EPM Projects 2020

Here's a bunch of the stuff I made this year.

 

Kiddo

Another drawing on cardboard from the liquor store days, scanned and colored. I liked this one enough to put it on Redbubble.

 

Your Problems Are Over

 

A comic I drew when I worked at a liquor store, scanned and colored digitally.

Sewer Ghoul

 

Here's a photo of a sculpture made with Sculpey and Fimo Leather Effect clays, Alannah picked up the Fimo on a stop at a hobby store and thought it looked fun. The leather effect has a fibrous papery material in it that gives it that nice texture and at this point I was basically just enjoying the look of it. It reminds me of those christmas cookie wreaths made with corn flakes covered in a green candy shellac. I dropped this guy at one point and busted out some of his teeth and had to reglue them in, which is why it is not for sale.

Same guy with different lighting.

This drawing was originally a study for a monster that was going to be peering in a window in a setting that was inspired by the sets in "Revenge of Frankenstein," I was trying to figure out the monster's look and ended up with this lumpy guy, who reminded me of the other lumpy guy. What a fascinating story!

Teepublic Drawing link

Redbubble Sculpture link

A Hidden Doorway To The Past & Your Fears Are Real

 

These two albums are connected to me because they both incorporate elements that were recorded around the same time, initially for a local noise label ended up turning into two different labels, neither of which released either of these! This material was recorded on the Fostex MR-8 digital multitracker, the first time I used it, and also I believe the first time I used MIDI sequencing on anything that ended up being released.

Hidden Doorway has lots of MicroGranny all over it, fucked with via MIDI using a Roland MC-303 and played on its own, the first two tracks are basically just MG layered over itself with some post-production. "Allium Sativum" is a mangled sample from Bart The General 2, "Frank Silva" is a sample of the man himself at Twin Peaks Festival in 1993 reciting a poem David Lynch wrote for the 'movie' version of the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. "Little Monastery" is a reference to the location of Vomir's Harsh Noise Wall Festival, and I briefly thought about having the track be a short HNW piece but found it a little too boring. The opening melody of sorts on "Roger's Bedtime Story" is MG sequenced with MC-303, and the sample is from a Slenderman youtube series called Tulpa Effect. The rest of the track is mostly synths and tape manipulation thanks to the ever reliable Library of Congress C-1.

The final title track takes up all of the B side and is mostly a manipulated band rehearsal cassette recording which was played through the MR-8 using it as an effect by switching between the delay types, which gives you an interesting glitchy delay (AKA the Koufar vocal effect), layered with noise synths and some MC-303 programming.

Your Fears Are Real opens with "Bridge To Nowhere," which is basically the same as how I performed it live, except it has a sample from the EverymanHybrid/Tribetwelve crossover of the same name. This album thematically was supposed to be about how we process reality and our fears of death and dismemberment through fiction, although it doesn't always keep to the plot and anyway I don't think they meaning is very well conveyed. "The Infection of Grant Mazzy" refers to the main character of the movie (and radio drama) version of Pontypool and incorporates a sample from the movie played in fast forward and reverse on cassette tape. "Dzud" is named after a "Mongolian term for a severe winter in which a large number of livestock die, primarily due to starvation due to being unable to graze," an occurrence that is becoming more common thanks to climate change, and incorporates samples from "The Last Winter" a horror movie by Larry Fessenden about climate change. "Assimilation" I think was recorded for Hidden Doorway originally and has MicroGranny all over it, plus some tape loops, and the last track "The Pain Goes On And On" was originally supposed to the the final track on Hidden Doorway but didn't really fit tonally so it ended up here. The title came from a true crime show and was said by the family member of a murder victim after the murderer had been sentenced to a long prison term.

