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Composed by Modergrade featuring Vinich (track 8), I.D. (track 8) and Net Pirate (track 9).

Written by Dmitriy Troshkin, Victor Vinich (track 8), Ilya Komlev (track 8) and Vsevolod Dostoevskiy (track 9).

Synthesizers, programmed and arranged by Dmitriy Troshkin and Victor Vinich (track 8).

Percussion by Ilya Komlev (track 8) and Vsevolod Dostoevskiy (track 9).

CGI by Dmitriy Troshkin.

Artwork by Anna Riet.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

You have right to playback, copy, distribute, transmit, adapt, remix or otherwise use this work as long as you mention the authors and provide the source of material textually. Any alterations and works built upon this work should be published under same or compatible license. For any reuse you should make clear the license terms of this work to everybody. Some rights reserved.

THE BACK STORY

I grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota. Home of the World’s Only Corn Palace. A depressing little sealed tuna sandwich inhabited by 14,000 annoying people and a few occasional gems. One of these gems was Evan Peta, who lived literally around the block from me (I lived on the 200 block of 11th, he on the 300 block of 12th). Despite the fact that we lived so close, we never hung out until we were in our late teens after discovering we both played guitar. Not too long after, we began a regular Friday night tradition of jamming together for a couple of hours. When I felt comfortable enough, I started playing Evan the tapes of original music I was making at time.

It was Spring 1986. Evan was going to tech school at the time, and his favorite classmate was Jeff Ashby, the first “Official Punk Rocker” that either of us had ever known. Jeff was from Huron, about 50 miles North of Mitchell. Evan told me that Jeff had some other friends back home that were into weird music. One Friday after jamming, we got in my primer-grey AMC Gremlin and drove up to Huron to search out Ashby and his weirdo friends.

We managed to find Jeff, and for the first time also met a couple of other Huronites : Ken Nelson, a very friendly, immediately likable guy, and the man with the largest record collection in South Dakota; and Ken’s initially shy and reserved buddy Scott Johnson...the man that would become Love, Calvin.

That night, all five of us piled into Ashby’s car with the loud stereo and, as would become tradition, drove the deserted gravel roads of South Dakota with music blasting. That night was one of the most formative nights in my musical life. I distinctly remember being awe-struck at hearing the Butthole Surfers “The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey’s Grave” for the first time. I never quite looked at music the same after that night. I was 17 years old and had grown up on metal and radio music. It made me realize that there was a whole world of music out there that I was missing. With the help of Ken’s whale-sized record collection, it wasn’t long before I got a new education.

FORMING A NEW FRIENDSHIP

That initial night was followed by countless trips back up to Huron over the next 8 years until my eventual move away from Mitchell in 1994. Scott’s house (actually his brother Dave’s house where Scott lived with wife Susan, daughters Rachael and Sarah, and Dave) became “freak central”. Anyone with unusual tastes in music, art, or anything else seemed to gravitate to the regular parties held there, which always featured great music and nutty behavior by some of Huron’s and Mitchell’s finest misfits.

It wasn’t too much longer before those tapes I had been making and had already played for Evan were presented to the Huron scene and everyone seemed quite amazed. It was 1986. There was no internet, no Pro Tools, no Garage Band, no MP3’s or iPods. A four-track recorder cost over $500, which seemed quite out of reach to our 1986 dollars. The idea that some 17-year-old kid was recording albums in his bedroom in Nowhere, South Dakota must have seemed like some kind of retarded revolution.

EARLY LOVE, CALVIN

Scott had been writing poetry for some time. Despite the fact that we lived 50 miles from each other and saw each other frequently, we got in the habit of writing weekly letters to each other. Mostly the letters were a lot of nonsense, scribbled art, and poetry. It seemed only natural that Scott would eventually start setting some of that poetry to music.

With some initial direction from myself on the process of ping-pong recording between two tape decks, the Love, Calvin recordings began. Scott acquired a keyboard and guitar and went at it. Some early favorites (available on ‘EARLY RECORDINGS 1986-1987”) like “Tree Farm”, “Great Big Disco Kiss”, “Jeff’s Legs” (dedicated to Jeff Ashby), and “Black Sabbath In Ken’s Car” featured straight-forward humor that Scott eventually grew away from in favor of more serious, heart-wrenching stuff like “Love Lies Bleeding”, “One Of Them”, “All I Remember Is...”, and “Time To Die”. I was amazed at how quickly Scott took to writing music. He seemed to just pick up a guitar or keyboard and immediately know what he wanted to do, and it all sounded great. I recently asked Scott’s mother Joann if he had taken piano lessons as a child, because he seemed pretty talented on keyboards. “Yes he did!” she replied “and he was very good on that as well as the drums and anything else he ever tried. He loved music like his Momma.”

