The Panama Canal Project

(Released August, 1997)

Ok — the Panama Canal Project. This session was actually designed with a much larger scope in mind and I think it may have failed!  At least in terms of variety, the record doesn’t break any new ground.  It’s kind of a slow-moving, methodical grafting of terrible sound effects on to each other. The recording session was set up like some kind of low-rent, suburban Andy Warhol party, with lights from Spencer Gifts and a handful of masks given out.  The results?  Not memorable, exactly, but every listen yields some new, awful thing that someone was doing in some other corner of the room that probably went unnoticed at the time.

Wrapping up the first big wave WMAS recordings (you could define this as the era between The Noise Tape and, well this one obviously), this one takes everything the group had going for it blows it up wide-screen, Lawrence of Arabia proportions.  Relatively speaking.

We’d made strides by parodying song forms, pretending to cover other music, passing microphones and enforcing loose rules on improv, but the guiding principle behind this one ended up being, apparently, to just throw as much equipment on the ground as possible and just turn everything on. There were computer screens turned on to hokey 1997-era animations, strobe lights, samples patched together in GoldWave playing out of plastic speakers near the microphone, busted amps, plastic mics, multi-effects pedals, and one of these things turned on now and then:

Really.  It made the entire house shake.

It was the last get-together for the year — for the foreseeable future, really. People were moving out — Boston, Pittsburgh, Columbus, San Francisco — in a few weeks. Who knew what to expect? Maybe that anticipation is sort of to blame for the unfocused work here.  I don’t know.  This was slowly becoming the preferred means of musical expression throughout those months (as opposed to waning interest in teenage garage band deals different members had going on), so maybe people were getting too comfortable with it to remember what made this kind of thing so weird in the first place.

So anyway, what we end up with is a few long pieces dominated by swirling, uncontrolled, drones splattered over blown-out tape (the whole thing was recorded on the  group’s go-to recording device at that time, which was a beige Texas Instruments machine that came with one of their early home computers).

There are moments of inspiration and chaos and in general, the whole recording is a pretty maddening mix of crude multi-tracking noise, bottomed-out robot groans and demonic, irritating feedback.  It’s sort of a greatest hits of all the garbage we’d stumbled onto up to that point.  There’s the razor-thin squeals from the plastic mic, the UFO beeps and whirls from leaning a flanged guitar against the speaker, and the surface noises of players literally kicking the recorder across the room on accident.

It’s almost disturbing how by-the-numbers some of the stuff here seems to me.  What was wrong with us?

There’s the utterly painful slow sort of ballad moment in “The Bressler Reservoir” that involves a pretty terrible guitar strumming and a piercing, insistent whine from start to finish.  Breadstick and Meadornack sort of duet through bubbly, strobed speakers like grieving humpback whales.  A worthy send-off to this crew that luckily enticed us all to return to the “studio” later on and continue this whole mess.

You never do hear that vibrating exercise machine, but there is a video tape of this session in existence that includes bonus footage.

Track Listing:

1. The Locomotive Works

2. The Lazarus Tower

3. The Armstrong Ball

4. The Bressler Reservoir

5. The Serpent Mound

Star Ball Contribution

( Released 1998 )

Star Ball Contribution is a dead of summer, windows open in the middle of the night, empty two-liters of Big Red sort of an album. Everybody barefoot, no one paying much attention to this or that. This is the result of throwing two art school kids in a room with an auto mechanic and a host at Applebee’s. Sort of by-the-books Meadornack 4-track era deal going on here. Topical tunes, pranks played on pizza delivery guys, a circuit bent (sort of?) toy calculator called Major Morgan. Maybe they tried a bit too hard to bring the funny with this one, but don’t let it get in the way of classic depravity like “Normal.” Take a dip, then maybe try something different. Sorry!

“Normal:”

Track listing:
1. Star Ball Introduction
2. Knockin’ On Your Butthole’s Door
3. Normal
4. Olestra
5. North Street
6. Cult of the Hexagon
7. Contribution from the Red Stick
8. The Pizza Man

Bounced Checks

( Released 2000 )

Bounced Checks revolves around a vaguely busted practice amplifier Walt had been carrying around with him since his move from Pittsburgh to Boston in 2000. This was during a sort of junk-rat phase in the post-art school career of Walt — everywhere he went, he found another old TV set sitting on the curb and plans were in slow-motion to build a giant bass-playing robot using a 150 pound iron jungle gym base for feet and a box full of half-assembled servos. We eventually tossed the iron thing under a neighbor’s back porch, but the amp actually proved useful.

