Buffer (#128)

Source file found here. Originally broadcast on October 1st, 1998.

"Buffer" because the number 128 reminded me of old computer systems? An aural dumping ground, the shows built up around whatever got picked up, following patterns and relationships not discernible to the distant listener. Some pieces are wholly random and unrelated, lying clumsily against each other like discarded cutouts and leftovers. This could be some run-up-to-Halloween material resting awkwardly between editing experiments, random loops, and effects overloading. Tape manipulations, reversals, and forced-skipping records figure largely in this episode.

1. Water drips on piano keys
2. Pressure release valve
3. Mob scene, Haunted Village, 1952
4. Hot cats and wobbly bolero
5. Lecture and gunfire in drainpipe
6. Yule fawn
7. DO NOT CONCERN YOURSELF
8. Atari Teenage Blabbermouth
9. Jody is losing reality
10. Self-destroying suspicion
11. Windy city loop
12. Out-of-range 80s electro
13. Windchimes & PVC bass

TKDF Vampires (#114)

Source file here. Originally broadcast on June 25th, 1998.

Ah, vampires. They get a lot of attention, as ghouls go. Why did we never do a show about yeti or Frankenstein's monster? They don't generate the raw material in media that vampires do. Also, zombies.

Among the movies heard here are the dryly humorous Nadja, Tony Scott's chilly The Hunger, Polanski's goofball Fearless Vampire Killers, Abel Ferrara's academic and brutal The Addiction, and the ones everyone knows. The dialogue heavy movies like Nadja and The Addiction make the show somewhat philosophical and Nietzschean, while others variably add creepy dread, campy horror, and short spurts of bloody gore—or at least the sounds of it. All in all, a rather verbose, thinking-vampire's production.

1. Europe is a village
2. Aspects of determinism
3. How old am I?
4. I have lost a day
5. Like this, in one go
6. Why all these garlic flowers?
7. Vampire Rules
8. I'm not bleeding all over myself
9. They fall like flies, don't they
10. Demons suffer Hell
11. All these years running uphill
12. Face it Jim, she's a zombie
13. Why all these people dead?

Wax Snd Trk (#42)

Source to be found here. Originally broadcast on February 13, 1997.

This show features decorative and distracting sounds surrounding the audio from David Blair's feature-length film Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. Wax is a surreal allegory involving a beekeeper who skips across time and space to interact with Cain and Abel in the Garden of Eden, meet giant intelligent bees in the New Mexico desert, and become a high-tech weapons system in the 1991 Gulf War. It was the first motion picture to be available via HTTP in 1993.

I purchased a VHS copy of Wax from Blair after seeing a fragment of it in video studio at undergrad art school. Its unstuck-in-time story and the juxtaposition of disparate elements appealed to my new sense of Digital and The Internet, as well as fondness for the really strange. Using early non-linear editing, it exploits that technology's advantages, crafting archival, stock, and original video footage with early computer graphic animation into a disorienting but compelling visual epic.

Soundwise, Wax is simply narrated in the first person by Blair with ambient music and sound effects, so our audio contributions attempt to enhance it in the absence of the film's imagery. Mostly, they add another inscrutable layer, consisting of guitar scrapes, clangs, screeching hand-turned records, samples from Negativland's A Big 10-8 Place, and, finally, some good old drum-and-bass.

1. The first plutonium bomb
2. A message was waiting for me in my grandfather's diary
3. 'O' for the operator
4. The Tower of Babel
5. The language of Cain
6. Out of the dark machinery
7. I was Zoltan Abbasid
8. Priests and military planners
9. A machine large enough to scan an entire mourner
10. In the air over Basra, southern Iraq
11. We're genetic researchers
12. We've come for what's ours