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| 1-kyiv to odessa (lyrics) | originally
appeared on little missles. recorded in john's parents'
bedroom on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-vocals, spacey guitars john-bass, bassy guitar, moog |
Rock day, right? I think so. Rock day was this day we recorded 5 songs in one day. I don't know, though, if this was the take of "Kyiv..." we recorded that day or not. Anyway, I always thought this was a beautiful track. I think the fact that we were doing this in 1996 when we were literally 17 years old is pretty cool. And I hold this up and scoff when people try to compare what I do to OK Computer or something. I'm just like "Sorry. It was out there already." Which reminds me -- thank you, God, for the internet, for. Without it, this song probably would've been speed metal, and I would still be a virgin. | I've always enjoyed this song and have thought about rehashing it as something else. One of many European flavored songs. This one isn't about anything special - mostly just about a trip from Kyiv to Odessa. Yeah. I love the random moog thing. | |||||||
| 2-photos from odessa (lyrics) | originally
appeared on the gospel according to mary. recorded
in john's garage on cassette 4-track in 1997. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-drums, moog |
The drums sound good here - I especially like the way the hot rods interact with the guitar picking, so you can't really tell which is which unless you're listening for it. I also recall using my big 18" crash as a ride cymbal on this one, so that the sound would be nice and light. (My ride was very heavy and pingy - see: "Czech Flag") I also remember distinctly copping some Jimmy Chamberlin moves on this. We were getting pretty into the moog-as-a-bass sound. Brad was lukewarm on this song but I always loved the hell out of it. I remember him making a face and kind of doing a swing dance to it once, mocking it. I stifled my protests. | I always liked how the drums sounded on this song for some reason. They just sound kind of strange to me. This was never meant to be such an upbeat song, it just kind of turned into this swinging kind of sound. I was always really anal about not calling it "The Ukraine" in any songs because this Ukrainian girl I'd talked to said they hated that. She always would say "You don't call it The Russia, do you?" I wanted to work that line into a song, but never did. | |||||||
| 3-hungarian dream come true (lyrics) | originally
appeared on the cactus gum CD compilation, whiskey, you're the
devil. recorded in john's garage and his parents' bedroom on reel-to-reel 8-track in 1996. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-drums, moog, tambourine |
This was the turning point for us. We had used the moog in a couple songs before this ("Same Time Zone," and "Oh, Brazil") but something about the sound we got here opened us up. It didn't come out until 1997, but this was the 5th song we ever recorded, and we went from the goofiness of "Same Time Zone" to really making something that was interesting to listen to and to make. This song marked our official divorce from our pop/rock past of our early teens. We were just stunned when we heard the playback -- we had never heard anything like it, and we couldn't believe we had made it ourselves. The entire next year of recording was completely inspired by the momentum that began here. | This is one of my favorite songs I've ever written. It has such historical value as far as my songwriting style goes. It was the first time "not giving a fuck" really came together into something. John actually wrote the outro, and it really made the song. I love the swishy-ness of the "ride" cymbal. I think that was John's old ride with a huge crack in it. The song itself is a silly love song. It's about two people who meet in Romania and fall in love. Yaw. | |||||||
| 4-cinematic | originally
appeared on the gospel according to mary. recorded
in john's parents' bedroom on reel-to-reel 8-track in 1997. brad-distorted guitar, bass john-drums, spacey guitar |
I remember playing the drums with headphones on, because the sound in the mixer was so incredible, all mic'ed up. I recall sending the cymbals through the compressor on the way in, because I wanted them to just bleed into your ears for the whole song. What it also did was really balance out the toms and room sound in my parents bedroom and made for one of the best recordings we ever got out of the 8-track. (One of my better drum performances too.) The sound cut-out midway through (and the staticy sounds) are the result of mastering to SVHS - which always had mixed results. Oh, the days before CD-R. | I remember when we were putting together initial ideas for the "Gospel" album, we decided "Cinematic" needed a better treatment. The lofi 4-track version had come out so well, we knew that it begged for 8-track treatment. I like this version a lot, though part of me is still partial to the 4-track version. I just love the lofi drums. | |||||||
| 5-rings of saturn (lyrics) | originally
appeared on little missles. recorded in brad's bedroom
on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-drums john-acoustic guitar, bass, vocals |
