"One blog isn't going to change them"

So Fete began as an excessively syncopated drum beat that I was messing around with in the old Wyman St. garage (now a mold-infested contaminated waste zone). It has the classic N/A song structure of a mysterious, minor A section followed by a happy major B section and then a thrashed out rehashing of the minor A section. Nice and simple the way drummers like it. I added some bass and guitars with cheesy effects on my 414 and put aside. When we started to record drums for PYGA I basically took song ideas Rafi and I had come up with and various 4-track forays (including Fete, Distracted and Let it Go) and turned them into primitive drum charts. Since there were only the two of us, we recorded the drums by themselves with me getting all the inspiration I needed from my scribblings. Most of the songs, including Fete, hadn't really been entirely written yet; although we made a few minor changes to form when over-dubbing and mixing basically the forms were set up with these drum charts and it gave us a nice skeleton to build upon. We actually recorded all the main drum parts in just a few quick days. Back then I was playing a Ludwig-Rogers hybrid/bastardized kit. A Ludwig Rockers kick and 16 inch floor tom from the late 70's and a 12" and 13" Rogers Holiday model toms (from the '60's Cleveland era when Buddy Rich was their spokesperson - "The Cadillac of drums"; I've since rounded out the Rogers kit by adding a Dayton model 20" kick and a 16" floor tom). After we had put most of the tracks down for Fete and were listening to it with master Darron Burke we realized the syncopation was a little much so we added all sorts of percussion to counteract the psycho-synco effect. I think at one point we were going to have our good friend Kate Krug (who used to sing with Incus) sing some femme fatale type business on this track but since it kept on not happening we decided it would be easier just to embrace our instrumentalness and the idea for samples had already been kicking around in our head. So when Karyn started listening to our rough mixes she started imagining various story lines for the songs. Same Old Shit (as it was lovingly called) K said took place during the party where ominous forces are gathering, so femme fatale became fete fatale ('fete' of course meaning 'party').

A note on inspirations for PYGA: Although I didn't realize it at the time, I think one of the main inspirations for the concept and sound of the record comes from the soundtrack for Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily" a hilarious re-dubbing of a pulpy, campy Japanese Bond knock-off from the mid '60's. The soundtrack was done by The Lovin' Spoonful and is in turn mysterious, spy-tastic and country hoe-down good fun. As for the source for samples I think the 80's collaborative project between Brian Eno and David Byrne "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" is really the earliest and certainly most interesting use of vocal samples I knew of. I was exposed to this record by my sister when I was young and though I was at first freaked out by it, it has become one of my favorite records. I think it influenced not only our use of samples to accentuate the mood of our instrumental sound but also influenced the process we used of building a piece of music as we recorded it. As we were beginning to put samples over the tracks and worrying about the copyright issue I discovered the group ECC (Evolutionary Control Committee) which is most famous for their song "Rocked by Rape" which is a series of Dan Rather excerpts put to a reworking of Back in Black. Their record not only uses great and weird discovered audio, it also has a great explanation of why their record is not copyrighted. They believe that recordings of any kind should be fair game for usage, manipulation and reworking into new compositions which is basically what their entire record is.

Photo Shoot

Here's a first impression of what went down in yesterdays photo shoot...

Check out Mr. Thomas
Visit Kid Rafi's Blog to see the original color photos a little larger.
Also I'm trying to figure out how to best sequence all this information. No answers yet.

Fete Fatale - Same Old Shit

This song started out being titled "Same Old Shit," which would imply that it's pretty much the exact same thing as Distracted, or any number of other songs in our arsenal. SOS stuck as a title for a long time, until we finally graduated to Fete Fatale at some point when the movie narrative was developed by K.

Makeshift Process
I think Ned had a version of Fete on four track that he was working off of - I don't remember ever playing it in our practice space before it was recorded. In fact I still have a hard time remembering how to play it! Ned played the lions share of instruments on this track. To start out he played bass, (after he had recorded the drums of course), and then preformed most of the guitars. I don't remember too much about that, except that I remember the parts being somewhat meandering and that he recorded two tracks of guitar using my blue paul, possibly with the boogie(?), and that he was in the room with the amp, cause he was going for a feedbacky feel I think.

I played many of the guitars in the B section, including a banjo line, possibly? I think ned played the banjo in the outro. Banjo was appropriately distressed and ran through an MXR distortion box (using Ned's pickup) and into some amp, the Scout would be my guess... Around this time I recorded several guitar solos over the end of the song, later deciding I hated them all, so they were mixed in very quietly. I also played some scratchy guitar parts into the scout or some other tiny amp. Those are the small-stoned sounding guitars in the intro I belive.

Tributes
The B section has the infamous Dan Martinez Memorial Guitar line - which is buried way in the background and goes chug chug chug in a nice thin tone of a strat, but it's probably Ned playing Daron's tele. It might even have gone through my awful black box, the VORTEX. I added an acoustic guitar to the b section at home @ Blue Brain Room while pre mixing. Darron brought that part out nicely when we remixed it after mastering the record and deciding the track was too weak to be the opener in the state we had it in. To be honest, I think it might have been one of the first things we ever mixed for real at Q.

Look, Fete In The Box!

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
One important component to this piece is the Steve Reich slide part which was initially three tracks of the identical slide part. These came in and out in important parts, as they still do; except that only two tracks made it to the final mix, due to 24 track limitations of the mBox. I recorded this one night alone in some frustration at our lack of progress on the record. Little did I know then that we had many more moons to go!

The Machine
Most important though are the samples. In the very first A section before the guitars really kick in you hear an organ part from some spooky movie (Attack Of The Giant Leeches?), which we cut up carefully and arranged in that space - it really makes that part, and is now a big feature in the live performance. We also have a strong female presence admonishing us that One man isn't going to change everything - which might be a good way for us to think of John Kerry.
In the very intro we thought we'd be clever and add a man who says: I thought it was the end! when in fact everyone knows they just hit play and heard the first track of the record - how smarty! That man, btw, reappears later and says "Nasal Block" (Dne Eht Saw Ti Thguoht) leaving the B section I think?
I believe that intro was a little manufactured, I think Fete had started right away with the drums and bass, but i think I flew a few guitar lines earlier to add a little width to the event.

I Thought It Was The End!
The very end has a both the Major Dillon introduction, the high hat solo, and the distorted and delayed epic banjo section. We fought with this section quite a bit in the premixing phase.
The last (but possibly most important) thing to get added, during mastering, was the Invisible Ray sound. It's taken directly from the movie of the same title and is the sound the gun made while being fired - i think in this instant it's being fired at a mountain. It's actually being used in reverse for some reason.

Drop The Needle In The Groove

So this is the Irays blog - it will serve the purpose of telling even more than you'd ever want to know about PYGA, and after I'm all done with that we'll move on to bigger and better things, like our next record! But for now I need tea.