Coming Attractions

Take a gander at the up-’n’-comin’ Purple Puke Music product slated for release sometime before the next millennium.

While there’s a good chance a few of these projects will never be released, the smart money is on the Lazy Bastards’ eagerly anticipated debut.

The Prof. Mastrato Sessions Letters to Von Hib Diving for Bearded Clams The Life & Times of Hermie Nürr

Afterbirth: A Föetal Demise Retrospective Travelogue — Around the World in Ab Ways Miracle of Urine Therapy: An Ode to Gimlet Werques

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Diving for Bearded Clams
While this release exists in a cluttered state of sound amid myriad reels of recording tape, the Lazy Bastards are determined to one day get it together. Here is a proposed track listing, which contains some songs that are far from a finished form.

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Letters to Von Hib
At the moment, this forthcoming Purple Puke Music (PPM) release merely exists as an idea with only a couple of songs attached to it; such tunes as “(no subject)” and “Beer and Yo-Yos Saved My Life” will certainly be popping up on this record. Here’s some background:

Ian archives practically every last piece of e-mail he receives. When Chris found out about this, he just had to have his archive. So, per Chris’ request, Ian sent it to him in one huge file. Then, in an equally surreal moment, Chris decided to read the whole goddamn fucking thing. He divided the humongous file by year and began sifting through each annum for mention of song titles, lyrics, and secret homosexual code. As of this writing, he’s still plowing through the archive.

But then, God bent down and whispered into Chris’ ear, “Concept album...”

As a result, Letters to Von Hib will be a concept album — of sorts. As amazing a fact as it is, a great deal of Chris and Ian’s inspiration for songs, especially song titles, came (and will forever continue to come) from e-mail correspondence. Any sort of witty or idiotic phrase or made-up word has the potential to become a song title — which, as any songwriter knows, is the easy part. Writing lyrics about something you said once three years ago during an electrical storm while chewing a wad of Bubble Yum can be quite a daunting task. (Perhaps that’s why Abattoir Buggery has so many cursed instrumentals?)

In any event, here’s the concept: The album will compile the whole lot of e-mail-inspired songs. As an example, here’s the genesis of the song “(no subject)”:

First, the phrase itself, along with its punctuation, is something you’ve likely encountered while writing a cyber letter. If you’ve ever composed an e-mail missive but have failed to give your letter a title (or, hence, a “subject”), your e-mail program will inform you of this fact and/or place the phrase “(no subject)” within — yes, you guessed it — the subject area of your e-mail message.

As for the song’s lyrics, they were odd phrases uttered here and there during the course of one or two or, at last count, 2,087 e-mail exchanges between Ian and Chris.

Lastly, the title of the album: It is a product of Chris’ numerous personalities; though, oddly enough, they all act and smell the same. Von Hib is a name that will hopefully stir in the listener (and reader) a profound admiration for the letter — as in taking a pen and sheet of paper and writing to someone — instead of merely contacting someone via the soulless medium that is e-mail.

Get the whole picture now? Good.

Incidentally, the artwork for the album was done by Von Hib himself — many, many years ago within the sweet-smelling and heavily wooded confines of Ian’s bedroom in East Flushing, N.Y. — using one of Ian’s now-ancient Apple computers.

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Werques
Progressive rock never fails to inspire the Purple Puke Music people. This time around, Ian and Chris — dressed up in the guises of Abattoir Buggery, of course — amass a pile of songs that were worked (werqued?) on individually.

To illustrate this idea, take the three songs listed below — they were entirely of Ian’s creation, without any participation from Chris.

And while Chris will also have some of his own songs on this disc (though none have been submitted yet), Werques will feature the duo’s usual collaborative efforts as well.

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Miracle of Urine Therapy: An Ode to Gimlet
Yet another release that exists merely as an idea. It was first called The Gimlet Sessions, after Chris’ idea that Abattoir Buggery should record something, anything while consuming numerous glasses of gin and lime juice (otherwise known as gimlets), but then the title changed. Here’s what happened:

Ian received a rather disturbing, yet downright hilarious e-mail from, he assumes, a bunch of legitimately insane people. Namely, the Japanese. Now, don’t get us wrong, we’re not out to become xenophobes of the year; we just find the Japanese people a little... strange. Especially when it comes to food, or anime, or their relentless need to adorn everything with a cartoonish, cutesy, pop-culture-courting icon.

