tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:/rss/departments/mixtapeSPLICETODAY.com2016-10-06T17:29:01Ztag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/203912016-10-06T08:00:00-04:002016-10-06T13:29:01-04:00Remembering The Ass<p>The Ass was the craziest band to come out of upstate New York in the 90s, yet until now you've probably never heard of them, or any of the twisted visual art and writing created by The Ass' frontman Ryan Klemek. The Ass' work occupies a hallowed place in the realm of crucial DIY weirdness, a conceptual landscape that continues to expand today through Klemek's amazing and hilarious contributions to the <a href="http://skullislandtimes.com/">Skull Island Times</a> website, the bonkers erotica he writes under the alias R.K. Galaga, the wacked out t-shirts he designed for Donkeyshines, and the strange yet realistic paintings he creates featuring godzilla, old school pro-wrestlers, and sexually uninhibited dinosaurs.</p>
<p>Klemek's early recordings with The Ass were a startling combination of jazz, classical music, performance art, dark shock value humor, and joyous nonsense. With his high school chums Paul Hagin and Nate (who asked that his last name be witheld here), Klemek unleashed a complex absurdist attack. While they were never indie rock scenesters, The Ass' crazed hubris was similar to that of obtuse 90s artists like Ween, Thinking Fellars Union Local 282, and The Tinklers. Their work was an imaginative sonic manifesto for nerdy sarcastic weirdos bored by the conformity of rock music, but madly in love with the genre's brash theatrics.</p>
<p>The Ass formed in 1994 in Latham, NY, a suburb just outside of Albany which Klemek has described as "typically conservative" and "not very diverse." The trio never played a gig, but they did manage to self-release two extremely lo-fi records. The first, a self-titled tape which came out in the mid 90s, featured suitably bizarre cover art by Klemek that served as the perfect visual comment on the group's music (a photo of the original painting used for the cover art appears above, sans text). Their second record came out shortly after that. The sophmore Ass album was titled <em>The Best and the Worst of the Ass</em>. This was a CD-R version of their first record augmented by previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded around the same time. The Ass never sold their records; instead the band members jointly made around 10-20 copies of each release and gave them to their friends, including some students at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, which Klemek attended in the 90s.</p>
<p>Some of The Ass' material could befuddle, offend, and annoy even the more adventurous fans of outsider music. They never tried to emulate any kind of established anti-mainstream or underground aesthetic. Klemek and the boys dumped all their influences into a conceptual blender and cranked that thing up to ten thousand resulting in a chaotic brew of sounds and atmospheres that remains wildly original even when compared to any of today's many self-consciously genre-bending musicians.</p>
<p>Some highlights of their recordings:</p>
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<p>"Flute Murderer" is an instrumental track that almost completely betrays its ominous name with a sublime, melodic grandeur that's both mystical and romantic, despite the lonesome background noise of someone sloppily tapping on a snare drum and hi-hat cymbal in what might be the silliest ADD imitation of jazz drumming ever recorded.</p>
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<p>"We Dont Wipe" is as close to playing it straight as the group ever got. A bonus track from <em>The Best and the Worst...</em>, this tune is a scatological romp set to the melody of Twisted Sister's hard rock classic "We're Not Gonna Take It." In the bizarro world of The Ass, of course, the famous hook's lyrics have been changed to, "We don't wipe our assholes!/No! We dont wipe out assholes!" as the crew marries the best elements of Klemek's main pop influence Weird Al Yankovic with a cacophonous percussion section and devil-may-care approach to music theory that brings to mind pre-WW2 jug band music or teen outsider rock obscurities like The Movement's "Stinking Peanut Butter Love" or "Scream Mother Scream" by Sur Royal Da Count. </p>
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<p>"Not Affraid" is one of a handful of their rap songs and, needless to say, it sounds absolutely nothing like any other rap music that's come before or since. The hilarious nasal teen MC's Klemek and Hagin balance cold nihlism with one liners in a steady stream of absurdly violent brags that are about as dangerous as a water gun wielding toddler. The instrumentation (a stand-up bass/drums/xylophone/vocals combo) further adds to the aggro harmlessness. The xylophone lines in particular give this track a surprising dash of psychedelic whimsy. </p>
<p><iframe frameborder="no" height="150" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/286223489&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe></p>
<p>"Jimmy Died in a Bowling Alley" is in many ways a signal of things to come. Two maniacal vocalists, a lone bass guitar, and some brief moody trumpet lines combine in complex, angular melodies and arrangements with silly narrative lyrics that reflect Klemek's interest in the contrast of dark fantasy and the mundane. This juxtaposition would return time and time again as a major component of the artist's more recent non-musical work, but here it emerges in a teenage miracle of sonic power that's awkward and graceful all at once.</p>
Mike Apichellatag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/64672009-11-18T07:02:44-05:002013-09-20T14:22:12-04:00Splice Premiere: Height With Friends - Swiss Chard, Vol. 1<p>This is the first in a series of free Height With Friends EPs. These are songs that couldn't be on Baltimore Highlands; or on our forthcoming album, due to time constraints. Here's a little breakdown of each track...</p>
<p><strong>"Rock Roll Jam Mix":</strong> This is a cover of the last part of the Schoolly D song, "Put Your Filas On." I changed the words to the verse, but it's the same idea. It was done with maximum respect.</p>
