PAPER AIRPLANE CRASH
Occasionally I get the OCD. This weekend, I went through the number of thousands of audio tracks stored on hard drives scattered throughout my house like so many mines.
(We've all been at that place where we feel trapped, cornered, gasping for air. Sad to say, but in this new millenium, I attempted to claw myself out by clearing up electronic storage space. It seems to work. Or maybe I'm just clearing dirt until the Nancy Wilson sex tape finally goes public. You'll never know.)
During my audio cleansing, I discovered hundreds of demo tracks from all the various projects I've been involved in. The cream of the crop was the sessions myself and the Misanthrope spent riding out a summer in a Varick Street bathroomless basement, committing random ideas to tape.
'Paper Airplane Crash' grew out of one of those jams that starts near the end of a 12-pack, and one session later, it grew into this. I listen to it and I try to remember where we got all the sounds. I clearly remember mining the basement studio for particulars that could be used for percussion. Fortunately, the point person for this particular space had quarantined a third of it for personal belongings; from which I was able to gather a pair of kickass cooking knives, which when rubbed together, added a lot to the attached track.
I also remember this, distinctly, though, and those of you who don't believe in ghosts can move along. A lot of the super distorted crazy noises you hear at the end are the product of running a microphone through three distortion pedals and a rotary fan. As we wrapped up the track, I realized that I had screwed up some setting, and there should have been no signal from the microphone at all.
Eventually, Microdot played this song live with lyrics and all, but to me this will always be the definitive version.
(We've all been at that place where we feel trapped, cornered, gasping for air. Sad to say, but in this new millenium, I attempted to claw myself out by clearing up electronic storage space. It seems to work. Or maybe I'm just clearing dirt until the Nancy Wilson sex tape finally goes public. You'll never know.)
During my audio cleansing, I discovered hundreds of demo tracks from all the various projects I've been involved in. The cream of the crop was the sessions myself and the Misanthrope spent riding out a summer in a Varick Street bathroomless basement, committing random ideas to tape.
'Paper Airplane Crash' grew out of one of those jams that starts near the end of a 12-pack, and one session later, it grew into this. I listen to it and I try to remember where we got all the sounds. I clearly remember mining the basement studio for particulars that could be used for percussion. Fortunately, the point person for this particular space had quarantined a third of it for personal belongings; from which I was able to gather a pair of kickass cooking knives, which when rubbed together, added a lot to the attached track.
I also remember this, distinctly, though, and those of you who don't believe in ghosts can move along. A lot of the super distorted crazy noises you hear at the end are the product of running a microphone through three distortion pedals and a rotary fan. As we wrapped up the track, I realized that I had screwed up some setting, and there should have been no signal from the microphone at all.
Eventually, Microdot played this song live with lyrics and all, but to me this will always be the definitive version.
posted by stinkrock at 9:49 PM
5 Comments:
It still breaks my heart that we didn't record better versions of some of those tracks. It might have been the beer, but we were in the ZONE that summer as far as song writing. I was just thinking of the one with the 12-string the other day (Am - F7 C - B) and thought, "Damn, that was a good tune."
I imagine that ghost looks strangely like Michael Keaton. That's one catchy tune, there, friends. Good work. And of course the definitive version is the instrumental. You can't bring those knives on stage.
That's fantastic, but I think the knife in your left hand was slightly out of tune by a half tone...
i might have a decent version of that Am - F7 - C - B song. I'll take a look for it.
I believe in ghosts.
With three pedals and a fan, there was probably enough noise to make the mic unnecessary. Hook up enough gear and it'll play itself. Worked for Pink Floyd.
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