"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.