all tracks ©1995-1997 Noel Lairson
Starting in 1995, I lived in a room built on to the side of a residential house - it was originally contructed as a jeweler's workshop. I had the cleanest, strongest power in the house, and was seperated from my roommates by the garage and the full length of the living room. The house was on a corner, and of the 2 adjoining neighbors we had, one was an elderly man who was very nearly deaf, and the other's bedroom was located at the far opposite end of his property. In other words, I could work at any hour of the night or day. And boy did I.
During this time I gathered essential tools of my craft - a 4-track recorder, a drum machine or 2, a condensor mike, and a new 7-string guitar. Eventually I added a DAT machine to do stereo bounces back to the 4-track. I got pretty way out during that period. I recorded lots of improvisations, experimented with restringing my guitars in odd and interesting ways, created random backing tracks through dice, as well as worked on longer, more involved pieces.
"Soapbox" was one of the names I pondered using during this time, and it seemed to fit the "whatever, whenever, and because I feel like it" nature of the material. So, about the Soapbox Sampler:
Life At The Beach
This song dates back to 1992. I tried to make it an ISaur song at one point, but the grindcore drum pattern was hard for us to maintain and still hear each other. Once I had the recording setup, I proceeded to make a full recording of what I wanted. The drum machine was an old Korg that I picked up from a pawn shop for $40. The guitars were tuned in an odd 4-string tuning of A,E,A,E, the bottom A being below the E in standard tuning. The lyrics attempted to express my complete and utter disgust towards Pamela Anderson.
Three Fates
This song was written in a tuning that I no longer remember, and the backing patterns were programmed into a Roland drum machine over the course of a couple months of coffee shop afternoons. The lyrics were expressing disgust at my parents' generation for trying to change the world, then dropping the ball when things got tough and turning towards greed and short-term comforts. The title alludes to a dreamstate hallucination I had of 3 little girls sitting on a rock looking at me, and I woke up just as I was asking them some very important question that they were going to answer. Trippy! This track also appears on Guitar Violence, sans vocals
Six Degrees
Believe it or not, this was a randomized song. Using dice I wrote out 10 chords, and minus some structural coniserations this song is those 10 chords in the order in which they appeared. I purchased a new vocal mic for this song - my friend Tom had just bought a condensor mike and I was amazed by the difference, so I got one of my own. Lyrically, it's actually kinda funny, but still I cringe. The guitar during the bridge is a bit of Xenochrotony - what Frank Zappa called the act of importing a track from one piece of music to another unrelated piece. The guitar solo was recorded LOUD. I had matresses against my door, and covered the amp and mike with a lot of bedding. I had to stand in the garage so the amp wouldn't overpower my headphones!
A Few Words from Brother Michael
This is my favorite guitar tone EVER. The backing track is an improvisation that I recorded at 5:30 in the morning. Despite the sound, the amp was actually whisper-quiet, and if you listen closely you can actually hear the acoustic sound of the guitar. I remember I kept taking the headphones off because I could not believe that huge sound was all from microphone gain. A couple of months later, I went to my friend John's house, and a friend of his had left him all these rambling phone messages. I thought they were hysterical and being a fan of found sound, I got John to loan me the tape long enough to duplicate it. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about his, but just as a basis for understanding I'll tell you that he believes David Icke. Oh, and he wasn't terribly pleased when John played him a copy of this song. No accounting for taste.
Random #2
Just what it says. The backing is from a dice game and I programmed the results into the Roland, then I recorded an atonal guitar solos over it.
Hate My Job
Wheee! Fretless guitar insanity! The backing was inspired by a dice game, but heavily modified with the addition of the bass, if only to give it some groove for a listener to hold onto. The fretless guitar is one of my favorite noisemakers; an Electra-brand Les Paul clone, with built-in effects and a line drawing of the Buddha on the back. Not a very precise instrument, but fun.
Satchesque
I remember almost nothing about recording this. I think the backing derives from a dice game. My tone and the notes I played reminded me of Joe Satriani, thus the title. I am first to admit that this thing goes on way too long.
I Don't Surf!
OK. This was fun. This was part of the same batch of dice-game pieces as Satchesque and Six Degrees. I was having lots of fun making these backgrounds and seeing what they transformed into once my creative side threw the dice away and said "I know what to do with THIS!" This one became a surf tune -- not a kind of music I've ever played or really listened to much. I think I found my inner Dick Dale and let him fly quite nicely here. I don't know that I could ever do it again...
Random #1
Same deal as Random #2. I think most of this solo was recorded by taking the whammy bar (detached) and rubbing the 'V' shape of it against the strings. Velllly noisy.