Fall 2001 - DRAMA! Tidbits & Digressions

Drama! Last time I checked in I was working in Washington DC and commuting home on Southwest Air twice a month and spending time with Mariana, my family, Rinus and a few Louisville friends. I arrived home in late September to be greeted with the news that my father was recently diagnosed with advanced leukemia. That changed everything. Just as I was stressing my living arrangements and future in DC this event emerged to send the signal to return home. I'll try to minimize the discussion of how my personal life has taken a whack with my father's condition, my mother's reactions, family interworkings, etc. I must note though, that the poor job market that I left in May has only gotten worse and I've re-encountered unemployment for months now. For the past few months I had also been sweating the lack of a girlfriend in six months or so, but now everything else is so intense that I've plum forgotten that worry for the time being. So the night before I left DC I threw my self a good-bye dinner at Paradise Restaurant and arranged a jam at Lampshade's studio with the crazy musicians I'd met during my stay. That taken care of I packed up the Imperial and cruised home in record time. I made one in-car tape recording on the way with my trusty high-intensity Aiwa portable deck that I bought last fall in Valencia for my final Zanstones show at the Observatori Festival. I bought the deck for playback as it's a small sliver jam box about a foot long and an inch or so thick and has two speakers, a tape in the middle and a radio tuner. This summer in DC I discovered when using it to record my Now Music Zanstones show that the Aiwa gives very bright and noisy recordings. I first used this as a feature with the Zanoisect work "Museum of Frenzy" which was recorded in various museums in downtown DC with Zurich and mixed in the open air with the Aiwa doing the mastering. On the roadtrip home I had the Aiwa in my lap as I'm driving through the mountains of western Maryland and West Virginia (passing over Negro Mountain at one point, I'd like to add) and I was singing a solitary note. The recording of this, plus the wind noise of the car, came out in an otherworldly way I didn't expect. I felt it was going to work perfectly with an Ultra Milkmaids source recording I received from France this summer. When I returned, the result of that experiment was the Zanoisect release "Mantra Milkies" (with an alternate "Milkies Mantra" mix also available). On the positive side of my return home is one excellent development. I've taken over day care responsibilities for my girl Mariana since I've been out of work. I have been spending every weekday with her in addition to my regular schedule. At first I was concerned with what I'd do with her all day long. But soon it became apparent that it was simple: we'd play, color, eat, walk my parents dog Ernie, play with Tim Ruth's girl Morgan who is Mariana's age, run errands in Eduardo my Imperial, and For fun we started pronouncing countries on my globe in the kitchen and this has led to me teaching my 2 1/2 years old girl world geography. And my patient and delightful work with her has paid off as she now knows the countries of South America, nearly all Asia and north Africa. Her pronunciation is great and sometimes hilarious as Sri Lanka becomes Shirley Lanka and Mongolia turns into a nicer Mongonia. Rinus Van Alebeek has left the building. To bring you up to speed in case you've just tuned in and have missed previous episodes, Rinus is my compatriot in audio recordings with the dnasnow/mouseup project. We met last fall in Barcelona as I played and he attended the LEM Festival in the Gracia district (word to my homie Victor Nubla there!). We soon formed dnasnow and started combining our recording efforts. I come from a background of experimental audio and Rinus is a Dutch author who also records marvelous personal historical audio works. I have heartily encouraged his audio efforts and we've kept up vibrant communication online since we've parted. This summer after returning to Holland from Spain, he was unsure of his next destination and I bugged him to visit me in America. And he did. For a few months. He arrived a few in DC a few days before Zurich and I were planning a roadtrip to Louisville. Rinus drove with us and he stayed in Louisville with Barb Hall. Barb, an ex-girlfriend from over 10 years ago who still lives around the corner from me, started writing Rinus months previously and they had formed a friendship which led to Rinus staying with her for the months he was in America. During the weekend Zurich was in town we played a twisted live