THE 33-AND-A-THIRD-YEAR ALBUM (Part 1)

In the Autumn of 1982, during my first residency in Dunstable, Massachusetts, I made, strictly for my own amusement, a home-recorded cassette album called IMPOSSIBLE CENTURY. It was basically an improvised, abstract freakout tape, with almost no “composed” music. I recall this being a period of personal Varese-mania, and the influence of pieces such as Poeme electronique and Deserts would be undeniable. The 60-minute tape included pieces titled: The Act of Memory, November Beach, Hammers Killing Flies, Impossible Century, Homage To Sargon, Epitaph for Small Things, and Water of Iron. There was also a track having something to do with Halloween about which I remember nothing, and a long, frivolous musique concrete offering called Twinkle, Twinkle, Piece of Shit, which was tape-speed manipulations of a well-known nursery tune. I successfully amused myself with IMPOSSIBLE CENTURY and probably let a couple of friends hear it, but that was the extent of its immediate impact. I’m pretty sure the original cassette is long gone, though I believe I still have a copy of some of the tracks on a reel-to-reel tape.

I retained the overall avant-gardist concept of the collection, and always suspected I would eventually make something more of it than what was on that crappy little cassette. But it wasn’t too long before the first incarnation of The Four Last Things appeared, and I spent several years working on the Rock band venture, including recording a studio album, FIRST THINGS, released in 1992 (by which time, sadly, the band was just about kaput as a working unit).

More years passed and a lot of changes took place in the music business. The Compact Disc became the standard recording format. Artists producing music independent of the big name record labels proliferated, as did the means of creating and marketing such music. Finding (and affording) local recording studios was not the daunting challenge of old. My slow easing back into the commercial studio was nudged along by two “one-off” home-studio projects.

In Fall 2002 – 20 years after the original IMPOSSIBLE CENTURY tape – I answered a call for submissions for a program at Georgia State University called Pulse Field: International Exhibition of Sound Art. It sounded to me like they wanted material that combined multiple sound sources – voice, instruments, electronic, random abstract - into some kind of artsy creation. Right up my Varesian alley. Using the best recording equipment I had at the time, my Tascam 4-track Portastudio, I set to work.

First, I needed subject matter. You may recall that, in Fall 2002, President Bush Junior was ramping up his campaign to persuade the country and the world that the U.S. should invade Iraq. There is evidence as early as November 2001 that the Bush team was building a case to justify this action, and in September 2002, Dubya had brought his case before the UN Security Council. We know, of course, that, despite no legitimate proof of WMDs and no evidence of a connection between the Iraqi government and the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld finally got their wish, launching a military invasion of Iraq (that lingers to this day) in March 2003.

In October 2002, the Iraq War was still only a possibility, albeit one that felt disturbingly inevitable. Hearkening back to a theme that had run through my mind during Bush Senior’s Gulf War of 1991, I began Alas, Babylon, a lament on the vision of the birthplace of Civilization, the land of the ruined cities of Ur, Ashur, Babylon, et al, with all their remote magnificence and historical importance, again being savagely brutalized by modern war – in essence, ruined all over again.

The music came first. I assembled a 20-minute montage consisting not only of guitar, keyboards, and percussion, but also tape manipulations of vinyl records and other distorted sounds. One of my primary sources was an LP of speeches by American Presidents stretching from Grover Cleveland in 1892 to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. With these excerpts were interwoven passages from Mesopotamian literature such as Gilgamesh and the Babylonian Creation Epic, read in the original languages. The montage was completed the first week of October. Cramming to meet deadline, a 100-line original poem beginning “When the day of storm shall come” was written and recited on top of the music in a single day, October 11, and the whole composition was mailed to Pulse Field on the 12th. Whatever happened to Alas Babylon at Georgia State, I cannot say. For all I know, it might have landed in the circular file shortly after its arrival. But the work proved a catalyst for further recording efforts.