Anyway, Ian got this missive from someone touting a slew of, shall we say, very alternative medicinal practices. As he was going through the list of available “treatments,” he came across one that instantly screamed out, “Song title!”

Or, in this case, “Album title!”

One of the advertised elixirs was called “The Miracle of Urine Therapy.”

Now, we here at Purple Puke Music are always up for a good ol’ golden shower every once in a while, but any sentence or phrase or applauded medical cure that contains the word “urine” can’t be taken too lightly.

Therefore, an album — not necessarily about lime juice, gin, and urine but certainly inspired by such troublesome liquids.

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Afterbirth: A Föetal Demise Retrospective
Fifteen years in the making, Afterbirth chronicles the life span of Purple Puke Music’s (PPM) seminal art-rock collective, Föetal Demise (F.d.).

When Chris, Ed, and Ian first set foot on the PPM path in 1988, none of them had even the slightest idea that their special little in-joke would have lasted this long.

Here’s an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of this set. Engineer Lars has graciously ripped out a page from his notebook on which he has jotted down his notes, and now he shares it with you:

I got a little “liberal” with F.d. as an entity, to the point where I have something of an addendum to the official band history:

F.d. went on a sort of hiatus, with the band members finishing college and getting jobs or going to grad school. When the desire arose to branch out a little from their trio format, they explored various side projects: Pudtug; Pudtug, Too!; and Abattoir Buggery (Ab) among them. However, various band members’ marriages brought about renewed interest in the original group, sparking talk of a reunion tour to support an album (NAMBLA sponsorship for the tour fell through, but the music from the sessions remains). After that, Ab carried on, but the interest in F.d. remained, to the point where another reunion was considered — but, unfortunately, Ed was unavailable. So, figuring one Riedl is as good as another, Ian and Chris plugged Ken into Ed’s spot and hit the studio to see what would come out. Sadly, no tour bus could accommodate Ken’s toe, but some material made it onto wax in the studio, including a special jam featuring both Riedl brothers. Most recently, F.d. was up for a six-month stint playing the Rainbow Room and worked on new material, including honing its lounge act. This, unfortunately, also fell through, when the booking agent realized that the band was not, in fact, Robert Goulet.

With that said, Afterbirth is a three-disc set. The first disc features all of the “classic” stuff, including whatever was in “song” form on the original F.d. tapes; some of Chris’ original F.d. demo; and We’re Föetal Demise... And We Suck!

Disc two has all the newer material, which comprises Chris’ bachelor-party recordings; the Ken sessions (“Five-Thirty a.m.,” “Who Wet the Bed?,” and “Continuity Is a Chopped-Down Tree,” which features both Ed and Ken); Ian’s demo for “Monokill”; and the Dec. 29, 1999, session the band booked at All-You-Can-Eat Studios (which produced “One-Hand Jack,” “Killer Basketballs,” and “I’m No Suck-Ass Fanboy”).

The third disc follows the evolution of the band’s art-rock masterpiece, “Utopia.” It contains the definitive version of the entire suite that includes the Yianni Plesspray-produced version of movement VIII (“Utopia”), as well as Ian’s multitracked-vocal take of movement IX (“Karn Evil 13”). I recorded a version of “Super-Brain Big Knuckleheads” a couple of years ago featuring Ed on vocals, but it came out so-so, so I had Ian redo the vocals; however, to keep the Ed flavor, Ian’s vox are in one ear and Ed’s are in the other (but lower in the mix). Also included on the disc are Chris’ acoustic demo of nearly all the movements, Ab’s take on the title cut, and the very first version of “Karn Evil 13” that was laid down way back in 1988 at Chris’ Attic Studios.

Wow! Now that’s what I call music, motherfucker!

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The Prof. Mastrato Sessions
The first and only release from the band ProjeKctile 1.

