It was that terrifying time, the early '80s, and as perms wore off and gave way to incipient mullets, four young men in Ann Arbor, Michigan - who suspiciously had never been seen together, and who bore a quite uncanny resemblance to one another - assembled to lay down some tracks.

Having narrowly averted injury due to a misunderstanding of the lingo (a train that had been misrouted down their newly laid tracks destroyed their dorm), the fab four (hmm . . . might that be a band name?) regrouped: on rhythm guitar and vocals, Gnarly "Tweeze" Hamster; on lead guitar, "Thumbs" Boxton-Glover; on bass, Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Film; and on drums, Soylent B. Dedley. Taking cues from their Svengali-like leader, Noncom Posmentis, a series of highly compromised audio disasters was surreptitiously recorded while sneaking into laundry rooms, hiding beneath beds, and lurking inside janitor supply closets so as not to be heard. Utilizing the finest in felt-based recording technology, as well as a unique foot-treadle-driven dual tapedeck studio set-up, the four men gave painful, bloody, and disgusting birth to a quite unpromising litter of stunted runtlings. (Had anyone but known of this event, the annals of biology would have received a thorough reaming.)

Utilizing a cheapo microphone probably remaindered at a Radio Shack, Posmentis single-handedly set back the art of recording by several decades. Two home tapedecks that Sears-Roebuck would have been ashamed to sell were run through My First Stereo Speakers. Multiple tracks were achieved by playing back a previously recorded track via one deck through MFSS and singing or playing the new part on top, with the whole thing being recorded by the other deck. Everything was a first take, generally done in an effort not to be overheard by any other life forms, lest lawyers familiar with various war crimes rulings take interest.*

Some twenty years later, due to a malfunctioning probationary ankle bracelet and an orderly who'd carelessly left his computer turned on, Posmentis managed to further mess up these recordings, randomly adding echo, reverb, pitch alteration, and noise reduction (the last of which should have been increased quite dramatically), resulting in the atrocities against the art of recorded sound you now are about to listen to. The wiser listener will simply refuse to click this link. When asked to explain what it was he was trying to achieve with these recordings, Posmentis expostulated: "I like jello. We had jello today. Do you like jello."

* The following is from a deposition given by Posmentis in an utterly unrelated matter. His attorneys successfully carried a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity as a result of this testimony: "This song came about through a sort of formal challenge I set myself. First, I came up with a rather unlikely chord sequence - I may have used some randomizing device to do so. Then my goal was to write a melody that made the chords make sense together. I decided to do something different with the vocal harmony - so I basically turned the first melody line upside down for the harmony. If the main melody went up a whole step, the harmony went down a whole step, and so on. The lyrics come from a sign greeting people as they enter a middle/working-class suburb, West Allis, Wisconsin, which was next door to the suburb I grew up in. The sign read CITY OF HOMES AND INDUSTRY. I changed it a little, and did this sort of suburban/industrial thing. I think the idea of first abstracting the familiar, then personalizing the abstract, was stolen from David Byrne or somebody (before he didn’t write the Book of Love)."

If you like this, try Monkey Typing Pool’s full-length debut, Flung, or their singles compilation, Wish in the Other: Piling Up Seconds.

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