The second one-off home project came about a year later, in December 2003. The League Of Existence, after a long hiatus, had returned to group tape-making in Summer of that year, and a few tentative efforts had built momentum for a plunge into something more complex. Thus, with the Tascam Portastudio again as recording console, Cogswell, McCusker, and Pestana convened on a Saturday in mid-December to begin recording the Ode To Nowhere. Finished about a month later, the 15-minute piece featured surrealist lyric contributions from all three participants over a musical background far more rambunctious and far less somber than that of Alas Babylon.

Ode and Alas whetted the appetite for creating and recording something on a broad scale, and prodded the idea of a new Four Last Things album, although with the 4LT having been moribund for so long, I did not initially think of it as a “band” project. I did think that the new album would take 1982’s IMPOSSIBLE CENTURY as its starting point, and would be a largely improvised and abstract production, not requiring a great deal of time to complete.

My initial plan was to do new recordings of The Act of Memory, Impossible Century, Hammers Killing Flies, and November Beach for the album. I could also include the already-recorded Alas Babylon, perhaps with some studio beefing-up to enhance the home recording. Additionally, I had ideas for three more pieces, one very long, one very short, and one in the middle, that would bring the total album length to nearly a full 80-minute CD.

The first 4LT album had been produced and partly engineered by noted Boston-area musician Erik Lindgren in various local pro studios, but by 2004 he was operating his own studio in Middleborough, Mass., and when I contacted Erik about working on a new project, he booked me in for a session on June 22, 2004.

That first session was a marathon, nearly 12 hours, from about 10am to about 10pm. I brought what pre-recorded material I had, to see what could be made of it. We launched a remake of The Act Of Memory, using the beginning and ending sound effects from the original tape, and transferred the four separate tracks of Alas Babylon from my Tascam demo to digital tracks and started layering more stuff atop that base, mostly additional keyboards. Dipping into more deep & distant archives, I revived a recording from 1980, Ancestral Voices, which was a 27-minute guitar feedback freakout piece originally recorded on an orange label Certron cassette with a portable mono tape machine. Not exactly modern hi-tech, but my plan was to use it only as an atmospheric background with a lot of other things on top. Erik transferred it to digital stereo and it sounded pretty good for an old, musty thing. The last thing we worked on was Paleolithic Bouncing Pigs, a short piece based on a poem by Jim McCusker. My idea was to try what David Crosby did on I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here from his first solo album: 3 or 4 tracks, each ad-libbed a cappella, that would blend into something coherent. I could tell right off, however, that it was too loose tonally, too unthought-out, to achieve coherence. I don’t know if I ever listened to it again (that bad!) but I knew it was “back to the drawing board” for PBPigs.

Before my next session in Middleboro, I got with my brother-in-law, Paul Lavoie, who happened to be a fine drummer and was doing a lot of recording with some fairly sophisticated studio equipment in his Derry, NH, home. Over the 4th of July weekend, I trekked up there and we started laying down tracks for a remake of Impossible Century.

By this point, IC had developed way beyond the original abstract tape piece of 1982. I pulled a couple of riffs/progressions from recent music notebooks and spliced them together into a heavy, uptempo rock piece. I also added lyrics to match the Century concept. Some years earlier I had conceived of doing a set of lyrics that consisted of nothing but numbers. I used this idea in part on IC, referencing significant 20th Century moments, such as “Eleven-twenty-two-sixty-three” (JFK assassination) and “Oh-eight-oh-six-forty-five” (Hiroshima bombing). Similarly, strings of place names, e.g., “Saigon – Siberia – Munich – Manchuria” alluded to other important events. Paul added drums, and after a couple more sessions in Derry, with what seemed like an orchestra of guitar overdubs, we had a solid foundation track that I could take to Erik’s studio for finalizing.

