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Excerpt from "Son of Ganglia": 1973
Soft to Loud (Ogg Vorbis)
Soft to Loud (MP3)
Son of Ganglia is a 40 minute album consisting of short audio sketches, recorded and produced by me in 1973 (I was 16) on my Radio Shack 8-track cartridge stereo tape recorder using two Radio Shack microphones, in a garage attic in Watseka Illinois. Participants were: me, Steve Courtright, Marty Buswell (the core of the GSPS), with Bruce Hustedt and Larry Duling. For this piece, we begin softly, slowly increase in volume until we were making as much noise as we possibly could with whatever was at hand, then taper off to near silence again. At 2:22 you can just hear me call out "gradually get quiet, gradually get quiet! (That's me doing the introductory announcement too.) It's perhaps interesting to note that at the time we recorded this we hadn't heard anything remotely like it on record; had never heard of Faust, Henry Cow, "free improvisation", etc...it just seemed a natural and fun thing to do!
Guitar Solo: 1980
BD-guitar solo 1980 (Ogg Vorbis)
BD-guitar solo 1980 (MP3)
Recorded "live" to cassette in my apartment in Denver Colorado in 1980. Using two electric guitars one of which had an additional pickup above the first fret, plugged into a small Teac mixer which was in turn connected to a stereo reel to reel tape recorder and one of my home made "noise boxes" I'd built out of the innards of a transistor radio (known as "circuit bending" today.) The inputs and outputs of everything were fed back into their inputs via the little mixer, resulting in the interactive feedback. At times I had the guitars leaning against the tape reels, which bowed the strings as well causing the tape to stick and wobble. One of the guitars had a telephone mouthpiece microphone attached to it, that's why you can sometimes hear the acoustic sound in the room and noises coming through the open window. The more sharp-eared among you may recognise a few sounds here; I have used short snippets from this tape on a few songs over the years, most noticeably on The Skull Mailbox and Other Horrors. Now you can enjoy the whole thing, if so inclined!
Warheads 4-track version: 1981
Warheads - Bob and Mike 4-track 1981 (FLAC)
Warheads - Bob and Mike 4-track 1981 (Ogg Vorbis)
Warheads - Bob and Mike 4-track 1981 (mp3)
Back in the early '80's, just about the time we finished recording the first Thinking Plague album, Mike Johnson and I worked out a song called "Warheads" which we eventually recorded a few years later and finally released on the Moonsongs album in 1987. Many years before that album was recorded however, I'm going to guess 1980 or 81, Mike and I did this 4-track version of the song, just the two of us playing and singing, recorded in our friend Geoff Landers' attic on a Teac 3340 tape recorder with a pair of Radio Shack microphones, mixed to cassette. It has a crazy quality which I really like, in contrast to the more toned-down album version. (Mike Johnson: guitars, glasses, voice. Bob Drake: drums, bass, guitar, voice, glasses, engineering.)
Whither's Old-Time Town Square Cabaret Orchestra: 1986
Whither's Old-Time Town Square Cabaret Orchestra
(complete album on SoundCloud)
An album of instrumental music by Eric Moon on the keyboards, and me on the bass and drums. I sing once and play a touch of guitar too. This all started in 1984 because I was doing the sound effects for a Halloween haunted house, and they needed some music for "Lucifer's Lounge". I asked Eric to help me make some appropriately hellish lounge music, and I'll never forget his response: "Yes, but only if you use such a bad bass tone you can't tell what note you're playing". So we did three or four "jazz" pieces, (all of which are included on the album) and we had lots of fun so we kept doing stupid little tunes until we had enough for an album; an album which still amuses me to no end and which I think no one but me and Eric and Susanne Lewis and my mother and Mike Kazaleh have ever heard. And now YOU?
The Lost Waltz: 1996
The Lost Waltz (mp3)
I started recording this piece which was intended for the noisy country/cajun medley of Medallion Animal Carpet, but when I was putting the album together this piece was nowhere to be found. Years later I
re-discovered it on a broken, wrinkled DAT tape and was just able to play it one last time and get it saved on a hard disk, and now here it is for your listening joy. (BD: bass, drums, guitars.)
