Hal McGee Earliest Recordings 1981 to 1984

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60 Minutes Of Laughter

(originally released on cassette in 1982, C61)

60 Minutes Of Laughter was the first audiotape artwork on which I ever appeared. Recorded in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1981 and 1982. 60 MOL was Deborah Jaffe’s tape project, the fourth issue of a small press magazine Debbie published called 12 Seconds Of Laughter. 60 Minutes Of Laughter features sounds by Hal McGee, Debbie Jaffe [aka Master/Slave Relationship], Viscera, Gabble Ratchet, Trish & The Swishettes, The Dancing Invisibles, Residential Rick (Karcasheff), and more. 60 MOL is a lo fi lo tech collage consisting of earliest recordings by Viscera, tape cut-ups, primitive noise jams, simultaneous poetry readings, deconstructed rock songs, a live dada performance recording in a Country & Western bar, weird pop songs, experimental music, and more.

60 Minutes Of Laughter was the first audiotape artwork on which I ever appeared. 60 Minutes Of Laughter was Deborah Jaffe’s tape project. It was the fourth issue of a small press magazine Debbie published called 12 Seconds Of Laughter.
I met Jaffe in August of 1981 while I was working as a prep cook at a Mexican restaurant in Indianapolis. We found that we shared a lot of the same interests in music, art and literature and Debbie and I became best friends. We often visited her friends Rick Karcasheff and David Mattingly, who knew a lot about weird avant garde music. They had a group called Gabble Ratchet and they played analog synthesizers, with Jack Sexson on guitar, and recorded their noisy experimental music on cassette tapes.
Debbie published a small press magazine called 12 Seconds Of Laughter, the subject of which was “the obscure, in all forms”. She took photos from foreign film catalogues, nonsense absurdist phonetic poems, cut-outs from advertisements, tracts, etc. and collaged them together to make non-statements about “love, sex, politics, psychology, religion”.
After publishing three print issues she conceived of an audio version on cassette. 60 Minutes Of Laughter was a compilation of audio routines of material by ourselves and our friends that Debbie and I had recorded on a small portable “shoebox” cassette recorder during 1981 and 1982. Deb made a collage of these recordings with various segments from poetry and language instruction records, a Wurlitzer organ, domestic audio scenes, her junior high school band and sundry sonic doodles.
Debbie and I recorded numerous simultaneous poems. We chose texts from a wide variety of sources -- our own poems, magazine articles, shopping lists, advertisements, The Bible, etc. The often arbitrarily-chosen texts clashed, collided and melted into one another.
Debbie and I read in the newspaper that a local Country & Western Music bar called The Sanctuary had an open microphone night every Wednesday. Anybody could go into the little performance area and play a song. We constructed big paper cones to put on our heads. We chose Dada names for ourselves: I was Jolifanto Karawane. Debbie was named Mipoola Palinga. We wrote our new names on the hats. I taped the words of Hugo Ball’s Dada abstract phonetic poem “Elefanten-karawane” (1916) onto my beat-up $70 acoustic guitar. We both donned long black coats. When it was our turn we donned our big tall cardboard cone-hats and walked to the stage. Deb went to the microphone on a stand stage right. I sat down in a chair in front of a boom mike lowered to my mouth level. I spoke into the microphone, addressing the audience:
“The first step is to realize you’re asleep.I mean, would it really matter if you stuck your head in a Waring blender?”
I began to rub and scrape a grooved stick against the guitar strings, pulling the stick back and forth roughly over the strings and striking the body of the guitar with my hands and the stick. I increased the speed of the rubbing and striking and abrasive scraping up to a big crescendo. I cried out in a loud voice inflected with a pseudo-Caribbean-tribal wail, stretching the phrasing out and down and around as far as I could: "Gadji beri bimba!"
Debbie took up the response in a long cascade of wails, yelps and pseudo-operatics. Our vocal lines crashed into silence.
Then I took up the next call: "Glandridi lauli lonni cadori..."
We continued this call and response of a line from Ball’s poem with Debbie providing the elements of contrast, background and setting. Debbie warbled and chirped and giggled like a maniac and screamed and bellowed out and swooped in big arcs up and down. I leaned into the microphone, coughed up the words, rolled and gargled them around in my mouth and throat and spitted and barked them out – going through a rapid-fire catalog of exaggerated phrasings, monkey chattering, accents and character voices from Monty Python and bad jungle movies.
The audience soon started to make lots of noise, with lots of loud talking and people standing up, shouting and yelling and shaking their hands and gesticulating. People yelled out their responses to what we were doing, things like: Devo!
We were up there making a bunch of racket, just yelling a bunch of stuff, and me beating and misusing and abusing my guitar. After several minutes of this chaos we brought the assault to a close and the audience burst out yelling and clapping and shouting – united together in their response to us. As we finished a guy in the audience yelled out “Heil Hitler!”. And the rest of the audience burst out cheering and laughing in agreement at the sentiment. They were clearly excited and everybody was having a good time.
We were scared and decided it would be a good idea to pack our stuff and head out the door as quickly as possible before we were attacked. Neither of us wanted to get beaten up and we didn’t think it was unlikely if we hung around much longer.

