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I gather a few scattered memories from the past for your amusement.
Around 92-93 I played bass in a band with Karlheinz (Karl Geising) on guitar and his brother Kris on vocals. There was no drummer, but we had Al, an Alesis drum machine, which powered our rather unconvincing 80s-styled industrial-metal attack. We had one cassette release, Barbed and Rusty for Your Pleasure, the highlights of which included psychedelic scatalogical lyrics barked through a Roland Vocoder we borrowed from Golan Levin. One day Karl decided we kind of sucked and he was right.
I started playing drums seriously through 94-95 and started a noise-rock unit called Bitchhiker with the guitarists Scott West and Peter Beck. I was hyper-obsessed with metal percussion around this time, and carted around a staggering amount of huge plates, springs and oil-drums everywhere. One of my favorite memories from this time is recording the sound of us destroying a dozen cases of empty beer bottles. We did pretty well for a while, then Scott packed it in for Austin and it was on to other things for all of us.
By 97 or so, Karlheinz had transformed into the full on noise-fiend we know him as today, and we pooled our mayhem as Lord & Karlheinz. For two years, we played these hyper-aggressive confrontational noise shows, mostly in the basement of a drag bar called Jacques Caberet. There were incidents with lighter fluid and fireworks that would get you arrested today. There's a nice CD-R release from this era that we made from a live show that Keith Fullerton Whitman got on minidisc.
Soon I was making a lot of recordings in my home studio, which was rapidly spiralling out of control with analog synthesizer aquisitions. I decided to get a real place to work and I started Wire Sounds in a shitty warehouse building near Andrew in Southie. I was mostly working on my own records at night, but in a weak moment I agreed to start engineering some records for other people there. I got the wacky idea to do a compilation record and hooked up with Mister Records to release it. This turned into the Mister Comp #3, in which I recorded 1 track by 15 different bands. It was fantastic working with some great acts like Ho-Ag, Neptune, and Devil Music who remain among my favorite bands in Boston. I'm still mad at a particularly fiendish incarnation of Life Partners whose kamikazee cover of Don't Stop Believin' gave me nightmares for two weeks after mixing it.
Another good memory from this time is a trip to Iowa City for the annual SEAMUS conference. I was invited to do an off-campus event with the other 'underground' acts so the academics could see how the kids were getting down with max/msp these days too. This could have been ridiculous, but it was a great show. It was also great to see Don Buchla finally, and Joel Davel blew me away performing on the Marimba Lumina. That was a real inspiration to start getting serious with the instrument.
Around this time I was corresponding a lot with J.Hall, a producer in Kansas City, and a new band he started called The Secret Club. He convinced me to work on their concept record The Sunday Suite, and compose segues that stiched the whole disc into one continuous experience. That was one ambitious project, and I'm not sure those guys still love all this weird shit I put all over their record. The whole experience of slapping avant-garde weirdness on a rock record tickled me, and I imagined that it was the sort of thing that Eno got off on in the day.
Ellen Godena introduced me to Butoh, the stark post-war Japanese form that she dances, and soon I was collaborating with her and a growing scene of other dancers in Boston and New York. I went from zilch to dance snob in 60 seconds, and became convinced that this type of movement is a close cousin of the musical approaches that I value. We started a series called zeroplan where we paired dancers with improvisors and held a secret speakeasy show in my loft. I talked Jessica Rylan, Greg Kelley, and Howard Stelzer into performing with us and the whole show was really wonderfully weird.
I am really looking forward to doing more of this, and seeing what it turns into.