The Overnightscape Underground

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48:07 – Welcome to Tape Land! On each episode, I will be presenting the audio of a cassette tape from my collection. It’s a way to help motivate me to digitize more of my archives.

In 1987, at age 19, I set up a rudimentary recording studio in my parents’ basement. I created six “albums” of music as “Little Frankie Nora”: Die!, The Good War, Demolition Curve, Original Tin, How Do You Feel About the Job?, and Ending the Era with Calm Music. I compiled the best of these to create two official cassette releases: Welcome to the Weasel Village Mall and Bicentennial Cane, which had very limited distribution. These two have been released on the Onsug Archive.

However, the individual “albums” have never been released. So I’m starting with the sixth and last one – “Ending the Era with Calm Music”, which I remember as having a very unique sound. The main instruments I used were a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard and a small black-and-white TV.

The first 14 song titles are from a paragraph in a book I had at the time, though I can’t remember the title. “The Dharma Bums” comes to mind, but I don’t think that was it.

Also, at 45:37, there’s a 74 second clip from a TV show, including the phrase “some silly, some not” – solving a mystery I talked about on The Overnightscape 1349: The Nineteenth Adventure (12/20/16). However, I have no idea what TV show the quote is from… does anyone know what show it could be? “The Old Curiosity Shop” comes to mind, it sounds like some kind of educational show, but that’s not it – what we’re looking for has a character named Rodney.

Track list: Your Time, To This, Thing Man, You’re As, Out Of, Place In, A Photographer’s, Studio As, Joseph Was, In Pharaoh’s, Prison Bring, Your Family, Up To, Dayton And, God’s Ass, Fish-Car, Fuckin’ “L”, Bitch Caviar “N-5”, Green Monarch, Butterfly March, Winds in Moon, Madness Five, Alice and Drinking, Water “Kids”, Are Us Them, Darn Wilsons, Cincinnati Red, Tonight Black, Aggit Baa, Locked Glass Door, Mice Girder Spring Cartoon, Cartoon of the Gods, The Lockhorns, P.O., Sonic Drill, Sonic Drill II, Mystery of God, Dance of Spasms, Throatripper II, The Weather Whistle, Where is Albert?, Walking Along, Genesissy, Liberty 1985, Acirema Fo Setats, Detinu, Unum, Some Silly Some, Waiting, Right or Left.

License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Attribution: by Frank Edward Nora – more info at TheOvernightscape.com