Editorial to the third edition

“Tape recorders are nefarious because one falls into the trap of believing that the tape recorder thinks, and so we disconnect our brains the moment we plug in the cord. A tape recorder is a parrot, it has ears but it doesn’t have a heart. It does not pick up details so our job is to listen beyond the words, pick up on what is not said and then write the complete story.”

The quote is attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He refers to an act of journalism: recording the interview.

In the third edition of staalzine I applied a method that can be considered the reverse side of the journalistic routine. I listened to a tape and wrote down images and thoughts that came to mind. Every track got its own little intuitive story. I presented them to the makers of the tapes and asked for their answers.

Listening to a Tape might become a series of interviews if I continue to receive tapes and find their creators willing to join me in this experiment.
You can get in contact through staalzine at staalplaat dot com.

Rinus van Alebeek

Listening to a Tape – A – Interview with Jason Honea

The table is filled with Italian magazines from the fifties, and with what is remained from their pages.

I look on a piece of the Liparian Sea, so called because of the Liparian Islands I can see on a clear day, when I move to an other spot. There is a chunk of rock next to the building. More close to me are a set of headphones, a Marantz cassette player and a tape by The Shitty Listener, which handwritten title I have misread for days: constant stranger. I have given it a listen already, so I rewind the tape to the beginning of side A. I put the tape into the player. I put on my headphones, and I push ‘play.’

Get a Grip

The song is recorded by Loren Chasse, a friend of Jason’s from his Californian days. I remember him telling, they went out to record an abandoned rose farm. I liked the image. Roses left on their own, to grow for ever, and every once in a while someone from the neighbourhood comes to pick some.

What I hear takes me back to last century, when during phone calls snippets of other conversations came through. It was said this happened because the cables lied too close to each-other, such a romantic idea. Truth is that something similar can happen when recording from a four-track. Faint sounds of track three and four, which is the two stereo channels from the last track of side B, leak through, backwards. This adds something of a spell to the opening sequence, when our hero leaves a scene in a house where happy music is played, walks a wooden floor, picks up a guitar and sings Get a Grip, then he returns, and we hear different, still happy music coming from another room.

I am a sucker for lyrics, never listen to them, but I am a very easy victim to catchy tunes, and this is one that rings in your ears for days. My mind wanders in two directions. The acoustic guitar – I don’t like acoustic guitars – seems untuned. I don’t have a trained ear to recognise the E minors in our life. It just sounds very unpolished, which I like. Most strings are left free to swing, make me think of Glenn Branca. Make me also think that this song could welcome more free swinging strings to provoke audio hallucinations.

The song wandered around in my musical memory for days. And doing so it scanned all the pop songs I had heard in the past. I arrived at ‘black and white’ and the guitar riff to it. Then, knowing that also Michael (Jackson, not Northam) must have had a pop song memory of his own, I digged deeper and arrived at Gordon Lightfoot and his ‘If you could read my mind.’ That is a 1972 song, a year when the light on earth was disabled by soft focus camera’s and young boys and girls wandered out in mass to get away from a suit and tie defined society. Freedom was a good song on the FM radio: Get a Grip!

Jason: The Germs are a hobby of mine. I discovered reading when I discovered their lyrics. I used to keep a copy of the (GI) lyric sheet in my car and also had a copy folded up in my jacket at all times. Needless to say, that one got kinda ratty. Loren Chasse recorded this in the Aero Star parked at Jacek Ostoya’s in SF. For the Manimal.

I Call You Up

This is the scene. Somewhere in the 1950’s in a small town in the southern states of U.S.A., a kid walks into a recording studio. He sings his song. He is a good singer, everybody in the choir of the Catholic Church says so. You should record a song, boy – they all say.

The man from the recording studio looks at him. He sits behind a desk, a bit too relaxed, a Winchester rifle rests in his lap. The only thing we hear is a fan.

How old are you boy?
Fifteen, Sir.
You recorded that song for your girlfriend? I suppose you have a girlfriend.
(blushes)
How old is she?
Sixteen, Sir.

And then you know he should not answer the next question and leave the studio straight away. He doesn’t. One hour later he is back on the street again. The look in his eyes has changed. In his hand the one and only 45′ copy of his song. He throws it in a dustbin and gets on the first Greyhound that leaves town. The song travels with him, and would haunt him for years. He never saw his girlfriend again.

Jason: We did a show some August with N.O.T.A. in Oklahoma City. Actually, I believe we drove down together from their place in Tulsa. There were a ton of Native American kids at the show and a bunch of them were already well buzzed when we pulled into the parking lot. The venue was a gym and it remained lit for the entire show which only complicated things due to the staggering heat.

We had been on stage for about twenty minutes when a young couple came running into the crowd screaming for us to stop and come help in the parking lot. When we got out the door the first thing I saw was a big crowd of kids rocking and banging a station wagon inside of which a battling couple was kicking the shit out of each other.

A big Pawnee kid named Badger had locked himself inside with his girl and he was punching her out. Some guy in a flannel took a tire iron and smashed in the rear window which then allowed people to somehow scramble in and get a door open. Gnarly scene. Can’t remember what happened after that.

Across My Dreams

Today the electricity went away for a short time. This triggered the alarm of the house at the other side of the trees, a fifty meters uphill. An uptight sirena as a dog chaises own tail maddening centrifugal woowoow spat in all directions. A useless sound. I also find the sound of vacuum cleaners useless. Across My Dreams drifts on vacuum cleaned sounds.

The image is different, because here we touch blissful moments. I have been going through the fifties magazines more then once to find pieces of pictures I could use for my collage. I have looked in numerous faces of women then young, attractive and healthy as three pints of milk a day. Those women are now in their eighties. Most of them probably have married and have used a vacuum cleaner as well.

