approximate different notes. Needless to say, while it is/was better than OPL3, it was FAR from perfect, especially with the lower end models. I, personally, had a low selling, but excellent wavetable board called the Gravis Ultrasound Max. Rise of the Triad was one of the very few games that had a native sound mode for that card, and to the day i retired it in favor of my faithful Sound Blaster Live (soon to be also retired for one of them Audigys, heehee), that game was the showpiece for my $200 sound card investment.