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Since this record is one giant overkill, in every aspect, I thought it might be a good idea to start off with a funky tune to prevent scaring away every listener at once. At least it reminds me a little of a real song with a verse, bridge and a chorus you can hum along to (although you'd have to be an eunuch to sing it accurately in pitch). The "apparatus" used on this track is a small Chinese dildo called "Lady's Finger" (also featured on the Freak Kitchen instrumental "Six Dildo Bob and the Bluegrass Samba from Hell" from our third record). While increasing and lowering the vibrations of the dildo over the pick-ups on the guitar you get the delicate sound heard in the beginning and middle of the song. This invention has proved to be quite popular in live situations where the audience is invited to imiate various dildo "licks" in some kind of bizarre sing-along contest (instead of the usual Neanderthal growls).
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I found this old, horrible sounding cymbal in a friend's basement, sat down and jerked around with the intro rhythm and built this rabid piece of music around it. Speaking of rabid, I am a sucker for genius Canadian director David Cronenberg's innovative and disturbing films and the title is inspired by his movie eXistenZ.
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Like several other tracks on this album "The Grey Hat..." was intended for vocals. No lyrics were actually written, but since I had the melody line pretty much worked out, I tried to make the guitar "sing" as much as possible. Don't know whether I succeeded or not, but what the hell...
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After I recorded "Lisa's Passion..." I realized I had, unintentionally, recycled the melody from an early Freak Kitchen song called "Lisa". Since Lisa got killed in the first song I figured she might have risen from the grave, her genuine passion for heavy metal being too strong to keep her dead. Picture a dirty fist, complete with leather glove and shiny metal studs forming a gleaming pentagram, cracking through the ground as the head-banging zombie Lisa digs her way out to seek vengeance. The atomic explosion in the end is, of course, her gruesome revenge on the guy who killed her in the first place. What a terrific, ingenious plot! Maybe it could make a swell John Carpenter movie?
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I saw the 1987 movie (abut twelve years after everybody else and immediately fell in love with the song (about fifty years after everybody else). I simply couldn't pick up the guitar without playing this enervating, super-happy riff. There was only one way to get the damn melody out of my system - record it. Talk about cheezy catharsis.
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The shower really does exist and it's truly evil. It's probably poaching people this very minute in the little Swedish town of Rattvik. I barely survived the experience sometime in the summer of 1994. Apparently there was something seriously wrong with the heat lever, not to mention the nozzle which only produced one enormously vicious, hot and intense beam. Trying to wash my slimy hair, my body and intellect got introduced to various forms of indescribable pain while performing some kind of improvised infernal dance...Beware! Originally written for vocals the lyrics went something like: "Step behind the curtain and turn the water on. Get yourself castrated and burn off your complexion. The evil shower's here to fry your ugly balls away. The evil shower's here to take your life this very day." Sheer poetry...
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What kind of music is this anyway? This extremely corny tune started out as an arpeggio exercise for my (very) patient students. When I added the fake jazz guitar solo later, it grew into something totally different. If I had a couple of million bucks I would happily release this little rocker on a single, spend the money on a braindead promotional campaign in order to get these stupid fifty-nine seconds on the radio just to f*** around and have good time. (If I could recreate the spastic "dance steps" from my acquaintance with the evil shower, together with the music, maybe this could start a new trend). Considering what is being played by the bribed, conservative a**holes on the radio stations today I think it would improve the planet's mental health. Turn on the strobe! Let's dance!
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Once a year, on Midsummer's Eve, the inhabitants of Sweden suffer from an implacable urge to party their brains out. The country goes berserk. Out to lunch. Plain and simple. In some parts, this "creative outburst" is subsumed in our folk music tradition (usually in the afternoon, before things get outta hand), with fiddlers and musicians "taking it away" in the local shrubbery. I've had this pseudo folk music theme lying around since I was sixteen years old. It finally made it. The melody's major/minor shift is so typical it hurts, I felt I had to write it in 4/4 + 9/8 to make it interesting. After that, it mutates into some kind of synthetic blues, lydian techno and then it starts all over again. It must be midsummer night in hell...
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Every now and then I bump into techno stuff that I find really inspiring: attitude, groovy, vital and musical. However, most of the time I get bored. As with "Numb", I totally lost myself half-way in "sequencer heaven" and painfully realized it had turned into two minutes and fifty-two seconds of monotone sh**. I slowly rebuilt it, piece by piece, dressing it up in a very different suit, hoping the combination of the frenetic 5/4 drum-machine beat together with the acoustic instruments and distorted guitars might break some new ground in my composition.