The monotonous sound with its very subtle variations lulled them into a trance. And yes, there are the wedding bells, so distant they sound, to remind of the happiest day of their lives. But wait. The windows are open. People are running towards the cheering crowd further down the street. The military marching band plays. Women throw flowers at the troops that will go to the front tomorrow. So much dust.

Jason: Across My Dreams: I wrote this to the Knit Separates. I wanted them to know how I felt about our song In the Sea at Night.

The Daymoon

This is the song that relates to the picture on the cover of the cassette. It is in black and white and it is a portrait of Jason that could have been made in one of those cabins with a little stool with adjustable height and a curtain too short to make nocturnal love making possible. Jason’s pose bears traces of Bowie in Berlin, Rutger Hauer’s disposable Hollywood movies and Sigue Sigue Sputnik after they cut their hair (but left the orange dye in it).

Yes, indeed, he looks very average on this picture. But we have to remember that ‘average’ has a high iconic value in the United States. Someone has to marry the girl next door and make suburbia a beautiful place.

The opening line of the song is “I Call You Up.” By then we have heard a car engine as a droning background and a lot of reverb around the guitar playing. Acoustic guitar. I am sure this song connects with some other great songs from the last century. Not as a copy, but to confirm that the melody is again one that stays with you for days.

There is an image to this song, that connects to the description of the front cover picture. It is very much an MTV song. MTV was big in the pre-internet post TV era. The image of the videoclip comes natural, it is a black and white view on a nocturnal highway (or is it Mulholland Drive, the stage for every young american who wants to be James Dean for a day) Captured in the lights of the car, Jason appears, a see-through ghostly image in a leather jacket and jeans, sings this song. Sad song, melancholic…why.

Put the daylight on, go faster because now you hardly hit 25 miles an hour. I know it is dangerous, but are we talking rock ‘n’ roll or not. Get a drummer, throw in electric guitars, something Harrisonesque, something Go – Betweens, even the Californian sunlight flooded songs of Fleetwood Mac can stand. Yes fuck, I know this is all experimental and shit, but the song has a potential that goes beyond our laboratorial lifestyle. Sometimes you have to take a break, get some air and sing.

Jason: There had been some school arsons in the area and apparently punk rock graffiti was found at both sites. The cops came after me for some reason. I was eating dinner with my parents when he came to the door. When I got outside he told me to lie down and that he intended to cuff me. At one point he had his knee on my back. My father stood there in the doorway , yelling at me to just tell the truth. I looked up and there in the sky was the day moon. I could hear some kid down the street laughing. Later on it came out that two jr. punk rocks were responsible for it all. 

As a boy I used to trip on seeing that same moon in the morning light as I rode. That moon always seemed to be much bigger to me when we were in Japan. It’s also something quite central and recurring in the work of two men I greatly admire: Sherwood Anderson and Charles Burchfield.

Where did you ride to see the Moon in morning light?

Jason: I could see it hanging over the Pacific as a little guy on my way to school.

What were you doing in Japan, Joejoe San.

Jason: My father was a navy pilot. We were stationed in Iwakuni.

Who are these guys Sherwood and Charles.

Jason: American writer and an American painter.

Bad Wonder

This is the same song as the song before, with this difference that it is early morning now, very early morning, just after sunrise, crickets already sing in the rising heat. The girls have long gone home. The room, mainly a worn down leather sofa, a table and a tv set that doesn’t work is scattered with empty beer cans, pizza boxes, plastic trays with unidentifiable food, full ashtrays, is half in darkness, a tiny ray of sunlight splits the room in two.

On that couch sits Jason with an acoustic guitar he bought at a garage sale for 3$, and it sounds exactly like that when he plays it, torturous to any Segovian ear. On an old pouf that I forgot to mention sits a second person with an acoustic guitar. His one sounds better. And while Jason is somewhere in a back room of poet’s heaven, hammering those rotten strings, his friend delivers one beautiful curl of melodies after the other. At the end of the song it is also his idea to load the sofa on the back of his pick-up truck, drive it to a bend in the road above the village and leave it there, for those who want to enjoy the view on the Pacific ocean. Jason forgets to bring his guitar.

Jason: I was fifteen on an El Camino bus heading to Santa Clara. I got on a few stops further down than usual. Next stop a young, young vato in hair net, baggy white T and light gray overcoat with corduroy black slippers got on and sat in front of me. He produced a shiny silver colt 45 that seemed as big as a football and then loudly exercised the action the next couple miles.

El Camino? Where were you going (as usual)

Jason: El Camino is a major thoroughfare in the Santa Clara valley. I was more than likely on my way to go punk rocking somewhere.

Vato?

Jason: A Vato is a Mexican gang member in most cases. They can be lone wolves as well.

What action? 

Jason: Receiver/loading mechanism of a gun.

Smile Now Cry later

The friend waits in the pick-up truck. Jason has gone back into the apartment, calls up the girl. (This is pre-cell phone era). The girl doesn’t answer. Just as he expected. The answering machine records the song he sings to her on a cassette. In an other life in an other time Jason would have stood a chance in American Idol if Jonathan Richman had been part of the jury.

Song ends, enters bliss. It was really a good idea to get rid of the couch. Song ends, enters sunlight. The old transistor radio starts playing as if touched by magic; it is the alarm. Some 50s, early 60s melody, almost BurtBacharachish repeats itself over and over again, gets absorbed by the triangular roar of the pick-up truck. Summer of ’87. 5:30 am. The awakening. After a break the most beautiful melody comes to define the universe, something fake Chinese maybe or vintage TV-serie, something played over a very cheap system. I want this.

Jason: This is a cover. East Side Story cruise comps. A pavilion at the San Jose flea market late 70s. Watching Latino/Afro soul R&B vocal groups- guys my age playing instruments and hitting soaring lush harmonies through too small speakers full of mice shit and nest hair. Some of them are in suits while others are in their field clothes that have been meticulously cleaned and ironed for just this occasion. Lots of dead grass and steel fencing, sugar cane and melon. The heat and smells bewildering. I end up leaving at  with a head full of melodies and tunes that I’m trying my best to commit to memory.

