Bad Hair Day (Live Drums)

Bad Hair Day (Live Drums)

(Morgan-Wall)

The third Dr. Dave studio version of "Bad Hair Day", and another lyric rewrite which this time centers on...aging! Well, write what you know, I guess. I have since turned into the narrator and have comfortably settled into the role of suburban curmudgeon. Now get offa my lawn, you kids!

This version features actual drums and real instruments and everything. I don't have my Osmium CD handy, so I can't remember the name of the guy John got to play drums, but thank you, wherever you are...

Al: Vox
John: Guitars
Dave: Bass, Guitars
Some Guy John Found: Drums

Time

Time

(Morgan)

Painting through words, describing through music, The Impressionist strikes again!

Al: Time for another one

Turn Off (Instrumental)

(Morgan-Wall)

Groove to the post-post-rock sounds of Osmium. Make up your own screed! Now we're even.

Al: Keys, Drums
John: Guitars
Dave: Bass, Guitars

Stay

Stay

(Morgan)

Dedicated to anyone who puts up with me, but especially my beautiful wife.

Al: Stickin' around

Hey, Einstein! (Instrumental)

(Morgan-Wall)

Hmmm, we appear to be a few tunes behind. OK, I'll throw a few extra bits in here for a few days to catch us up. Sing along with this "Karaoke-ready" version of "Hey, Einstein!" (or "I Can't Get What I Want For Christmas", if you want to look at it that way) and fascinate the neighbors with your knowledge of obscure pop songs.

Al: Acoustic Guitars, Drums
John: Electric Guitars
Dave: Bass

Test Post

Test Post

1000 Miles Away (Instrumental Edit)

1000 Miles Away (Instrumental Edit)

(Morgan-Wall)

A few years back I was given the chance to submit instrumental versions of some of our tunes for consideration on a relatively major DVD release. This window was open for about 5 minutes and did not come to pass, but I like some of the remixes that occurred regardless. This tune was the best contender in it's edited form. Hum along while you wait for that elevator.

Al: Keys, drums
John: Guitars
Dave: Bass, keys

Optimum Reciever for M-ary Orthogonal Signals

Optimum Reciever for M-ary Orthogonal Signals

(Morgan-Proakis)

Boy, I sure wish Schoolhouse Rock was still around. I might be able to submit this piece, the lyrics of which are taken from one of my grad school signal processing textbooks: "Digital Communications", by John G. Proakis. Take a bow, John.

Geez, if my professors sung the lectures like this I might actually pay attention in class.

Al: Get optimum!

Repete S'il Vous Plait

Repete S'il Vous Plait

(Morgan)

Mid-period Pop Machine, really a chance to try out an earlier version of my digital home studio. For some odd reason I've had a fascination with pidgin/fake French for many years now, and often will seize on any excuse to spew forth faux-Gallic goop in the context of a song. So really, the lyrics are meaningless drivel (please no snide comments about the rest of my catalog) though individual phrases may mean something. The title refers to virtually the only thing I remember from high school French: that the phrases for "Could you please repeat that?" and "Could you please fart again?" are one phoneme apart.

Al: Zut alors!

Headed Back to the Clubs/Clubbed in the Back of the Head

Headed Back to the Clubs/Clubbed in the Back of the Head

(Morgan)

For a guy who doesn't really dance except to occasionally amuse himself and various onlookers, I am having fun learning to create this dance music stuff. I'm sure it would sound quirky to a true aficionado of any of the dance-related subgenres, but on the plus side I've learned how to create it fairly quickly (perfect for this site) and it allows me a fair amount of creative freedom to explore. And it keeps the kids happy in the car, so there you go.

Al: Headin' on up

Bad Hair Day (Evangelical Lyrics)

Bad Hair Day (Evangelical Lyrics)

(Morgan-Wall)

OK, here's another Osmium fave from days gone by. At one point we wanted to retool BHD since we thought the lyrics needed punching up...well, I took the "bad hair day" concept seriously and applied it to televangelists. Snarky...in a good way. Eric, you knew this was comin' eventually. Enjoy.

Al: Vox
John: Guitars
Dave: More guitars and the rest of the stuff

Eat The Whales

Eat The Whales

(Morgan)

Let's get back on track with some new stuff. It's fun and it's free!

Al gets political? Nah, I just think I'm sick of empty sloganeering, but then I'm sick of most things these days. Of course, if I'm sick of this I should probably pick another place to live rather than...um, EARTH.

Anyway, enjoy the tune; I think I may be getting a handle on the pop music creation thing a bit, though I do seem to be drifting into mid-period Steve Winwood territory here ( I leave it to the estimable Mr. Sookman to come up with a more accurate/obscure comparison).

Al: I'm full, thanks...

The Jig Is Up

The Jig Is Up

(Morgan)

In honor of St. Paddy's Day I've come up with something that sounds vaguely like Rick Wakeman performing a faux-Irish jig on Ecstasy while accompanied by a bevy of dentists' drills. You're welcome.