4-TRACK SCOTT

Eventually we all (Evan, Scott, and myself) bought Tascam Porta-One 4-track recorders. The first official Love, Calvin release came out soon after...and they kept coming at a steady rate for the next 6 years. What follows are some of my impressions and memories of the Love, Calvin discography (all of which can be heard and downloaded at www.lovecalvin.com):

LOVE,CALVIN (1987)

Well first off, the name. The origin of the name Love,Calvin is this: Ken Nelson had written a letter to Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening. Calvin replied, and signed his letter “Love, Calvin”. Scott found this so touching and honest that he adopted the phrase as his “band name”.

Some of the songs on this tape that I consider to be “Classic Scott”, lyric-wise would be “Getaway”, “A Reason”, “After The Storm”, “So Pretty Dead”...well hell, I could just list them all. Like I mentioned, Scott wrote a lot of poetry before ever entertaining the idea of songwriting, and he had a lyrical style that, when he was being serious, could just cut right through your heart and just leave you feeling exactly what he was feeling. He had an amazing way of expressing his life experience.

Jeff Ashby plays guitar on “Breakdown”, and can be heard during the initial “studio chatter” uttering what would eventually become a much-repeated catch phrase : “WHAT DID I JUST SAY?! FUCK!”. “Peace, Love and Nuclear Fusion” was a song title that originated from something Evan babbled once. Scott decided we should all record a song with that title, like each record our own individual versions. Scott’s version is on this tape. Mine ended up on my “History Of A Year & Other Assorted Songs” tape (also 1987). Evan’s remains unreleased.

NOW WHAT (1987)

Contains one of my top ten favorite Scott songs, “I’ve Had A Happy Life” - which flirts with what would become a running thread through the rest of Scott’s tapes : songs about or that mention Jesus.

They played ‘La Bamba’ at your funeral

I kissed your pretty lips

as you lay dead in the coffin

I said goodbye

The funeral parlor was decorated

In shades of red and gold

with pictures of Jesus on the wall

with pictures of Jesus on the wall

Jesus on the wall

I’ve had a happy life

I’ve had a happy, happy life...

This tape also contains another song for Ashby (“Dear Jeff”), and is most significant for the first appearance of Evan Peta on lead guitar (“Summer Park”), who would from here on out become Mick Ronson to Scott’s Bowie; playing lead guitar on many future Love, Calvin songs.

PRETTY WORLD OF UGLY PEOPLE (1988)

On the cover, Scott’s wife Susan in a Butthole Surfers t-shirt sits mockingly on a gravestone in the Huron cemetery, a frequent stop in the night-time drinking/driving/music tours of the next few years.

Stand-out songs include “Paint By Numbers”, “A Rose-Colored House”, “Misty Curtains”, and the Devo-ish title track. Evan Peta returns on lead guitar (“How Do You Feel”). Scott honored me with a cover of my song “I Miss The Shit Out Of You”. Collaborators from the Huron/Mitchell freak scene began to trickle in. Brad Bennett recites on “Kiss Goodnight”, and even Ken Nelson gets in on the action, drunkenly babbling on “Paulette’s Favorite Song”.

“Think Right”

If you don’t look right

If you don’t talk right

If you don’t think right

Nobody will care about you

If you don’t live right

If you don’t pray at night

If you don’t think right

Nobody will care about you

Better grow up, get married, have a family, find God

Better grow up, get married, have a family, find God

PORTRAIT OF FLESH (1989)

This stands out for me as the climax that the first few tapes were building up to. It has great tortured pop songs, more collaborators from the scene, and is more of a well-sequenced ‘album’, whereas the first three tapes, while chocked full of greatness, could get long at well over an hour each. The cover features a shirtless Jeff Ashby, displaying the severe burn scars he obtained in a power-line accident (Jeff would later demand that he be written a song called “Burn Victims Suck”. Scott and I both took him up on it; Scott’s version showed up on “Mr. Joy”, mine on my “Hi Honey...Drop Dead” tape (1989). Ashby also provides lyrics here on “Seasonal Death Rape”.

Evan returns on the sloppy stream-of-consciousness blues “Sex With Your Lipstick”. “Portrait OF Flesh” features a fantasy scenario involving local painter Jim Bryant (Who’s work would grace the next two Love,Calvin cassette covers; “Diseased Birds” and “Mr. Joy”), The inseparable trio (they seemed to show up as a set quite often) of Carrie, Karin and Channing provide some lyrics and vocals, my favorite of which begins the tape as one of the girls states “even ruthless dictators need love’; leading into “I Kissed Hitler”.

DISEASED BIRDS (1989)

Shortly after releasing this tape and handing out only a few copies, Scott decided against it for reasons unknown. At the time I was unaware of this decision, but later remember him telling me that he did not consider it a part of his ‘discography’. Contrary to that, it contains some songs that he must have been proud of. When I transferred the Love, Calvin albums to CD in 2007, Scott told me to make sure to include the song “Diseased Birds”. He told me it was one of his favorite songs he had ever written. Oddly, it did not originally appear on the 1989 cassette release despite being the title track :

“don’t forget the diseased

 don’t forget the dead

 don’t forget the postage when you write

 don’t forget your friends

 don’t forget the diseased birds

 in your life...’

