(first image that shows up when you type "happy take trash head toe" in google images)
I was using these MIDI machines they had in the college music lab — you could play a piano/synth that was hooked up to a computer and it would transcribe it into musical notation — and showing Jack how great it was. I then went further and demonstrated how you could type in lyrics and they would appear below the music. I was just typing nonsense to show how it worked, and for some reason I typed "I’m a happy take take the trash out with my head. Head of a toe head." No idea why, they were just the first words that popped into my head and anyway, I was just trying to show Jack a feature of the software.
Jack started laughing like to bust a gut. He thought that phrase was so damn funny, we printed it out and somehow that night recorded this track. Now I don’t know if you know about bouncing tracks on 4-track, but you can do this thing where you record 3 tracks of stuff and then mix it down onto 1 track. You can then record 2 additional tracks with that one and mix THAT down to another track. In this way you can pile track on top of track on top of track. The only issue is that the first stuff you record will get pretty buried in the mix.
Jack and I came up with this idea to record the main phrase as this singer who was in a club and the crowd slowly gets it and starts to sing along until everyone’s doing it at the end. When we recorded the voices of the club’s crowd, we decided that each one would be someone we admired who was at the club. For one take, Jack did Bowie and I did Tom Waits. He did Lou Reed and I did Black Francis. He did Screamin Jay Hawkins. I can’t remember the others, but there are a bunch in there. We also added the sounds of glasses and other ambient stuff to really make it feel like a club. It makes me laugh every time I hear it.
This is the kind of stuff we did when we were bored.
My friend Sandy had given me an acoustic guitar that he found in the trash somewhere and I was trying to learn how to play. Then this strange thing happened where my Aunt Helen ended up with an electric guitar and amp at her house because someone owed her money and they gave her the guitar as collateral. I found out about it somehow and asked if I could borrow it and she said sure but that I would have to give it back if this person ever paid her. I took the guitar and worked harder I had this idea to write a song for every chord I learned — not an original idea (see: every punk band ever), but fun.
"Winter of 1849" is a 2 chord song and Jack and I recorded it on 4-track (surprise) in his freshman dorm room late one night. We added all these other misc sounds to it (trying for Tom Waits and failing), and other random voice sounds and mixed it into this short weird stew. Jack does the "Oh Yeah"’s. We drank a lot of beer that night and ate a lot of chocolate chip cookies (not recommended). Once I got back to my own dorm room I threw up and then this girl I knew came over and stayed the night. This was the point where college started to get good.
At one point I started multi-tracking the piano, adding layers of piano on top of other layers of piano. Since I didn’t have a click track to play along with or anything, the rhythms were all really chaotic, but I liked that, thought it gave it a good random quality. This is my favorite of the multi-tracked piano pieces: Mellow Warpath. I like this one a lot, it starts off sweet, locks in around :20 and then kind of goes nuts until the end. I also like the very end, with the last notes coming from an underlying piano track that you kind of didn’t know was there.
One of the only good things to come from my eye scenario is that I finally hooked a tape player up to the computer to digitize all the stuff I recorded to cassette during college. I’d had this box of tapes laying around forever, so it’s great to finally get this stuff recorded and mp3’d. Also, since most of doing the task was just listening, it was the perfect project for my eye. I figured this week I would post some of the recordings — not sure how many, most of them are so cringe-inducingly cheezy that I’m not really sure why I digitized them.
This first one is recorded in a piano practice room when I was going to college. My pal JW lent me his 4-track and I recorded a bunch of piano songs that I had been working on; digitizing this tape made me realize how much time I must have spent that Freshman year in the piano room. Freshman year wasn’t a good time, and I guess I channeled that stuff into the piano. The weird thing is, I would record these tracks and not re-do them if I made mistakes, so you’ll hear little wobbles in there and parts that aren’t quite 100%, but so be it. I think at the time I was mainly influenced by Windham Hill New Age music.
At the end of Freshman year I had to turn in a cassette of a bunch of tracks for some kind of class project, so my friend PH and I named them with the cheeziest names we could think of as a joke.
Unfortunatley I am still experiencing (bio)technical difficulties in my left eye…look up “corneal ulcer” for a hint of the fun I’m having. Regular posting will resume once this is sorted out, hopefully no more than a week or so…
Now this is more like it. It’s been a while since I felt like I hit a vein of gold on the ole internet, but this is jaw-dropping solid. Using clips found deep deep in the belly of youtube, this artiste has sampled, cut, sliced and diced them to create some phat trax. Sure, it’s the same thing folks have been doing with James Brown and P-Funk samples for years, but there’s something fantastic about harnessing the collective talent of the crowd and resampling that.
The site has an album’s worth of tracks, and there’s no easy embedding, so go check it out over lunch or whatever…I’ve recorded the first track as a sample so you can see what I’m talking about, but the other tracks as just as good and some moments are better…this one is nice ‘cuz it starts slow so you can see what he’s doing, and then it kicks off into the stratosphere…
I mean, this is why the copyfight is a good thing, because appropriating footage of The Monkees lets us a, re-appreciate the original and b, add to the exuberance and joy that this song and video can bring us. Keep fighting.
Listening to fluxblog‘s fluxcast that focuses on comedy, and the first track is so damn funny I keep having to replay it…these Lonely Island guys are good, and the songwriting is sharp, the absurdity is fantastic, the beats are fr3sh, the satire is pointed…
plus its so great to hear this track while I’m working on upfronts (i.e., massive marketing tape that will be produced by committee and end up as a piece of junk that everyone hates)…take a meeting indeed…
listening to the In Our Time podcast this morning, all about time, our conception of it, or perception of it…heady stuff for the subway ride in, makes me wanna ditch work something awful…
good philosophical puzzler in there: if the universe was empty, if there was no "thing" in the universe, no "stuff", would there still be time? it’s great to hear the host get more and more confused as the podcast goes on and gets into stranger concepts…
reminds me of something I used to get into when talking about hallucinations, the fact that we are all experiencing hallucinations ALL THE TIME, that we aren’t seeing the sun, we are seeing light that is 8 minutes old, that the stars we see are apparitions of stars (some long gone), that we don’t actually see any objects, we see the light reflected by matter (i.e., we’re seeing what those objects don’t absorb, or what they AREN’T, not what they ARE), that when you get down to some quantum physics, particles move backwards in time, etc ad infinitum.
This is good, but somehow I want it to go further…that is, everytime it does a particularly cool reveal, I want the others to be as good…that said, it’s still pretty good…
It’s no secret that animal habitats are being encroached upon and causing all sorts of weird "coyotes buying ice cream cones" type of behavioral adjustments. I feel like this was big news in the enviro movements of the 80’s, right? There’s that Miyzaki film about the Racoons (remind me to tell you the story of Cakeface sometime) in Japan, that Disney film about the animals losing their homes to buildings, etc.
But I had no clue there’s an entire GENRE of youtube clips all about foxes bouncing on people’s trampolines! The clips are fun and weird. How do the foxes know that this is what’s supposed to happen on a trampoline? It must feel great. They must like to have a good time.
Fun and weird.
Go to youtube and search for "fox" and "trampoline" and you’ll find tons of these vids.
