BLACK TRENCHCOATS & SWASTIKAS 'N SHIT
(Demos, Outtakes & Rarities: 2003-2006)

The four years spanning from late 2003 through the end of 2007 were not a time of sustained inspiration and productivity for Forms Of Things Unknown. About five months after the release of my first CD Cross Purposes in June 2003, my recording system crashed irreparably when I pretty much ran it into the ground from the prolonged sessions of intensive micro-editing involved in recording and mixing "Interrupted By Interior Design" for The Bone Tickling Nightmare Pig CD compilation. Exhausted from months of effort with recording, producing, and then attempting to promote and distribute my first self-released album; drained and demoralized from working a miserable day job that led me to the brink of a nervous breakdown and a subsequent two-year period of disability and unemployment; and finding myself without the technical means to go about making music in the manner I wanted, I produced very little new music for a number of years. Occasionally, I would receive an invitation to submit work for a compilation or find myself blessed with a transitive burst of inspiration, and some small creation would emerge. Most of the pieces on this collection were recorded through a cheap mixer with a basic multi-effects unit fed directly into a two-track stereo CD recorder. No editing was possible with this setup, and the only way to overdub was to record live with effects onto a CD, then to play the CD on a portable Discman player through the mixer along with live accompaniment into the stereo recorder for a combined recorded mix of two separate performances, with no possibilities of remixing once recorded. Despite the unfinished quality of some of these recordings, I feel that the substance of the various works merits public listening, and so I have decided to collect them together on this album (paired with a fully remastered and expanded edition of Cross Purposes) as a summation of the first phase of Forms Of Things Unknown.

01. Vallåtar - A solo for sopranino saxophone inspired by the ancient Swedish female vocal tradition of kulning. Kulning refers to the melodic wailing sung by shepherds over long distances of fields and valleys, calling home the cows, goats and sheep after a day's grazing. I first became acquainted with this haunting vocal music when I heard it as part of the soundtrack to Andrei Tarkovsky's sublime swansong The Sacrifice, and it immediately struck an atavistic resonance within my ancient heart. My own instrumental interpretation is adapted from a recording by the contemporary Swedish folk singer Susanne Rosenberg which appears on her album Uppå Marmorns Höga Berg. Recorded in 2006 and previously unreleased.

02. Interrupted By Interior Design, Part I: Speculum (for Marcel Duchamp) - This two-part piece was the beast that broke the back of my 16-track digital audio workstation as a result of the micro-editing involved in cutting, pasting, looping and processing all the varied samples and elements that went into the mix. The crackling, staticky sound that permeates the whole of Part I is actually a close-miked contact lens receptacle with a pinhole in the cap, recorded after adding a tablet of enzymatic cleaner to the solution, causing a fizzy chemical reaction that produced an effervescent gas which made the sound I recorded as it escaped through the pinhole of the cap. Eau et gaz à tous les étages.

03. Interrupted By Interior Design, Part II: From Here To Parker Posey - Without revealing all of the samples that went into Part II, I will confide that two of the sampled voices are those of Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali (and no, the female voice is not Parker Posey). The saxophone riff which blurts in at strategic moments (played by myself) is a musical quotation from the lounge standard, "Witchcraft." (Attentive listeners will find other evidence of the occult subtext underlying this musical incantation). Parts I & II were recorded in Fall 2003 and originally released in 2004 on The Bone Tickling Nightmare Pig compilation on the Psychochrist label.

04. The Fifth Path - A composition for solo harmonium, recorded with no edits or overdubs, which turned out to be a rather tricky feat owing to the fact that I had to perform the melody without interruption, one hand pumping the bellows and one hand on the keyboard, while the refrain of the main theme midway through the song required me to pull out another drone stop without taking my hands off the keys or bellows. The solution I arrived at was to perform crosslegged on the floor in my bare feet and pull the stop out with my right toes exactly on the first beat of the designated measure. Recorded in 2006 and first released in 2008 on the Auricular Audio Magazine #13 CD compilation (Auricular Records).