Listening to a Tape – B – Interview with Jason Honea

Nothing has changed. The magazines and snippets of paper in various dimensions still cover my table. I had a break of a few days to do some other things. The sun shines fiercely. The wind sends cold messengers that sneak through the warm layers of air. We are a few days away from the first day of spring. The year is 2014.

Lets get on the Bed

Another proof of bliss. It is not a pocket radio that transmits at its peak volume, deliriously distorting the commercial message. It could be. Positioned on the big custard-green fridge, the kitchen door open, no-one at home. The jammer and glory feels more like a megaphone blaring from the roof of a little white car, a compact station car with round forms, a model they stopped producing in 1971. The company’s name is written on both sides; impossible to detect what it sells. The announcement coming through in the sunlit empty street smiles like a kid on its first day of Summer holiday.

Jason: Breath in a meadow. Redwood coastal morning. Camp Loma Mar 1978. Bible summer.

I Thank Heaven For Everything You Do

Maybe this is a great song under the shower, or on a bench on the Maybach Ufer in Hip-kid Heaven Berlin, a bottle of cold beer, the smell of Turkish sausages on the barbecue. On this tape it is a minor incident in belo-fi.

Jason: My father told me about an incident on the Western Front in WW1 in which at some point a giant cross appeared in the heavens, a solar phenomenon of some sort. What ever the case , it caused fighting to cease in some sectors, soldiers walking away from their positions.

I know It Shows

And this is the song that makes you wish that Jason had run into Stevie Nicks when he got out of the supermarket near San Diego, and had the guts to ask her to listen to the cassette. Two acoustic guitars express that love, summer, youth come to an end, melt into an apotheosis to mark that after a long ride we finally arrived at the ocean; it is also a memory of the great uplifting feeling that a great last song of a great concert can achieve, it fills you completely; it makes you go on the street and engage in choreographic moves vaguely reminiscent of the fight scene in West Side Movie.

A manifesto of home produced music, a strong indirect protest against the anonymous studio productions; we hear friends who try out harmonium or other noisemakers, it doesn’t matter if it fits in or not, and for this reason it fits in perfectly. The accidental caught fragment of conversation turns the song even more into a visit to a place where only a few objects remind of the life that once passed here. Did I really write that?

Jason: California coast just south of Half Moon Bay. As a storm comes ashore the sky fills and swirls with what seem like a thousand or two maritime birds that start to dive into the water singularly and in sets at all angels. The cove is teaming with anchovies or sardines. Now sea lions are appearing-dolphins and small pilot whales too. From where I’m sitting it looks as if the sea is boiling. All those feeding mammals breeching the surface look like massive cart wheeling rags.

Except In Dreams

I come to a point where I start to see and hear things that probably have nothing to do with the author of this cassette. A few boxes with sealed memories and dreams are delivered by my very own inter-conscious postman.

Here, this, is another tune that shines like Christmas in a perfect Hollywood movie. Ghosts of strangers suddenly appear through a thick curtain of big soft snowflakes that slowly fall down on a city that never sleeps. Hand in hand run away moments with a new found love, a sudden stand still in front of a shop window, to marvel at the reflection clearly visible between the presents that shine in all colours gold and red.

From a small loudspeaker above a song, hardly distinguishable because of its crappy quality, and maybe an electric disturbance. A loop of ten seconds from that song appears here and nowhere, except in dreams.

Jason: Our gazes met just seconds before he was gunned down by a New Orleans police officer. Death was upon him. I ran down there and saw him in a swamp of his own blood. The only thing he had on was a pair of nylon dolphin jogging shorts. James something… (15)

I Hold My Face

Up tempo guitar, and a bass walking around, picking flowers; we are back in San Francisco again, even if the song is recorded in Berlin. Jason sings like a new romantic; I can’t figure out who or what it reminds me of, a first sign that we have yet another song worthy of FM play here, albeit not in our times.

We roam through an era during which all the good pop songs were played over the small loudspeakers of a transistor radio, or a car radio. It gives a quality of sound that leaves room for imagination. This is in fact the other song that should have been presented to Stevie Nicks; the typical West Coast harmonies are already there, maybe a result of the resonating strings.

Yeah, I can see her. Little woman in a big car, ejects the Cramps cassette and shoves this one into the player. There is no pitch. But she stops it after a minute and continues singing, slower rhythm, “Am I kissing true blood” does the chorus as well, very faint and angelic huhhhh, looks at Jason’s guitar and asks him to play the song, but slower. After two minutes they are both singing: “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies….true blood.” They’re an odd couple there on the parking lot. Jason is twice her size.

Jason: July 1986,  Canada. After a show a kid invites us to stay at his place as his parents were out of town. It’s quickly determined once we arrive that we need more beer. A small detail is sent out to handle that and our host goes with… but not before he tells us by all means NOT to go down to the garage which we immediately do. It’s a gate of hell. Some one has a nest set up where a work bench should be.

Graphic b/w 60s and 70s horror stills are just a gentle introduction to what comes next. Shelves on three sides are jammed with jars full of human organs among other things. Larger containers contain a variety of dead animals that look for all intents and purposes like road kill. The floor around us is full of alchemical symbols that have been scorched on or drawn on with chalk. He’s got a three foot high Roman Catholic sacramental candle on a tarnished brass stand that is also about that tall.

The candle’s been painted over black with Testors model paint and it’s stuck full of upholstery nails in the form of an inverted cross. They too have been painted but in 50s red finger nail polish. His bed is a filthy comforter cover that I guess he wraps himself in and when he lays down on the concrete slab of the garage. All around the floor are a wide, wide variety of bones mixed with knives and fire arms. Strung from the ceiling with fishing line to a point just two feet above his ‘bed’ is a rotted side of beef with spine and hip included. Needless to say, the place stank like a decomp stench fest.

