Slag

In the winter of 2011, Jacob Bailey came over to my house to record some gritty ass blues song. We wound up jamming and I stowed away the tape, like I normally do. I've probably recorded more with Jacob than anyone...free form jams, his bands like The No-Nothins and Tehnus Racquet, our doomed punk band The New American Camels, or just his own songs. Like normal, something gets in the way, the band dissolves, or we get busy, he with tremendous amounts of work and I with tremendous amounts of black metal stuff. Anyhow, I dug up the tape and it sounded to me a lot better than it initially did. I proceeded to call him up and invite him to record some more in tracks in the same vein.

What we have here is eleven songs torn from hours of cassettes. All the songs were entirely improvised, with Jacob and I switching instruments and vocals. I don't have his confidence in making up lyrics on the spot, so mine were dubbed, along with the bass on Smelt and a tom on Lines of Symmetry. Everything else is live and void of effects. Most of the tracks are grossly out of time, stupidly loud, and Southern as all fuck, which is basically what we were going for. We call it freeblues (or maybe acidgrass) as a cover up for our inherent lack of rhythm and general apathy regarding tonality or listener comfort. We're bastards and we ruin music, including the standard, Summertime. So here's a bunch of songs about women, the devil, and being Southern.

Slag MP3s

And below is the WAV files with all the songs arranged how it was supposed to be heard, if you're interested. It sounds better but it's just two big files.

Side 1
Side 2

Jacob Bailey- Vocals, harmonica, plucked and slided guitar, trumpet, trombone, spoons, and drums on track 3.
Nicholas Riley- Vocals, drums, bass, strummed guitar, alto saxophone, banjo, tambourine, and harmonica on track 3.
All songs written and recorded by Slag in the winter and spring of 2011 in Clarksville, TN except Summertime, which was written by George Gershwin.

Fizzlepop-Tin Cans, I Can, +I WILL/The Blade

I started Fizzlepop when I was about 15 as a means of pushing all my ego into one project so I could be more productive with other people. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. An obvious victim of so-called "middle child syndrome," I sat with my hand held tape recorder and recorded weird shit, sometimes racket, sometimes perverted folk songs. I wrote about school. I wrote about germs. I wrote about aliens. I wrote about cryptids. I wrote about all the sex I wasn't having. I wrote about my Catholic guilt. You know, basic Aquarius shit. By the time I became 17, I upgraded to a four-track, so that my bullshittery could be all the more prominent.

Originally intending to sound like Primus (Fizzle Fry/Anti-Pop maybe? I don't remember; I've been trying to figure it out for years), my tasteless attempts at wit and humor and the acoustic guitar stood in my way. Fizzlepop evolved into something that my audience would laugh at/with, albeit nervously. Some people are a little disgusted by liposuction, as I discovered when a man at a local bar and grill abandoned his jägerschnitzel and walked out in the middle of The Blade, which is about liposuction. I also listened to a lot of Cannibal Corpse at the time, so I was a bit into the whole shock value deal. You've been warned.

As these songs were written from ages 15-17, some of it has, over time, proven to be somewhat embarrassing. I can't exactly remember what I was thinking when I wrote some of these, so it is difficult to tell when I'm being satirical, totally facetious, or completely melodramatic. I remember that Spank the Monkey was written before I knew the meaning of the euphemism and was just me being silly/16. (For some reason people love that stupid fucking song.) Tin Cans, complete with Thurston Moore sample from Sonic Death, is about my distain for ham. Stone Sour Face is about my disappointment with a hateful student teacher. Sicko is about my belief that math was invented to torture me.  

Damnation Blues was written with a comedian friend of mine, Michael Krychiw. We wanted to write a blues song, so we thought of the most depressing thing we could think of: damnation. So we came up with a guy that does hideous, terrible shit, and he gets a well deserved punishment. Racecar AM was the first song I ever put on the computer, taken from my very first cassette I ever recorded on, and jumbled up with a bunch of radio static and reversed. The reversed vocals inadvertently say, "I'm backward!" at the end. Listen for it, it's pretty cool.

So there it is. This stuff was written before my first two EPs. I never released it because I wanted the songs to be just to my liking, but never got around to finishing them. I've had this long list of albums I've been wanting to release for years, track order, art, everything, but it takes me almost as long as Kevin Shields, and the results aren't nearly as rewarding. Besides, I have tons of new shit that I'm more concerned with presently. But to be fair, I do like *most* of these songs and am rather proud of them. I had the help of some friends and they're listed below.