Pulling the circuit board out and leaving the thing plugged in while poking around at the diodes and capacitors with bare fingers, Walt discovered that all kinds of whirls and pops and squeals could be coaxed out of the machine, sometimes even with a half-assured predictability. Walt and Johnny quickly pulled out the 4-track, a drum machine and some mics and got to work on some singularly weird combos. Over a couple days, they cobbled together Bounced Checks, which ends up being this weird sampler of genres all spoiled by the rotten tones of that amp. A pseudo surf polka gets smothered, some TR-808 sort of tones jab back and forth with grating bleeps and scrapes, and much more.

I love this record because, on top of the exhibition feel for the amp, there’s this dank atmosphere throughout all the bumpy switch-overs. There’s sort of this dreadful bunch of angsty horror film clips that inform that, but there’s also a waterlogged feel to the thing. A heavy sort of echo used here and there? Slightly fuzzy tape? I don’t know. This is also one of a handful of records recorded in the cave basement Walt and Johnny inhabited for one winter (before half the building burned up) — the oven would shoot fireballs on command, mice wandered around the apartment like they were browsing at Wal-Mart, and cars splashed water through windows from the alley above the kitchen. When I think of that moldy little abode, I think of this record.

“Syroos Rampage:”

“Brick On Head:”

“Early Warning:”

“Methadone Clinic 27B:”

Track Listing:

1. Syroos Rampage
2. Jesse from Sydney
3. Kid Stew
4. Final Notice
5. Unwelcome
6. The Colon
7. Wet and Slippy
8. Brick to the Head
9. Play It Safe
10. The Buck Stops Here
11. 6 People Wanted
12. Early Warning
13. Picture of My Butt
14. A Bad Idea to Begin With
15. My Dog’s On Fire
16. Methadone Clinic 27-B
17. (Bonus Track)

Sweetness

( Released 1999)

Sweetness is possibly the nastiest series of sound-stabs in the whole WMAS catalog. The whole thing was recorded in one day by Walt and Donnie Maleriamax with just a four-track, a mangled Yamaha keyboard, a handful of pedals and microphones. The songs are quick and aggressive and reflexive and imply a lot of retching action. The pair of plastic monitor speakers in play with this recording play a big role in deliberate scrapes with feedback that cover the thing like rug burn.

The recording of this album, in both slamming the tape during tracking and during mix-down, is one of the most painfully bleached out frying pan jobs I can think of ever hearing.

Themes? It’s an improv piece that left both participants nearly deaf for several hours after the recording, so anything you’re going to get out of it is pretty abstract. There’s a transporting (?) moment in a sort of apocalyptic rendering of “Peace Like a River,” a lot of feedback and crunched keyboard tone sparring, hobbled electronic beats climbing through shadows like spiders on busted webs, gnarled and sickening scatalogical screams and much more. It’s a bleak world, and the recording stands to this day as a kind of watershed moment in WMAS levels of musical irresponsibility.

Walt and Donnie actually packaged this album and sold a handful to a local record shop with artwork featuring the founding fathers of the United States drawing up maps.

“The Squealer:”

“Peace Like a River:”

“JWB:”

“Gift Certificate:”

Track Listing:

1. I Think I’m Going Out Tonight
2. Beginner Beat
3. Bass In Your Face
4. Such Sweet Thunder
5. Rocky Top Tennessee
6. Sweet
7. Not Sweet
8. Testing
9. War
10. Gift Certificate
11. JWB
12. Razors
13. Battleship
14. The Squealer
15. Peace Like a River
16. It Was a Special Night
17. Death
18. Pater Noster

The Fire Tape

( Released 1998 )

So the story here is that one day in July of 1998, a tornado touched down near the house where a WMAS was about to take place and knocked all the power out. What you have here, instead, is Meadornack, Schmartzky, and Maleriamax using a tape recorder to document themselves setting fire to random household objects. This is about what you’d expect it to sound like. A real treat.