Another song that still lives on, in the Terrene songs "With Shining" and "Stereo!" I don't really get the lyrics anymore, but I seem to recall them being about this emo kid who I really, really hated. Oh, this one's on Brad's drums, but he only hit one drum - the floor tom - which was going through a delay pedal to get a drum circle sound going. | The idea for drums-through-delay actually started, I believe, with a piece I did for my then-ambient project Ukraine (now The North Sea). I had just done a bunch of weird drumming through my delay pedal and it ended up being this thing called "Aborigine Death March." We wanted a "pulse" kind of sound for the percussion on this, so the delay pedal-idea seemed logical. It came out pretty well. The toms from that drum set weren't as awful as the rest of it since I'd replaced the heads on them. | |||||||
| 6-aristocratic nature (lyrics) | originally
appeared on the cactus gum 2xcassette compilation, north america
vs. europe. recorded in john's parents' bedroom on reel-to-reel 8-track
in 1997. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-drums, bass, spacey guitar |
The funny thing about this track for me is how different it is from the first version of this song, and how that difference came to be. In the original, Brad had his guitar going through pitch-shifting that created harmonies in a minor key. Well, when we geared up to do this one, he kind of had the dial on the wrong setting, and it came out in a major key. The result is a much happier trip-hop song than the first. The spaceguitar and bassline I put were all just built on the implied chord changes of the pitchshifted acoustic. All written right there on the spot. I kind of flub the end on the drums because there wasn't much of a marker for me to go on, the song being two chords and all. I remember the song I was tapping for the drum part was "Ready or Not" by the Fugees, but I couldn't really play it. Sorry! You know, this reminds me. When you're putting out all your work on cassettes, you really try to save your best songs for the compilation appearances, because that's the closest thing you get to being on the radio or something. We thought this one was good, then. | This ended up being one of my favorite songs John and I ever collaborated on. It was so beyond anything we'd be doing up to this point, in my opinion. I'd started really getting into the idea of mixing breakbeats and spacerock, and it was fully realized on this remake. The original was this dirty, noisy, hip-hoppish track, but this was like the version after being on "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." The lyrics are about Attila the Hun, of all things. I was huge into the Mountain Goats back then (still am), and a lot of my weird, Eurohistory-tinged lyrics were Darnielle-inspired. It may be silly, but I think it kind of gave Ocasek that extra-weirdness factor. I mean, how many bands have written trip-hop songs about the settling of Hungary?! Exactly! | |||||||
| 7-n-betwixt (lyrics) | originally
appeared on little missles. recorded in john's garage
on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-drums, tambourine, bass, 12-string guitar |
I have memories of listening to this song in my parents van when dad was driving me home from my classes at the community college I went to (before going on to OU). I think it was the day after this was recorded, actually, and I was so proud of how the bass and the acoustic interacted - it was the first time I let the bassline wander and create a second melody that wasn't necessarily implying the root note all the time. We've always been especially proud of this song, even though it's so simple. Something about its laziness and warmth is heavily nostalgic and beautiful for me. | This remains one of my favorite songs I've written. It has this wonderful circular structure to it. There's no chorus or verses, it just kind of goes from one part to the next to the next and then back to the first. I wrote it in one afternoon; it was one of those tracks that just hits you in the head and you don't have to spend much time on it. I always thought it was a really laid-back song. There's this laziness to it that I like. I don't remember what the lyrics were about, but I still love the "I'll chase the ball down a busy street anytime" line. One of my favorites. | |||||||
| 8-transcend on the starlets (lyrics) | originally
appeared on little missles. recorded in brad's bedroom
on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-moog |
Definitely one of our stranger ideas. It's funny how when you start experimenting with things, you go over the deep end before coming back and making a pop song out of it. But this isn't as bad as we got. I think that would be one side of one of the "Fuck Jackson" cassettes, which was literally two half-hour long "songs" of Brad and I improvising using a guitar and a casio and a bunch of pedals. Well, okay, and we did some intentionally ambient stuff. Anyway. So, the ending to this song got recorded over. This literally fades out at the millisecond where the cutoff occurred. | I absolutely love the acoustic guitar-through-pitch shifter effect on this song. Somehow this short little song became one of my favorite Ocasek moments, mostly due to the overall weirdness of it. I can't really remember what it's about, but I think it has mild political undertones. I always wanted to write politically charged songs back then, but never really pulled it off. So you get this half-assed effort instead. | |||||||
