Apocrypha — Live At The Chill Room, Ascension 1998

Warning: Do not listen while driving or operating heavy machinery. This music may chill you out. Also includes bad poetry recitation.

This was one of the last performances I took part in before my long hiatus from music (which began in late 1998, stretched through my time in grad school, and was finally ended after I arrived in South Korea in late 2001). The group was actually a kind of experimental live- ambient music outfit thrown together at the request of a DJ friend Mike — aka DJ Deko-ze– who was hosting a “party” (what most of us call a “rave”). He asked a few of the musicians and DJs he knew to collaborate and put something together for a live show. Two or three raves later, we actually got around to recording one of our performances. It wasn’t our best to date, but it also wasn’t our worst. I think that the particular show was at the party titled Ascension, but I can’t be sure.

We foolishly started the show early, and because of that, the apparently well-respect trance group “Union Jack” (who’d come over from Britian to play at the party) missed our show. I had no idea it was all so carefully planned out, so I guess we missed our big break to international ambient music stardom. I’m not too choked about that, frankly. But I do think the tracks came out nicely.

The personnel include: Phil Greer and Keenan Gauthier as DJs, Marie Vasquez (incidentally, my ex-wife) on vocals and percussion, and myself on saxophones, percussion, and occasionally exclaiming things that are supposed to sound profound and reciting one poem about John Cage. The live show was recorded on a digital multitrack machine and some of the sound effects that were not present in the live show were (apparently) mixed in afterward, by an acquaintance and fellow music-store employee of Keenan’s, whose name I do not believe I remembered for more than a week after I met the guy (though he did seem nice). I did not hear this album until sometime in 2003 or 2004, I believe. I received it as a single track and I did the track-splitting and naming of various tracks.

(Legal note: There are a massive number of samples throughout this. The technique involved was basically DJs mixing background tracks while live musicians improvised over top of them. I can’t even credit a lot of the tracks, but I do know that a majority of them are from Pete Namlook’s Silence I & II; the piano piece audible during track #4. is a John Cage piece titled “In A Landscape” or “A Landscape”, though I haven’t been able to find a recording of the piece since the last time I heard it, which was at that show. Track #1 also includes a section of Gavin Bryars’ spectacular The Sinking of the Titanic (something slyly referred to in the title of the track), and I believe that in Tracks 5 and 6, there are snippets from the famous Master Musicians of Jajouka album that everyone and his dog samples all the time. I believe that our usage of these samples constitutes fair use, especially since nobody’s made any money on this recording—this is the only format it’s ever been available in other than bootleg CD—but should any of the artists complain, I am willing to take the tracks down.) And by the way, trackl #7 is thus named because the samples sound so much like the Vangelis soundtrack to Bladerunner that it put me in a Philip K. Dick frame of mind… hence a reference to another great P.K.D. novel.

The performance was in a “Chill Out” room, so there is a lot of open space in the music. The pieces with the most interesting things going on, including the most interesting sax parts, are Tracks 2, 4 (but please excuse the awful poetry recitation), 5, 6, and 7. I think Track #6 is actually almost worthy of compilation somewhere humble.

Without further ado, feel free to download either the whole thing (a 68 megabyte mp3 file) or the individual tracks:

Track 1: loose lips
Track 2: je suis triste et seul ici (live remix: a little less triste, a little less seul)
Track 3: playing with angels
Track 4: in a landscape (for john cage)
Track 5: dervish abound
Track 6: thus sang solomon
Track 7: ubix
Track 8: to sleep, now