MR.JOY (1990)

This is the tape that regular Gajoob readers may remember, as it received highest praises in the issue after it’s release. The sarcastic title was a sign of the times for Scott. Rough times were ahead. His 10+ year marriage was ending, and his eventual crippling depression and substance abuse problems were just beginning.

“The Truth (Some Assembly Required)”

“Don’t get up anymore

When there’s nothing to live for

Stay in bed and rot

Useless, pathetic, choose your favorite adjective

Wallow in your addictions

Die for your obsessions...”

This tape is most memorable to me for my two lyrical contributions that Scott turned into the two best songs we ever wrote together, “Death Is A Reality” and “I Was”; the later being a song that was written about my marriage proposal to my wife, ironically just as Scott’s marriage was ending.

This tape (as well as “Diseased Birds”) features snippets of conversation from “Hellraiser”, the Clive Barker film. Scott was a huge Clive Barker fan. 

LOVE SONGS (1990)

This is the “Divorce Album”. It rocks loud. Distorted guitars and almost no keyboards, and the lyrics bite hard. Almost every song is like the kind of thing that would slip out in a heated argument and ultimately be regretted the next morning, except there’s no sign of that regret here. This is a pure venting.

“Hurt You”

“My waters run deep, my walls are so high

I wanted to hurt you, I don’t know why

My head was empty, my soul was laid bare

I wanted to hurt you, and I didn’t care...”

Evan Peta makes his preeminent appearance in the Love,Calvin catalog, playing lead on half the songs, with a distorted urgency that fits the situations perfectly.

The somber angry mood does occasionally lift, as in “Gay Bar” (major foreshadowing) and “Letter To Raymond” (a song for daughter Rachael, who lived with Scott after the divorce). In between song snippets are of comedian Brother Theodore, a regular on David Letterman’s NBC show, and another favorite of Scott’s.

LOOK IN-2 MY EYES (1992)

At eight songs and 30 minutes, this seems almost like an EP along side everything that came before it. There are some interesting features that make this one stand out, 12-string guitar and acoustic drumming add an organic touch that is a complete 180 from LOVE SONGS. Still though, some left-over rage in “Wheelchair Nation” and the primal scream therapy of “Floppy Kitty”(inspired in part by a cat Scott had at the time that had some sort of ailment that made it fall over sideways while walking).

KGOD (1993)

Scott made up for the short timing of “Look In-2 My Eyes” by returning the next year with a 90-minute tape crammed with a lot of the best songs he had ever written. This tape is filled with incredible songs and stories. Over the past 6 years, Scott had become an amazing singer/songwriter. If he would have come along ten years earlier and in a more populous area, I have no doubt in my mind that he would have been revered as another Lou Reed or David Bowie. My favorites from this tape would fill most of my top ten of greatest Love,Calvin songs : “Fallen Saint”, “Secrets”, “Model Of Tolerance”, “Blue-Eyed Nun” and “The Damned” are all incredible, personal bests. At the end of this tape, Scott did two very significant things. He came out of the closet (“Wake Up In Manville”, “(Standing In A) Prison Shower”);then he quit recording for ten years.

AFTER THE STORM

I have very vague memories of what exactly happened next. I know that Scott had run into some financial difficulties, which ultimately resulted in the selling of recording equipment. In the spring of 1994, I moved to Sioux Falls, which meant I now lived two hours away from Scott as opposed to the 45 minutes between Mitchell and Huron. Scott’s problems with depression, drugs, and alcohol continued through the 90’s. In 2000, Scott went on disability and eventually left Huron for Madison, which was a little closer to me. I visited occasionally, but not as much as I would have liked. Before I knew it...ten years gone.

SHORT TRIP TO OBLIVION (2003)

By 2003, We were back in contact more regularly thanks to e-mail, and one day Scott informed me that he had just bought a new digital 8-track, keyboard, drum machine, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, and microphone and was ready to get back in the recording game. He was having some trouble getting used to the new digital recording method, and asked me over to see if I could make heads or tails of it. That first day we ended up recording his first new song together, “Relapse” (which I played bass on). Every so often I would get an e-mail from Scott with an MP3 of his latest song attached. All total he ended up sending me probably around 20 songs over the course of the year. He continued to experiment with the digital 8-track, but soon confided in me that it just wasn’t the same as the trusty old Tascam Portaone 4-track we had both started on. I’m not sure exactly why he stopped recording again later that year, but I do know that he just wasn’t having as much fun recording digitally and dealing with the inevitable decline of the cassette. Most of the new equipment was gone again by the next year and that was that.

