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.