Debbie knew a guitar player who idolized Tom Petty. Deb and I tried to work out some songs, with Deb and I doing some vocals along with Roger’s hot electric playing. “Airplanes And Engines” was extracted from an epic nine-minute version. I had written a poem of several pages treating the subject of how technology, in spite of its drawbacks, will be the instrument through which we will transcend earthly, bodily limitations and enter into different realms of the spirit or consciousness. I do my very worst imitation of Jim Morrison. “Floatin’ On The Waves” was another example of how Deb and I banalized and deconstructed rock music. The excerpt here shows us reducing song lyrics to mere arbitrary sounds, with no regard to content – only to the way the words sounded together.

A couple of times that fall of 1981 we visited a waitress I knew from the restaurant where I worked. We all had a lot of fun sitting around in her house doing trio vocal improvisations – stream of consciousness – start with no preconceived idea – listen to the others – make sounds in reaction to what you hear – whatever came into our heads. Deb and I were trying to cultivate a kind of artistic infantilism, to draw closer to true uninhibited expression. We experimented quite a lot with babbling, shouting, crying, screaming, whining and giggling. We also cultivated artistic “primitiveness” in an effort to communicate as directly and instinctively as possible.

“Ant War” was culled from a recording of me playing my cheap electric guitar through a small amplifier. I liked to misuse, abuse and overuse the tremolo and reverb effects on the amp. I was trying to create something that had a lot of energy but that evoked visual imagery. A driving rhythmic pulse, with noise in overlapping, frothing currents of distortion and crackling electricity, controlled feedback and pitch manipulation.
“Composition” was composed with a Casio VL-Tone, and is an early example of my use of programmed music. The VL-Tone was the first keyboard ever made by Casio. The VL-Tone was a hybrid calculator/musical instrument.

There are two recordings of Rick Karcasheff and David Mattingly’s experimental music group Gabble Ratchet on 60 Minutes Of Laughter. Both date from the months before I met Debbie, Summer 1981. I admired Gabble Ratchet’s improvisational style, and their use of Korg MS-10 analog synthesizers.
“Improv” is a short snippet from a much longer jam. Debbie included it here to showcase her weird stifled scream. “Collage/Gertrude Stein” is composed of a collage of pop music, news programs, TV ads and other sonic detritus, mixed completely into the left channel; and in the other speaker, a Gabble Ratchet jam tape with Deb doing readings from a book by Gertrude Stein.
Rick’s two short tracks are original works that clearly point to an infatuation many of us had at that time with The Residents. “Three Blind Pigs” is based on a traditional nursery rhyme I knew well from childhood, but in the original it was three blind mice. In Residential Rick’s world the mice become pigs.

On 60 Minutes Of Laughter Debbie Jaffe included several audio scenes and oblique references to her life that illustrated some of the themes that she would later develop in Viscera and Master/Slave Relationship. Debbie’s early life experiences caused her to doubt and rebel against common notions of romance, marriage, family, religion and popular taste.
The pieces “Husband And Wife Scenario” and “New Eyes” were from a recording Deb made of her much older half-brother Jim (a con man and womanizer), his ex-wife Val and their church minister in 1973 in Des Moines, Iowa.
“Kurtz Kapers” was taken from a recording Jaffe made of her junior high school band in 1976. She played clarinet in the band.
When she lived in Marion, Indiana she went to the Wurlitzer Electric Organ shop downtown and played the organs, which were available for rent on an hourly basis. There were cassette recorders built into the organs. Debbie took extracts from her hours of organ jam tapes for the “Wurlitzer Intermission” segments on 60 Minutes Of Laughter.
Deb got the sound effects, language and poetry records from the main branch of the Indianapolis Public Library. One of her great finds was the Gertrude Stein record that had a scratch on it that caused the phrase “sometimes Vollard mumbled” to repeat over and over. Debbie used this recording as a segue into the first Viscera piece on the 60 Minutes Of Laughter tape.