Different Fur

Moments and Whatnauts! If you don’t know what it is, look it up. Again the rotten degraded crappy lower then lo-fi sound that makes the time leap right into the sunloaden early seventies. Tall slim groove walking black men with detective hats and big sunglasses. Afro, platform shoes in screaming colours, tight red pants. Talking is singing, walking is moving, moving is dancing. And all that is left from that period is an endless refrain and a piece of recording on micro-cassette from a phone-call.

Jason: We did a show with Bad Religion and Doggy Style in Sun Valley. I arrived later with Jimmy just in time to watch the city park across the street fill up with Vato knuckle head meat rags. This is going to get fucked real quick. At a glance they’re only six. Turn your head again and they’ve turned into thirty. They start mad dogging us and begin to hurl fightin’ words and gesticulate..

Then, the venue fills up with Venice suicidal psychos and some other punk gang. At some point a bunch of the Venice psychos get upstairs and break into one of the offices which they quickly convert into a blacked out chamber that they can hurl people into to get the shit kicked out of them anonymously in the dark. The locos from the park have now come across the street too and a couple of the kooks start flashing deer rifles.

We blast through our set in about thirty or forty minutes. We blazed! We banged it ! At some point I was back outside by our van when some one socked me on the side of my head so hard that I saw stars and saturns. I remember waking up somewhere north of Bakersfield on the 5 freezing in my own sweat.

Somewhere in between the former and the next song Jason does a western version of a muezzin, or maybe he had really managed to get hold of the microphone and was this song recorded outside of the mosk, while it drifted over the roofs of the old city of Fez.

Smile Louder

Somebody does Philip Glass over here. Time to get the tape out of the player, or let it run.

Maybe try to listen what is happening in the background, a looped message recorded in a barren abandoned space.

Another somebody has joined, and does Philip Glass as well.

Noises in the background have moved to the Führer’s bunker.
“Can you come over here a moment with that candle?”

If you listen long enough it turns into an adventure movie for kids.

“Can somebody read this stuff?”

The door slams shut.

End of tape.

Jason: Wilderness by Rockwell Kent. RK travels to Fox Island Alaska with his young son where they spend several months. Their only companions there are an old Swede and his fur foxes. RK and his son work hard to stay warm and dry and make tons of art: wood cuts, charcoal drawings, love letters. It’s a big gorgeous book that smells really good. It’s in my blood!

Listening to a Tape – A – Interview with Jason Honea

I sit at a big kitchen table in the belly of a big building on a stones throw distance from the shore. During Summer months a local cook will use it to prepare food for the guests. There is no-one. The table is filled with Italian magazines from the fifties, and with what is remained from their pages: scraps of paper in various forms. I look on a piece of the Liparian Sea, so called because of the Liparian Islands I can see on a clear day, when I move to an other spot. There is a chunk of rock next to the building. More close to me are a set of headphones, a Marantz cassette player and a tape by The Shitty Listener, which handwritten title I have misread for days: constant stranger. I have given it a listen already, so I rewind the tape to the beginning of side A. I put the tape into the player. I put on my headphones, and I push ‘play.’

Get a Grip
The song is recorded by Loren Chasse, a friend of Jason’s from his Californian days. I remember him telling, they went out to record an abandoned rose farm. I liked the image. Roses left on their own, to grow for ever, and every once in a while someone from the neighborhood comes to pick some.
What I hear takes me back to last century, when during phone calls snippets of other conversations came through. It was said this happened because the cables lied too close to eachother, such a romantic idea. Truth is that something similar can happen when recording from a fourtrack. Faint sounds of track three and four, which is the two stereo channels from the last track of side B, leak through, backwards. This adds something of a spell to the opening sequence, when our hero leaves a scene in a house where happy music is played, walks a wooden floor, picks up a guitar and sings Get a Grip, then he returns, and we hear different, still happy music coming from another room.
I am a sucker for lyrics, never listen to them, but I am a very easy victim to catchy tunes, and this is one that rings in your ears for days. My mind wanders in two directions. The acoustic guitar – I don’t like acoustic guitars – seems untuned. I don’t have a trained ear to recognise the E minors in our life. It just sounds very unpolished, which I like. Most strings are left free to swing, make me think of Glenn Branca. Make me also think that this song could welcome more free swinging strings to provoke audio hallucinations.
The song wandered around in my musical memory for days. And doing so it scanned all the pop songs I had heard in the past. I arrived at ‘black and white’ and the guitar riff to it. Then, knowing that also Michael (Jackson, not Northam) must have had a pop song memory of his own, I digged deeper and arrived at Gordon Lightfoot and his ‘If you could read my mind.’ That is a 1972 song, a year when the light on earth was disabled by soft focus camera’s and young boys and girls wandered out in mass to get away from a suit and tie defined society. Freedom was a good song on the FM radio: Get a Grip!

Jason: The Germs are a hobby of mine. I discovered reading when I discovered their lyrics. I used to keep a copy of the (GI) lyric sheet in my car and also had a copy folded up in my jacket at all times. Needless to say, that one got kinda ratty. Loren Chasse recorded this in the Aero Star parked at Jacek Ostoya’s in SF. For the Manimal.

I Call You Up
This is the scene. Somewhere in the 1950’s in a small town in the southern states of U.S.A., a kid walks into a recording studio. He sings his song. He is a good singer, everybody in the choir of the Catholic Church says so. You should record a song, boy – they all say.
The man from the recording studio looks at him. He sits behind a desk, a bit too relaxed, a Winchester rifle rests in his lap. The only thing we hear is a fan.
How old are you boy?
Fifteen, Sir.
You recorded that song for your girlfriend? I suppose you have a girlfriend.