“Dorito:”

Track listing:

1. Jordan Catalano
2. The TI
3. Baked Apple Pie
4. Dorito
5. Pen
6. Design
7. Chapstick
8. Pure
9. Garbage
10. Can
11. Holes
12. Orange
13. Hot Dorito
14. Nature’s Postlude

Labyrinth

( Released Summer 1998 )

Labyrinth is the first complete soundtrack project ever finished by the All-Stars, though the concept had been kicked around for while.  A sort of aborted sountrack exists for the Van Damme flick, Bloodsport, which more or less uses the same set-up as this one, is still lurking on a cassette in someone’s closet and will most likely end up on the B-Side Disasters thingy if that ever materializes.

That set-up:  a television (the big family living room kind with the wooden furniture-ish console and the fake drawers with the brass handles), a Tascam MkII 4-track, some microphones and some of the early multi-effects guitar effects pedals.  For Labyrinth, we added a keyboard.  Hit “play” on the VCR (yeah, a VCR), hit “record” on the tape, play whatever comes to mind.  That’s about it.

You can hear this one develop as it goes.  Here’s the personnel — Meadornack, Breadstick, Maleriamax and Leshmaltfe, which is the volatile group that churned out the head-scratchingly terse and limp My Bad.  The opening scene — that black space title credits sequence with the fantastical mirrors flying around and the white owl flying around, is given this sort of terrifying death-swoop wind blast treatments with some scrappy sci-fi 50s chords bleated out on delay.  It’s good.

For the next twenty minutes or so, it’s like no one knows what the hell to do — Breadstick is flipping through some keyboard themes from who knows where, people are grabbing the microphone, mumbling  and spitting and yakking and doing all kinds of sub-vocalizing.  Sometimes it seems the rules are to “talk” for characters talking, sometimes not.  These twenty minutes are the most challenging, sometimes in good ways and many times in bad ways.  At some point, Leshmaltfe splits.

Movements become a little more sparse, a little moodier, and finally it starts to come together.  “These Hands” begins the real party — discordant toy organ folding over itself, thudding lipping sounds, a whipping percussive rhythm on some sickening repeat (the source:  a mic thrown into a wooden cabinet, which was then slammed over and over from all sides, the sample then reversed).  This piece culminates in this bouldering avalance of great, fuzzy-speakered texture and they leave it alone, one vocal part popping in now and then in stabs of feedback so dry it’s like real-life personal memories bursting into flame inside your own head.

The thing is punchy — parts jump out like crazy now and then that feel like stepping on a broken bottle while walking peacefully down the street (barefoot?).

By the halfway point, there is real chemistry going on.   Slippy Breadstick is playing keyboards throughout and basically leads the way through, whether it’s just slamming down a sickly couple of underlying tones or hopping through some jaunty bits, like he’s the hunchbacked little piano guy in the saloon.  Does that exist?  Juicy mouth percussion duets with a lazy flange mic feedback, dogs talk, warbly piano backs up buzzing, almost gone speaker cones, delay pedals tend to malfunction.  It moves around surpisingly quickly and easily.  In the end, you have one of the most disciplined, varied, and explorative things the group has recorded.  The mics were covered in slobber and everyone had finished many cans of Pepsi.  It’s like the best of whatever you feel a thing has to be to sound intelligent while at the same time being completely retarded enough to comfortably play for friends as a joke.

In life, there actually exists a VHS copy of this film with the WMAS piece completely overdubbed as the audio tracks.  That’s right!

“Those Hands:”

“Down In the Junkyard with Augra:”

Track listing:

1. Title Credits
2. Pretending in the Rain
3. Curse of the Goblin King
4. The Man Himself
5. I Am Peeing in the Water
6. Getting Lost At First
7. Not a Lot of Progress from Here
8. Murkiness Prevails
9. Deep In the Labyrinth
10. The King’s Machine
11. Royal Puzzles
12. Those Hands
13. Beating On the Chest
14. Bubbling Water
15. Rough Crossing
16. That Guy Smells
17. A Classy Trip
18. The Poisoned Masquarade
19. Trashtime
20. Finally Getting Somewhere
21. Monster Pogo Big Guy
22. Opening the Door
23. What the Rocks?
24. Final Fight
25. This One’s for Toby
26. Back In My Bedroom
27. Closing Credits

May Day

(Released June 2001)

Recorded in a night during Kalamitysax’s month-long stint in a bunker-sized brick apartment with razor wire edging on roofs on the Charles River, May Day was a quick and thoughtless return to form for WMAS after a fire claimed their basement headquarters earlier that spring. There weren’t any broad themes aimed at during this session, but we do get a quality dump of noises that seem like they were waiting for ages to appear. Drenched, sickly guitars wallow in glitchy reverb. Howls stumble through tricky bussing switches like a Nintendo game stuck in a motion freeze.