show with Tim Ruth. This friendship between Rinus, Tim and Barb led to the formation of the project The Elvis Sisters. [[[When I was dating Barb there were these two characters who lived across the street: old, roly-poly sisters, one boisterous and the other quiet and henpecked. We called them the Elvis Sisters due to their matching dyed black pompadour hairdos and the real attraction was the out-to-lunch crazy way the boisterous one talked when she was scolding her sister on the way to the car. ]]] Since the impressive audio skill of Rinus is in his Sony Walkman recording techniques I constantly kept him lubricated with excesses of blank and pre-recorded tape to use to gather sound sources. The man logged over 24 hours worth of the stuff during his visit! We took all our sources and orchestrated all manner of things onto 8-track tapes. I insisted, to help in his education, that Rinus remix the whole lot of them. We finished 11 new dnasnow works while he was here and I put the finishing work into the 12th right after he left the building. After he left I redoubled my efforts to improving my zidsic empire with activities such as working on zids.net, starting and finishing recordings that have been on the studio docket for a while, using new collaborative material I've been getting in the post, putting together my next generation of mail-out, etc. Generally I've been kicking arse in such a way that people I write continually wonder how I do it. Here is some commentary about the recordings I've done this fall. After completing my first collaboration with Ultra Milkmaids I turned my attention to some blistering collaborative noise pieces sent to me from Spain by my new pal Crypt of Hinyouki. How to respect the Crypt sources yet put them to best use was difficult to conceptualize and I spent months in DC debating with myself about the best solution. The final answer involved resurrecting a one-off Spanish collaborative project from 1985 "Mechanic Demonic Azrael" and the result is massively challenging listening. "Mechanic Demonic Azrael Holotype" sent out a secret beacon to Rafael Flores who was the focus of the first Mechanic Demonic Azrael release and he proceed to e-mail me thus re-establishing contact after an absence of over 10 years. Life is beautiful, no? Lately I've been badgering my contacts to make me fifteen one minute collaborative pieces and since late summer the submissions have started arriving. The first in was my very first collaborative recordings from Chris Phinney from Memphis who I've been in contact with for over a dozen years. Our new project 'patina' is a fine and unique entry into the zidsic catalog I'm pleased to announce. Like other abstract projects of mine it's hard to describe or pin down and to say it's different from seven hundred other zidsic releases you probably have not heard either sounds like I'm being evasive. "Patina scent fondle" succeeds by exposing a variety of spaces and techniques while bonding together as a complete statement. Next on the studio docket was the third work by Second Violin. Both Zurich and I had a hand in the first work. We decided to use the nearly finished 60 minutes Zurich had assembled as part two, and concluded I would be responsible for the third installment. I had some obscure recordings Zurich and I had made in DC this summer which were overlooked for the first two releases so I culled that material. In conjunction with this I raided my massive Adam Bohman archive - over a hundred cassettes I traded for since the mid 1980s. I made a cut-up using excerpts from each side of every audio letter, live show, tour tape, project with friends, and more. Between all this material comes a very crusty and rewarding release: "Increasing Overdraft". In early November two project with Tim Ruth were finished one day after another. The third Asa Nisi Masa release "Ponder" was followed by a session with Rinus: the premier of The Natural History Museum of Sound. The latter is caught somewhere in the warp between dnasnow and Asa Nisi Masa, and the former is another twisted transonic carpet ride with Asa Nisi Masa. More one minute pieces poured in from Canada with both Ames Sanglantes and Praying Gods contributing fifteen works apiece and these inspired the latest Here Be Monsters work "A Tick for a Tack". This is nice in that it's noisier than any of the other eleven Here Be Monsters work and still lives within the framework of this project which started in January 1989. Fifteen sausages is the english translation of the Polish project XV Parowek run by my friend Bartek. His one minute tracks led to the eighth work by Your Life Has Been (...) For You, a