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Liner
notes for (scream):
Curt Golden
Misplaced Faith 5:00
Patience 6:37
Venus In Furs* 6:55
Reclamation 6:25
No Shadows 4:43
(scream) 8:59
all songs written by Curt Golden, except *Venus In Furs by Lou Reed
all compositions BMI
Musicians: Curt Golden; guitars, bass, drum programming and vocals
Basic tracks recorded by Curt Golden, in my Pinehurst Avenue apartment, NYC,
late 1994 to July 1997.
Mixing and additional recording: Reinaldo Perez and Curt Golden, in Reni's West
Palm Beach apartment/recording studio, July 6-13, 1997.
Mastering: Steve Turnidge, for Ars Divina, Seattle, September 2-7, 2001
if you suspect you are in this band, please contact tmaster music
(message on cover of Temporary
Masters demo tapes circulated around NYC)
The story:
This six-song EP was recorded between 1994-97, in my apartment in New York
City, much to the dismay of my neighbors. It began as a simple archiving
exercise. Two of the pieces, Reclamation
and No Shadows, had been in the
repertoire of a smoking, if short-lived, band Victor McSurely and I had, called
Desperate Measures. After the band broke up, I didn't want to lose track of the
material. I pulled a lot of already obsolete recording equipment out of
mothballs and set up in my living room. I worked without any sense of urgency,
evenings and weekends. There was no deadline. As much as anything else, it was
a useful project to keep me engaged and usefully occupied through a rather
fallow period of my life.
With the recording equipment permanently set up, I started discovering other
things I could try. Throughout my career I have had songs from the first Velvet
Underground album in the repertoire of any band I played with. Venus In Furs was a piece I had been contemplating for a long time, so I
thought I'd give it a go. Once the process was under way, new material started
appearing. A chance late-night encounter with the amazing array of telephone
psychic ads that appear on NY cable TV, combined with my impressions from
hanging out in New Mexico with a number of one from column A and two from
column B spiritual folk, spawned Misplaced Faith. The appearance of a single lyric, "if you want to
break my heart you can kiss my ass", required me to build a song around
it; Patience. The basic guitar lick for
(scream) appeared early on, and just
sat there going nowhere until I started playing fun with prepositions for
possible lyrics. What emerged from this process was more me than anything I had
previously unleashed. The aim of the project moved from archiving to demoing. I
wondered if there was really a band that might play this material, so I started
to do one-off direct to cassette mixes of whatever material was presentable at
any given moment. Temporary Masters, I called them, and I gave them to anyone
who would listen.
This was strictly low-tech and bootstraps. The basic tracks were recorded
starting with an Alesis HR16 direct and then everything else miked with my good
ol' reliable SM58, into an ancient workhorse 4-track Teac 3440 reel-to-reel. I
would program and record the drum tracks, and then record, bounce, re-record
and overdub all other parts until I had something that sounded to me as much
like a live rock and roll band as possible. Parts were generally recorded in
single, uninterrupted takes, since punching in required that I operate the Teac
remote control with my toes. If a change in form, tempo or arrangement became
necessary, this meant going back and starting over from scratch. Nothing was
salvageable, combined tracks could never be uncombined and synching a new drum
part to existing recorded material was not possible. This was before
computerized recording software had become ubiquitous. I went back and started
from scratch many times. It rarely seemed to bother me. All of the pieces were
in a constant state of revision right up until the final mix. In July 1997, as
Reni and I drove nonstop for 24 hours from New York City down to his
apartment/recording studio in West Palm Beach, I was still composing the lyrics
to (scream), including some lyrics for
the chorus which I eventually abandoned because I just couldnt deliver them
with authenticity. We had scheduled a week of necessary overdubs, mixing and
mastering, so I brought all of my recording and music equipment with me. The
complexity of layering and overdubs that Reclamation required were such that we ended up abandoning my basic
tracks altogether, two days before I was scheduled to depart, and started over.
Didn't sleep much that week. When we were done, I had the best we could have
hoped for. The music was right, and intact. It was far from releasable, but
more than adequate as the demo it was intended to be.
Some time after I had pulled up roots and moved to Seattle, a new version of
(scream) arrived from Reinaldo. In the intervening several years there had been
quite a leap in the generally available music software, and Reni had taken it
upon himself to remaster and re-EQ it. The overall quality was vastly improved.
Hmmm, I thought. More time passed. Enter Steve Turnidge. Aural resuscitation
was his thing. He was proposing a project to clean up some of the early League
recordings, and we got to talking about this little side project of mine. Six
days later, all six songs were not only cleaned up and remastered, but MP3s
were posted on his website. Suddenly I started getting responses. My pals Peter
Dervin and Dawg up at KSER latched onto it and put it in rotation. And then,
Krimson News Radio was born. internet radio, with an audience predisposed to
give me a listen. For the first time I got the question: where can I get this?
So, if you suspect you are in this band...
Curt Golden, July 2002
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