For years, from various places, I heard strange music. With or without beats, the structure was unconventional to say the least. It started with a saturday evening community radio program - unfortunately, I never made good notes on the artists I was hearing (Crash Worship was the only one I remembered). When that program went away, I found what I could, usually in the in-between spaces of the industrial tapes I was listening to at the time. The concept of industrial music was always much more interesting to me than the actual result. I wanted (although I didn't know it at the time) Musique Concrete. I slowly found music that fell more and more into what I was searching for, but it wasn't until I came across Nurse With Wound's Live at Bar Maldoror that I finally found an artist dedicated to that sound. It was a great moment, sitting at the music store listening to that album; that sound I had been looking for for so long.
I wanted more.
There was one problem: Nurse With Wound and the few similar artists I was aware of at the time were import only, and thus more expensive than other CD's. I was eighteen and had little extra money. But I needed more. So, having long wanted to start a music/art project, early 1994 saw the birth of what is now AODL (then named Forgiveness). The first few months were the best. A lot of tape laid down. 70-80 percent of it was crap, but the bits that hit, well, really really hit. Herein lies some of the story of those first recordings, some of which are about to finally see a CD release.
It was a violent transition year. Exploratory. I remember the ideas as the came out and were executed upon: if I can talk into a headphone plugged into the microphone jack of my boom box and have it record, could I take two headphones, cut off the ends, and wrap them together to record other things? The first venture was radio and tape. Sleep, the demo sessions started out with It's dead anyway, just two radios going (the boom box would combine the line in signal with the radio or CD, a deluxe treat).
The rest of Sleep involved records off of the other stereo being played haphazardly, belt sometimes disabled. It involved tapes, such as earlier guitar recordings. And of course, it still involved radio upon radio.
The first rivcs (now rive) tape to be released was The Mind Sounds Off. It featured the experimental-goth-industrial pair of works done in a studio out by the airport, various pieces of Hitting which combined radio and often sample loops from the Amiga - still in double channel overlays only, and some portions of Sleep.
Ideas grew from there. From a conversation with a friend came the idea of layering. I realized that - still using those spliced-together headphone cables - I could record a double layer of radio (or radio and CD, or cheap keyboard and ... in whatever combination I could get); and then take that bit of tape and place it in the walkman and play it against another layer of radio or CD.
I went to the library and loaded up on various sound source CD's and tapes, primarily sound effect collections. I also recorded onto tape various samples off of TV and videotapes.. Then, at home, in March of 1994, what would become Pachyderm began. I would record a few minutes, switch the tapes, rewind, and start again. I would do fades by using the volume knob of my walkman to fade out the last combination of layers and to add in a bit more - such as the cheap keyboard, records, or other tapes. Pieces of Sleep even found their way into the mix. Eventually, a whole side of tape was filled. But that was only half of the process.
During the conversations about layering, the friend also talked of an idea he once did (or maybe just had?) where he did a tape with four songs on one side. Songs one and three were forwards, but songs two and four were backwards. On the back side of the tape, it was the same songs, but reversed so that the even numbered ones ran forwards, and vice versa. What I wanted to do was just one long track that was forwards on one side, and backwards on the other. Fortunately, my walkman had a trick in it to do that. By getting the 'direction' switch just right, you could play both sides of the tape. So after I recorded the front side, I filled the other side with a quiet loop off of the CD player of different sound effects, and then played both sides so that the main sounds now ran backwards. Of course, as I did this, I added another layer of radio, sound effects, etc. But this was now on another tape, and it needed to be brought back to the backside of the original. To do this would require repeating the process one more time. But I added something to it, and borrowed a Boss HM-2 distortion pedal from a friend, and ran the tape through it while adding in another layer of sound. Thus, the precedent to my favorite part of Pachyderm was formed. It's full of chants, boat communications, bits of classical music, turtablised bits of a rare Cure record that I have (a live recording at Lol's wedding, I believe), readings of Poe, and who knows what else. For the most part, it's still my favorite recording experience, and one that has never quite been duplicated. All done in mono, without a mixer.
But on mixers, I borrowed a friends DJ mixer later that summer, and continued doing what I had been doing (swapping tapes, adding in new layers) for "multitracking". The second great part of Pachyderm came about that way, with more tapes, CD's, and self recordings (my favorite being the cowbells I borrowed and shook until my wrists hurt). There's instructions on there about how to write music and sell songs (one friend really appreciated that).
The two main parts of Pachyderm filled up, differently, a side each on rivcs 002: Wrong Foot Forward and rivcs003 (title forgotten - never fully finished).
rivcs004, also never finished (but more so than three - and maybe this is where the second main part landed) gave me the chance to fix the first half by using the DJ mixer to add in some stereo sounds, and to also fade out and replace over the couple of small spots that I didn't like. So another layer, including a cool record loop from a stuck groove, was added.
Later that strange summer I started thinking of combining the two together to fill out a full side of a 90-100 minute tape. But it needed a filler - an intro. Something triumphant. One day, standing at a bus stop after work, I thought "what if I did the layer thing, but did five seconds of music, five of silence, five of music, five of silence? and then filled in the silence with an inverted pattern on another layer?" (again, this was without any kind of multitracking other than tape swapping). I decided to get a couple of classical CD's, and run one layer through the flanger of the only effect that I actually owned (an amptop delay/flanger unit), and run one layer through the delay. Then other layers found their ways in after the triumphant intro, and the other pieces of Pachyderm found their way in as well, and another layer of sound found its way in, combining it all together.
That fall, a couple of friends and I moved into a basement apartment near the university. In there, we had a small studio with an ADAT recorder, digital drums, various guitars, keyboards, and other things. I had a lot of new options here, but looking back - I don't like those sessions nearly as much (and the ones I did like have all but been lost, but I'll try to find. Some kick ass acoustic guitar, kazoo, and vocals).
Until now, Pachyderm has been one of my favorite recordings, but has been heard by only small bushel of people. BUT! There's a real dirty 10th anniversary edition of it that's going to be coming out on CD soon. This version is shorter than the real Pachyderm and has a couple of other AODL/ELW unfinished tapes running underneath it, but is still good. Part of me is thinking of releasing a limited CDR of either the original one slated to be released on rivcs009 (I could never find a good B side for it) or the fifth anniversary edition (some slight edits from the 009 version, and with a B side that probably won't get released). The extra sounds of Pachyderm y10 add an interesting layer, but in some cases (particularly towards the beginning), it drowns out some of the cool sounds made by the tape switching directions and fighting with itself.
It's ten years on...