Music | Performance | Sound
Lovely Little Girls is the avant-rock band that I front in collaboration with bassist/guitarist Alex Perkolup. Started as a performance piece in 2001, the project has evolved into a full band that uses theater and performance as its foundation. Using my paintings as a starting point, I write lyrics about sex, food, humiliation and abject undignified death by using a cut-and-paste approach. Words are meticulously arranged from cookbooks, encyclopedias, pulp novels and industry handbooks. Alex and I then write linear-suites around these lyrics where a line like "can't taste comfortably plump, brutish handsome belly up, bulge bodied still damp, help upright by sweaty hands" becomes a convoluted chant sung to an absurd and twisting melody. Inspired by artists such as Fred Frith, Magma, Arrigo Barnabe, The Residents and Captain Beefheart, we strive to make the avant-garde accessible. Our music can be dowloaded for free at Bandcamp and Free Music Archive.     click on images for audio
Performance has always been a large part of the group- from staging large absurdist spectacles to writing pieces based on a theatrical playing. On stage I attempt to channel the over-confident histrionic idiots and humiliated sad sacks featured in my paintings and lyrics. I accentuate grotesque body gestures and schizophrenic mood shifts.
Ritualistic School of Errors is a project started while I was an undergrad at SAIC, making the most of my access to sound studios and equipment, constructing an absurdist soundscape- taking children's Halloween records, early musique-concrete, the Three Stooges and the writing of Louis Ferdinand Celine as inspiration. It was self-released as a CD-R in 1999 and later reissued by Resipiscent in 2006 with a booklet of illustrations and a DVD of performances and films. The pieces were constructed by pulling apart recordings I had made of little performances of bashing around on garbage and vocal histrionics that were comprised of a lot of choking and strangulation. The events were isolated and made into long loops on an 8-track ADAT. Additional loops were layered over the main loops and compositional decisions were usually made by erasing various parts of a loop to create a structure that was chaotic but still had some sort of form and rhythm. Chance played a large part in the process. I continued the project with performances and photo shoots, staging Dada-ist vaudeville events that used sound to illustrate or accentuate gesture and motion. All of these performances were failures as I didn't have the resources to realize my concepts...but 'failure' was always a large part of the project.
I started work on a Sweat Stained Fancy Heaps for First-Rate Ladies when I finally obtained a decent computer. I had amassed a large collection of sounds in the seven year interim and immediately started to work. I decided to continue where the first CD left off: creating soundscapes of perverse and ridiculous events without resorting to too much computer trickery or sound processing. I had gained a bit of experience in composition through being in a band, so I was excited to expand on that aspect as well as introducing more musical moments in the melee. Sounds include prepared piano, cranberry sauce, faux-operatic soprano, wheezing accordions, hammered pipe organs, flamenco guitars and the usual throat gurgling and mangling. The CD was released in 2009 on Resipiscent.
Fatty Jubbo is a character and pseudonym I adopt when doing readings and radio. The character is highly excitable, dismissive and slightly unstable- a grotesque amalgamation of most of the people I know. Fatty Jubbo has a podcast on WFMU where he showcases a collage of odd music- children's records, no-wave, field recordings, noise, metal, religious rantings, sound poetry, 20th century classical, et al. The show usually begins with a monologue in the form of an audio love letter to the listener that is at once backhandedly insulting, pompous, pandering and self-deprecating. Joe Frank and Chris Morris are big inspirations. I occasionally perform these monologues in live settings.
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