project started in 1986 with some John Wiggins sources. I used some nice old collaborative recordings from three long-time domestic contacts: Wiggins, Agog and PBK plus some new recordings from an old Japanese collaborator Kazuhiro Ohtsuka on the work "Your Life Has Been Disturbed For You". Here is a digression worth making. I've been writing Kazuhiro since 1986 and we collaborated extensively until I lost contact with him in the late 80's or early 90's. In 1999 we bumped into each other again, but this time the arrangement has been different and rather amusing. He sends a collaborative tape with the words "please send me finished tape" written on the label. There is no letter, and the envelope is the very specific. We have been mailing collaborative tapes (him to me) and contributor copies (me to him) in this exact same envelope for about three years and there are ten zidsic releases he's appeared on during this time. So when this bandaged, taped and familiar envelope shows up in my post box I know it is time to start our next collaboration. Three more Zanstones releases to mention and class is dismissed for the day. 108-110 plus extra credit for checking out my new Zanstones pages. When Zanstones passed the 100 release mark this summer I started becoming painfully dissatisfied with the zids.net page that scrolled down for days describing each release. Impossible! Nobody in their right mind would put up with reading all that. So after bashing about a few new layouts I came to one which simply lists 25 releases and links them to solitary pages with the cover and description. I reconfigured the Zanoisect page too with all 60 releases listed on one page. I felt there was some source material I needed to make use of and this, plus some rediscovered old 8-track masters is what inspired Zanstones 108-110. The later is two Aiwa recordings of my last two Zanstones shows from Chicago and DC. Noisy business I will readily tell you. "Zanstones Breakthrough Chicago and DC" has my Deadtech show which was sparsely attended but pivotal in showing me a whole new way just as I was starting to feel nervous about the direction of my future shows. And it has an excerpt from the best attended show I did all year at an art opening at the Signal 66 gallery in DC. Plagued by no soundcheck, a late start, and sound problems aplenty this Aiwa recording comes across as intensely as I was feeling during the performance. There is a recording from the mixer from each show which tells a completely different story and this might indeed appear on another release, but this "Breakthrough" work powerfully tells of a new live Zanstones intensity. I'm very proud of the Zanstones 108 featuring guest audio by Planning & Lampshade (from DC) plus Tanja from Copenhagen. "Futile Planning Allegory" is a journey with playing and sound sources. "Squirreling Away Braggarts Rights" on the other hand was started after I uncovered an unfinished 8-track master many years old while trying to make sense of my many 8-track masters. I broke out the Indian sugar can and used 'Betty' (a gift from Zurich, the basis of an old instrument of his) to create tension on the string. I had a blast playing this instrument again which I first assembled maybe 15 years ago which I've not bothered with for over ten years. Ah, this features the fifteenth Polish sausage of Bartek's as well as some unremixed tidbits from hither and yon. A final tale of zidsic productivity before I close this missive. After I finished the 600th zidsic released in fall 1999 I had three landmarks I was looking forward to: my 100th Zanstones release, the 700th zidsic work and having 400 hours of recordings available in trade. May 14th I completed Zanstones 100 "Neue Carltones". September 6th I finished zidsic 700, the 107th Zanstones work "Elusive Instructions of Fortune". The 400 hour mark is a little more slippery to measure. Depending how you tabulate it I either reached it around November or will have clenched it with the 50th release of the year. Zanstones 110 is the 47th and I have most of December to hit that easy mark. Either way I mentioned it on my new homepage redesign, so it's 'official'. Lest people be confused that I'm only concerned about quantity I want to state that at zidsic I'm obsessed with creating an impressive number of high-quality recordings to share with the world. Oh, that's something else I finally did... revamped zids.net homepage since I realized nowhere on the page did it actually say what I do and what the site is about. See? As much work as I do, the work is never done here at zidsic. So stay tuned. Your friend in the bluegrass state, checking out.

December 4, 2001