On Saturday, May 3rd, 2008, Scott was removed from life support. Days earlier he had been air-lifted to Sioux Falls and remained in a coma after a particularly damaging bout of indulgence. The funeral was held the next weekend at the Welter Funeral Home in Huron, just a couple of blocks down the street from his brother Dave’s house, where we had all spent so much time together in the 80’s.

About a year or so after Scott passed away, I started thinking about this folder of his songs I had sitting around, and decided to put them together as a final Love,Calvin album, mostly because I was pretty sure that I was the only person that had ever even heard most of them, much less still had copies of all of them. I thought it would be cool if Scott’s friends, and even more so his two daughters, had a chance to hear the songs. That’s how “Short Trip To Oblivion” came together. Songs like “James”, “Dream Of The One-Armed Psychopath”, and “Short Trip To Oblivion” made it clear that Scott still had that spark, waiting to come out.

There’s no way I can really tie this story up with a neat little bow, except to say ; I miss you Scott. Thanks for leaving us so many great memories behind.

“Short Trip To Oblivion”

“...so please don’t cry as I sing this song

    laugh out loud and let’s get high

    there are no boundaries with angel’s wings

    there’s no sky, there’s no sky...”

KISS MY DEAD LIPS - A TRIBUTE TO LOVE,CALVIN (1997)

The music of Love,Calvin performed by: Bryan Baker - Bill Erickson - Mike Myers - Evan Peta - Aric Pringle - Jim Shelley - Solvei Stedman - Russ Stedman

THE MUTTS - Love Mélange (1994)

Written and recorded in one evening in 1994.

Scott Johnson - Guitar & Vocals

Evan Peta - Guitar

Ken Rubenstein -- Invert and Transcend

CD -- $11.99 

Tell us about your recording studio.

Well, there are tons of wires and things. I have attached a pdf of how it's wired. The bottom line is that all signals end up routed through a old Soundcraft Spirit mixing board into an old VF160 Fostex standalone multitrack. I use lots of midi, all coordinated with a Behringer FCB1010 which has been pretty heavily programmed. But I don't sequence and I don't use a computer.

Where do you come by the expression of Eastern modes in your music?

I listen to so much international music, that it's just very deeply embedded in my brain, at this point. I love Indian music very much (Carnatic and Hindustani), as well as Bulgarian, Irish, Scottish, Turkish , Chinese Pipa, Japanese Koto, Vietnamese traditional and so on. Honestly, very often timbre will dictate what ends up happening harmonically. Pitch bend by means of the tremolo bar and pedals sort of makes things sound a bit more authentic.

Tell us about making the "Invert and Transcend" track.

That's one of my favorite tracks. It came out good. Charlie Zeleny and Wendy Parker sound very good on that tune. It's complex, but very songy. Truthfully, it was initially inspired by Shakti's "Lady L", but then went off into La La land. Charlie is so important to my music, now. I think he is an exceptional musician. We tracked Charlie's parts at Colin Marston's studio in Brooklyn. I sort of conducted/counted him out for that very last section of the tune.

You stike me as a student of guitar. What is your focus on these days?

I just love music, Bryan. Sadly, I am mostly restricted to guitar based tunes. I wish I was less anchored down to the guitar. But it's sort of unavoidable. I always write with the guitar on my lap. My technique of playing is intrinsically connected to how I write. They kind of feed each other. My friend Mark Kissinger one time referred to it as a snake eating itself. These days, I am just trying to get better and write more elegant and sensible music.

Are you in the process of making of new album? Singular pieces?

Most definitely. I have all new material written for my next record. It's MUCH better than the Invert material. It usually takes me 12 centuries to get a CD done. But major changes are now taking place in my personal and professional life, which will help get things underway finally. I also occasionally collaborate through the Internet with friends on standalone, Internet based songs.

When Scott Johnson sings things like "We all have friends. Some live in cages," it hits you somewhere unexpected. This album of Love, Calvin's final recordings is a collection of raw songs, raw emotion, raw humor. Lots of things on the edge inhabit this place. The people in these songs are not so much people you know, but people someone else knows. People in Scott's head. They're like the people you know reflected back in funhouse mirrors. The song titles read like extras in a Felini movie. Bumblebee, Robyn Hitchcock and Some Other Guy, Living In South Dakota, Cheerleaders On Dope, James, Dream of the One-Armed Psychopath, Caine in Boxers, Pink Pussy, Relapse, Killer's Greeting Card and the title song -- Short Trip is a misnomer. It's a long trip. (Russ Stedman has archived all of Love, Calvin's recordings for free download at the lovecalvin.com website). -- Bryan Baker

This tape was the result of discussions on the subject of doing meditational music. McDonald writes, "I also wanted to stretch in other areas and see what I could do, and so proceeded to sit down and work up the four pieces for side two, which range from spacey music all the way up to stomp jazz. It was a lot of fun to do." Side one is a well-focused realization of ambient loop themes that blend and revolve around one another. Side two changes the pace a bit, while remaining within the realm of meditative music. Most of the percussion is live, by hand, rather than dependent on the sequencers, and as McDonald says, "Getting it down generally required multiple takes - though the furious drumming at the end of "Skeleton Dance" was executied in two passes (causing terrific envy amongst drummers hearing it because it was done so easily; however, I have the advantage of being able to think in Middle Eastern drum patterns)." Steven's current work includes music based on ancient Egyptian themes.