Down in Middleborough again on August 26, Erik and I began work on the remake of November Beach. Of all the numbers from the 1982 tape, this one retained the most of its original character, as well as original sound material. The new version had a three-part structure. The opening section, consisting of two acoustic guitars and a bass, was based on a song fragment I wrote in 1974 called November. It was a theme without a home and it seemed fitting to use it as a building block here. The next part was taken directly from the 1982 original: a bunch of noodling around on a cheap electronic keyboard that occasionally breaks out into a broad chordal theme. Over this, I laid some reverb-heavy poetry, almost ten years old at the time of recording, describing a beach in winter. After this section came a brand new chunk of music, a slow waltz, played on organ, a sad but pretty melody that sounded to me very much like old-school muzak. This segment fades in and out and is followed by another slab of the ’82 original: more noodling and more beach poetry. The waltz fades in again, repeating its melancholy tune, then fades gradually out to allow the ’82 keyboard one final return. At the very end, the chordal theme dissolves into digital echoes. “Wave” sound effects and tinkling tubular bells close the piece with pure sound painting – you are standing at the beach feeling the spray and hearing the crash of the waves. Or maybe you’re back in the 1980s listening to a station identification blurb on WJIB…?...hard to tell. (I wouldn’t blame the listener for thinking of Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore.) I played most of the keyboard music on the track, but Erik, a truly top-flight keyboardist, helped out greatly by playing the hard part, the 6/8 arpeggio accompaniment.

Returning to Middleborough September 16, I brought a drum overdub from Paul for Act Of Memory, which Erik managed to synch to the song despite the fact it was recorded on tape rather than digital media(!) More work was done on Alas Babylon, as I added keyboard highlights in certain passages. A third piece was tackled, a new instrumental called Homage To Pollock (in honor of the modern American painter). Against a click track, I laid down seven minutes of guitar chords based on an old 12-tone composition of mine. Unfortunately, that was about as far as the track was to progress.

In early October, I was back at Paul’s studio, working with him to create the foundation for a remake of Hammers Killing Flies. Like Impossible Century, Hammers has aspects of standard heavy rock, with crunchy power chords and screeching guitar solos. On the IC tape in 1982, it was in fact a totally ad-libbed one-track guitar solo, though very abstract and not bound to a conventional chord progression or even a key. Concentrated in the lowest register of the instrument, it was meant to feel unrelentingly heavy, like a bludgeoning weapon; the title indicates a kind of “overkill” mentality. Once again, what was originally free improvisation ultimately gained form and became a composed piece. The main riff is a little hook I had dreamed up somewhere in the mid-1990s. To this was added a middle section, newly-written, ambiguous both in tonality and rhythm. Paul’s accompaniment, with tribal tom-toms bouncing along on top of a steady tick on the hi-hat, kept this section tight and dynamic. The opening of the song is totally unrelated to all that follows. It’s another piece of antiquism, having been salvaged from a discarded instrumental called October written in 1975 in a deep “jazz chord” period, with 7ths, 9ths and augmenteds all over the place.

I didn’t see Erik again until mid-November, when we made the final mixdown of Alas Babylon. I also tried dubbing a bass guitar track to Homage To Pollock, but could not make it work. About a week later, another visit to Middleborough proved more productive. This time, long-time musical associate Dave Ambrose was with me and he played the tenor sax lead parts for Act Of Memory and November Beach. In NBeach, one of the verses featured a melody too high for the tenor’s range, so the multi-instrumental Mr. Ambrose played it on flute.

Thus far, there hadn’t been much done in the way of vocals. That changed in January 2005, as I enlisted Rosalind Landman to contribute to the longest piece on the album, now titled Oxyrhynchus. Rosalind is the youngest daughter of my great college English professor, David Landman, and her vocal talent and theater experience proved just right for this one. A little background on the work in question seems appropriate here.