There aren’t a lot of songs and not a lot of ground covered — impatience and a weird housing situation looming in the background (Meadornack was reportedly sleeping in the condemned and electricity-less apartment that had suffered ruinous fire, smoke and water damage two months earlier) lead to this one being a pretty visceral, reactive album. Thus, songs played directly on top of radio broadcasts with mics grabbed from in front of the stereo speakers at random times to ape whatever was on at the time (a South America ghost hunter, at one point). Change is slammed into a drying machine at one point, which is turned on and tumbles for five minutes in the album’s closing track. Scatalogical song titles added to the WMAS catalog with this release: “Hot Pee Pee, Wet Poo Poo” and “The Sizzlin’ Drips.”

“The Sizzlin’ Drips:”

Track Listing:

1. The Sizzlin’ Drips
2. He’s Got a Case
3. Hot Pee-Pee
4. Sneaky Little Cripple
5. Dollar Twenty-Five
6. Art On the Main Line

Monstro

(Released April, 1997)

A one-night recording session with Walt, Donnie Maleriamax, Burt Schmartzky and Bobbie Leshmaltfe in early 1997 resulted in this powerful work, the first and possibly most improvisational and experimentally free-form of all Meadornack pieces. There were simply, absolutely no expectations. The live room was strewn with shoddy amps and guitars that lied face-down most of the night. A plastic computer mic squeezed a weak signal through a patchwork of effects and lobbed out of speaker cabinets like someone trying to punch through a rubber wall. In short, this was a muddy feedback-fest for the most part.

But it also marked the beginning, I think, of a vague unspoken agreement to treat what was being done as songs, or at focused chapters in some greater book, closeup features on a face that might actually end up being somebody. There’s a moment where the group gets together and tries to record a creaky, creepy cover of the Nightmare On Elm Street lullaby where things build up and fall flat on their face, Leshmaltfe not bothering with the vocals halfway through the drumbeat played on the carpet petering out and latching onto a few delayed bleats — and it almost feels like the point where boundaries were drawn. This is an album about conversation more than music, like when the group of determined Risk players just puts the cards down and starts chatting about physics homework or old cartoons, quoting lines from <i>MST3K<i>, anything, seeing as they didn’t really know the rules to Risk to begin with.

The mic would literally just get passed around during songs here for different members’ mangled versions of local car dealer commercials and mock high school taunts to real acquaintances with never-used nicknames. At one point, there’s a cover of “In Heaven” from <i>Eraserhead</i> (the Pixies version hadn’t made its way to Lima yet bootleggers yet…) that’s really just what Maleriamax could remember from the one time he had seen it while the rest of the group put quarters in guitar strings and played with the strobe light in the corner.

In some respects, you could argue that the basic fact that these pieces had beginnings and ends were all that made them songs–there is certainly nothing written, repeated or even skillfully played out. But the idea took hold in the All-Stars minds this very night, that there were sounds to be wrangled and statements to be made and identities to be carved out. Copies of this tape soon began popping out of Deck B in Meadornack’s home stereo.

“Everything Falls Apart:”

Track Listing:

1. Dark Alley After Ten
2. Nor’Easter and Heaven
3. And Everything Falls Apart
4. It’s a Personal Matter
5. 419
6. Freddy
7. Guitar Maniac
8. At Least Try Monstro
9. Mike Pruitt’s Finance Center

Walt’s New Collection of Short Songs

Released 2002

This lightning-round style horde of little numbers could be one of the most efficient songwriting sessions in the history of songwriting.  The statistics say a lot – 41 songs in just under 15 minutes?  One night of recording?  Yes, yes, it’s all true.

Alright, it is the All-Stars and no, these aren’t 100% pop nuggets.  The initial line on the album was a sort of brash minimalism, something about boiling down songs to their essential, memorable cores.  But I’d have to say it doesn’t end up being that simple.  Sometimes, like in the case of “Everybody’s Got a Problem,” you could make that case and get away with it.  But the real modus operandi here was a strict adherence to a facsist deadline and productivity quota.  Were there any theories thrown around about how to construct the nuts of a song and cut away the fat?  Not at all.  Had anyone in the room ever really even consciously tried to write an honest pop song?  No.