Short Hallways & Back To Basic Principles

 

These two albums kind of like a call and response set, with Short Hallways (an anagram for Harsh Toys Wall) being a reaction to HNW as a genre and Back To Basic Principles as a response to that reaction. Short Hallways is the two first "HNW the hard way" recordings I made, with "Silver Hallway" being made up of 12 hours of recordings of a slinky attached to an oscillating fan stretched out across a room and "Red Hallway" being 8 hours of circuit bent Speak & Spell. Both recordings were made on a Tascam 414 four track tape recorder and layered using mixdowns, so three channels would be mixed down to the fourth channel, over and over until it was as dense as I wanted it. Instead of rewinding to the beginning of the tape each time the tape was flipped over so that the next channel would be recorded in reverse. The Speak & Spell was modified with a 'hold' switch (as noted on the CasperElectronics Speak & Spell circuit bending page) that would freeze the sound so it would continually play a drone, it would do this for about five minutes before crashing so I had to be more vigilant than during the slinky recording, which is why there's only 8 hours instead of 12.

Back To Basic Principles is 19 short songs, each based on an improvised recording with one instrument or one instrument processed through a vocoder. These improvisations were recorded using CoolEdit96 onto an old laptop running Windows 98 and then edited into about 30 short loops for each instrument. The loops were imported into BackToBasics 9, which assigns sounds to each key on a keyboard, and then improvisations were made using the loops, which were recorded onto a Fostex MR-8 through a SoundCraft mixer using the built in delay effects. Besides being a response to the pseudo-HNW of Short Hallways this album was born from a desire to get back to the type of sound that I had when I was recording as D-503 in the early 2000s, and also an attempt at times to capture the feeling of the self titled album by Basic Principles. So it's an attempt to return to back to basic principles, as influenced by Basic Principles, using BackToBasics!

Yam Lynn/Edwin Perry Manchester Split Tape

 

Another track with a Schism Tracker riff, overlaid with a sample from a short film about human effect on the environment called "Countdown To Collision" from 1972, which leads into a swirling cloud of synthesizer noise. Synths used were my homemade Blast Fed Disaster, which is a modified Atari Punk Console designed by the Squarewave Parade, two synths designed by Ellie Voyyd of SeeleOfficial and I think a GetLofi Quad Oscillator.

BVTH & Edwin Perry Manchester split tape

 

"The Last Glacier Rains Down Upon The Midwest" is based on a field recording of a storm in Fargo over the summer that at points had almost continuous thunder, as well as police and fire truck sirens, hopefully setting an apocalyptic mood. It was supposed to be in stereo but one channel had a weird buzz, which happens sometimes on the Zoom H2 I used. The synthesizer bit is something I wrote in Schism Tracker and the drones are bowed metal and piano wire. At the very end there is a sample from Tiny Tim, from the song "The Other Side" which is about people turning into fish because of global warming. Enjoy!

The Strange Man At The Bookshop

 

This is just a study for a larger piece, I wanted to have someone in a bookshop, flanked by shelves crammed with books, backlit, but I was really not feeling the sketches I was making. They were either too abstract or too over the top, and I'm never really sure how subtle I can be because my style is not super realistic already--so does something weird in a guy's face read as something weird with that guy or just as being stylized? Anyway here's the first sketch-

And here's some of the faces-

Redbubble link

Here's the digitally colored version, the eyeballs in the window are a distorted photo of my first eye-mold sculpture.

Teepublic link for the color version

At Play

 

This drawing is based on a sculpture of what I think is a cute little cosmic horror type of guy who seems to be filled with innocent glee at the sight of its favorite playground, which is of course a graveyard. The background for this is a scrap of paper from my printmaking class, college days almost twenty years ago now. I keep getting older. Here is the simplified color version-

More comic book style but lacking the nice textures. Here is the original sketch-

I keep trying to put in goofy looking moons and it never feels quite right. One day I'll make it work.

Here's the original sculpture-

That sculpture was also in the Happy Halloween image, looming in the background.

Redbubble link for the drawing

Redbubble link for the Halloween image

Teepublic link for the drawing

Etsy link for the original sculpture

Strange Old Man

 Strange Old Man, felt pen and markers, scanned out of the inside cover of a sketchbook. Drawn after a Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack binge a couple years ago.

Redbubble link

The Bugs

This was a sketch for a watercolor that I ended up liking better than the painting itself, although I'll post that when it's finished too. I think I went a little overboard with the mark-making but this new brush pen looks really good on a paper with some tooth to it, which is kind of a shame since I decided that the images that may end up being for a calendar are all going to be on the same paper as "The Graveyard" which is a bit smoother... 