In the tradition of early Violent Femmes, along with DiY groups like Private Studio's Squigbelly Phlegmfoot and Baltimore's Groovy Like a Pig, Lords of Howling is an acoustic conglomeration of folk street band with a punk edge along with some nods to Captain Beefheart and maybe Tom Waits. Great songwriting and playful musical invention make it all work perfectly and still seem completely natural. There's a whole lot of material here that makes Long Dry Spell a sure fire on your regular rotation list. The combination of sheer songwriting talent and musical adventure, with a more than generous amount of craziness makes this release one of the best I've heard all year.

The follow-up to "Long Dry Spell" (reviewed in DiY Report 29) is every bit as perfect a collection of magnetic particles as it was. The guitar work here is simply wonderful, coaxed to play a variety of endless sounds that somehow manage to be musical amongst backcountry story tellers whose stories are the prize -- who cares if they're lies. The music here is an environment. Living and breathing. But musical and full of song. Bits of Waits, Femmes, Beefheart may be used as reference, but you'll start there and never look back. Highly recommended.

by Mark Kissinger

What's the first thing that got you really interested in music?

You mean way back?

Yeah, whenever that moment was when you realized that this was what you wanted to do

It was sort of what I think most people are hit with: "Hey, I can do that." This kind of realization. When you're little, any music has a kind of magical quality to it, no matter what it is, and the idea that you can make that kind of magic yourself... I just knew that I wanted to do that. It was like "Hey, this is for me!"

Do you remember how old you were at the time? Were you listening to something in particular when this realization was hit?

Yeah, I was in Kindergarten.. the teacher was playing piano and we were singing little songs and I like watching her operate this big instrument and I said, "That looks fun."

So what did you do, go home and tell your parents?

Well, they knew I wanted to take piano lessons 'cause they would see me... I would open a storybook up like it was sheet music and pretend I was playing on the table like it was a piano.

Do remember what music you listened to when you were real little?

My parents had a bunch of 78's dating from WWII and when I was five I wanted a record player for Christmas. I mean, that's all I wanted. And they got me one; a very nice little Capitol record player, red and white... it was beautiful. And after I got that, they got out all these 78's that they had stashed in the attic and I went crazy with them. And swing music was the first really big... that was before I discovered the radio and the Beatles and everything that came after that.

What does music mean to you? What is it? What kind of effect does it have on you?

It's sort of a way of organizing chaos in the world, kind of bringing it into us.

How so?

Well, of course, when you create music, composing or performing it, it's sort of as though you're grabbing these sounds out of this continuum of sound that's all around you and molding it into specific shapes....

And thereby bringing order out of chaos?

Yes... it's not a way of controlling it but rather of selecting a bit of it and..not making it your own.... what is it I want to say?

Do you think we tend to just grab those sounds that are our own?

Well, let's say that no one could make music without having heard music previously, otherwise what would the result be? You'd probably just have a chaotic jumble. So, I mean, you're influenced by everything you hear, if you're a musician, and it's a way of reaching out and grabbing that particular group of sounds. But you know, of course, every musician has their own way of ordering that for them, just like a signature, so no two people are gonna make music at all similar.

Unless you're signed to Columbia Records, .... then maybe ...

Well, that's up to the producers, of course, and the sound engineers and the hair stylists.

Who or what would you say has been you're main influence in your composing?

One of the biggest, of course was Frank Zappa, and that goes back to when I first heard him when I was 12 or 13 years old. It was like... you could do all sorts of ingenious and off-the-wall things and get away with it, or make it something really viable and useful. Through him I got into, uh.... I had always been... let's just say that before that I had always been into classical music and he used elements of that and he used a lot of different things, but he showed that you could use just about any influence, any style, and bring your own little zing to it. He was a big influence when I was just starting to write, just starting to play around with it seriously, as far as composing goes.

Any other influences?

Eno, he's another. What he did is brought the "non-musician" angle into it; He himself is an admitted non-musician. And he showed that you didn't have to be particularly well-skilled in an instrument in order to... you know, there are other ways of making and shaping sounds than just virtuosic finger-play and so forth. He brought a sort of naive, untutored approach that I thought was refreshing and it sort of made me want to limit, to a certain extent, the degree of schooling that I would have in it, 'cause I wanted to keep it fresh and I knew that if I got too deeply into it, it would be like... discovering how the magician did all his tricks or something. It would lose that potency for me.