Oxyrhynchus is the Greek name for an ancient Egyptian city which in the early 20th Century yielded, via archaeological digs, an immense treasure trove of papyrus fragments. Amongst the grocery lists and sales receipts, taken from what appeared to be your basic “town dump,” were hundreds of scraps of literary works – many theretofore lost to modernity. Thanks to this yield, scholars are kept busy to this day scanning through copies of the Greek New Testament, remnants of the archaic Greek melic poets, and substantial chunks of several Attic plays. Of the latter, one of the most notable examples is 350 lines or so of Euripides’ tragedy Hypsipyle (originally probably over 1500 lines long). The tale is of a woman multiply wronged: exiled from a land where she should have been Queen, bereft of two infant children, kidnapped, sold into slavery, falsely accused of murder. . . ahh, Greek tragedy - it’s always something! I selected about 100 lines from the already-fragmented text – scattered verses that painted scenes within scenes – just enough to give a sense of the flow of the story. The lead character, Hypsipyle, dominates the extant text, and so Roz was really the star of the show. I gave her some tips on Greek pronunciation, a rough idea of the technique I was looking for, and she plunged into it. On January 20, in Middleborough, Erik recorded her parts (along with mine in the same piece). These vocals were layered over the Ancestral Voices foundation track already in the can. The voices weren’t really singing – not a melody, but something in between singing, speaking, and chanting. On top of the abstract guitar feedback track, it made for a pretty wild reconstruction of high Classical Athenian drama. Much more to come on this one.

I was back at Erik’s about a week later to do more work on Oxyrhynchus - basically adlibbing an entire track of guitar chords and riffs based on ancient Greek songs (more fragments from the Oxyrhynchus town dump). But then the album sat stagnant until late May, when I got with Paul again at his place to mix down Impossible Century and Hammers. A month later, I took the stereo master tracks on CD from that session down to Middleborough for transfer to Erik’s workstation. At this June 30 session I also had old friend Brian Ryder with me. (Shades of “Horizon” 1976!) Brian laid down lead vocals on Impossible Century and then added his part in Oxyrhynchus, the lead male character, Amphiarus. It was great to work with Brian again; he approached the task with seriousness and executed it with precision and skill.

In the first week of August, at Erik’s again, I finished overdubbing guitar and bass parts for the two “heavy metal” songs, Impossible Century and Hammers. It may have also been at this session that I overdubbed a few abstract guitar lines on Oxyrhynchus. At this point, the whole project was getting a bit sketchy, and in fact, a gap of almost a year ensued before the next studio visit. One should know that the old adage “Time is money” applies to few things more acutely than recording studios, and that must have played a factor. There surely were other reasons for the long hiatus but they escape me now.

When I finally returned to Middleborough in early August 2006, I was grinding my musical gears and about to come to a full stall. The album was about 80% complete but that last 20% had me flummoxed. Oxyrhynchus, at 27 minutes, was a huge muscular torso that could have passed for finished, but I felt it needed just a little more dressing up. I had done about three minutes worth of abstract guitar fills for it a year earlier, but that was a puny fraction of the piece, and I didn’t seem to have the drive to cover the rest.

More significantly, I was totally stuck on Homage To Pollock and Paleolithic Bouncing Pigs. The concept behind the former was to imitate Jackson Pollock’s painting style with sounds. I began with a low-volume background track made up of excerpts from Water of Iron (a discarded 1982 IC number), meant to function as the white ground layer on a canvas. In June ’04 I had overdubbed a track of guitar chords based on a 1977 instrumental called Serial Bowl (itself based on a 12-tone, or serial, row a la Schoenberg). Above this, I planned to add several instruments, recorded separately, playing further permutations of the 12-tone row. I thought it would work especially well because the melodic lines, by virtue of their atonality, would not clash with the background, and because the constant variations (forward, backward, upside-down) of the 12-note theme in several instruments would correspond to the multiple layers of swirling, splashing paint - sometimes jarring, sometimes blending – on a Pollock canvas. But my experiment with a bass guitar track had proven frustrating, and the thought of trying the same with another half-dozen or more instruments grew more and more daunting.

As for PBPigs, the idea had morphed from its earlier David Crosby-esque a cappella improv into a fully written out neo-medieval bagatelle with virtual instrument (Sibelius software) accompaniment. But it still required a vocal performance which I did not feel capable of pulling off, something in a real “church choir” vein. I tried to get John McCusker (brother of the poem’s author), a trained choral singer, but his circumstances at the time would not allow for his participation.

And so, at that early August 2006 session, I worked with Erik on final mixes for The Act of Memory, Impossible Century, Hammers Killing Flies, and November Beach, taking home CD copies of these and putting the project on hold for what I thought would be only a short while.

(Part 2 coming soon)