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