The summer of 1998 was a peculiar period in my creative history. My musical imagination was on fire as I composed—in my head, mostly—music for a never-to-be-completed DIY indie film, but my historically bad music equipment situation was at a particularly low point. The late-80s era stereo receiver that I’d been using as a preamp since about 1995 had become increasingly noisy and useless—it finally crapped out in ‘97—so I was only able to make music by way of my trusty old Casio SK-5 toy sampling keyboard (1987-2015, R.I.P.) and a cheap, portable AM/FM cassette radio. I’d just bought a cheap-o guitar (see [Deedledee]) to replace the other cheap-o guitar that I had sold for supplemental rent money back in ‘96, but I had nothing to plug it into.

This recording is all about the SK-5. I remember it had a janky power jack and a loose battery cover, so anytime I created an interesting sample and found myself drawn into some sort of “performance" (read: me, alone, sitting on my apartment’s dirty, cheaply-carpeted floor, lost in a super lo-fi sound-world), I had to consider it a final cut, because at the slightest bump, those little 0.7 and 1.4-second samples could be wiped from the keyboard’s tiny memory—and they were usually impossible to duplicate.

These three tracks comprise the better part of one side of a tape in my archive, labeled “1998 EXPERIMENTAL”, which also contains a very long noise drone (not included here) created by overdubbing multiple layers of myself reading aloud from Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan,” with traffic sounds from Summit St. in the background (I was still using the classic 2-tape-deck method, speaking into one tape deck while playing another tape aloud into the same mic; I don’t remember what kind of tape deck my 2nd one was). I’ve sampled that recording a handful of times over the years in other pieces.

On to the tracks proper:

[Sirens of Titan] is musically unrelated to the “Sirens'' noise drone, but obviously that book was on my mind when I created it. I think the sample for the ostinato bassline was created by pressing the Casio mic to the body of my electric guitar as I plucked the strings, and the high pitch was created by kind of nicking the mic with a fingernail, creating a sort of square waveform out of the rapidly repeating clicks. The jagged, glass-like sound was a sample of my jingling apartment keys. Simple stuff. I distinctly remember recording this in an afternoon before going to my job as a busboy at The Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown KC.

[Deedledee] is just one of those little moments where I found myself absent-mindedly plucking my guitar in a certain way that struck me as interesting, and since there was a tape in the deck, I figured I’d hit record and capture a few seconds of it, for possible later use (here it is, I guess).

[Pepper] was recorded at night, probably while drinking cheap—there’s that word again—cheap red wine and eating Cheez-Its. I got the bass sample by holding the SK-5 up to my cd player’s speaker as it played a very well-known track from a very, very well-known album, and I played it on the sample pads and keyboard along with the “hi bongo” and "low bongo” preset rhythm pads (I think... I could be wrong about the rhythm pads; it sounds more like down-pitched snare in the sample itself, as I listen to it now—I mean, it was 24 years ago). The other samples, I have no idea; I think guitar, but I’ll never know. [Pepper] is the definition of repetition—I liked how the looped sample sounded and wanted to live in it for a while before it was lost forever—but I played it like I meant it. It’s got some breakdowns that create odd time-signature zig-zags, and the whole thing just has this creakily compelling and funky feel to it (to my weird ears, anyway). You might need a handful of edibles to get into this one, but if you like extremely low-fidelity weirdness, it should suit you just fine (and it’s got a chef’s kiss-worthy improvised fade-out).

-G