(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
