Zoon's
(Dirge): '89-'91(?). Recorded at Ave. F house, Duval house and Kirkwood
house.
Zoon
was my cat. Actually she was only a kitten brought to me by some friends who
lived in the country. Their Doberman had already killed her mother and siblings
when they got to her. I had to feed her with an eyedropper for the first week
or so. Zoon (pronounced zoôn) means 'animal' in Greek. The piano part
came to me while riding my motorcycle home from a music class. It was fall.
A day or two later I was working on it when my neighbor came by to tell me
she'd found Zoon (who had been missing) dead. Apparently she had managed to
knock over an ice chest with herself inside, so this became her funeral dirge.
All
instruments by Jet Brown.
About The Studio:
I
always referred to it as Doma Studio because 'doma' means 'home' in Russian.
It consisted of, in its final configuration, an Ampex A440 ½"
4 track (c. 1972), 2 Ampex 351 ¼" 2 track decks (c. 1955 but with
solid state amplifiers), a Tascam 6 in/ 4 out mixer that I had rigged for
stereo effects, an ART reverb/effects unit, an Akai sampler, Gibson Les Paul
electric and Martin acoustic guitars, Fender bass and Sequential Circuits
Prophet 5 synthesizer. At various times it also included a Teac ¼"
4 track, a Tascam cassette 4 track and a Moog synthesizer. The rhythm composers
('drum machines') were Rolands. The piano track for Zoon's was recorded with
the cassette 4 track in a practice room at school. I believe that Works on
Paper was partially recorded on the Teac ¼" 4 track.
When
we dubbed the master tapes to CD we didn't have the idiosyncratic and temperamental
dbx noise reduction unit that all this stuff had been recorded with(actually,
we had it but, typically, it refused to function) so we dubbed without noise
reduction. Thus there is more noise on these tracks than there should be.
The fact that all this stuff was recorded using the ping-pong multitrack technique
accounts for other noise and density issues. The studio was recently given
away after spending almost 7 years in a friend's shed.