60 Minutes Of Laughter contains the earliest recordings by Viscera, from the Summer of 1982. That Summer Deb and I started developing some pieces in which I would recite, sing or act out poems and stories we’d both written, and Deb would compose a minimalist background/ backdrop or mood setting using simple instrumentation – mostly our Casio VL-Tone mini keyboard.
We wanted to get right to the heart and guts of the matter of life and existence: to live and show the pain and torment of existence through the art. There was no redemption in life except for the artistic expression of our experiences. This expression must be direct and bare, devoid of artifice and rationalization, all the loose psychic wires hanging loose and going every which way. Erratic mood swings and spurts of energy followed by lassitude...our fragmented perplexed perception of the world outside and our fragile mental states.

Music we were listening to during that time included: Patti Smith, Talking Heads, The Residents, The Doors, Eno, Joy Division, New Order, Lemon Kittens, Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristle. Plus, we were reading lots of books on dada and stuff by William Burroughs.

Originally released by Mirth And Merriment Productions. Reissued by Zidsick.

"60 Minutes Of Laughter Part One" 30:45 -- 42.2 MB mp3

Side One of the tape: "Red House, Blue House" – DJ & HM / "Voulez In The Voulez" – GS; "Ant War" – HM / "Kurtz Kapers (Apocalypse Later)" – Kurtz Memorial Band / "A Different Kind Of Music" – Viscera / "Love In The Tropics" / "Starvation And Beating" – Viscera / "Floatin' On The Waves" – Dancing Invisibles / "Love Is On My Side" – Trish & The Swishettes / "Home" – Viscera / "Composition" – HM / "Outraged Civilized World" – Viscera / "Another Simon And Garfunkel Hit" / "Three Blind Pigs" – Residential Rick / "To Tristan, With Love" / "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" – Trish & The Swishettes / "Seeing The Future" – Viscera / "Airplanes And Engines (Are Beautiful)" – Dancing Invisibles / "Husband And Wife Scenario" / "New Eyes"/ "Pain Research" – Trish & The Swishettes / "Improv" – Gabble Ratchet / "Apple Pie"; "Wurlitzer Intermission" – DJ.

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"60 Minutes Of Laughter Part Two" 30:11 -- 41.4 MB mp3

Side Two of the tape: "Wurlitzer Intermission (cont)" / "Collage/Gertrude Stein" - Gabble Ratchet / "Dharma Proclivity/Butchered Calf" – Jolifanto Karawane and Mipoola Palinga / "Tinyness" – Park Avenue Rick / "Live At The Sanctuary" – JK & MP / "Bird Is Dead" – HM & DJ / "I Love You I Love You I Love You" / "Repercussive Illusion" – HM / "WWIII" – Army Brats (RK, DJ, HM)/ "WWIV" – Army Brats / My Balls – L. Extentensa (Toby O'Brien) / "Public Lavatory, Blue Light" – HM & DJ / "The Edge" – Viscera / "Negative Image" / "Everything And Nothing" – Viscera / "Tiger Talk" – Burnt Circuits (DJ & HM) / "I Don't Understand" – DJ w/ 'Mr British' / "Silly Love Songs" / "Why Do You Do It?" / "Freedom To Be Immoral" – The Conversations / "Accepting Things As They Are" – Viscera.

