Haven’t posted anything in a while…so I figured I’m due.
A long time ago (close to 10 years at this point), I was part of an experimental band in Minneapolis called Mickey Mao. We had our roots in some of the work I used to do for the Minnesota Contemporary Ensemble (renamed the Intergalatic Contempory Ensemble and basically defunct since 2001 or so), and it was a lot of fun.
The basic idea behind it to combine bass (me) and drums with a “modified” sax and computer, and see where it went. By “modified”, I mean my friend Bob Schrepel drilled a hole in his mouthpiece, mounted a small microphone and ran it through a Boss guitar pedal rig; the computer aspect of it was my friend Jason Swain, who would rip samples (found primarily by scouring old record stores for some of the worst things ever printed to vinyl and by recording audio from the UHF channels, AM and shortwave radio) and then mix them live using Sound Forge 3 (ah, those were the days!) in place of lead vocals.
Considering we started this in 1997 or so, I’m kind of feeling like we were some sort of visionaries—today it’s pretty common to be using a computer live for performance, but back then it was pretty rare and not very well done.
We only did two gigs (a show at the Walker Art Center under the moniker of the Minnesota Contemporary Ensemble, where we did a complete deconstruction of When Elephants Fly from Dumbo and earned some pretty strong anger from the staff at the Walker, and a full-on show at the Weisman Art Museum with the now-defunct Own), but we had a shit-ton of fun doing it.
Right now I’m considering the idea of starting up another side-side music project (as opposed to my band Morning Society), where I can go play my fretless and do things that would never pass muster in front of a live audience…so I went back and ripped the original live demo Mickey Mao did. After some noise reduction and a very, very quick mastering, I present to you the originals from Mickey Mao:
(Yes, the lowercase is intentional.)
Bear in mind that these are all live recordings (in our makeshift studio), and have been remastered off a cassette tape that has had a lot of playings; you’ll definitely hear it in this land is your land (tape cuts out a little near the beginning).
I kind of wish we were still doing what we’re doing but as with any project, people tend to evolve and we basically stopped playing by 2001. Still, I think it’s pretty cool stuff and figured it needs a listen. =)