Tag: music

It is said that men are always proud of the wrong things.  That may be, but I think everyone here will most certainly agree that working in “aw, he got the velcros” into the conversation, in correct context, makes the week productive, by definition.

In general, my rock tastes tend to run more to the barely repressed violence that is Disturbed, but this nondescript little English guy in a red suit with no flashy guitar pyrotechnics or moves like Jagger is a capital-R ROCK STAR in a way that Axl Rose and other overly self-conscious performers could never be. The guitar line is so simple, and yet so awesome when it kicks in. You can see the crowd just waiting for it.

I think Michael Medved could have gotten a lot further with his Nazi Boy theme if he’d known that I not only believe Laibach to be the world’s finest Slovenian Nazi-Industrial band, but for a brief while had the distinct and immeasurable honor of being label mates with them at Wax Trax!.

So, in honor of a brief conversation with Spacebunny this morning – I have what must be considered the endearing habit of quoting entire verses of Laibach when certain trigger words are mentioned – I present a true magnum opus. You can keep your Taylor Swift and your Beyonce; this is without question the greatest video of all time.

Actually, I really liked a lot of Wax Trax! music that was being released around that time, particularly Sister Machine Gun. It very much amused me that their main remix of Wired was named the Silicon Satan mix.

One of the Dread Ilk, David the Good, has released his third album. Based on the video, he’s got a bit of a mid-90’s trance thing going on; “brainspider” would appear to be an appropriate theme. “Phat Beat Saturday” made me think of Spooky on quaaludes.

In 2002 when I released Space Age, it was a grand experiment. Could I go into the studio for a year… and come out with something that was different… creative… and might even sell a few copies?

Apparently, yes. It sold well enough to break even and got some nice reviews. But back then, I had time to promote, write e-mails, drop off copies at events and venues and all that slavish sales stuff. Unfortunately, I’m much more interested in making the music than I am in selling it – though Space Age continues to sell online. The track “Elvira” is some kind of a hit… despite being ten years old, it gets played regularly on internet radio stations.

Really… why do I do this? It’s not for sales, though I like those. It’s for the joy of creating something and laughing my head off while doing so. It’s for people to pop into their stereos at a party so their friends think they’re insane. And it’s to continue annoying people that don’t like puns and songs about animals, science, grocery stores and pathetic attempts to woo non-existent women.

My second full album, The Infinite, got crashed half-way through by a drop-off in finances and time. I finished it and went broke. And had a baby at the same time. And had to move. The momentum was shattered just as it hit the Internet. No e-mails to listeners… no promotion… no physical copies sitting in coffee shops and dusty record stores. And, on top of that, the record is a downer. It’s about nuclear bombs, the loss of a father, a limbless angel, the emptiness of existence, and the battle between good and evil.

Hey… I like it, but not a lot of other folk seem to.

The new record drops all that. Sure, it mentions anarchy, guns, man-eating women and being trapped on an island… but in a positive, upbeat way that makes one feel good about their prospects and filled with a new faith in arachnohumanity. And, in keeping with Our Modern Era, it’s digital only. No more CDs to print and lose money on.

I hereby present The Brainspider Affair, 20 phat tracks of digital good stuff that’s guaranteed to change your life. Especially if you slip it into the DJ booth at a wedding. One particularly phat track even has its own video on Youtube:

You can pick up the new album at the following locations: CD Baby, Amazon, and iTunes.

Thank you, my friends… enjoy.

The enthusiastic response to our first collaboration, Sex Me Up, made Paul realize that somehow, we had inadvertently laid what could be the foundation of a pretty good band. The DJ at The Perimeter played the song every Friday and Saturday night at the height of the evening, and within two weeks, people knew the lyrics and were shouting out the climactic phrases. Of course, we didn’t have a name for the band, we didn’t have any other songs, and we didn’t have the ability to play anywhere even if we’d been asked given the fact that it was a two-man band, only one of whom had any significant musical talent. Fortunately, he had enough for the two of us.

Paul was just getting into reading Mondo 2000 at the time and I was a huge fan of William Gibson throughout high school and college, so it was natural that most of our ideas for a band name revolved around the cyberpunk theme, (which, strangely enough, was a neologism coined by the writer with whom I would later collaborate, Bruce Bethke). Most of our ideas came right out of Gibson; I can remember Burning Chrome and Chrome 23 being two of the potential names discussed and rejected. I really liked the name Mona Lisa Overdrive, but it was so obvious and recognizable that we never even considered it.  However, I did scan the cover of the paperback version, which later paid some unexpected dividends.