Al: Because I can

365 Jukebox

Howdy, campers. With the recent "Oop!" opus fulfilling some song-posting requirements for a few days, I thought I'd revisit some 365 high spots for your remembering pleasure, all of which were written & recorded specifically for this site. Gosh, do you remember when you first heard these classics? It's as if it were sometime in the last few months...

Numerosophy (Morgan)

With the Police riding high on the comeback trail, let's revisit this sonic/lyrical tribute/steal/swipe at them from last September. I'm fairly sure I stumbled onto one of their alternate guitar tunings here, so if I have to leave the country suddenly you know who's after me...

Can't Let You Go (SQ Quad mix) (Morgan)

An acoustic guitar, ethereal voices and surprisingly reflective subject matter illustrate why the on-the-fly ethos can work. Check it out.

Centrifugue (Morgan)
Technofugue (Morgan)

The original is the Nirvana rip and the followup is the strip-down-and-rebuild-electronica-style. (Remember electronica? No, she wasn't a member of the Avengers...) Of course, Nirvana never did this kind of thing themselves...leave it to third-stringers Bush to release an album of their own remixes. I like to think I make better music than gavin Rossdale (who doesn't?), yet Gwen Stefani still will not return my calls.

Meet the Oop!

Psurgery of Pst. Jude (Morgan-Spring)
Hello (Sookman)
Rock Hard (Morgan-Sookman-Spring)
Experiment #17 (Morgan)
Gimme Back The Cadillac (Sookman-Spring)
Synthetic Woman (Morgan-Sookman-Spring)
Do Ya! (Lynne)
Tony Donn and the Fracture (Morgan-Sookman)
Blun (Morgan-Sookman)
Hours of the Night (Morgan)
Flash in the Panties (Morgan-Sookman)

Well, I'm sure I whetted your appetite for the legendary "Oop!" album back here, so what the hey, here's the whole darned ever-lovin' thing for ya. Heck, I owe you some tracks, so this'll actually put me ahead. Note that some of these tracks are all Sook; I've added them to preserve album continuity, but won't have them count on the 365 tally.

Listening back on this, it's actually funnier than I remember. Performance art lives! And now, some short comments on the songs themselves:

Psurgery of Pst. Jude:
Same song as last wek's post, but the original mix complete with "Strawberry Fields Forever" fade in/outs and spoken bit at the end.

Hello:
Sook's original demo, included as a bonus track on the original album. A Pop Machine signature.

Rock Hard: We attempt to get all Rolling Stoney in the privacy of our cheap Hollywood apartment. Not nearly as excitingly seamy as you might think.

Experiment #17: Hey, Bill came up with the song titles (and lyrics for the first half), so I had to come up with something suitably arty here. I believe you'll notice that later in the album Sook and I actually start yelling "Art! Art! Art!" to underscore the point. Subtle we're not.

Gimme Back the Cadillac: This is all Sook, and all good. Showing his unabashed love of glam, the man strips the beat down and delivers several minutes of Bolanian goodness. This one worked out very well in concert.

Synthetic Woman: An early space rock/ELO opus. Reach exceeds grasp here, but surprisingly dense for something recorded on 4-track cassette (and appropriately enough, not the first or last time I've been labelled "surprisingly dense").

Do Ya: I love Sook's deadpan Brit piss-take on this Move/ELO classic, complete with sound effects. Don't get me wrong, we both love the song (we've covered it several times in the past), but I forgot that this was a lotta fun.

Tony Donn and the Fracture: Written and recorded in record time, I actually revisited this one later, incorporating a faux-Santana Latin percussion break. (Sook's take on this: "Uh....OK.") I believe it was this track which later resulted in an almost knock-down drag out argument between Sook and I about whether we used macaroni or rice as percussion. (Our friend Dan's take upon witnessing this: "Uh...OK.")

Blun: Featuring buddy and fellow Syracuse alum Tommy G. via phone. Hey, Tommy G!

Hours of the Night: Not part of the original album, the lyrics for this came to me in a dream (I know that happens to artists on occasion...I'm willing to take inspiration from wherever it flows). I can't remember how many times I bounced the tracks on this one but it winds up being pretty thick with sound...might even be a dropout or two in there. Still, I remember getting the most kudos for this direction and have been following up with atmospheric stuff ever since...which anyone who has been following this site can attest to. So I guess I've been trying out the same stuff for almost 20 years now...

Flash in the Panties: Sped up voices and goofy lyrics? Sign me up! Now you understand the Pop Machine experience.


Al & Sook: Vocals, keyboards & percussion
Special appearance by Tommy G. on "Blun"

Do The Math

Do The Math

(Morgan)

OK, I know I'm two behind so will double up this week. Here's a new one for now!

This is "do the math" as in "figure it out" as opposed to "do 365's newest dance craze called 'The Math'". Though I suppose if you were in the mood to gyrate, hey, why not? It's got a good beat and you can calculate to it...

Al: Adding it up

Feed The Body, Feed The Brain

Feed the Body, Feed the Brain

(Wall-Morgan)

Well, here's one big sprawling what-is-is-about?, Al's-got-a-cold, Faux-lice (rhymes with "Police") mess. Having gotten some good tracks out of previous early Osmium sessions at Dr. Dave's, we got cocky and went into the studio without this next track being "fully formed". It didn't quite "gel". Yet we still like it, "especially" (OK, I'll cut it out) for Dave's cool bass line and all the goofy samples. It's fun! It's free! It's fabulous! (Did I mention it's free?)