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Two Polaroid photograph collages

from early in the Jaffe and McGee era (1981)

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Viscera In A Foreign Film

(originally released on cassette in 1983, C59)

In A Foreign Film was the first full-length tape that Debbie Jaffe and Hal McGee recorded and released under the name Viscera. Industrial gothic minimal synth avant neo-primitivism. Most of the songs consist of abstract and expressionist texts recited with a sparse instrumental backing of Casio MT-11 and VL-Tone keyboards, clarinet, Boss Dr. Rhythm DR-55 drum machine. Recorded at 821 N. Pennsylvania Street, Apt. #22, Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1982. Originally released by Mirth and Merriment Productions. Re-released by Harsh Reality Music in 1990.

from the January 1985 Cause And Effect catalog:
This first release by America's premier psychotic weirdo duo was described by Objekt magazine as "Music for the insane asylum/ lobotomy ward". 60 minutes of dreary, croaky voices chanting and spewing out disjointed texts about isolation, alienation and mental disease -- everybody's favorite subjects. Excruciating minimalism, great for quaalude parties."

IN A FOREIGN FILM was the first full-length that Debbie Jaffe and I recorded and released under the name Viscera.

The equipment Debbie Jaffe and I used was primitive, but was a step up from 60 MINUTES OF LAUGHTER. Along with the tiny toy-like Casio VL-Tone, we had a new Casio MT-11 polyphonic keyboard. We had recently bought a Boss Dr. Rhythm DR-55 drum machine, just like the one our friends Rick Karcasheff and David Mattingly used in their band Gabble Ratchet. Deb played clarinet on a couple tracks. We performed most of the vocals using our Shure vocal microphone through my guitar amplifier. We used the amp for the keyboards too. All of the pieces on IN A FOREIGN FILM were recorded with an Audio Technica stereo microphone directly into our Pioneer CT-F750 cassette deck, which had stereo mike inputs on the front.

It was an odd time. Deb and I were living in a hole-in-the-wall $130-per-month apartment in a crappy old building in downtown Indianapolis across the street from the Public Library. We lived there from the Summer of 1982 through early 1984. Apartment Number 22 at 821 North Pennsylvania Avenue was dinky, essentially one room. We prepared our meals in a tiny kitchen which had a gas oven which was always on the verge of blowing up. The bathroom area had one of those old-time footed bathtubs. The plaster and wallpaper were flaking and peeling off the walls. The apartment was hot in the Summer because there was no air conditioning. In the Winter we got heat from an ancient rickety steam heat radiator. We could not afford a telephone, so we went across the street to the Library to use the pay phones. The apartment was overrun with mice and cockroaches.

Downtown Indianapolis was a depressing place to live. There were a lot of direfully poor people living in rundown buildings that had once been luxury accomodations before all the wealthy people abandoned them and moved out to the suburbs on the north side of town. There were hundreds of homeless people living in alleys and condemned buildings, foraging for scraps of food in garbage dumpsters and trash cans in fast food restaurants. Within a few blocks of our apartment were several mammoth, gray, icy-looking war memorials made of huge blocks of Indiana limestone.

Winters in Indiana can be bitterly cold, with harsh winds that can drive the wind chill temperature as low as 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Sometimes we almost literally did not see the sun for six months at a time, as gray clouds blanketed the sky from October through March. It is little wonder that I sank into bottomless pits of lethargy and hopeless depression for months on end.

I was unemployed a lot of the time. I resorted to temporary jobs and collecting discarded cans for money. Deb had spotty employment, but at least she could type, so she got odd jobs at various offices downtown. We were on the U.S. Department of Agriculture food stamp program for about a year.

I had a lot of emotional problems. A couple of years before, in about 1980, I had been diagnosed as schizo affective schizophrenic. I was told that this condition was caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain and that this might very well be hereditary. I was in psychiatric counseling and took prescription medications (Lithium, Stelazine and Activan) that were intended to derail the psychological rollercoaster I was on: from stratospheric emotional highs to the depths of suicidal despair. They did the job so well that I felt like my consciousness was in a box. Instead of calming me down this had the effect of making me more anxious, because I felt like my mind was in a prison.

Debbie and I were broke and depressed and both more than a little crazy. But there will never be another time like it. Our intuitive collaborative powers were at an all-time high (a truly invigorating, joyful, creative feeling!). We knew each other so well that we could complete each other's sentences.

The bed, floor and chairs were littered with hundreds of books, tapes and scraps of paper on which we had written poems, tracts, manifestoes. The words poured out of us as we tried to make sense of our lives and the struggle of existence.

