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, so of the 2 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.
I would occasionally think about what name these recordings should be 'released' under. 'Noel Lairson' seemed a little awkward to me, and besides I wanted a 'band' name. Random factorE was one of the ideas that I kicked around, and seemed to fit my methods well. But the name that was most in favor during the period of these recordings was 'Soapbox'. It fit with the attitude of 'I'm going to say whatever I'm going to say, however I'm goind to say it', and the eclecticism of the recordings I was making. So when I initially compiled this collection of recordings, 'Soapbox Sampler' seemed a fine title. Here are the tracks, and a little about each:
1: Life At The Beach [14.3Mb]
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 my 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.
2: Three Fates [8.6Mb]
All of the backing patterns on this were programmed into my brand-new Roland drum machine over the course of a couple months. All my friends probably have memories of me sitting around at Diedrich's with headphones on, programming this thing. The song was written in a tuning that I no longer remember, but may have written down somewhere (hopefully!). 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. Funny how my marginal lyrical sense is more connected to outrage than sense of humor... 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! Like most of my music, I prefer to hear this one without vocals, and there is an alternate version on another collection called Guitar Violence that will be posted here eventually.
3: Six Degrees [10.4Mb]
Believe it or not, this was a randomized song. Using dice I wrote out 10 chords, and minus some thematic alterations, this song is those 10 chords in the order in which they appeared. I think the drum machine is the Korg. The vocal mike was purchased for this song - my friend Tom Springston 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 pulled off the matresses from my bed and put them against the door on my outside wall, and covered the amp and mike with a lot of bedding. I turned the amp to about 5 and recorded the solo while standing outide in the garage.
4: A Few Words from Brother Michael [11.5Mb]
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 was hanging out with my friend John and we went to his house after breakfast and his friend Michael had left him all these rambling 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 Michael, 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.
5: Random #2 [5.9Mb]
Just what it says. The backing is from a dice game and I programmed the results into the Roland, then I recorded a bunch of atonal guitar solos to it. This one came out best.
6: Hate My Job [10.2Mb]
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 Less Paul clone, with built-in effects and a line drawing of the Buddha on the back. Not a very precise instrument, but fun.
7: Satchesque [11.3Mb]
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.
8: I Don't Surf! [7Mb]
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, though.
9: Random #1 [6.6Mb]
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.