05. Quadrilateral - I won't deny that my love for the music of Ryoji Ikeda served as the primary inspiration for this piece - but from a technical standpoint this composition took shape as an experiment to test out the capabilities of the Electro-Harmonix 2880 loop pedal I'd just purchased. The pedal proved to be useless as a looping device for live-miked acoustic instruments, owing to mechanical noise produced by the footswitch, but it performed admirably with line-in electronic signals, generated in this case by a sweep function generator, vintage Hewlett Packard sine wave oscillator and Hallicrafter shortwave radio, plus other devices, all routed through a Tapco mixer with a Lexicon MPX 550 multi-effects signal processor, live and direct to two-track stereo. Recorded in 2006 and previously unreleased.

06. Elegy - A short solo piece for bass clarinet, this is one of two tracks appearing on the present collection which were recorded at the Magic Shop, a small production studio in South San Francisco, engineered by friend and musical colleague Benjamin Tinker. I added a touch of delay and some more reverb to the two-track master in the final version featured here. Recorded in 2005 and previously unreleased.

07. Blue Light - Created for a now-defunct web-based magazine/CD-ROM compilation, this is another sound art piece of limited means, using live environmental sounds, constructed loops and sampled material. The title alludes to the blue light of the gas pilot inside the wall heater in my apartment, whose muffled roar serves as the backbone of the track. Recorded in 2004 and originally released on the t02: home CD-ROM compilation which came out as the second (and I believe final) issue of the German Taucher web magazine in 2005.

08. Shave 'Em Dry 'Til The Cows Come Home - This track served as my entry in the Nurse With Wound Remix Contest which Mark Logan of Jnana Records sponsored in 2006. The idea was to use the rhythm tracks of bass/guitar/drums from the song "Two Shaves and a Shine" and construct a remix. Once the deadline for submissions had passed, NWW maestro Steven Stapleton then listened to all entries and selected his favorites for release on a CD collecting the fifteen 'best' remixes. For my attempt, all I did was loop one bar of the bass line and use that as an ostinato over which to layer a plunderphonic array of sampled material. The only element I actually performed myself is the long melody line of the sopranino sax, which is in fact nothing more than a reversed and shuffled remix of my "Vallåtar" solo. The ululating female vocal that predominates throughout is in fact a fine recorded example of the kulning vocal style described in the above notes to Track 01, taken from an early field recording of Karin Edvardsson Johansson (one of the very same recordings that Tarkovsky used as part of the soundtrack to The Sacrifice). Recorded in December 2006 and released in 2008 as part of The Two Shaves And A Shine Remix Project CD on United Jnana.

09. Cobblestones - This brief Renaissance-flavored self-penned composition dates from the distant and storied past of the late 20th Century and has waited until now for its recorded debut. I played this version on the soprano recorder, along with an overdubbed accompaniment on the bowed psaltery. Recorded in 2006 and previously unreleased.

10. Mesozoica (alternate mix) - Being a collaboration between myself and longtime musical associate Ure Thrall, this mix by Ure features an alternate flute track to the shakuhachi version I recorded and recently released on the remastered reissue of Cross Purposes. Here I am playing an alto flute in addition to rainstick and Tibetan singing bowl. Recorded in Fall 2003 and released in a slightly different mix entitled "Every Massacre Begins With A Funeral" on Ure Thrall's Arabian Knightmares CD (Tesco, 2006).

11. Burial Of The First Toy (title theme from El Topo) - This is the main title theme from the score to Alejandro Jodorowsky's brutal and brilliant El Topo, composed by the director and star himself, and played here on the tenor recorder. Recorded at the Magic Shop with engineering by Benjamin Tinker in 2005, mixed by myself and previously unreleased.

Ferrara Brain Pan - Summer 2008

HOME | NEWS | AUDIO | VIDEO | REVIEWS | INTERVIEWS | EVERYTHING BUT THE GARGOYLE | BIO |DISCOGRAPHY | DOWNLOADS | STATEMENT | LINKS | CONTACT