Al: Vox, Key, Samples
John: Guitars, Samples
Sook: Percussion, Samples
Dave: Bass, Drums, Samples

Chemicals

Chemicals

(Morgan)

Ha ha ha hahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Al: heh heh heh

Psurgery of Pst. Jude

Psurgery of Pst. Jude

(Spring-Morgan)

Let me tell you about the "Oop!" album.

The scene: 1990. Sook and I have just moved out to LA to find fame and fortune and are living in a a Hollywood hovel, one microphone, a cheap keyboard and a 4-track cassette recorder (the mighty Tascam PortaTwo) our sole recording equipment. Our college buddy Bill jokingly sent us parodic lyrics, song titles and drawings of an imaginary album he thought represented our styles at the time.
Being young, broke and with extra time on our hands, we decided to up the ante and actually RECORD the durned thing. Forget that we had no good equipment, little recording experience and that our musical skills were nascent, to put it charitably. As "idea men" and self-proclaimed rock stars we were gonna make it happen. And happen it did.
The "album" was titled the "Oop!" album (as in: "Oop! Gilligan! Don't drop those coconuts!") and the first song that we plowed into was "The Psurgery of Pst. Jude", which was Bill's take on my take on 60's rock excess: a "concept" piece based on my love of overproduced, byzantine, baroque psychedelia. Given the limitations noted above, it turned out to be a pastiche of ELO & the Moody Blues as formulated by Iggy and the Stooges and sung by Jonathan Richman.
A dozen or so more demos followed representing the rest of the album. First Sook and I would take turns shaping them over the space of several days, but with a self-imposed deadline looming as many as three or four of them were written AND recorded over the space of an evening.
This version of the song is a 2002 remix I dashed off after transferring the multitrack cassette to digital. Unfortunately it is missing a few overdubs recorded directly onto the cassette master (such as Sook's closing monologue), but appears here in generally superior fidelity (such as it is). If i can dig out the other version for transfer I'll post it later.
Anyway, here's an aural snapshot of some crazy kids making lo-fi freaky music on their own terms; beats the pants off Nickleback in my book. More to come...

Al: Psaints preserve us!

Another Day in Paradise

Another Day In Paradise

(Morgan)

Are you ready to...SOFT ROCK? Well, lightly-synchopated mid-tempo rock, at least. Here's a little ditty about the rat race and how ya gotta keep goin'...turn frustration into art, I say. Hopefully there's something everyone can identify with in here. If not, well...I want your life.

Al: In paradise

(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone

(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone

(Boyce-Hart)

Here's a little goodie from the early Pop Machine days: yet another cover of this perennial garage fave. To get a fullness of sound on my 4-track cassette recorder, a little voice kept running through my head yelling "Saturate the tape! Saturate the tape!" Set synths to stun, and 3 minutes later you're awash in sound. Enveloping.

Al: Still steppin'

The Doctor Will See You Now

The Doctor Will See You Now

(Morgan)

So where does it hurt? Show me any discoloration that you may have. Trouble sleeping? Nausea? Take two of these and lean back. Rinse. Spit. Explode.

This won't hurt a bit.

Al: under an aesthetic

Pictures of Power (Studio Version)

Pictures of Power (Studio version)

(Morgan-Wall)

...and here's the final version from Dr. Dave's studio. Since the original lyrics were "one take" placeholders, we cleaned 'em up for the final version and finished up the music. Sounds nifty, especially the DTS surround sound remix, which I will make available one of these days...

Al: Vox, guitars, drums
Sook: Backing vox
John: Guitars
Steve: Bass
Dave: Guitars, fancy mixin'

Pictures of Power (Demo Version)

Pictures of Power (Demo version)

(Morgan-Wall)

One of the earlier demos I did after the leap to home digital and one of the first I did the music for on guitar, this song was influenced by a number of the guitar-art-noise-post-grunge bands around from the mid-90's though the new millenium (think Tool/Failure/Replicants/Catherine Wheel/Pat Boone, etc...) I dug the idea of cold art-metal imbued with old school synths, so this and "Turn Off" is where we started to incorporate this on occasion.

For the final version (to be posted tomorrow), John came in and worked his magic on it...the one stanza we kept was the opening couplet "You've booby-trapped your skin again/Now the needles point out instead of in" Make of that what you will; best interpretation gets a free subscription to the Oswego Shopping News.

No Money For Fun

No Money For Fun

(Morgan)

Hmmm...I just noticed the piano is reminiscent of "One" by Three Dog Night, and the lyrics are a bit like "Can't Buy Me Love" on Thorazine. But like the best medecines this one goes down quickly and hopefully tastes good. No money for fun? No soup for you!

Strange Equations

(Morgan)

We go to the cassettes again to prove what a math geek I really am. "Tesseracts collide"? There's a lyric you won't hear in a Ramones song...