| 9-the czech flag hanging above my mirror (lyrics) | originally
appeared on the gospel according to mary. recorded
in john's garage on cassette 4-track in 1997. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-bass, drums |
I recall this being one of the last things we ever recorded. Even though I remember Brad's Europe fetish as kind of a symbol of our growing estrangement, which I think is part of what this song is about, I still always liked this song. When I suggested it for this compilation CD, I was surprised to learn Brad never thought much of it. But, once it was remixed, Brad was convinced. I guess I just love the chord changes and "keep your goddamn hands off me" leading into the rock-out ending. And this song is proof positive that my parents' garage was an awesome place to record drums. They should charge like 200 dollars an hour to set up in there. You can hear Brad guiding my drumming with the electric. That's just the bleed-through coming in on the drum mics. Oh well, it sounds good! | The remix of this song gave it an entirely new life. I still can't believe how good it sounds. The funny thing about this song, despite it's European tinged title, is that it's actually about my room. There literally was a Czech flag hanging above my mirror. Everything described in the song, for the most part, is something had happened in my room during the previous year or so. Also, the "Rusty airplanes" line was something that the infamous Rik Albatros (of Bacchalanian Revel) said to me in a letter. That was his vision of Oklahoma. I also really like the end of the bridge where I use "lie" and "lay" properly in sequential sentences. I am a grammarian! The "Walk around in someone else's shoes" line was one of my more emo moments - I had sort become bored with my life and thought there was probably something better out there I could do. I was probably wrong, though. Or wong, as Social Distortion might say. | |||||||
| 10-north atlantic (lyrics) | originally
appeared on the gospal according to mary. recorded
in brad's bedroom on cassette 4-track in 1997. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-drums, moog |
Brad engineered the drums because he had the worst drumset I have ever heard and I had no idea what to do with it. He knew exactly where to put each mic. The kick drums' head was like paper, and it was ripped. But it came out! The trashed-out cymbal even made kind of a nice ride. Something that helped was, his brother-in-law had given him a really nice snare, which was all wet and 80s-sounding and went well with the trashed out rest-of-the-set. I also remember being more familiar with the Boss PS3 than I was during, say, "Kyiv to Odessa" - and more familiar with the moog than I was in, say, "Same Time Zone." I still find the resulting moog track to be very haunting, innocent, and beautiful, which I thought was really nice for the wisftulness I perceive in the song. "Sitting under a bridge / Whisper something secret in my ear." | Another song that turned out way better than I ever expected. I had sort of half-assed written it one night at like 2. It was originally called "Winter's Lullaby" and then I changed stuff around and added all the silly European references. This is easily one of my favorite Ocasek moments. This is the best sounding I ever got those drums to sound. | |||||||
| 11-nikolett (lyrics) | originally
appeared on the gospel according to mary. recorded
in brad's bedroom on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-acoustic guitar, vocals john-drums, keyboard |
Recorded at Brad's house - again his engineering on his drum set. An early take of it was too fast and Brad stops singing to declare: "God! It's fucking fast! …This is horrible! It sounds like Metal!" I was impressed that I had actually figured out CHORDS on a keyboard, which is my most retarded instrument. I like the sickly sound of the whole thing and how it's kind of like, the background music in a saloon, except you just took some bad acid. | This is a totally random track. I remember writing the lyrics really, really late one night and they were some weird amalgamation of some book I was reading, some research I was doing for another song, and what I'd had for dinner (steamed rice). It came out, though, and I really love the lyrics. It's totally disjointed, but there is some story underneath. It was originally intended for a compilation on Doormat, TX I believe, but when it came out as well as it did, we didn't want to let it rot away there so we stuck it on "Gospel." | |||||||
| 12-from ukraine (lyrics) | originally
appeared on little missles. recorded in john's garage
and his parents' bedroom on reel-to-reel 8-track in 1996. brad-guitar, vocals john-drums |
I recall recording four-tracks of drums on the four track, then transferring that to 8-track, making sure we didn't bounce down to stereo so the drums would be 1st-gen. I think it was a wise choice - the drums often came out bad when we did the 4-track transfer trick, which we only did because we were too lazy to set up drums in the bedroom where Dad insisted on keeping the 8-track. (Cinematic and Aristocratic being the two times we actually moved the drums). I remember being really impressed when Brad did the harmonic on the guitar at the close of the song with the spooky effect. We kind of looked at each other and smiled -- it's a creepier noise when it's the main thing you hear and it's up really loud. Again, the crackle and cutouts are from mixing the song onto an SVHS tape. | This was one of what seems like a billion songs written about ficticious characters in Eastern Europe. I was obsessed with both the former Soviet-bloc and the Mountain Goats at the time, so this is how it came out. When we were working out the sequence of the song and everything, I remember asking John if he could do the drum-roll thing ala "Tonight, Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins during the ending of this song. He wasn't confident he could, but I think he pulled it off with flying colors. | |||||||