Rick Karcasheff had made dozens of tape copies for us of intriguing recordings by underground audio artists from all over Europe, Japan, Canada and the U.S. It was around this time that we first learned that there was a worldwide network of people who made recordings in their homes of their own electronic and experimental music. This was an exciting time because we were finding out all about the hometaper scene. IN A FOREIGN FILM by Viscera was the first tape we did that we sent out and traded with other audio artists.
Deb and I set about making our own unique and very personal audio statements. One of us would choose a poem or other scrap of writing by one or the other of us that we found lying about or in a notebook; the other would search for a sound setting on one of the Casio keyboards or a simple pattern on the drum machine. Then, with little or no preparation or advance planning we would turn on the tape recorder and let it flow out of us! We filled up several cassettes with these spontaneously created sound works. In a way they were like miniature audio theatrical pieces.
We chose to use the name Viscera because we wanted to create works that were as direct and straightforward and “from the gut” as possible. We strived to scrape away artifice, to get to the root, the core, the essence of existence – to baldly express our personal sense of the politics of experience. What did it mean to exist?
I had the sense that existence itself was suffering. I also believed that each person must find his own personal vision and meaning (if any) of life. We both believed in the power of art to redeem life of its seeming meaningless – all the boredom, confusion, contradictions and pointlessness of existence. If life was hell and if absorption in self was hell, then Viscera presented windows into that hell!
Yes, it’s true – I had read a lot of existentialist literature – all the Dostoevsky (Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov), Camus (The Stranger, The Fall, The Plague) and Kafka (The Castle and The Trial). Samuel Beckett’s bleak vision of a meaningless world in Waiting For Godot had made a big impression on me. The dystopian visions of William Burroughs had convinced me that reality itself was a vast conspiracy of cosmic proportions. I could not get enough of Ingmar Bergman’s films (Cries And Whispers and Persona were my favorites). At this time I favored music that presented a morbid, pessimistic view of life (Joy Division and early New Order, as well as Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and a little Nico).

expression of psychological/emotional states
---info actually intended to be conveyed
existence as struggle/is suffering
redemption through art
absorption in the hell of self
existentialism Camus nausea ennui
Dostoevsky Kafka
mind/body dichotomy -- escape from body Castaneda/Burroughs
Joy Division/New Order/Throbbing Gristle
inappropriate (or deadened) emotional responses
"profoundly amateurish" -- imperfections = genuineness
---Syd Barrett, Wild Man Fisher
Bergman Persona
disillusionment -- societal expectations
theme of black and white

And, in early 1983 we got the Kent Hotchkiss's Aeon Distribution Service to carry it! -- wow! -- what a coup! -- now we were in the Aeon catalog along with people like Nurse With Wound, Whitehouse, Borbetomagus, Human Flesh, Nocturnal Emissions, Legendary Pink Dots, D.D.A.A., P16.D4, Pascal Comelade, Mnemonists, Lt. Murnau, Maurizio Bianchi, etc. We felt like we had really arrived!

The album We Buy A Hammer For Daddy by The Lemon Kittens (United Dairies label) had an enormous influence on our style.

IN A FOREIGN FILM may be a difficult listen for many people. The singing/vocalizing is often out of tune, and the instrument-playing is riddled with imperfections. But the tape captures well a time in my life and experiences that I can never forget. The faults and imperfections reveal much about what we tried to express, our doubts, our isolation and alienation, our vulnerability.
PBK once wrote to me: "I've heard this early Viscera material, and it is profoundly amateurish". Profoundly amateurish? I know what he meant -- he was putting it down. But actually, "profoundly amateurish" sums this music up very well, although in a different sense altogether!

Originally released by Mirth And Merriment Productions. Re-released by Harsh Reality Music.

Side One of the tape: Slipping Away (00:00 - 02:38) / The Message (2:38 - 5:29) / Cause And Effect (5:29 - 7:35) / Mysterious Pleasures (7:35 - 11:31) / With Eyes Open (11:31 - 14:40) / Ruins (14:40 - 20:08) / In A Foreign Film (20:08 - 24:09) / Alone (24:09 - 28:44)

Side Two of the tape: She Wants To Forget (00:00 - 02:32) / Abandon (2:32 - 6:02) / Black On Black On Woman (6:02 - 9:09) / Drifting Into Sync (9:09 - 12:40) / October 12th (12:40 - 16:09) / Selling The House (16:09 - 21:31) / Pieces (21:31 - 24:38) / Black And White (24:38 - 27:58) / untitled drum machine outro (27:58 - 30:17)

821 North Pennsylvania Street, Indianapolis, Indiana. Debbie Jaffe and Hal McGee lived in Apartment #22, 1982-1985. Many of our early cassettes were recorded here.