Teepublic link

Here's the watercolor for comparison, my first watercolor ever. I did it on a primed canvas board that I found in Seagrave Studios, left over from someone who had moved out. Obviously I have no idea what I'm doing with watercolor, and I think the primer made it end up more like an acrylic painting anyway.

Redbubble link

(12-20-20) Here's a digitally colored version of the first one as well-

Teepublic link for this one too

 

The Graveyard

 

The Graveyard, pen and markers. 

Teepublic link

The original sketch gives away the secret of the text, sort of, although you still have to decode it yourself if you wanna know. I was originally going to have a big cartoony moon in there but the direction of the light saved us all.

Dream 11-15-20

The Strange Mold On The Wall

The sculpture was made first but I like how the drawing turned out better, the sculpture has the charm of being something you can hold in your hand but I'm probably the only one who's going to do that- this was my first pseudo-diorama so I had no idea what I was doing and just used folded tinfoil as the support for the wall, which means that it's a bit too flexible and has cracked in several spots. 

Redbubble link for the drawing version

Redbubble for the sculpture version

The Horror Of Svengoolie

 

The Horror Of Svengoolie, pen and marker. Some fan art for Svengoolie, although my heart belongs to Madd Frank and Commander USA.

Here's another one, this one with kind of a monster Kerwyn, toothy Yakko and my own lopsided monster behind him.

The Thing On The Hill

 The Thing On The Hill, AKA the big eye guy. Pen drawing with a digital photo background. I have no idea what to draw ever, sometimes I just make lots of lines until it ends up looking like something.

Black & White Redbubble link

Color Redbubble link

Teepublic link

Happy Halloween

 

Covered///Winter - Life

 

    A couple years ago, when the Harsh Noise Wall memes were at their peak, Chris Marteny and myself played our first show as Covered///Winter. The show was four or five tape recorders with multiple layers of Boyz II Men songs recorded on to each cassette which we counted down and played simultaneously (Harsh Boyz Wall, get it?). We let them play and stood in Brandon (Black Ring Rituals, Monowolf, Support Unit, etc etc) Wald's basement in HNW stoic poses, occasionally drinking from Olde English 40s and at a predetermined time pouring a little out onto the floor. Fun was had by all, I'm sure. 

    I've had a publicly low opinion of HNW for a while, although I do listen to it every now and again. It seems kind of low effort, although I am just as tempted as anyone who makes noise to just step away and let the sound unfold itself into seeming infinity. As a protest (or something) I wanted to try to make wall noise the hard way, layer by layer or even completely by hand, for instance by turning an amplified milling wheel for hours at a time, but most of these never got beyond the idea stage. Our next performance, which I had to do solo, was another variation on harsh boys wall but using the Geto Boys, taking all the original samples used in their album "We Can't Be Stopped" and playing them all at once, layered over each other, with the Bastl Kastle mini-modular synth accompanying.

    Eventually, prompted by Mr Wald, I started to think of what a Covered///Winter album would sound like (or could at least sound like) and I conceived of a noisier version of the Delia Derbyshire/Barry Bermange "Inventions for Radio" recordings, where interviews conducted by Bermange where cut up and processed by Derbyshire. My goal was to have a bunch of recordings of people talking about life, which begin sparsely but then overlap and lose individuality as they multiply, kind of like real life, right? I put out a call for recordings just before the beginning of the 2020 pandemic and then renewed it after most everyone began quarantining, ending up with a little over thirty submissions, which was not as many as I hoped to receive, but life finds a way I guess. Chris Martney composed the main synth line and I extrapolated from that and arranged everything. The full album was release by Black Ring Rituals on August 21st, 2020.

The Thing In The Corner Of The Room

The monster and the electrical socket are made with sculpey, the diorama is made with basswood with scrapbooking paper wallpaper and a carpet sample from Menards, plus a mirror pulled out of a broken projector. One day I will have more shots of this but I haven't actually glued it all together yet, I just faked it up for this photo. I made this into a Redbubble design, so you could get this printed on a travel mug or something if you wanted to, although I can't imagine why.