I think it was Paul who suggested stealing a line from our own song for the band name. In Sex Me Up, just before the guitar solo, by way of introducing it, I said “Go psycho sonic at the count of three.”  Paul liked the idea of using “Psycho Sonic” as a name since it was descriptive of the sound we wanted to create, combining fast dance beats, funky bass lines, rock guitar, and an aggressive attitude. We also thought it was a pretty good description of our partnership, since he brought the Sonic while I more or less provided the Psycho. We didn’t really have a musical model, as we both knew that the band we liked best, Duran Duran, was entirely outmoded, but to the very limited extent that we wanted to imitate anything out there, it was the EMF song Unbelievable. That wasn’t what we wanted to do, exactly, but it served as a useful reference point of sorts.

My one reservation about the name was that I considered Psycho Sonic to be too reminiscent of Sonic Youth, which I always thought was rather a lame name for a band, with shades of “Up With People” or “Hitler Youth”. For some reason, I never thought of Sonic the Hedgehog even though I had a Sega Genesis and the game had recently come out. But I liked the name as well as Paul’s reasoning, so we decided to put the words together and to further distinguish it by spelling it with “k” in the place of the hard “c”. Thus Psykosonik was formed.

We knew we needed more members and more songs, so we set about finding the former and writing the latter that winter. The second song we wrote was a bizarre melange of the cyberpunk motif and my political nihilism; it’s interesting to look back from the distance of 20 years, 10 of them spent writing national political commentary, and see what an unadulterated anarchist I was at the time. I scribbled down some lyrics, Paul laid down a fast beat and bassline over which we recorded some vocals, and I went off to the Bay Area for two weeks in a futile, but ultimately worthwhile attempt to convince companies like Creative Labs, Diamond, and Hercules to abandon their investment into video acceleration in favor of the radical new idea of 3D hardware acceleration.

Upon my return, the first thing I did was to drive to Paul’s condo to hear what he was promising was the finished version of Down to the Ground.  The end result was even better than I had imagined, as he had thrown in a Prince-like guitar solo in at the end and the final product was even more energetic than our first song.  I particularly liked the way the sampled crowd noise abruptly cuts off at the end, making it readily apparent that it isn’t real. We sat and listened to it five or six times in a row, when Paul mused that the two songs were so good, he thought we might be able to get a record deal on the strength of them.

Although a song named Down to the Ground can be found on the first Psykosonik album, it is a very, very different version than the one we originally recorded.  The album version is not a bad song, in fact, I still quite like what we usually called “the lush mix”, but in retrospect, I think it really tends to pale in comparison with raw energy of the original.

And yes, “Feel the blade of ’89” absolutely refers to the French Revolution of 1789.

The one thing we decided we absolutely needed if we were ever going to play live was a drummer; while neither of us minded electronics in the least, we both always thought it was lame when there was no visible percussion, especially for music that was going to be as percussion-heavy as ours was looking to be. Although Paul’s younger brother Nick had been his drummer in Smilehouse, Paul said that he was really impressed with how well Nick’s friend, who was barely out of high school, had managed to blend live drums with the programmed ones when we had played at the frat party. Apparently that is rather difficult to do well.  Since I didn’t know any drummers myself and found Mike to be likeable and extremely easy-going, I had no objections. We invited him to join the band and he accepted.

Thanks to his boosting of our two songs at the nightclubs around town, we’d become friends with the aforementioned nightclub DJ, who was a cameraman at the local ABC news affiliate during the day.  That New Year’s Eve, Paul and I ended up going out in a group that included him and his girlfriend Giselle. Paul noticed that Dan had some pretty serious music equipment at his place, which combined with his finely-tuned dance music sensibilities, sparked a discussion that culminated in an decision to invite him to join the band.  Psykosonik not only had two songs under its belt, it was now complete.

I was catching up with my old bandmates after writing the first two posts about the band’s history, and I learned, to my delight, that Mike not only saved all the old demos, but had even converted the old cassettes to digital as well. The quality is pretty low, but you’re interested in unreleased 21-year old music, you can find a download link to an MP3 of Sex Me Up, the song mentioned in the second part of the True and Obscure History, at Alpha Game along with a Game-related take on it. It was on our three-song demo and was very popular with the crowd at The Perimeter, but didn’t end up making the album since we’d moved too far into techno-rave and too far away from rock during the recording process, so it was never released and I hadn’t heard it since 1994.

I’m particularly excited about Mike’s little trove because there was one song that I didn’t have on tape and thought was lost forever. Fortunately, Mike saved it too, and it’s even more awesome than I remembered. But more about that in the next installment.