How old is she?
Sixteen, Sir.
And then you know he should not answer the next question and leave the studio straight away. He doesn’t. One hour later he is back on the street again. The look in his eyes has changed. In his hand the one and only 45′ copy of his song. He throws it in a dustbin and gets on the first Greyhound that leaves town. The song travels with him, and would haunt him for years. He never saw his girlfriend again.

Jason: We did a show some August with N.O.T.A. in Oklahoma City. Actually, I believe we drove down together from their place in Tulsa. There were a ton of Native American kids at the show and a bunch of them were already well buzzed when we pulled into the parking lot. The venue was a gym and it remained lit for the entire show which only complicated things due to the staggering heat. We had been on stage for about twenty minutes when a young couple came running into the crowd screaming for us to stop and come help in the parking lot. When we got out the door the first thing I saw was a big crowd of kids rocking and banging a station wagon inside of which a battling couple was kicking the shit out of each other. A big Pawnee kid named Badger had locked himself inside with his girl and he was punching her out. Some guy in a flannel took a tire iron and smashed in the rear window which then allowed people to somehow scramble in and get a door open. Gnarly scene. Can’t remember what happened after that.

Across My Dreams
Today the electricity went away for a short time. This triggered the alarm of the house at the other side of the trees, a fifty meters uphill. An uptight sirene as a dog chaises own tail maddening centrifugal woowoow spat in all directions. A useless sound. I also find the sound of vacuum cleaners useless. Across My Dreams drifts on vacuum cleaned sounds. The image is different, because here we touch blissful moments. I have been going through the fifties magazines more then once to find pieces of pictures I could use for my collage. I have looked in numerous faces of women then young, atractive and healthy as three pints of milk a day. Those women are now in their eighties. Most of them probably have married and have used a vacuum cleaner as well. The monotonous sound with its very subtle variations lulled them into a trance. And yes, there are the wedding bells, so distant they sound, to remind of the happiest day of their lives. But wait. The windows are open. People are running towards the cheering crowd further down the street. The military marching band plays. Women throw flowers at the troops that will go to the front tomorrow. So much dust.

Jason: Across My Dreams: I wrote this to the Knit Separates. I wanted them to know how I felt about our song In the Sea at Night.

The Daymoon
This is the song that relates to the picture on the cover of the cassette. It is in black and white and it is a portrait of Jason that could have been made in one of those cabins with a little stool with adjustable heigth and a curtain too short to make nocturnal love making possible. Jason’s pose bears traces of Bowie in Berlin, Rutger Hauer’s disposable Hollywood movies and Sigue Sigue Sputnik after they cut their hair (but left the orange dye in it). Yes, indeed, he looks very average on this picture. But we have to remember that ‘average’ has a high iconic value in the United States. Someone has to marry the girl next door and make suburbia a beautiful place. The opening line of the song is “I Call You Up.” By then we have heard a car engine as a droning background and a lot of reverb around the guitar playing. Acoustic guitar. I am sure this song connects with some other great songs from the last century. Not as a copy, but to confirm that the melody is again one that stays with you for days. There is an image to this song, that connects to the description of the front cover picture. It is very much an MTV song. MTV was big in the pre-internet post TV era. The image of the videoclip comes natural, it is a black and white view on a nocturnal highway (or is it Mulholland Drive, the stage for every young american who wants to be James Dean for a day) Captured in the lights of the car, Jason appears, a see-through ghostly image in a leather jacket and jeans, sings this song. Sad song, melancholic…why. Put the daylight on, go faster because now you hardly hit 25 miles an hour. I know it is dangerous, but are we talking rock ‘n’ roll or not. Get a drummer, throw in electric guitars, something Harrisonesque, something Go – Betweens, even the Californian sunlight flooded songs of Fleetwood Mac can stand. Yes fuck, I know this is all experimental and shit, but the song has a potential that goes beyond our laboratorial lifestyle. Sometimes you have to take a break, get some air and sing.

Jason: There had been some school arsons in the area and apparently punk rock graffiti was found at both sites. The cops came after me for some reason. I was eating dinner with my parents when he came to the door. When I got outside he told me to lie down and that he intended to cuff me. At one point he had his knee on my back. My father stood there in the doorway , yelling at me to just tell the truth. I looked up and there in the sky was the day moon. I could hear some kid down the street laughing. Later on it came out that two jr. punk rocks were responsible for it all. As a boy I used to trip on seeing that same moon in the morning light as I rode. That moon always seemed to be much bigger to me when we were in Japan. It’s also something quite central and recurring in the work of two men I greatly admire: Sherwood Anderson and Charles Burchfield.

Where did you ride to see the Moon in morning light?

I could see it hanging over the Pacific as a little guy on my way to school.

What were you doing in Japan, Joejoe San.

My father was a navy pilot. We were stationed in Iwakuni.

Who are these guys Sherwood and Charles.

American writer and an American painter.

Bad Wonder
This is the same song as the song before, with this difference that it is early morning now, very early morning, just after sunrise, crickets already sing in the rising heat. The girls have long gone home. The room, mainly a worn down leather sofa, a table and a tv set that doesn’t work is scattered with empty beer cans, pizza boxes, plastic trays with unidentifiable food, full ashtrays, is half in darkness, a tiny ray of sunlight splits the room in two. On that couch sits Jason with an acoustic guitar he bought at a garage sale for 3$, and it sounds exactly like that when he plays it, torturous to any Segovian ear. On an old pouf that I forgot to mention sits a second person with an acoustic guitar. His one sounds better. And while Jason is somewhere in a back room of poet’s heaven, hammering those rotten strings, his friend delivers one beautiful curl of melodies after the other. At the end of the song it is also his idea to load the sofa on the back of his pick-up truck, drive it to a bend in the road above the village and leave it there, for those who want to enjoy the view on the Pacific ocean. Jason forgets to bring his guitar.