Anything else?

All of the classical masters definitely have something worth studying and deriving things from, if not directly imitating what they do then, just the mastery of the materials. I mean, of course this goes against what I just said about Eno, so it's always been kind of back-and-forth with me, wanting to keep it naive and untutored on the one hand and trying to master the materials on the other (laughs)... sort of a friction right there I've maintained, I guess. There are times when I deliberately do things that are incorrect, I guess you would say, just to see if I can't discover something that has been missed somewhere.

Out of all the recordings you've done do you have any particular favorites?

"The Son of the Mayor of Rain"

Why that one?

It seemed to gel a lot of ideas that I was working up to at that point. I mean, I like to put out tapes and have a wide variety of ideas on them, and that seemed to have the widest variety and have each one individually be successful within itself as well. The pacing of it, the variety of sounds that I used on it, the whole package. It seemed to be as close to what I'd been aiming at, in that particular style anyway, which would be like pop/rock, I suppose. It just seemed to gel real well when I made it. I mean, I made it very quickly and I didn't eliminate anything I was working on at the time because everything came out so well when I was doing it. I just happened to be particularly well-inspired at that point, which I would say was the spring of '88. I put out a whole series of tapes at that time that just...one after another, bam-bam-bam, they were great one after another. Like, "48 Inventions" was one of my favorites also. I worked on that one, composing it, for about five years and recording it was pretty difficult too because these are very intricate little pieces and required a lot of discipline to master and I tried to pace them and organize the whole set as a unity, and it came off very well, much better than I had hoped, so that one's particularly successful.

Any others you'd care to mention?

"Tonecolor Variations", although that was a collaboration. All I did... "all I did" (laughs) was compose this six-minute piece.. but it was a real challenge to write it, to make something that had that kind of flow and continuity at that length, and what Lennart Ostman..when he orchestrated and arranged them he did a brilliant job as far as...he brought out a lot of nuances in the piece that one version wouldn't have said all that it had to say. For example, the version for woodwind quartet, you can hear a lot of things in that that you can't hear in the piano version and vice versa, and the same for all the other versions. They all bring out different facets of that little piece and I'm real happy with that one. And, uh..."Word War Four" with Courtesy Patrol came out very well, I thought. We had a lot of good ideas, we had a lot of fun making it, and we had a lot of participants who also were equally enthusiastic about it. It was also made around that period of Spring of '88. That was about the time we finished it, but it was in that period when I felt really inspired. Then there's the EP that I put out. I'm real happy with that because that seemed to be a new direction for me although now I realize that's just one aspect... I mean it's not a direction I can pursue single-mindedly. It's just like I've added another facet to the range of ideas that I'm working with.

While we're on the subject of EP, what was your first vinyl experience like for you?

A financial drain (laughs). It was... I think because of the amount of money I was investing in it, I took it a lot more seriously than any other project I've ever worked on before, so it required a lot more recording and recomposing and... I created about a dozen or so pieces that were potentially useful for it and it was a matter of selecting and polishing those that I thought were the best, so it was very intense...by the time I was done with it I was rather tired of it (laughs), 'cause I worked very hard on it trying to perfect it and I was afraid it would become sterile by the time I was done with it, but fortunately I don't think that happened. And of course taking the tape down to the recording studio and sitting there behind the board while the guy's saying "Do you want some digital reverb on it?" And I said "Sure!" You know, slap it on! (laughs).

Like asking if you want sour cream with your baked potato...

(Laughs) Yeah, well, he was very accomodating and I felt like a real big-shot sitting there behind the board, you know, in this over-stuffed chair and directing him around, you know? And of course getting the test pressing was a real kicker and then getting the finished product, of course. It's always fun to, uh... anyone who's put out a record knows what it feels like...It feels like you've reached a certain amount of legitimacy, just having it out, even if you've had to do it yourself as a vanity pressing thing. But one interesting sidelight to doing that is that I take my cassettes more seriously now, because I realize that, even though I don't invest as much money into producing them, that should in no way indicate in any way that I should take them less seriously. Because now that it's done with, I no longer think of it in terms of all the money I had to spend on it and so forth. So now I listen to it and just think of it as a damn good piece of work and not just a financial investment.

Did you send it out to many radio stations?

A few. Not as many as I wanted to. At the time, I was too concerned with sending them out as demos to the record companies...which were summarily ignored, of course... and I had a feeling that would happen but I felt it was something I had to try. I had to see what would happen. But it didn't seem to hit anyone particularly well, but...(chuckling, he shrugged)...(laughs) I shrugged, folks, okay? No, it's a ...(dammit!) Back to cassettes. It's a cassette magazine, remember? (laughs)

Of your various collaborations, do you have any favorites besides "Tonecolor Variations"?