Proj (pronounced “prodge”) came together for a very good reason: Ian’s bachelor party. Following in Chris’ footsteps — that is, setting aside some time to jam prior to one’s last day of bachelorhood (incidentally, the only existing evidence of Chris’ jam session can be found on the Abattoir Buggery release There’s a French Fry Stuck in My Beard), Ian requested his own session. So, on Nov. 28, 1997, the ProjeKctile 1 foursome was born.

Proj was able to spew forth a great deal more noise than most previous recording sessions at La Maison du Mixe et Merde in East Flushing, N.Y. To say the proceedings were percussion-heavy would be putting it mildly. On the debut disk of this eclectic group, there’s quite a bit of back beat, a lot of throttle-down singing (read: screaming), and lots of lo-fi quality (as the engineers present were mildly retarded at the time and didn’t pay much attention to setting the levels). As a result, Lars — of New Jersey-based All-You-Can-Eat Studios (and late of Manhattan’s prestigious Skirball Studios) — was faced with an interesting challenge: How could he make this shit sound good?

First, he hired an assistant quite familiar with the material — the highly regarded Prof. Mastrato: perhaps the finest assistant mixer within North America, had he lived there (the professor resides in Buenos Aires during most of the calendar year). Prof. Mastrato brought an inquisitive aura to the mixing process, as he time and again queried Lars with such insightful observations as “What the fuck are you doing?!” and “Babaloo!”

Getting back to Lars now... He employed an entirely new strategy to the final mixdown by, for lack of a better word, faking it. Lars fed the recorded product through a variety of effects until the tracks reached a level at which a common household pet would not wail in lament when exposed to the final mix. The resulting record sounds so good, in fact, that you would swear it was recorded late at night in an abandoned airplane hangar somewhere very far away.

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The Life & Times of Hermie Nürr
Chris once had a dream for a solo album, and most of it came true, at least in terms of song development — nearly all of the tunes he wrote for the solo set have since been recorded and sprinked across a number of other Purple Puke Music releases. But the back story behind the idea deserves some mention:

It begins with the film Singles. It’s an oldie but a fairly goodie. The movie itself, however, isn’t the point here. In the film, there’s a fictional band called Citizen Dick, whose members include Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament, the last of whom decided to have some fun with the idea of being in a fake musical group. Ament made up some bogus song titles for a nonexistent Citizen Dick album, which were then incorporated into a film prop (a cassette tape). During the course of the film, at least one of the faux song titles made an impression on Soundgarden’s principle songwriter (and singer) Chris Cornell (who also was in the movie but not as one of the band’s members). Cornell then wrote lyrics for it, and the resultant song was “Spoonman,” a track of moderate success for Soundgarden.

Here’s where Chris comes in: He decided to emulate Ament’s brainstorm sometime in 1994, making up his own fake song titles with the intent of writing their lyrics and music at a later date (which he did for most of them). Then, through the course of Abattoir Buggery’s genesis, the entire lot became actual songs.

Fast forward to 2003: Ian becomes inspired by Chris’ initial idea and decides to pull the songs together and create a storyline on which they could ride, piggyback-style. Here’s the story, which (for now) picks up at track no. 7, “She Is Wow”:

Hermie falls for a girl and gets rejected because he’s so swarthy (“She Is Wow,” “My Greasy Hair”), gets bombed (“A Drink for Now”), has a psychedelic experience while under the influence (“Gumballs Under the Rug”), revels in his swarthiness (“Scumboy”), finds solace in snack food (“Zingers Are”), becomes grossly obese (“Foolishly Fine and Fat”), to the point where he can’t control where he urinates and farts (“Don’t Hit the Yellow,” “The Bubble in My Butt Goes Blort!”).

The end.

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Travelogue—Around the World in Ab Ways
Vistas of the world come to bright, energetic life on this collection of international-flavoured songs from Abattoir Buggery.

Why, just take a look at that delicious track listing!

* Assorted bits caught on tape while “recording” in the living room of the house — No. 33, the Valeroti — on Bald Head Island in Palermo, Maine.