Jason: I was fifteen on an El Camino bus heading to Santa Clara. I got on a few stops further down than usual. Next stop a young, young vato in hair net, baggy white T and light gray overcoat with corduroy black slippers got on and sat in front of me. He produced a shiny silver colt 45 that seemed as big as a football and then loudly exercised the action the next couple miles.

El Camino? Where were you going (as usual)

El Camino is a major thoroughfare in the Santa Clara valley. I was more than likely on my way to go punk rocking somewhere.

Vato?

A Vato is a Mexican gang member in most cases. They can be lone wolves as well.

What action? 

Receiver/loading mechanism of a gun.

Smile Now Cry later
The friend waits in the pick-up truck. Jason has gone back into the apartment, calls up the girl. (This is pre-cell phone era). The girl doesn’t answer. Just as he expected. The answering machine records the song he sings to her on a cassette. In an other life in an other time Jason would have stood a chance in American Idol if Jonathan Richman had been part of the jury.
Song ends, enters bliss. It was really a good idea to get rid of the couch. Song ends, enters sunlight. The old transistor radio starts playing as if touched by magic; it is the alarm. Some 50s, early 60s melody, almost BurtBacharachish repeats itself over and over again, gets absorbed by the triangular roar of the pick-up truck. Summer of ’87. 5:30 am. The awakening. After a break the most beautiful melody comes to define the universe, something fake Chinese maybe or vintage TV-serie, something played over a very cheap system. I want this.

Jason: This is a cover. East Side Story cruise comps. A pavilion at the San Jose flea market late 70s. Watching Latino/Afro soul R&B vocal groups- guys my age playing instruments and hitting soaring lush harmonies through too small speakers full of mice shit and nest hair. Some of them are in suits while others are in their field clothes that have been meticulously cleaned and ironed for just this occasion. Lots of dead grass and steel fencing, sugar cane and melon. The heat and smells bewildering. I end up leaving at  with a head full of melodies and tunes that I’m trying my best to commit to memory.

Listening to a Tape – A – Interview with Charles Rice Goff III and Robert Silverman

Sometimes a few raindrops fall. One of the cats is pregnant. The tape is a 20th century relict; its inlay is a yellow copy-paper with a map of USSR-ian Europe on it, titles and info in neat small black characters emanate an illusion of relief. The cassette itself is one you’d buy in a store, TDK, MAXELL, FUJI or SONY. There’s more brands of course, but this one is a transparent TDK with triangles of gaffer tape stuck on it. Herd of the Ether Space – Beyond the Confessions of Hiss.

Confessions of Hiss

The memory goes back more then thirty years. We are in Oakland, Bay Area, California. Start 1981, finish 1989. Those are the two years united in Confessions of Hiss. In between there was Reagan and Mr. Gorbatsjov-tear-down-this-wall. A Polish pope travelled around the world and kissed concrete everywhere he went. Television. News. USA Today at the supermarket, together with six kilo’s of raw meat. Cans of Beer, Cooks. Barbecue Party, t-shirt, flipflops, cappie, belly, a few jokes. Aerobic pink and Aerobic green.

I was in Oakland a few years ago. I was most impressed by the empty factory halls, now in the middle of clean air. Big massive letters spelled out A M E R I C A N S T E E L. There was a lot of pride in it, and triumph. Triumph of Capitalism turned into Triumph of a Dream. The pride was still palpable in the streets. Epochs are hardly made by the politics or the iconic image of a president of the USA. Oakland’s streets must have been full of people going to work. Decades must have passed. In those decades shoes and trousers, shirts of the working man changed just a bit in style. Dust is from all times, as is the sunshine hitting hard when Summer comes. Ventilator making its rounds under the ceiling. Getting horny after work, bottle of beer at the lips, scrutinising the waitress.

Paradise is in a film studio. Zombies and private eyes, too. All falls down, heroin’s heroes play a guitar solo. The leading actress faints. Rehearsing voices keep on echoing in a film set cave. De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves is played in a backyard cinema. Going home in an old convertible. Living in a big house and in a small house, changing housemates. There is that sofa again, carried to the front porch, sit on it, drink beer from a can, play guitar and hear the neighbours and crickets and factories join with their yelling and tv-sets and fm radio and the distant hum. Sunset. The Pacific Ocean is just a car ride away.

Robert: Past and present merge. Dimensions intersect for an instant. In this fraction of a second, everything is possible, and everything is timeless. Analog and digital press together. I’m digital and Charles is analog. The two of us communicate to each other via anticipated sounds. Ronald Regan claims cold war victory. We know better. Salute the flag or bury it. Your choice.

Charles: The Robert Silverman- C.Goff III improvised recordings that blend together in this piece were recorded on June 7th, 1981 and November 2nd, 1989. The span of these recordings coincides almost exactly with the beginning and ending of an eight year romance that moulded my personal life in many ways. She was present at the 1981 session, held at Robert’s residence. The recording was done in a large room with large windows which overlooked Berkeley’s Tilden Park.

As the romantic story goes, my lover and I met as idealistic young adults; she left me years later for a life adherent to the ideals of classic Marxism. Synchronistically enough, the 1989 Silverman/Goff recording which is blended into “Confessions Of Hiss” is coloured with samples of broadcast news stories about the Cold War of Soviets vs. Americans, so-called “Communism” vs. so-called “Democracy.”

Much of this tape’s broadcast news centers around the 1949 trial of Alger Hiss for being a Communist and a Soviet spy. Amazingly, the 1989 recording was made exactly a week before the biggest symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, was torn down.

Where did you find the cold war broadcast samples?

Charles: Robert had brought a record of Edward R. Murrow news reports to incorporate into the session. As we grooved to Murrow’s historic reports about the Cold War and the building of the Berlin Wall, people in Germany were actually beginning to chip away at the Berlin Wall, which was finally breached a week later on November 9th, 1989.

