A Teenaged Caural on Acid

RELEASING EVERYWHERE TODAY:

My First Ever Recordings as Caural

Less a radical departure from my most recent releases than the true precursor to them all, these works were recorded completely live to cassette by a sixteen year-old me using a borrowed drum machine: a Yamaha RX7. During acid trips that summer on Chicago's lakeshore, each song premiered on a boombox to only a handful of friends.

Those teenage journeys of hallucination & sound have now been mastered in celebration of their thirtieth anniversary, bringing the summer of 1994 to speakers everywhere.

Boy

Medusa’s and early ‘90s Chicago radio - can’t forget the “Killer Bee - B96” and Z95! - opened me up to the world of House & Techno just before raving became a thing. I was a teenager in love with music, so I would tape DJ mixes on the weekends, hypnotized by the sounds and samples, and lost in their evolving patterns.

Making all of these recordings is a bit of a haze but this is definitely the last tune I committed to tape before returning the RX7 to my friend Stuart. I feel like I really dialed in the machine on this one, especially the bizarre rising bloops that always sounded like “boy” to me.

This song was preserved as is with no edits.

White Blotter

My friends and I used to do drum circles on the lakeshore, mostly at night. I had bought this enormous conga I didn’t quite know how to play, but it always complimented the timbre of their djembes with this fantastic, deep bass tone. I think I was trying to channel that kind of improvisational spirit with this song: the programmed cymbal flanges imitate waves, and of course there’s the obvious call and response percussion patterns building over time.

The second trip I ever took was on super clean white blotter (and thus the name of this song). I still remember the way I felt listening to this song on it, and how my preemptive experiments with the disintegration of sound - infinitely extending the decay of what were normally short accents - truly began to “look” like the visuals that trip gave me.

The original version of White Blotter - like the full section I omitted from “Milk Isn’t Helping Me Come Down” - similarly went into a double time 4/4 techno thing. Listening back thirty years later, including it was a hard no for me.

Paging My Daymare Dealer

I am not certain, but I think this is the first thing I programmed on this drum machine. I recorded over some rap cassingle to get it on tape, and I set the recording level to much louder sections that had corny bell sounds and an incredibly unfortunate whistle sample. Ultimately, I think that’s what gives this one an even more lo-fi feel: the quieter (hissier) parts are the ones that made the cut.

I premiered this one selling a New Trier student a bag of weed laced with PCP. I didn’t lace it myself: I willingly bought it over and over again from a dealer I would page and meet in the parking lot of a Jewel. It was the early nineties and we all just thought it was strong weed; it wasn’t. And instead of being relaxed and blissed out, you’d feel like a flesh robot with a metal cube banging inside of your chest. Paranoia was off the charts and so was a general feeling of unease, yet somehow I started to fall in love with the combination as it gave me a secret sense of power - and super bloodshot eyes I was once called out for in choir class. When I said it was allergies, no one believed me.

So, I dedicate this one to that dealer. I can also probably trace the source of my anxiety to that weed. Oops.

Milk Isn’t Helping Me Come Down

This song - the second I made on the RX7 - is still my favorite, and perhaps the most meaningful.

My friend Joe had this magical cassette. There was a moment where a kink in the tape would transition to the recording on its other side: Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, except, you know, backwards. And so, we’d get really high and drive through the north shore’s ravines to jazz in reverse, eventually getting spit out on the other side to Grateful Dead’s “Unbroken Chain”. I think those drives made me fall in love with reversed music - but definitely not Grateful Dead.

In its original form, this track is fifteen minutes long. I have never made something so minimal and rough, and I blame the drugs for stretching out my sense of time and space. I also wanted to do something Detroit-ish (the snares on Paging My Daymare Dealer were directly influenced from Plastikman). It was also the first time I tried to approximate a sample, but that entire section is omitted from this master, along with a refrain built from a sped up vocal sample and bell tree that I won’t subject anyone to anymore.

I think this is also the first tape I brought out for a trip with friends. At the time, I was calling this Red Sunshine after the first type of acid I ever tried. I bought it from a butcher at a short-lived grocery store I worked at called Fresh Fields, and it was amazing. For those that know my music, you’ll recognize the title…

The new title of this edit comes from a very real (and embarrassing) story. It was fall of 1994, and one of the last times I took LSD (I moved on to mushrooms and away from what was often a scary mixture of rat poison and speed). I dropped a dose in the morning with friends but, a couple of hours later, it just wasn’t hitting the way I wanted to. So I took another. That day, I am pretty sure we listened to “Boy” on a boombox. Anyway, in the late afternoon, I was absolutely not coming down, and I remember watching as speckles on bathroom tiles at the downtown Evanston Burger King rose and fell like tiny insects.

In just a couple of hours’ time, I was scheduled to perform in Yamo, my high school’s student written and directed comedy revue. There was music, dance, you know - the whole nine. A friend of mine gave me A Tribe Called Quest’s first tape for my Walkman to calm me down, but it didn’t solve the problem of me tripping balls. And so another friend - a guy in stage crew named Sam - told me that milk should counteract the acid, so I picked up a small carton at the corner store. I guess it makes sense that a base would even out an acid if you’re an absolute idiot, or just a sixteen year old on enough drugs to be enthralled by a Burger King bathroom.

Anyhow, of course it didn’t work, and the sponge-painted set was melting as I did my thing on stage. Except everything went great with that performance. It went so well, in fact, that when I got off the stage after singing Meatloaf’s “Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are” in a fat suit and wig, the head of the theater program grabbed me by the shoulders and told me it was the best I had ever done.

So, you know, there’s that.