so, i was absolutely mortified of george w. bush considerably before it was cool.
clinton had some problems, and gore was, at the time, a cartoon character; if you want to blame it on something other than the rain (and the moon and the stars), you should blame it on low turnout - something that was largely probably spurred on by the assumption that bush couldn't possibly actually win. well, maybe it was a fitting way to end the 90s. here's your apathy, kids. served cold. ice cold. cold as the blood of a shape-shifting lizard person...and cold as the blood on it's hands.
of course, standing in the spring of 2000, i had no way of knowing what was about to be unleashed. i was mostly still just pissed at clinton for bombing medicine factories in the sudan. i mean, the level of assholery underlying it was just.....the threat of "terrorism" could hardly justify that kind of indiscriminate bombing....fucking medicine factories...
the way i interpreted it was something more along the lines of this half-evolved hominid of undisclosed type slowly riding into town on horseback (with cronies in tow, including one with a yellow hat). it felt like you could see him coming days in the distance. it was unclear what was going to happen when he got to town, but it felt ominous. there was nothing to do but just wait, maybe prepare a little and ultimately hope for the best, even while bracing for the worst.
so, i did what i do - i wrote a conceptual piece about it with the intent of raising awareness. even just amongst friends would help, if they'd talk. etc.
...or, well, i sort of did, anyways. see, i lost a hard drive around this period, and most of the song along with it. what is posted here is a 90% done version that i thought i had lost completely but stumbled upon a few months after the election, after i had moved. given the circumstances, i'm lucky that i found this at all. however, it's remained unreleased as a cohesive piece all of these years.
well, the election was over. it was no longer worthwhile to finish it. i suppose that if i was operating on a profit motive, or a desire for control, i would have finished it. instead, i just felt like i failed to warn people, and it actually put me into a pretty deep depression for a while. it was too late, i blew it, we're fucking doomed....finishing it wouldn't matter....nothing mattered anymore...
listening to it now, it could maybe use a bass part. all this was really missing, though, were the vocals - which were also lost on the hard drive. i have no recollection of them at all at this point and don't see the value in making new ones up.
i did have the first and second section put aside somewhere, on a cd-r. i was able to fill that up with samples and get it out just before the election, and it also ended up sequenced into deny everything. so, it wasn't a total loss.
as for this suite, though? i present it as i've recovered it, with no further comment than that it accurately represents the deep, foreboding fear of the future that was in the air around the period that bush was elected.
this is a song cycle.
recorded in spring, 2000. released, unmodified, in jan, 2014. release finalized on oct 3, 2017. as always, please use headphones.
this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1999, 2014, 2017).
credits
released May 10, 2000
j - guitar, effects, bass, synth, drums, drum programming, sequencing, sound design (sound raider, audiomulch, granular synthesis, noise generators), loops, digital wave editing, production
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track 1...
i can date this well, and report that this was the initial idea of the track. if you read the books (and i'd advise against reading these to your kids), there's actually a fairly graphic section at the beginning where george is captured from the jungle by the man with the yellow hat.
the man with the yellow hat really comes off as a dick.
anyways, that's what's going on here with this.
the cd-r i found has an early version of acidosis followed by this suite. over time, i began to interpret the jungle sounds as being more connected to acidosis than to this suite and this did end up there, in modified form, as 'life goes on' (jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/life-goes-on). that being said, the version attached to acidosis was reconstructed from the initial samples because i lost this collage when my hard drive crashed...
the source files (along with the files for part 2) are dated to the end of april, which seems roughly right.
what i did was get a bunch of jungle sounds together and let sound raider mess with them. i then created a file in audiomulch that produced some exotic drum effects and adds in some unusual noises.
it's an atmospheric track in either context.
credits
from the curious george suite, track released April 24, 2000
j - sound design: soundscaping with found sound (sound raider), drum programming & noise generation (audiomulch), digital wave editing, production.
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track 2...
this section was augmented with samples:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/curious-george-2
it was also released on deny everything:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/deny-everything
musically, the track is a combination of an experiment with an idea. i should note that this suite together is maybe the first original track in the style that dominates my output over the next few years, even if it's incomplete (albeit hereby decreed complete). the idea was about creating "guitar symphonies" (and while i was aware of the work of oldfield and fripp, and of sonic youth and gybe!, branca was a black hole for me at the time) in a minimalist, electronic framework that most readily draws to mind the work of trent reznor. this is the first of many expressions and evolutions of that idea. the experiment was with a program called "leaf drums", which is a fairly basic drum machine except in it's ability to manipulate samples with effects in realtime (remember that this is the spring of 2000). once i had that loop running, i started playing some of the riffs i had put aside for the guitar symphony, mostly just to play around with them. it stuck far better than i expected....and that's really the extent of the track.
the bush sample at the beginning is a constructed loop rather than a direct quote. he was talking about gore - "this guy would say anything to get elected, i'd...". that was flipped around to "i'd say anything to get elected" and looped. well, at this point i don't think anybody is going to stand up for bush' honesty or credibility. regardless, the way i looped it purposefully pans it to make it obvious that it's not a direct quote.
the lost version was built up considerably further than this; this version has three guitar parts, the lost version had closer to ten. i was too focused on getting the samples together to worry about re-recording the guitar parts. i don't remember them at this point and will not make up new ones. to be honest, this is far easier to listen to, and, while i mourn the loss of the completed version, i'm actually happy that i kept a more stripped down one.
credits
from the curious george suite, track released April 24, 2000
j - guitars, effects, drum programming, digital wave editing
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track 3....
if i could find a source for the "people who are going to commit crimes shouldn't have guns" quote, i could maybe date this better. unfortunately, i suspect google has done some scrubbing for the bush family, which is a scary thought. i think it was early may, but it may be a little later.
i can't remember if i finished most of this, put it aside for later, recorded acidosis and then lost the hard drive OR if i finished the very beginning of this, recorded acidosis, then recorded the second half of this and then lost the drive. meaning, this is either early may or it's mid-september.
there's a number of reasons to lean towards may, though. the drums, firstly. there are not live drum parts in any of the material recorded from mid-may forwards. that indicates that they weren't available to play. second, i remember the early summer sun hitting me when recording the fourth part - and specifically in the hilliard basement, rather than the lexington basement i'd move to over the fall. there's a kind of nausea attached to the mid -season sun that only occurs in april/may and sept/oct.
musically, this extends out of the previous experiment, but it's easy to hear that that is an introduction to this, that this was meant to be the song that that leads into. as the big, ridiculous arena-rock tune it is? it holds up well. note that the aim was to push a message, and the arena rock theme wasn't an accident. this was supposed to be the take-away, the radio play, the thing that got stuck in your head.
i never added a bass track and don't see a point in doing so now. however, what is actually lost is really solely a heavily vocoded vocal track. i won't re-do it. i'll explain it a little. the theme underlying the curious george analogy was one of seeing bush as a corporate puppet. wherever george went, the man in the yellow hat would follow - to oversee, influence and ultimately dominate. i wasn't taking the analogy very far, i was simply drawing it with the aim of hoping that people would educate themselves about the dangers that he posed.
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track 4...
this was meant to be instrumental, and wouldn't have been modified in any way except maybe to embiggen the end part. i didn't expect to ever release this, so i raided the track for inclusion in ftaa:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/through-the-looking-glass
credits
from the curious george suite, track released May 1, 2000
j - guitars, effects, drums, synthesizers, sequencers, granular synthesis, noise generators, digital wave editing