How did you come across the 1949 trial of Alger Hiss. What can you tell about him?

Charles: The Alger Hiss story was reported on the Edward R. Murrow album. Hiss’s trial is an important bit of American History. It was an early (pre-McCarthy-ism) component of the Republican Party’s anti-Communist crusade. The Congressional hearing that eventually led to Hiss being convicted in a federal court of being both a Communist and a Soviet spy was headed up by Congressman Richard Nixon. The attention that Nixon got from this hearing led his to being elected as a Senator, a Vice President (twice), and a President (twice) over the course of the next twenty four years. If you watch the video that Chris Camacho did for the piece: “Confessions Of Hiss,” it portrays E.R. Murrow, Nixon, and Hiss.

As Far as the Eye Could See the Lord Sayeth unto Abraham

A decade rests in between the starting and vanishing point of this track. It was a decade when nuclear weapons were pointed at the cold war zones. The earth was a basket full of fireworks. One spark was enough to make it disappear. This knowledge was pumped into everyone’s consciousness on a daily base. That was what made the 80s doomed. But to whom?

Once again the walk goes in a different direction, towards a history that drips through the façades of the shops and houses in San Francisco. Calligraphy coughs up another time, so do redwood forests and the view on the harbour, the misthorns of the ship or the distant howl of the Amtrak train. People arrived just before and after the turn of the century, all excited, all moving like mad to make a living. The tramp trail still finishes on Mission.

Look into this song and you look at speeded up masses in black and white images from the early age of the movies. A man with a bowler hat, dressed like a pimp looks into the camera, to the left, smiles, says something we don’t hear, the next shot we look at the woman with the beard, a contortionist or a dancing bear. Life takes colour and a marching band arrives from around the corner, dressed like Roman soldiers; a preacher remains unimpressed, continues his sermon.

We are also back with American Steel and the howling sounds of iron being cut, the big plates smashed against each other, the infernal beauty of destruction and re-creation. Walk, sit in an old car, public transport, so many people on the streets, so many colours on a sunny day, so many snippets of conversation, honks, sirenes, yells, the awareness of the trance-inducing rhythm of walking, the stand still on the pivot of space and time, and all and all and all just keeps spinning round like an endless introduction to some country song by a young guy who Od-eed on heroin. It rains in the desert.

Robert: 1981 was the year of dreams and oblivion for me. I chased the tail of the dragon and puffed mightily. Anguish is palpable in the music. Time is out of joint. Ensoniq 13-bit sampling was my salvation back then. Death is not easy to process. I found ecstasy in the face of agony – in the conflict of sound.

Charles: “As Far As The Eye Can See” is a legitimate metaphor for how this entire cassette album has been observed and re-observed by the world since its inception. At first the tape was transported thousands of miles from my California recording studio in response to a request that it be included in a catalog for a Norwegian tape label. As far as I can tell, however, this tape label quickly faded into non-existence before a single copy of the tape was distributed.

Nevertheless, Taped Rugs Productions promoted it to broadcasters and other artists all over the world, and it did get some broadcast airplay as far as the eye can see, on various American and European radio programs. I actually have a tape recording which was sent to me in 1991 by a broadcaster from the French (Bordeaux) “Ensemble Vide” radio show, which features the “sermon” portion of this piece. In 2009, I digitised “Beyond The Confessions Of Hiss” and posted it as a free stream/download at the wonderful, non-profit, online library of archive.org. There it became available to anyone as far as the eye can see who has access to internet technology and is located in the range of a transmitter antenna.

.In 2010, one of the hundreds of listeners to this album, Chris Camacho from far off Florida, was inspired enough by the opening piece to create an incredible video to illustrate it (without any encouragement, nor even any awareness, on my part).

In 2014, the actual grandson of one of the witnesses whose testimony helped convict Alger Hiss in 1949 (amazing he stumbled on this!), watched and commented on Chris Camacho’s video from somewhere beyond where my eyes can see. The legacy of this cassette album now contains your poetic observations as well. I can only imagine that this legacy will continue to stretch as far as the eye can see for many years to come.

Listening to a Tape – B – Interview with Charles Rice Goff III and Robert Silverman

Fog comes, fog goes. It must be looking for a place to stay. The sea is turning into its summerly color azure. Birds are out; birds are loud. The lemon tree has flowers, and oily-green new branches sprout with fervor from its main stem. The table is still full of scratches of paper, magazines, things to write and stamp with. There is a bottle of water right in my view. It contains water, we got from a well.

Stress related disability claim

To live in a country that sent men to the Moon. And now it has this Thunderbird model plane that serves as a taxi. Rich people can buy a ticket, embark on a round trip to around the corner’s outer space. Point a gun at the television set. Tank top existence, wife beater. Five television programs run at the same time when the windows are open on a steaming hot Summer day. Take a pair of binoculars and stage a rear window re-make in the bedroom. It’s too hot to sleep anyway. A fire brigade arrives, joined by a police squad. Flashlights run over roofs and along walls. A cascade of sirenes overflows the street.
The binocular pressed against the eyes, leaving all sounds knock at the door, no way they get in, and look for a slowly evolving still life scene. Nothing happening is the best you can get. Something like a picture in a magazine of the 50s: young happy mum in an advertisement.

Where do these sounds come from. It is the memory of a walk through a music school; kids practising, young women singing up and down the scales; is it the tuning moment of a symphony orchester, a gamble hall with blinking lights. It is an attempt to make contemporary music thinking about all the Schoenbergs, Stockhausens and
Schopenhauers in our life and then fail because it just makes one laugh out hysterically hearing the first results, so best is to blow it up completely, and turn the piece into a pandora’s box filled with all the sounds an omnipresent ear would pick up in San Francisco. And then don’t close the lid.