Swamp Patrol 84 is one of the most obscure titles in my catalog and yet one of my favorites today in 2007. Swamp Patrol was a collaboration of Hal McGee and Debbie Jaffe (Viscera) with David Mattingly (of Gabble Ratchet and Bright Too Late). This tape was kind of a companion piece to the 60 Minutes Of Laughter tape from 1982, and in fact it recycles some of the material from 60 MOL and expands on many of the themes from the earlier tape. Swamp Patrol 84 was originally recorded for inclusion in an issue of Level Mail Art zine -- participants were invited to submit 100 copies of an art object -- 100 boxed issues containing the contributions of all the participants were distributed to subscribers and participants. Keywords: dada, collage, improvisation, cut-ups, Casio VL-Tone, absurdism, spoken word, bruitism, simultaneous poetry. Reissued by Zidsick. Listener discretion advised.

Chickens and Insulation / Exploring the Swamp / Big Punk Place / Swamp Massacre / The Melee / Dioramas Of Stuffed Animals / The Crystal Ship / Heeping Obscenities On Water / Lost in the Swamp / Twilight in the Swamp / Swamp Creature Ritual / Swamp Woman Lament / Titanium White / The Farewells Take Place In Silence / Intrigue & Surprise / Network Of Hidden Intention

Jesus In The Swamp / Gregorian Chant Funk #1 / Mortal But With A Vision / Exile In Belgium in 1815 / Her Hopeful Stupidity / Angry Mouth / Decaying Glass / The Search For Nothing / I Like Sex / Music For Dead Music / You Putting Me Down / Slapstick and Raucous / Describing Intangible Worlds / With Gravel In Little Boxes / Sojourn To Tahiti / Ektachrome Transparency / Pleasure Of The Simple Life / Structure Collapse / Soft Light On Water / Asparagus Comprehension

A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies was the second full length tape by Viscera, Debbie Jaffe and Hal McGee. It has always been my favorite Viscera tape, and it is the work in which our main themes reach their fullest expression. Gothic minimal synth industrial. Twisted poetic vocalizations over synth backings of Moog Prodigy and Casio MT-11, clarinet, drum machine and tape loops. It was recorded in 1983, and released in early 1984. Re-released by Harsh Reality Music in 1990.

from the January 1985 Cause And Effect catalog:
IN A FOREIGN FILM led the listener to the brink of insanity; this cassette jumps out over "the edge". The heavily vocal-oriented, extremely minimal stylizations of Jaffe & McGee have drawn comparisons to Cultural Amnesia, DDAA, Nico, Lemon Kittens, Young Marble Giants, The Velvets and others. "The emphasis here is on the atmosphere created by first the twisted poetic words; then the music kind of takes the whole thing a step downwards into despair." (No Commercial Potential).

A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies was the second full length tape by Debbie Jaffe and myself recorded under the name Viscera. It has always been my favorite Viscera tape, and it is the work in which our main themes reach their fullest expression. It was recorded in 1983, and released in early 1984.
Horror Movies is also our most accessible and melodic work. Like its predecessor, In A Foreign Film, Horror Movies was mostly recorded live through a stereo microphone directly to a cassette deck. So, much of the primitive sound of Foreign Film is still here, but there is a greater refinement and confidence to the performances.
A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies is almost unrelentingly morbid, dark and dreary. Debbie and I dressed in black quite a lot, smoke and drank heavily, and generally were pretty damn depressed and morose. Horror Movies not only dwells on but revels in the dark side of the psyche.
For the Whole Universe Of Horror Movie sessions we borrowed a Moog Prodigy synthesizer from our friend Roberta Eklund, and we gave it quite a workout. You can hear Debbie playing it on the opening track, "Blank Faces Of The Others", with me on our trusty Casio MT-11, on a fog-enshrouded instrumental that sets the tone for what will follow.
All of the songs on the first side of the tape form a suite, with each piece flowing into the next one, with a sustained ominous sense of foreboding.
The second song, "Something Else Strangely Familiar", is fairly short, and another introduction of sorts. Over minimal bass synth figures I declaim a text from an advertisement we found in the newspaper. We had done this quite a lot before -- lift a mundane text from advertising and the mass media and re-contextualized it, subverting the meaning and creating an ironic twist on the intentions of the words:
"Don't guess wrong / We're not going to give you any magical or supernatural powers / All we are going to do is show you how to use a highly effective little known principal that is available to any man..."