<p><strong>"Swiss Chard":</strong> Last November, Mickey Free, Travis Allen, Emily Slaughter and myself spent ten days writing and recording in a cabin in Deep Creek Lake, MD. This is one of the first songs we made.</p>
<p><strong>"Ferryboat":</strong> This song was created when PT Burnem and I tried to write and record an EP in one day. It didn’t work that way, but we came out with a lot of good stuff, including this joint.</p>
<p><strong>"Pinecone Boys":</strong> This was originally written as a sequel to the PT Burnem/Height song “Pinecone Hill,” from his forthcoming album, <em>Paper Cranes</em> (which comes out on December 5th). It worked out better as a little interlude, rather than a big production.</p>
<p><strong>"Right Road":</strong> This riff was lifted (with permission) from an unreleased Frenemies song. This was also from our cabin session. It's one of my favorite songs from that time. It was cut from our forthcoming full-length at the last minute, because it just didn't fit.</p>
<p>—Height (Nov. 16, 2009)</p>
<p><i>Many thanks to <a href="https://myspace.com/introductionshello">Jasen Reeder</a> for his mastering of the EP and to Height for making this Splice Premiere possible.</i></p>
tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/62122009-10-21T08:29:06-04:002014-11-10T13:44:33-05:00A Splice Original Compilation: Baltimore Does Baltimore, Part 1<p>In many ways I owe this compilation to Jenn Wasner. It was her idea after all. Back in the spring, only a few weeks after Splice released <a href="/mixtape/a-splice-original-compilation-the-old-lonesome-sound" target="_blank">The Old Lonesome Sound</a>, I was already kicki <script></script> ng around ideas for a follow-up. I knew I wanted the second compilation to be exclusively Baltimore focused, but I hadn't quite worked out an idea that I liked. After a show at the Metro Gallery, I asked Wasner what she thought of doing a covers compilation of <span style="font-style: italic;">If Children</span>, the first Wye Oak album. "Why make it just about us?" she said. "Just get a bunch of Baltimore bands to cover a bunch of other Baltimore bands." Looking back I don't know how I hadn't already thought of it. But I knew right then and there that was it, that was the next project.</p>
<p>From the dancy oddball weirdness of Dan Deacon and the Wham City crowd, to the gorgeous synth-pop of Beach House and the fiery wailing of Arbouretum and Pontiak, to folksters Small Sur and Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, to the DJs tearing up the Baltimore Club scene and the noisy post-punk bands blaring from the Copycat and the H&H, Baltimore has the best and most diverse music scene in the country. And it's a close-knit community -- you'd know that from any show, the liner notes of any album. Go to Whartscape, watch Dan Higgs share the same stage as Celebration, watch Height and Double Dagger and Future Islands fill a MICA parking lot. We're a city made for musicians, for record-store junkies, for the kid who can list off every Smiths b-side. And I hope this compilation adds something to the mix.</p>
<p>Many thanks to Matthew Leffler-Schulman at <a href="http://mobtownstudios.com/" target="_blank">Mobtown Studios</a> for his fine mastering help and to <a href="http://www.2hawks2fishes.com/" target="_blank">Kathy Fahey</a> for her beautiful cover art.</p>
<p class="text">--Zach Kaufmann (Oct. 21, 2009)</p>
<p> </p>
tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/37712009-02-18T12:48:08-05:002016-10-05T16:31:05-04:00A Splice Original Compilation: The Old Lonesome Sound<p class="text"><script></script><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial;">In <em>Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus</em>, Jim White's documentary on Southern folk music, storytelling, and religion, banjoist Lee Sexton <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEuNUzRyQvM" target="_blank">describes</a> the traditional music of his native Kentucky hills as "the old lonesome sound."</span></p>
<p class="text"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial;">"These old hills are kind of sad looking," Sexton says. "You get to feeling down and out, looking at these old hills, sitting on your front porch, and you get to playing these old tunes and it helps you. It builds your morale up a little bit."</span></p>
<p class="text"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial;">The old tunes that Sexton was talking about are the ones that have been with us for hundreds of years: hymns and gospels, murder ballads, protest songs, African-American spirituals, old bluegrass and country standards. Whether you hear them on albums by Dylan or Springsteen, or in films like <em>O Brother, Where Art Thou?</em> or <em>Cold Mountain</em>, they are songs that get reworked again and again, that cut to the heart and soul of the American story.</span></p>
<p class="text"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial;">In his memoirs, Alan Lomax recalls the days on the Lower East Side of New York when Lead Belly and a young Woody Guthrie would stay up all night trading off on such songs, coming home after a show and playing for hours: "They had their whole, fresh, powerful, pure folk repertory intact: living, vibrant, and with the impact of a country mule ready to kick a hole into the future."</span></p>
<p class="text"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial;">In keeping with this tradition, we at Splice Today present to you our first annual mix of original recordings of traditional folk music.</span></p>
<p class="text"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial;">Many thanks to all the bands involved, as well as to Nick Sjostrom at <a href="http://www.cleancuts.com/index01.html" target="_blank">Clean Cuts Music & Audio</a> for his production assistance and <a href="http://thingsthatareyellow.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Samantha Strand</a> for her beautiful cover art.</span></p>
<p class="text"><span style="border-collapse: collapse;">--Zach Kaufmann (Feb. 18, 2009)</span></p>