| 13-cherchez la femme (lyrics) | originally
appeared on the gospel according to mary. recorded
in john's parents' bedroom live-to-4-track in 1997. brad-acoustic guitar john-acoustic guitar (left spkr), vocals |
I remember I had liked the sound we got on one of the first ever Ocasek songs, called "Half of My Day." We had recorded that live to four track, each taking an acoustic. When you track it live, the mic bleed creates a really nice, natural "je nas se quois" ambience that brightens the sound a lot. When someone shifts in their seat beforehand, you hear it in better-than-reality stereo. Well, we did this the same way - except I added that little vocal harmony, later. The rest was live. I recall sitting on the floor cross legged and Brad sitting up on the bed. It might have been because we only had two mic stands that would angle, and a bass-drum-mic stand, which I probably used on my guitar. This song is kind of the "zinger" to the main body of the Ocasek saga. | Possibly the easiest recording ever as it was all done live. We'd done this before with "Half My Day" and it worked. John pretty much just showed me how the song went and what the sequence was and hit record. I don't remember if this is the first take or not, but it's amazing I didn't fuck up more. | |||||||
| 14-same time zone (lyrics) | originally
appeared on cassette harness. recorded in john's garage
on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-bass, guitar, vocals john-drums, moog, tambourine |
And so begins our Secret EP! Welcome! These songs are kind of fun additions and interesting bits to the Ocasek story. Enjoy. Now, this song is our first ever moog recording! And our first use of "bouncing" on the 4-track as well. (Drums + bass on one mono track? Why not!) In fact, this is the second track we ever recorded as "Ocasek." It was just a summer day in '96 and we realized my parents had a moog. We thought "let's just do a mostly-improv thing, and play with it. When we played back "Same Time Zone," we were like "Holy shit, there is a world outside of clean guitar / distorted guitar!" Really, the influences were already there - we had been listening to people like The Azusa Plane and Mars Accelerator and Polvo and Pie, none of whome were straight-up rock anyway, but this was our first attempt at TRYING something different. We never looked back - going on to record the beautiful "Hungarian Dream Come True" shortly after for Brad's compilation CD he was then putting together. I consider this track, and "..Dream.." to be the two tracks that mark us "growing up," musically. They are certainly the origins of Ocasek. The spots where the synth goes insane and is then quiet is because I had no idea how to play a keyboard. That's how guitar-driven we were up to that point. | This is one of our more lofi moments, but it sounds pretty decent. It's the beginning of an era. John and I have never looked back since we cranked this out. It's about a random meeting I had the previous weekend with a girl in St. Louis. Hardcore. I actually have a hard time listening to this song these days. | |||||||
| 15-helsinki anthem | originally
was to appear on the bees make honey compilation, music without
instruments. ended up unreleased. recorded in john's parents'
bedroom on reel-to-reel 8-track in 1997. 2 gallon-jugs of water, with the caps taken off so you could hear the sound of the water sloshing around. played by brad. 1
glass jar with about 20 pennies in it. - shaken for 3
wine glasses - 3 tracks of them, each track containing 1 gallon-jug of water - used as bassy drums, beat on with drumsticks. keeps the main beat. played by john. 1 metal cookie jar lid - 'pinged' on the 2nd beat with a fork. played by john. 1 metal cookie tray - 'whacked' on the 4th beat - worked as the 'snare.' beat with massage balls on sticks by brad. |
The challenge of submitting a track to this compilation was to record a song using nothing that was an actual instrument. So this was our attempt. The beginning is funny, you hear Brad mockingly saying "When the *water* comes in…" Well, just before tape was rolling, we were deciding when a couple of the things should start, and we just sounded really stupid referencing the entrance of the water sound. I had fun playing the wine glasses. That was way cool tuning them by filling them up to *just the right* level. I wasn't very good at it, which is why you hear all the squeaking of my finger. But that sounds kind of cool, anyway. I also laugh at the memory of Brad shaking the plastic gallon-sized milk jug full of water in his lap, with a towel under it, and getting soaked anyway, in the process. | Our most insane track ever. The whole open-water-jug idea seems pretty dumb in retrospect; there's many easier ways to get the sound of water without sloshing it around in a 2 gallon-jug without the cap on. I was literally soaked by the end of the recording. All in the name of music, I guess. John did most of the wine-glass tuning, I just concentrated on trying to keep a constant note. It's a lot harder than it seems. I still am impressed by how we put this song together based on the rules of the compilation. I don't believe that tape ever came out, which is too bad. It's an interesting idea that I might pursue later. | |||||||