The text of "Honest / Dishonest" came from my experiences applying for a job at a major department store in Indianapolis. They gave the applicants a personality assessment questionnaire to fill out. You were asked a number of questions about stealing and questions of honesty and character. Such as: Would you report a co-worker if you saw them stealing? Or is it all right to steal something if the value of the item is more or less than a certain dollar amount? And so on. And the survey would ask you the same questions several times with different wording -- trying to catch you being inconsistent, or trying to beat the test. The text of the song addresses the dichotomy between honesty and dishonesty, and being honest about one's dishonesty and dishonest about one's honesty. Over dreary synth drone patterns I intoned like a dark priest:
"I am honest / I am dishonest / I get high / I get low / I get dumb / I move slow / I'm an idiot; I love to steal / I'm basically dishonest / I'm wrong-minded / I got a set of totally insane ideas / I always think of myself before I think of others/ What would you do? / What in fact do you do? / You lie, you cheat, you steal ..." and so on.

"Bones Are Chairs" is the most light-hearted song on the tape, but even then it leaves the listener wondering with an uneasy feeling as to the singer's intentions. Over a crazy bagpipe-like synth figure and over-dubbed clarinet fillips, I sang my dada nightclub bit, in one of my "Monty Python voices":
"Bones are chairs spilling spilling across oceans that would invite unusable poems over for dinner / pounds and pounds of flesh / then insult them for not wearing the lapel pins that say: Yes, I am in the corner squatting squatting squatting today / My bones sing tunes that are like investments in radical smoke-tasting stocks and bonds oops crash who smile and wave at the crowds while private yes they're unwashedly reminding themselves how much much mooch they hate feminist stomping on this little insignificant little scrawny little measly little not mine, little most certainly yours / Little most certainly your penis / and that elephantitic bouncy bouncy balls in a sack with your fruits and your veggies and fruits and your veggies and fruits and your veggies, oh yeah! / Rate the yellow smack the hand that reaches for naughty things / No date no time no memorization no recitation just elbow-yanking / piss ocean qualm / We don't use that thing, and any way, somebody broke it!"

On "Ugly Talk" we do our very worst/best Throbbing Gristle imitation in an examination of political doublespeak. Over Deb's droning synth bass and primitive tape loop I intone words by Jaffe:
"This man's not happy with this beat / Doesn't say what he thinks of politics / Brother, open your throat for dead things / Say things to regret / Then bury it / Ugly talk / Approving it this morning / Running to the person who makes the laws / Running into ruining / Ugly talk / I will give you a message / Be willing to do anything it says / Be willing to talk ugly talk ..." Etc.

And from there, the mood slides further and further into the pit. Over a plodding synth figure and fluttering speeded-up drum machine pattern, I sing a tune that sounds suspiciously like "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell, as sung by Genesis P-Orridge, with cut & paste words by Debbie:
"Juices / I don't know what's upside down / Do I have anything to read? / I'm nervous as hell / Punitive manslaughter / Beefed-up juices / Grab a piece of art / The wrong side vetoed out / Slid down the hill / I don't know where they landed / The governor reads the newspaper for all his information exclusive / A dumb-dumb gives off a slice form without grace / Dinner is served late today / We'll be talked about / We'll seep deep into the ground / Split pea soup, jam, purple salt, people seasoned and tart / It simmers tenderly / Two people slide together killing each other instantly... " Etc.

The text of "Failing" is a collage of writings by both Deb and me, and addresses the utter failure of the self to confront its own shortcomings, failures, and the void within. Deb's words set the tone:
"I looked around for something to believe in / I didn't find anything / Look at me saying this / I can't believe it... / Save me / God help me they said/ And all was lost/ Your character tells those around you keep away / We're all animals without repentance..."
In the bridge I cackle demonically some words I wrote about how:
"Mr. Whip gets to smacking his lips / Drooling over dead birds / I get them and strike them / Light them, you believe me? / Up all night swinging like an idiot / Fat is as fat smells and I smell death in a pot of stewed meat ..."