One Dyin' and a Buryin': 1997
One Dyin' and a Buryin' (mp3)
Cover version of one of my fave tunes by the great Roger Miller. In 1997 after I'd finished recording Medallion Animal Carpet and was still in the same noisy country-ish mood, I did this one just for fun. Posted with kind permission of Mary Miller. (BD: all instruments and vocals.)
The Unused
Announcements: 2002
When I started recording what eventually became the album 13 Songs and a Thing, the original title was Some Recordings of Pieces of Music with Instruments and Voices on Them. One of my early ideas for the album was to put several stupid little announcements here and there between songs. I recorded four of these announcements but as the album took shape I decided not to use them. I still think they're pretty funny, so here they are for your listening joy, in MP3 format.
Announcement 1 (music: BD, bass. Ron Miles: trumpet. Eric Moon: keyboards. Mark Fuller: drums.)
Announcement 2 (music: BD)
Announcement 3 (music: BD bass, drums. Eric Moon: keyboard.)
Announcement 4 (music: BD: bass, drums and violin. Eric Moon: keyboards.)
Yes indeed I had planned to include a so-called "bonus track" on the album: Peter Blegvad and I doing one of his songs. We did record the tune but it didn't quite turn out as we liked and I may yet dig out those files and see what I can do. This is the announcement which would have introduced said piece.
Pleasant Valley: 2002
Pleasant Valley (MP3)
Might have been intended for 13 Songs and a Thing but didn't quite fit in. The lyrics were taken almost verbatim from a book summarizing, in a few sentences each, all of HP Lovecraft's published stories. I thought each summary
told an amusing, ghastly little tale in itself. This one was the summary of In the Vault: "It's the story of Mr Smith, an undertaker who was not particularly conscientious as to the manner in which he carried out the professional duties of his trade. But he came to have sound reason for contrition the night he was trapped in the receiving room of the Pleasant Valley Cemetery." (BD: bass, drums, voice.)
Someday: 2003
Someday (Ogg Vorbis)
Someday (MP3)
The piano comes from a cassette of me improvising some chords, recorded in the mid 1980's in Denver. In 2003 I added the drums, bass, guitars, voice, and a barely audible amateurish performance of "Some Enchanted Evening" found on an unlabeled cassette. It never quite worked out and was never finished, but I sortof like it anyway, and really like that bass solo! (BD: piano, drums, bass, guitars, voice.)
Untitled banjo song: 2005
Untitled banjo song (FLAC)
Untitled banjo song (Ogg Vorbis)
Untitled banjo song (MP3)
This was almost certainly recorded in 2005 towards the end of the Shunned Country era. I wasn't happy with it at the time for some reason and left it off the album, but it seems OK to me now. If you are familiar with The Shunned Country you'll recognise the theme at the very end of the tune, which I also used at the end of "The Cloud". (BD: banjo, drums, bass, violin.)
The Harvest: 2005
The Harvest (Ogg Vorbis)
The Harvest (MP3)
In late 2005 after I'd finished recording The Shunned Country, which consists of 52 extremely short, extremely tightly arranged songs, I HAD to do something as far as possible from that so I figured a 10 minute piece using one note was the way to go. Can't remember some of the things I used as instruments here, but recall doing things like cutting lengths of copper pipe and rubber hose to the right length so they'd produce that desired note when blown through, and bowing pieces of wire and anything else that would produce (more or less) that one note. When I started mixing the finished piece, I kept noticing a strange, high-pitched tone floating in the air, coming seemingly from the aether; it turned out to be the distant sound of a big harvesting machine of some sort in a field about a kilometer away, mutated into a ghostly harmonic by distance and reflections off the hills. It was just what the piece needed so I put a pair of mics out the window and mixed it in. (BD: organ, drums, bass, voice, harmonica, violin, lots of other things I don't remember now.)
BD's Cabinet of Curiosities Orchestra Live: 2008
Click here for songs, photos and info.
Playing some of my tunes with a huge group, most of whom didn't know the songs!
BD's Cabinet of Curiosities Live: 2008
Click here for the list.
From our show at Orion Studios in Baltimore Maryland, which was recorded on multitrack.
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