While it’s hard for me to believe, this year marks the 23rd anniversary of the start of Mystery Cabal and the first release, Coefficient of Friction’s Teaser EP. To honor the occasion, I’ve gone back to the original tape and remixed a new version. It will be showing up on the digital services soon.
Teaser has a special place in my heart, and I thought I’d take a few minutes and write a little about it.
Coefficient of Friction
Coefficient of Friction started life as an ensemble at the Lamont School of Music, University of Denver. In the fall of 1995, there were a few of us in the department who were not connecting with the music we were playing in the Jazz and Commercial Music ensembles. The jazz combos were of the repertoire style, and the commercial music combo was what we’d now call BG music. In Winter quarter of 1996, the director of JCM let us start a new ensemble to indulge our weirdness.
The ensemble was originally Scott Scholz, Kris Bennett, myself, and another musician who really wasn’t interested and eventually left the group. Scott and I were the main creative forces for the group. Scott and I met at Lamont in Fall of 1995. We immediately struck up a friendship. We exposed each other to a lot of new ideas. When I introduced him to Discordianism, he immediately recognized that he had sort of always been one. We were active Discordians, regularly printing and handing out Pope cards around town, publishing an absurdist Discordian journal called the Golden Apple, and generally spreading and enjoying chaos.
Coefficient of Friction was a natural outgrowth of our Discordian interests. Our first concert performance included game pieces, weird rock, noise, and a lot of other things that made the audience rather uncomfortable. After the show, we got a wonderful array of uncomfortable semi-compliments – “That was really… ummm… interesting” and the like. Given that we wanted to push the boundaries of what was happening in the JCM program, that was pretty much exactly the response we wanted.
After the first show, Scott and I posited a relationship between how hard you could push an audience and the resistance they would have to new music – a sort of dynamic coefficient of friction. We also posited a prevalence to the first and last things that happen in a set in shaping the impressions of an audience. If we started and ended with something they liked and recognized as musical, they would block out any of the discomfort they had at the weirdness in the middle.
Scott had written the main part of Green prior to COF, but we started playing the song with a long extended improvised section in the middle. Often, it was a noise section with Scott and I pushing the limits of extended techniques on voice and guitar. We ended that show with another very melodic song that featured Scott really singing – it was a nice R&B track. After this show, we got a ton of the “Wow! That was great. I really liked it this time” type of comments. Mission accomplished.
Coefficient of Friction was a breakthrough for me creatively. Scott was a prolific songwriter and composer, and he was fearless. I was at an early stage in my development, and I was very hesitant. From Scott, I learned that having fun and creating things mainly to make us laugh and have a good time eliminated all fear. The fear that perhaps I just wasn’t very creative disappeared when it became play. We wrote new material almost every week. Songs changed and evolved. No musical style was out of bounds, especially the stuff that we thought was really bad, or had a high potential for parody.
We went through a number of lineup changes, always with Scott, Kris, and me at the core. We eventually ended up with Brad Breeck playing drums and Allen Burke on bass.
For our next show, we were on a showcase with a bunch of other groups. We had a 20 minute set time, and we decided to do 20 songs in 20 minutes. To create the setlist, we went to the student cafeteria and made a list of names based largely on things we saw in the cafeteria – an flyer for a support group, taglines on products, pieces of overheard and misheard conversations. We went back to rehearsal and wrote songs to go with the names. The rest came together over the next few days. Fancy Catsup, Not Pepper, but Cat, Women with Disabilities, Stupid Art Student, and Auctioneer Executioner all came from that list.
Teaser EP
We had another show a few weeks after that one, and I had just bought a very early CD-R burner. We decided to do a quick recording of the songs. At that time, I had a workstudy job supervising the fledgling recording studio at Lamont. We had a Mackie 24/8 and one ADAT machine, plus a few pieces of modest outboard gear, and only a few microphones. The school had received funding to buy about half of what we needed that year, and we were basically trying to use the gear as much as possible while we waited for the following year to get the rest of the budget to round out the gear.
As a young beginning engineer, that was actually liberating. There was no easy path to getting good recordings, and we just had to experiment with what we had. I got to know the SM58, SM57, and the Equitek CAD100 really well since that was the extent of our mic selection.