If that isn't morose, morbid and death-and-insanity-loving for you, the title track goes right off the edge into the abyss of self-extinction, with distinct resonances of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (a la Crash). The narrator has reached the point of total collapse, with no defenses and no resistance left, no more lies, no more excuses. He/she cowers in a corner waiting for apocalypse and the end of life and time:
"I want to die / I feel like I'm gonna get my wish ..."
"Acid flashback / Perverted soundtracks / Screaming and throbbing and thrashing about / Tongues lolling around in slimy holes / Does anything intelligible bloody wound in rearview mirror get away with anything? / Something like mutant meat communication / Gaps in the instinct film / Totally mad addictive behavior / Transmuted again from refrain and message to message / back again into the mass hypnotic maw / Spewing out vomit cartilage and bone ..."
Later -- "The tape is our effect / A whole universe of horror movies / The things that were destroyed with no completion / My broken nose / My broken back / Black potatoes / My black lungs / And airplane psychiatric mad religious art / Disgusting and vile / assassinate copying machine mentality! ... "

The second side of A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies opens with two short instrumentals. My "Shards" is a free improvisation exploration on piano, with lots of pounding, changes in tempo and textures. This kind of free form piano piece has cropped up again and again in my work over the years.

Many of the other songs on Horror Movies sound like they could have come from the In A Foreign Film sessions. I do my wistful introspective sounding vocal on "Changing Minds". Deb does vocals on two tracks, She does her wild screaming warbling Yoko Ono style on "Last Wish", and the long-lost lonely little woeful girl singing on a porch in the rain style on the final track, "Geometry". I take a turn at the synth and instrumentation on these. On "Last Wish" I do a particularly gnarly noisy all-over-the-place Moog part.

"The Box Is Green" is a real stand-out too. A song about the futility of the American political process and how it is too mired in money and the concerns of the wealthy and big corporations. On this one I do my Ian Curtis / blues singer imitation.

We were very proud that A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies was distributed by Aeon Distribution of Ft. Collins, Colorado, just like In A Foreign Film.

A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies is the last of what might be considered the Early Period of Viscera. Things would change drastically on Who Is This One and Hot And Cold.

Side One of the tape: Blank Faces Of The Others (00:00 - 02:44) / Something Else Strangely Familiar (2:44 - 4:28) / Honest/Dishonest (4:28 - 8:26) / Bones Are Chairs (8:26 - 10:44) / Ugly Talk (10:44 - 15:38) / Juices (15:38 - 19:10) / Failing (19:10 - 23:22) / A Whole Universe Of Horror Movies (23:22 - 27:55)

Side Two of the tape: Shards (00:00 - 02:56) / As Though On Little Wheels (2:56 - 4:46) / And Said Nothing (4:46 - 9:44) / Last Wish (9:44 - 15:36) / Changing Minds (15:36 - 18:10) / Strange Words (18:10 - 20:58) / The Box Is Green (20:58 - 24:56) / Geometry (24:56 - 26:18)

No Specific Answer by Occupant is another highly obscure title in my catalog of releases. Very few people have actually heard this 90-minute tape over the years, but I like it a lot and I want to share it with you here. Minimalist, pulsing, drone-based electronic music that slowly changes over time. Repeating, slowly-evolving phase pattern music created with a Casio MT-11 keyboard, Moog Synthesizer, and a small amplifier - along with some experiments in feedback modulation. Not exactly ambient, because it contains abrasive textures. The music here pre-figures several of my later releases of aggressive minimalist electronics, such as Deep Space Search Engine. Occupant was a one-off solo side project - kind of proto-Dog As Master.

"No Specific Answer Part One" Side One of the tape: 45:38 -- 62.6 MB mp3

"No Specific Answer Part Two" Side Two of the tape: 41:28 -- 56.9 MB mp3

Music by Hal McGee Earliest Recordings 1981 to 1984

This music was recorded in Indianapolis, Indiana, during the time that Debbie Jaffe and I lived together on West 38th Street and at 821 N. Pennsylvania Avenue. All of this music was recorded direct to cassette, before we bought our first four-track cassette recorder.