Here’s the lineup: Walt, Slippy, Kalamitysax and Schmartzky.  The studio (i.e. bedroom) was filled with a drumset, a guitar, keyboards, theremins, floppy tom toms, etc..,  The only regulations set on the recordings were loose time limits (10-20 seconds) and a must-rotate after every song.  The results are mixed, surprising, and turn new corners with every track.  What became obvious, probably after the fact, is that the inability to get comfortable on any instrument or melody keeps every little bit of sound on the album completely spontaneous.  Example: the squiggly rhythm on rims and squawked guitar on “Blouq.”  You can almost see the pattern drawn out like blueprints in real time as the thing quickly unfolds into a quick collapse, each instrument leading the other down the slippery slope to the tidy finish line.

There are machine gun call and response tactics (“People Move Too Fast,”) mangled echoes of standard rock melodies like the honking apish trumpet line of “Rock’n'Roll Pt. II” in “We Burned All the Copies” and plodding micro-dirges (“Window Shopping”).

Some of the brightest spots, though, are the most inventive, the most surreptitious, are the ones that just happened.  Keys locked, psyches mingled, I don’t know.  Check the weirdly sensible narrative in “I’ve Been Late All Week and I’m Late Again.”  The whole thing moves through three sections almost seamlessly, unrehearsedly, Peter and the Wolf-ishly.  And then it’s over.  It’s not clear why this works, but there you have it.  Check the audio samples for the real deal – for once, you’ll have a clear view of things with just a tiny audio sample, which is on a scale of 1:1.

Vocals, generally overdubbed on the single track remaining on every song (recorded on a pristine Maxell tape in our cherished Tascam 424), are a cherry on top here.  Desperately grabbed from books, random magazine pages, trivia cards and REAL LIFE.

“Feel the Bark and Leaves, It Cannot Flower:”

“I Buy Eggs and Juice for Breakfast:”

“Everybody’s Got a Problem:”

TRACK LISTING:

1. The Grass and the Water
2. Black Hood On My Head
3. Blouq
4. Botany Lesson Number Nuthin’
5. The Ultimate In Authenticity and Musical Usefulness
6. We Burned All the Copies
7. Seasons Greetings
8. Pilgrim Freshener
9. People Move Too Fast
10. Church Is Weird to Me
11. Through Grit
12. I’ve Been Late All Week
13. Man’s Gotta Hunt, Bird’s Gotta Fly
14. Puking All Over the Ferry
15. Everybody’s Got a Problem
16. Fell the Bark and Leaves It Cannot Flower
17. Window Shopping
18. Iguana Burger Snack Bar
19. Ivy Day In the Bedroom
20. I Buy Eggs and Juice for Breakfast
21. Lucky Day
22. Two Men Enter Only One Man Leaves
23. Migraine Nightlife
24. I’m Never Sick Doctor
25. Olive Baboon Salmonella
26. Peanut Brittle
27. Willy Wonka II Is Coming
28. Charmless Benefactor
29. Pill Confession
30. Public Restrooms
31. Come and Swab Me
32. Pumpkin Driver
33. Red is the Wiser
34. Oh My God, He’s Got a Knife
35. Rod Sterling Getaway
36. Sounds Like a Swell Life
38. I Can Make a Better Toaster
39. Thought I Heard Her Talking
40. Public Property
41. Stuck in a Cab-Over

Yankee Doodle Dice Game

(Released 2001)

This shorter instrumental offering (six songs) is the last in Meadornack’s works centered explicitly around compositional techniques. Centered around guitar and bass lines written entirely according to dice rolls, which set a road map for the songs along the perimeters of phrase length, pitch and note length, the songs make what could easily be considered the most rigorous and rigid music of the group’s entire catalog. These songs were conceived one summer by Walt and Johnnie Kalamitysax during one of their stints as housemates in the attic of an old mansion in Boston that had no locking doors and several missing windows (a raccoon was found eating bread off of their counter at one point during the writing of this album). Atonal notes pluck and ring against each other in offkilter patterns and uncaring harmonic pairings in patterns that patiently await the lister’s familiarity. A bed of percussion and fried keyboard parts were added after the fact by Peck Leathers after the group had moved to the space on Green Street in Jamaica Plain. The key, though, is that he was given no clue or even cursory explanations of how the songs were structured before the record button was pressed – his internal meter thus clashing with the orderly patterns already in place in a blind, exciting adventure.

“2:”

TRACK LISTING:
1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
5. 5
6. Yankee Doodle Dandy