Demons In My Head

My first vivid memory of NCP [No Commercial Potential, a radio program at WZBC 90.3 in Boston] is of hearing the soundtrack and dialogue of “Apocalypse Now” on my car radio while driving on Storrow Drive at night. I remember being struck by how much more spooky and atmospheric the dialogue was in isolation, without the film’s visuals. I started tuning in more regularly and became more aware of sound collage as a specific genre. I was making experimental music in the late 1980s, and playing guitar and singing in a couple of psychedelic hardcore bands (Iron Kilbasa, Oracles). I vaguely remember Oracles playing a live show at ZBC. Digitally delayed screaming and feedback solos were already routine features of my life. NCP acted like a seed, crystallizing disparate threads of my life into a more coherent whole.

In 1993, Suzan Baltozer was curating an art show called Angels and Demons at U. Mass Boston, and commissioned me to make a soundtrack for it. The result was a 40-minute sound collage called “Demons In My Head.” I had recently acquired a portable DAT recorder and a small stereo microphone, and busied myself exploring the soundscapes of my hometown.

The opening sequence results from me standing casually inside the I-90 tunnel under Massachusetts Avenue, with my microphone pointed towards the oncoming traffic. Such behavior would be almost unthinkable today. I reached out to many Boston area factories and some of them actually responded. By far the best was the Necco candy factory. They had astonishingly complex machines that looked like they’d been invented in the 19th century. The noise was deafening, but beautiful too. The machine that writes cute messages on candy made an especially intriguing sound. I also sampled the New Balance factory, and the gigantic printing presses of the Boston Globe, along with many public spaces such as the Harvard Square Red Line station and a carnival held near Kendall Square, but most of my samples came from around the house: washing machine, sink, water cooler, furnace, oil tank, and of course the toilet.

The sound collage was scripted using a technique I borrowed from David Lynch. I wrote the name of each sample along with a brief description on an index card. The cards were then arranged on the floor, so that their order could be changed easily. This was necessary because the sounds would be assembled on eight track quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape, with no possibility of changing the order afterwards. The index cards could also be arranged into multiple rows, making it easier to conceptualize the overlapping of sounds with each other, or with musical interludes.

I was so pleased with the result that I had it pressed as a CD, my very first musical release. At some point I got invited to play part of the CD on Andrew’s show. I’m sorry I don’t remember his last name, but he was infamous and later got banned from the station. I remember him referring to the Boston rush-hour traffic as a “sea of miserable faces.” Around that time I also put a copy of the CD in the mailbox of every NCP DJ. The results were mixed, but one DJ who really appreciated it was Gary Geiserman. I gather he got a lot of mileage out of that toilet flush. He later invited me onto his show, New Metaphysics. Gary’s inventive mashups of sounds from his suitcases full of cassette tapes influenced me profoundly, so much so that I subsequently wrote a software program (called Mixere) whose only purpose was to emulate his methods in the digital domain. But that’s another story for another day.

In case you weren't one of the lucky recipients of "Demons In My Head," or your copy wore out from overuse, you can download it in its original 16-bit glory from archive.org.