The one I did with John Oswald, "Diesel Restaurant/Color Breathing", was especially good. We seemed to be in sync as far as...the material he sent me was eminently, uh....I'd hate to degrade it by simply saying it was "usable" but it was, uh...it seemed to strike a very good chord with me and I was able to meet it's demands, so to speak. I was able to work within the framework he gave me very successfully. I think, and that one came out particularly well. And this big collaboration I just did an EnDuration, which has twelve different contributors on it. It came out pretty good. It was sort of a collage more than anything because there were so many people involved that I got to the point where I just wanted to combine different people in different ways...sort of set them off from each other. The people who've heard that enjoy it. I recently finished a collaboration with Chip Handy, the guitar improviser from California. That's an area I haven't done much work in myself but I really enjoyed that because it was different. And of course he's one of the great guitar improvisers. I rank him right up there with Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith myself. So it was a real honor to be able to work with him, and also it stretched me out a little.

How did you two work? Did he send you material to work on, or did you send him stuff?

He sent me a tape of guitar solos he had sone which he felt needed something and I added a second guitar to these pieces and I improvised them just as he improvised his so I improvised right along with the tape as though he were right there playing with me.

Do you feel you've learned anything useful from being involved in the underground music scene for the past seven years?

Yeah..

Okay, like what?

Don't take criticism of your work too seriously. The whole point behind doing it is... no one's in this cassette culture to make money, few people are anyway, so don't take the criticism seriously because you should just do what you want to do anyway, which is the whole point of doing it the way we are doing it.

What else?

You can save a lot of money on postage by not mailing boxes out with your tapes. (chuckles)

(laughs) Oh, a very useful insight!

Well, lets face it: most cassette artists probably have tons of boxes sitting around their houses anyway. Most likely.

If they aren't sending them out, that's probably why!

Exactly. Well, I think that's the way it ought to be. You know, there's no point in us trading cassette boxes. And at any rate, if you get a tape and you don't happen to have a box handy you can always go out an buy one. If I had mailed out cassette boxes with every tape I've sent out, it would be as though I'd mailed out an additional hundred tapes or something, as far as the cost of postage is concerned. And that can really add up. If you really want to get your music heard, you have to send out a lot of tapes and you have to conserve any way you can. Sometimes you even have to cheat a little at the post office by not telling them there's a letter enclosed. (chuckles) For some bizarre reason, they always ask you "Is there a letter in here?" (laughs) and I say, "Oh, no! Huh-uh" (laughs) Well, I mean, it's going by weight anyway, so what the hell's the difference? I mean, the paper weighs 1/2 ounce or whatever and that's what's being mailed out is that weight, whether it's written material or a personal letter or a greeting card or whatever, it's none of their business. Or soiled underwear, it doesn't matter (laughs)

Do you send a lot of those out?

(laughs) Well, James Hill told me about...he wanted people to.. "Send me anything, something useful or funny or different or weird or whatever," in trade for his tapes and he mentioned some woman sent him a pair of soiled underwear. And he wrote her, "Thanks Barb: you know what's funny!" (laughs) That's what brought that to mind.

Any other useful "cassette culture" ideas?

Don't make a tape if you don't have any ideas. Don't make a tape just 'cause you want to make a tape. Don't bother. (laughs) No one wants to hear it. When you start making tapes, don't send out your first ten tapes. Keep working till you've really got it honed down to what you want. Don't make 90-minute tapes if you can avoid it 'cause they're too long, let's face it.

Are you still doing one-of-a-kind tapes?

Yes. As a matter of fact, I sent Bryan Baker an article about them.

When did you start doing them, and why?

Well, I'd say I've been doing them ever since I started home-taping, even before I started releasing tapes. They were just for my own amusement. But the reason I still do them now is that they allow me to stretch out and do things... not take myself too seriously and play around a lot more than I normally would. When I'm making a tape specifically for release I tend to week out a lot of extraneous matter or just try to make them conceptually coherent. But with the one-of-kind tapes I can just throw in any ideas that I feel like at any given time...and so they won't always work as a whole sometimes but that's the nature of them...to allow myself to stretch out a bit. And there's also a conservative aspect to it in that instead of sending out dozens of copies of tape and adding to the general glut of tapes that are out there I'm just sending out one tape. You see what I'm saying?

You think there's a glut of tapes out there? (laughs) Maybe... maybe even two gluts?

(chuckles) There's a lot of stuff floating around, that's for sure, and a lot of it...well, I won't say a lot of it..

Most of it?

A...good deal... we could do without since, as I mentioned, people tend to pretty much just make a tape for the sake of making a tape.

How many one-of-a-kinders do you think you've done?

There's no way of telling. Must be a couple of hundred by now. Generally when I get a new piece of equipment I'll go crazy and do a lot of experimenting and playing around with it and I'll do a lot of one-of-a-kind tapes and send them out....(Tape runs out and the rest of the reply is lost forever...)

What are some of your all-time favorite recordings, and why?