History climbs back along a family line. Know the material shoes and shirts of former generations were made from, and you know enough. A can of corned beef, unopened, bought on 25 April 1935, here, I keep it on a shelf in the kitchen. Sometimes I look at it, and lose any sense of time, of the present time. There is more then one neural memory lane. We can walk them all. The film goes backward. That’s a nice image. Look out of the window and see time flow in the opposite direction. People walk backwards into their youth and disappear in the womb; everything concludes in and onto itself, finds its essence, hears the spirits talk that cross the Native American Dream. Indian Preservation, a mammoth ride. A Timothy Leary book for one dollar. It’s time for a pop song.

Robert: I stand naked facing the dawn of the internet. Multi-task or die. Emails are a novelty, but they keep growing in number and won’t leave me alone. The digitisation of society is well under way. Welcome to the stress of the computer age. The sonic pallet used for this piece is not unlike TV cable channels being disbursed to the cosmos via optical fibers..

Charles: When many things are going on all at the same time, it can overwhelm an unprepared mind. It can overwhelm a prepared mind too. This recording is overflowing with inputs: Electronic guitars, a sampling keyboard, a modified casio keyboard, a toy piano, a tape of reversed vocals, two phonographs playing records backwards/forwards/off-center/slow/fast, a tape of modified sounds that Herd Of The Ether Space member George Gibson had recorded on a canoe trip in British Columbia, etc.

Looking back into the late September of 1989, when this piece was recorded, there seemed to be a lot of things overwhelming my mind. My living situation and my financial (survival) status had both suddenly changed as a result of my lover moving out a few months previous. She left me quite unexpectedly, broke my heart without warning. I actually went to the emergency hospital because of irregular heart beats on multiple occasions during the three months previous to this September.

I had firemen come to my apartment one night and discover that I had no pulse for a while. I was forced to move my entire recording studio into my bedroom, so I could offer the living room space to a friend to share the rent and expenses. In that bedroom recording studio setting, I had to angle my bed upright toward the ceiling to allow space for myself and other musicians to set up equipment and perform in there.

Stressful? Certainly challenging. The name for this piece was actually picked out of a notebook that I kept — a notebook which I still keep, in fact — for writing down phrases that I randomly hear which strike me as potential song titles. At the time that I named this recording, I had no idea that years later I would marry a woman who would make her living dealing with disability claims and other such social welfare matters. While you mention here the aspects of this recording which bring you back in time, for me, the song title sort of predicted my future. I am still married to my social worker wife, and our loving relationship has indeed lowered my overall stress levels over course of many years.

Desparately waltzing with Spock

Disparate, desperate. After all it is folk music. Real Americans don’t need foreign countries; there is enough foreign country in each one of them. Disparately, sometimes desperately chewed into a new existence driven by a force to look forward, knowing that all bridges are burned. There is no way to return, even if the horizon is in flames. Flames produced by the A-bomb or by napalm, flames caused by the exhaustion pipe of a deranged Corvette.

Big cattle move over the prairies. Modern day cowboys talk in their walkie-talkie. Tons of living beef walk slowly to the slaughterhouses, and in the evening we drink, we dance on the wooden floor, the band plays a waltzer. Mary is a fine American girl. Her grandparents came from the east of Europe. Some killings going on there. But we live in outer space. Look that guy with the wicked ears, he is my favourite, Spock, his name. But she has only eyes for him, doesn’t give a damn about rockets and the future and planets and stuff, and the scent of leather turns her on. She wants to waltz.

A fight, a bottle, screams from the parking lot. A drunk guy still wearing his marching band uniform, blood on his face walks in, sits at the bar, orders a whiskey. Barman talks backwards, Pluto and Neptune conjugate, visions of Madonna, her big eyes and her big boobs and her chewy chewy gummy yummy petticoat voice, someone should turn the radio of. The news shows an exploding space shuttle. The explosion remains unheard.

Charles: “Space” has always been one of the key themes in the recordings produced by the Herd. This theme sometimes shows up simply in the “spacey” qualities of the music itself. Sometimes it is evidenced by the tendency of listeners to “space out” when listening to the music. Sometimes there is actual verbiage or lyrics relating to “outer space,” “inner space,” etc. in the music. (By the way, I am using the term “music” for something that certain people might argue is not music at all.)

As for this piece, one of the elements that led to its name was a record album produced by Peter Pan Records that relates a Star Trek story about the Enterprise’s encounter with a “being of pure sound.” This story was never featured in a Star Trek television show nor movie. The record sleeve gatefold opens into a comic-book-style version of the story too. There is a lot of noise that genuinely threatens the well-being of the Enterprise crew during this encounter, all of which is revealed via dramatic audio on the record album. Eventually the Trekkers communicate with the “Sound Being” by manically improvising some modern classical sounds on a big keyboard instrument which has to be moved up from somewhere to the ship’s bridge, and, by the end of the story, all is well (in harmony?) again.

Listeners of the Herd’s “Desperately Waltzing With Spock” hear bits and pieces of this story throughout, although, because I was randomly dropping the record stylus into various spots, hand turning the record forwards and backwards, etc., the story is presented in an extremely cryptic manner.

This record album is similarly mixed into a couple of other Herd Of The Ether Space recordings as well. The epic 45-minute piece: “Claws Longer Than Your Middle Finger” on the cassette album “Other Than Random Modulation” (1990) immediately comes to mind as an example. The “waltz” aspect of this recording comes across (barely) through the triple meter of some of the modern classical music played by the Enterprise crew (and heard on the record album) and (similarly, barely) through one of the modified Casio keyboard’s presets: “Waltz”.

Robert: Imagine yourself sleepwalking – no – sleep-waltzing on a tight rope. Your sleep-state and waking-states have been reversed. Fiction is now reality. TV shows you once watched as a child now surface to your consciousness unexpectedly in random patterns pressing against your eardrums. Accept this.