| 16-cinematic (take 1) | originally
appeared on little missles. recorded in john's garage
on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-distorted guitar, bass john-drums, spacey guitar |
I totally love the trashed out Beastie-Boys-ish drums on this take. Totally different interpretation. Don't remember much about recording it, except that when I was done with the guitar, Brad listened and said: "That's really pretty." Heh. John "Hugh" Dickey from the band Pie (who were amazing - see: richardbitch.com) once extoled the virtues of the "baked sound" of the 4-track during a rock song, where the tape is all saturated. I think that interview was in Foxy Digitalis, actually! Well, anyway, I agree with him. I also just, never got tired of how the drums sounded in that garage. My parents should charge like $100 an hour to record drums in there. | This song originally had lyrics and was never intended to be instrumental. Of course, once we recorded it, there was no way I could add the vocals to it. Which is good, because they lyrics we're really, really bad. I think they had something to do with going to a movie, and that's not good at all. | |||||||
| 17-diplomatic nature | previously
unreleased. recorded in john's parents' bedroom on reel-to-reel 8-track in 1997. brad-acoustic guitar, spacey guitar lead guitar, phone dial tone john-drum machine, drone rhythm guitar, tape speed, tambourine |
Pretty sure this was our very last recording together before the teen angst finally rended us apart. The way we did the phone dial was funny: I sat at the 8 track, holding a mic up to the handset, and twisting the tape speed dial (so that the pitch would change). Brad counted off every few seconds and hung up, and then let the tone come back on, so that we wouldn't get the "IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO MAKE A CALL" operator message. I also remember tuning the electric guitars so that the harmonies were generated by the pedal, and then sending that through another pedal so that the whole mess was doubled an octave lower. There is no bass guitar on this track. Like the first take, we sent the drum machine through my guitar amp, turned on the distortion, and recorded the output through a mic. The opening "1, 2, 3, 4" is Brad talking into that mic, so we would have some frame of reference when we hit "go" on the machine. We weren't clever enough to program a click-in. The last sound on our last song: Brad saying "doh!" because he played the wrong chord on the acoustic. | One hell of a way to go out, I feel. This has always been and will always be one of my favorite Ocasek moments. You can really tell that we were listening to a lot of ambient stuff at that point and were really interested in mixing different textures. The dial-tone came out so much better than I ever expected. It has this UFO quality to it that I love. I actually did my best to "reset" the tone on beat, so most of the time you don't really hear the clicking sound because its masked by the drum machine. I was really pleased with the lead track I played on this as well. It was totally improvised but made the song a lot better, if I don't say so myself. Hey, I'm all for patting myself on the back. | |||||||
| 18-alpha celluline | originally
appeared on little missles. recorded in john's garage
on cassette 4-track in 1996. brad-electric guitar, tambourine john-acoustic guitar |
A warm little song idea that has been through many incarnations for me - the result of which I still play in Terrene in a song called "Stereo!" ...I remember sitting in the garage on the step that leads into the house, playing the acoustic. And being cold -- the garage was completely vulnerable to weather. During summer we would get these huge slurpees and set them next to our setup -- so the ice headaches would counter the heatstroke, I guess. And during the winter we would crowd around this TINY space heater that my mom got for us. (After my complaining.) God, we really *were* kids at the time. And this song is the "zinger" to the disc. It just felt appropriate to me. The picture on the inside of the disc is of my parent's garage, where my old toy box and bike were. I don't know if you can put all this together - being a bored teen in the middle of nowhere with a lot of heart, culling all your favorite music out of mail order catalogs from distant nobody labels, pondering the pointlessness of religion, work, and the adult world. But it all fits, I promise, and for me it comes across - despite how inarticulate, pathetic and lazy we actually were at the time... | It should also be noted that this song ended up spawning another Ocasek song, "Tiny Roses." I swear, the lead riff I came up with for this will never die. It's so damn catchy. | |||||||
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all inquiries should be made to:: brad@digitalisindustries.com |