Teaser was recorded live to ADAT during a 40 minute period of our normal rehearsal time. We did a few overdubs the next day – the guitar and vocals on Not Pepper, But Cat. In most ways, Teaser represents a log of some of the dumbest recording decisions of my career. Since I was playing live, we had to set signal levels, hit record, and go. No adjustments or real live-to-multi mixing. I pushed signal levels too much, bringing a practice common with cassette multitrack machines of pushing very close to clipping to get the best signal to noise performance. That was my first experience with digital clipping. The track allocation was also really silly. We had Drum OH in stereo, a close mic on SD, Bass DI, Guitar in stereo, and Vox and Keys in stereo on the same tracks. I had just put together the first iteration of my guitar rig, and I was really into stereo effects, including a lot of MIDI controller driven effects like auto-panners. I was too naive to know to record the guitar in mono, and then add the effects during mix, so we tracked me in stereo. The worst decision was the summing of the stereo keys and stereo vocal tracks. Scott sang through a digital effects unit at the time, and we just tracked the output of that the way you did on cassette four-track with no aux sends. It was really just a comedy of errors.
On the other hand, we were a well-rehearsed machine. Brad and Allen cut heavy grooves. It wasn’t perfect, but it was true to what we did as a band.
The mistakes during the session left us with few options during mixing. I did a barely serviceable mix, printed to DAT, and burned it to CD-R. It was the very first Mystery Cabal release, and a DIY prototype for the first round of releases.
The title was really Teaser EP, as the plan was that we would record a full length LP. We started sessions on that recording the following year. By that point, we had gone through another line up change, with Jon Powers playing drums. However, the band broke up, playing our final show at the Neon Renaissance festival in May 1998. Unfortunately, the tapes for those later sessions were lost following the breakup of the band.
For this re-release, I went back to the original ADAT, made a new transfer to Pro Tools, and brought all of the current generation of technology to try to clean up the recording. The limitations of the source material, especially the poor track allocation and the overall sound quality of the equipment meant I could only do so much, but the current release will at least serve the songwriting and performances a bit better than the original. The biggest improvement is in the Drum and Bass mix. Brad and Allen played the shit out of those songs, and you can really hear it now.
In many ways, COF was one of the most successful creative projects from that period of my life. Listening to the EP, we accomplished exactly what we set out to do – write really challenging, propositional, and frankly, weird music, and disguise it in popular music forms. We also had a hell of a good time doing it.
Revisiting this material has been so fun. There is a vitality to the music that I miss. While, I expect that few people will find this release as compelling as I do, I hope that at least a few of us who were around will enjoy a moment of nostalgia.
The Songs
At it’s core, Coefficient of Friction was always a bit of an in joke for the band at the expense of the audience – the sort of thing that super-creative 20 year olds do to entertain themselves. The stylistic variation was largely due to our voracious musical tastes and our desire to mock pretty much everything we heard. Scott and I were both active Discordians, so there was never any sort of coherent mission like the “Rock Against Rock” motives of Idiot Flesh. At the time, we were actively developing an artistic movement that Scott named Neon Renaissance. There were a lot of projects under the N.’.R.’. flag, and we eventually put on an international arts festival at the Bug Theater in Denver.
Green is a soliloquy of a teenage boy who believes his lack of success with the ladies is a result of his over-consumption of a mysterious, green, caffeine-rich substance which has shrunken his genitalia. This is likely the the first and only rock song of someone singing about their shrunken junk.
Fancy Catsup explores an almost-but-not-quite exotic exploration of food and sex magick.
Auctioneer Executioner was a performance piece – we actually would auction something off from the stage. It made its way on the album as a slight pallet cleanser.
Not Pepper But Cat is about the courtship of one inflatable sheep sex doll by another. The title and subject were a bit of synchronicity. The title was chosen at random by asking four people to say the first word that came to mind. When I later mentioned the title to my roommate, she laughed and told me that the adult store where she worked had two inflatable sheep sex toys on display, one white and one black and white. They had named the white one Cat after one of the managers, and the other Pepper. After that, there really was not choice but to make the song about them.
Women with Disabilities explores the psycho-sexual dynamics of a complex relationship.
My Soul is Black – Part beat poem, part death metal tune.
Stupid Art Student is the story of a well-supported art student who just can’t seem to get ahead.
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