The Beatles (white album): the variety and quality, just consistently brilliant from one end to the other. It's amazing that they were falling apart as a band yet still managed to put together such an impeccable piece of work. Uncle Meat by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: a lot of variety, a lot of great ideas; it's a masterpiece, it just doesn't let up. There are no flawed points in that album that I can think of. Zappa was pushing a lot of boundaries out at that point; very innovative. And it's hard to be innovative and a great musician at the same time, to invent practically a whole new style of music and do it technically well. Another Green World by Brian Eno: he showed how one could create all sorts of arrangements of different instruments, how one could make all sorts of heterogenous elements work together and create a somewhat seamless whole. He seemed to be grabbing at anything he could get his hands on and utilizing it. Also with that album he seemed to single-handedly create the "new age" genre. Zoolook by Jean-Michel Jarre: it's probably the best use of sampling combined with acoustic and electronic instruments that I've ever heard. Blue Oyster Cult's first album: they added an intellectual quality to rock that seemed to be lacking at that point. Their lyrics were very arcane and mysterious but seemed to have a lot of literary and philosophical references. They seemed, also, to be developing the heavy metal genre at that point. Starless and Bible Black by King Crimson: it seemed to sum up the progressive rock idiom of the late '70's without being bombastic or self-congratulatory. There was a lot of subtlety to it. Residents' Commercial Album; what can I say? Residents, you know? I can't really say anything about it. It's something if people haven't heard it, they're missing a great deal. Band on the Run by Paul McCartney...

Pardon me while I draw back an inch or two .... (laughs)

That's simply his best work ever, I mean his best solo work. He hasn't done anything solo before or after that has really matched it in overall quality. Speechless by Fred Frith: it seemed like he was taking the really experimental ideas of progressive rock and stretching them and taking them where they should have gone had progressive rock still been a populist idion by that point, which would have been 1980 or so. There's a three-record set of Steve Reich's music that contains "Drumming", "Six Pianos", and "Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ". It's pretty much full-flowered minimalism and I don't think anyone does it quite like Reich does, or did, or still does. I think he himself disparages that categorization but he did some of his best work in process or minimalist music at that point with those three major pieces on that album. Hymnen by Stockhausen: he took the Cologne School of Electronic Music farther than it had ever been at that point (1966) and it's still a landmark album. A lot of home-tapers would do well to listen to that album and understand proper techniques for collaging. As the composer Mel Powell once said: :Writing electronic music requires every bit as much discipline as writing eight-part madrigals for voices." (chuckles) People don't realize that; they think they can throw pretty much anything they want at you, and it's not true. Exposure by Robert Fripp: again, it was progressive music of the 70's taken to the point it ought to have gone to. It's one of those albums with a great deal of variety and a lot of textures, and it seemed to be summing up for Fripp a lot of directions he was heading in and it seemed like he was trying to consolidate it and put it all out in one shot so he could continue on with other ideas. But it doesn't sound like a clearing house (chuckles) by any means.

Who in the cassette underground would you say in doing significant work?

tf: Dino Dimuro is one. Minoy has done some brilliant work. I would equate it with some of the best so-called academic avant-garde... A lot of people are going to hate me because I didn't mention their names! (laughs) Lawrence Salvatore is doing some of the best songwriting of the whole bunch. He has his very personal viewpoints (chuckles), sort of an uholy marriage between Jimmy Webb and Kurt Schwitters, presided over by Salvador Dali. (laughs) Croiners: some of the best tape loops, or digital loops in his case. He knows how to make loops work and his use of found sounds is very meticulously planned and well thought-out. Zan Hoffmann! He's a genius, a mine-field of ideas! (laughs) Call him! Everybody! Everybody out there call him. Here's his phone number: 502-454-3944. Call the guy, talk to him.

Any particular hours?

Doesn't matter: he's awake all the time.

Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that we haven't covered so far?

Yeah, I'm sick of these people who say that decaffeinated coffee is no good for you. I'm going to continue to to drink it.

Anything else... anything pertinent, that is....

(chuckles) Yes, people should keep working and working at what they're doing, but...

You mean "keep that day job"?

Yeah (laughs), hang on to that day job, definitely! No, people should work more release less tapes. (chuckles) Practice.... makes ...perfect .

GAJOOB began life as a print zine about cassette culture in 1987, edited and published by Bryan F. Baker. It's been online in various forms since 1992. GAJOOB.org is partly archive of many thousands of indie, underground and DiY cassettes, CDRs, vinyl and other albums, as well as letters, photos, and other material sent to GAJOOB over the years. I am busy digitizing and building an online library of it.

GAJOOB also features new releases, focusing, as always, on music with a more or less independent ethic. We list digital-only and netlabel online releases as well. Our listings often include interviews and discussions, embedded streaming audio, video, photos, letters, etc. Artist profiles evolve over time as these things are added. 

See GAJOOB on Youtube  where we vlog about new and old music featured here.

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