I'm sitting at the Meredith Gallery listening to an somewhat old ELW (my pre-Eucci noise collective) tape. It's from spring 1999, at the beginning of a very active year for those involved. This particular piece, Bathroom Fixtures (originally meant to go along with a series of paintings under the same name as a collection of tape loops - one for each painting), blows my mind. It's utter cacaphony of a sort that we haven't done in years. It's almost entirely done with guitar pedals. At the beginning of the year, following a breakup of a long-time relationship, I put my energy into an all-guitar-pedal (with no guitar, no synth, just a closed loop feedback circuit) release that was then put out on 24 very cheap tapes as Because 1999 Needs an Enemy / Accelerate Kate Moss. By March I had gotten back in contact with an old friend, Cybele, who had worked with me before on music, entirely by mail. Now she was living in Virginia a few miles west of me. After submitting a terrific piano+tv+loop+distortion piece to me, we got back together, this time collaborating in person. We did some very (VERY) small shows around the area, often long droning or percussive pieces, and released two tapes in May alone: Audio ELW Plays Whitefield and the live set Cooler Muse. Plays Whitefield featured our most intense (ever) live performance, Whitefield; it also featured a fast cut,punch,loop,punch impromptu jam using an airing of Scared Straight as the instigator and principal source. I think that the instrument/pedal collection had just recently grown to include a Big Muff Pi and an old DJ Sampler from the Pawn Shop. The frontside of this tape is grabby and violent; the back side widened the net a bit with Cybele's piano piece, the chaotic soup of Bathroom Fixtures, two experimental trip-hop variations, and My TV Wife guitar feedback piece.
I'm revisiting this because I'm putting together the next EUCCI release - which may turn into a family of releases - which may turn into a small online label (possibly a sublabel of No Type). Certain bits of the pre-modern belongs to us (the first ELW cd/mp3 collection) catalog have not made it into mp3 form, and I had gotten curious about the forgotten tracks of early 99. It's four years since some of these were made, and it's been nine years since the ELW collective started. Trying to decide what of it to bring forward could be a long task. Coupled with the amount of new(ish) material, it could take even longer. And that's not what I need to experience right now (I'm so behind on the project I had planned to do last fall).
Things are different now without the likes of Cybele, Elwe, Kate, John, Jason, Jonas, and others who have played part over the years. It's back to just me, almost 10 years later, wondering what to do with it all.