So, much to my embarrassment, seven years in the making, a testament to my angst, my virginity, my bad sense of humor, and my constant need to be the center of attention:

Tin Cans, I Can, +I WILL/The Blade

Brandon Gregory- drums on track 1
John Riley- bass on track 4
Randy Hall- drums on track 4
Nick Riley- everything else
Track 7 co-written with Michael Krychiw
All songs written between 2005 and 2007 and recorded between 2005 and 2011.

 

Sam Gray: All the Crystal Castles in the World...

Through my little brother, John, I met a bunch of really cool kids that went to my old high school. They all have excellent taste in music, and more importantly, they make excellent music. One of these kids is Sam Gray. Sam started recording with me in my old house filled with pitbulls, no furniture, and unfinished floors in the countryside of Robertson County when he was about sixteen. Armed with his acoustic guitar, Sam came and played me four folkish sortof songs about girls, Liddy and Leary, and Bob Dylan going electric. Over the next year, I added some overdubs, hammer guitar, drums, etc... and Sam recorded on his own four track, making sound collages, weird folk songs, and fucking spy music by himself and with some friends.

After I moved back to Clarksville, we brought in my aforementioned little brother and laid down the H.P. Lovecraft inspired Dagon. Since we had everything set up, I asked Sam if he had anymore. We made up three songs on the spot and those wound up being included on his album. One was a variation of Mogwai's Christmas Steps which Sam lied about and said was his so he could get around my previous "no covers" recording policy. Little bastard. Those tracks are a testament to his thick and passionate (yeah yeah, what she said, shut up) guitar playing and what a beast John is.

So Sam gave me his tape of songs he was working on, and I went about turning them into MP3's. I waded through a lot of shit and a lot of gold. Sam and I have varying opinions on which is which. I did a few more overdubs and molested his tapes a bit and the result is fourteen songs about science fiction, video games, anime porn laws, self-deprecation, and more girls that don't love him. It beckons SeBADoh and Rivers Cuomo. It's as real as blunt as Woody Guthrie...actually one of them is a Woody Guthrie song. These songs are honest, at times painfully so. I seriously hope some girl listens to Joy and marries him on the spot. It worked for Lou Barlow, after all. If this is the music these kids are making today, I have hope for the world.

Sam Gray makes awesome music and he's a hell of guy.

He's on Facebook and SoundCloud. Talk to him..

All the Crystal Castles in the World... can be downloaded here for free.

Sam Gray- vocals, guitars, chord organ, noise, and album art
John Riley- bass on tracks 2, 3, 11, 14
Amanda Noyes- vocals on track 4
Casey Williams- bass on track 6 and something on track 8, I can't tell
Issac Welfare- percussion on track 5
Nick Riley- drums, guitar on track 13, bass on track 1, synth on track 7, tapes and KAOSS pad

Christmas Steps is a Mogwai song and Do-Re-Mi is a Woody Guthire song.

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, and 14 were recorded by me in Clarksville and Robertson County.
All other tracks were recorded by Sam Gray on the moon.

Thomas Yates/Fizzlepop Collaboration

This is the first of several works by Thomas Yates I have to upload. When I first became aware of Thomas, it was around 2007. He was fairly well known around town for being that kid that made racket everywhere from shows at the Ice House to house shows to guerrilla gigs in the local mall here in Clarksville. His self-released cassettes had titles like Black Templar and Crowd Scalper. It was unlike anything else here. Irritating and inspiring, Thomas continued in his own particular fashion, unhampered by what was cool or popular and made something incredible.

This recording was the first time I really hung out with Thomas outside of shows and whatever else. We went down to his mothers basement, a cramped grotto that you expected some kind of inter-dimensional creature crawl out of. This was in his "fast sounds" stage and this is when I was playing in TEETH. Thomas showed me his guitar with a tuning of his own design and certain frets painted gold, showing him where he should play. We plugged up, I droned and Thomas employed his fast guitar technique.

After two tracks, we put away the guitars and began a more abstract jam, which culminated up to three short tracks and the finale, OPVS VI. After, Thomas and I talked until about four in the morning, talking about politics, World War III, human nature, and music. We agreed that even though this was the first time we hung out or played music together, we felt like the spirit of our individual music, he and I and Billy Rich (Thomas's partner in making Fast Sounds), had been inspiring each other since we started playing out and putting our music on MySpace. I left that night, carrying this piece of gold on my cassette.

I mixed this a long time ago, so I don't exactly remember how I did it. I know for a lot of the recording, I'm in one ear and Thomas is in the other. I'm pretty sure I switch it around and combine the two in mono though. Enjoy.

Part I
Part II