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Imagine an upstart yuppie alien stuck behind the wheel (or whatever kind of steering device those guys and gals use) of his intergalactic Porsche in fat Friday afternoon traffic, madly shaking his glowing E.T. middle finger in the air. The first title of this potential hit (if it was up to me, that is) was, "A Momentary Extra-Terrestrial Brouhaha on the Corner of Zfwwapffz-Street and Pzzffftttt-Street on the Reletively Unknown Planet Apple Horn in the Hejsan Svejsan Galaxy". Commercial or what? Eat your heart out George Lucas!
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Woke up one morning with the most bizarre dream: Salmon Rushdie was this Michael Jackson wannabe who paid his rent by dancing and lip-syncing "Thriller" in Persian discotheques. Michael Jackson was in turn a controversial writer whose latest book, a critical look at Scientology, was simply entitled "The Satanic Moonwalk". Wonder what I had been drinking the night before...
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The cheap rock 'n roll "verse" in "Cornholed" is based around the overtone scale, which I enjoy playing. The mode isn't used in Western popular music a heck of a lot so I felt obliged to do something about it. The tritone together with the minor seventh scale tone gives it it's bite. Still, if it sounds a little harsh at times, you're probably right. A friend of mine told me "Cornholed" reminded him of video game music (maybe the folks at Nintendo would beg to differ, I don't know).
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Buying the KISS "Destroyer" album in 1976 I knew from the second I put it on I had to "rock 'n roll all nite and party every day", sort of. I constructed my first wooden guitar and day by day I mutated into my alter ego Ace Cooper (a mix between Ace Frehley and Alice Cooper). In 1980 I went to my first KISS concert. Watching KISS live was simply too much for my tiny intellect. I got so excited I broke my (very lime green) seat! I'm still a fan and, like a complete fool, almost fell to tears when I saw the original line up together again in 1996 (sitting on the same very lime green seat). Many years ago I was introduced to the late gypsy jazz guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt. Like thousands of guitar players before me, I was blown away by his unique style of playing. Messing around with my grandfather's old acoustic, I figured "Detroit Rock City" would make a cool, if somewhat silly, gypsy jazz tune. (I know it might be a minor blasphemy to use nylon strings in this particular kind of music but I'm a phony Swede who never should have got into this experimentation in the first place).
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"What's a place like diz doin' arrround a girl like you? Now turn up that hand-clap 'n turn up that bass-drum too" (Techno Moron from the album Sexually Primative by Mr Libido).
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Listening to this record from the beginning to the end nearly drove me insane. I thought we all needed a f***ing break. Some time to breathe...
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Another semi-funky track with the intended vocal melody "sung" by the guitar. Contains probably the only interesting bass playing worth checking out on this record.
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The Mud Man is a modern comic book kind of anti-hero who carries the burden of mankind's ravaging of Mother Earth. Since Homo sapiens, to a large extent, is full of sh**, this behaviour manifests itself in actual mud and the Mud Man grows rapidly every day. Sooner or later we will get what we deserve and the planet will be covered in clay. The only thing you'll hear as mind and body mire and the Mun Man walks the earth is a dorian 7/16 riff and a tiny shaker.
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From the beginning, the excerpt from Francois Voltaire's famous satire Candide, so eloquently read here by my brother-in-law, Kevin Fickling, was intended for what later came to be "Apparatus". It didn't work out very well though, so I wrote this low budget piece of music for eight guitars, a remote control, a hose-clip and the infamous dildo. On "Dr Pangloss..." I got really inspired by the excellent composer Howard Shore's orchestrations for guitar on the soundtrack to the David Cronenberg movie "Crash".
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Backward vultures. Cheap mono FM samples. When the saints go marching in. Revenge of the Bambi loving terrorist. Amen.
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Only a rough demo, badly recorded and played pretty crappy, "Squirrel" had a funny vibe to it I knew I wouldn't be able to re-create. The percussion is a can of sliced cucumbers and if you listen closely to the drums, you can hear it's the same stiff salsa pattern repeated over and over again. While I recorded the genius solo (hrm) a guy on the worst-sounding moped I've ever heard drove by and I couldn't keep from laughing (not to say coughing).
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