Random Encounters
October 23rd, 2006 @ 8:36 pm by TimHere’s another album loaded with crap. I present to you Random Encounters. Once again released in 1999. Once again it’s a mix of songs recorded long before they made it to this CD and others recorded minutes before the CD was burned.
Opening Act is worth listening too once, if for nothing else than for the laugh. I was always impressed with myself after we recorded The Bells. A step above our usual drivel.
Dear Evander introduces a recurring topic in our strange brand of humor. Mike Tyson. Most if not all of the Mike Tyson bits are audio recordings. I’m not quite sure how many made it to CD, though Track 13 certainly is another appearance of good ole’ Mike.
Circus Lupus is perhaps one of our finest moments. Joe played the original guitar on Circus Lupus and Mike came up with a fantastic set of lyrics for it. I think name Circus Lupus was originally from an SCTV sketch. Track 6 is somewhat of an intro - the two tracks work well together. On a side note, Mike originally recorded a cover of One Way or Another to the music.
Our original 4-track recorder broke at some point. There was this TV repair shop in Salisbury that was owned by some Korean guy who was apparently and electrical engineer before he came to the US. Such is life. Anyway, Dad was always taking our broken TV’s and electronics to this guy to fix, and he always did a great job. When the 4-track broke, it naturally got sent over. When we got it back, we found this on the tape in the machine, named Korea in an homage to its creator.
Another recurring theme you might notice in these albums that we are putting up is the obsession with word “Bear”. Bear for some reason became my Cave of Trouble pseudonym. Mike would always create the track listings for CD’s we were putting together. Often times, there would be 2 or 3 songs that I had written that Mike never put any lyrics to, so they remained nameless. When it came time to name them, they usually got the word “Bear” in the title. Now you know.
Potogold was recorded when we first got our Sound Blaster card for our 386 Wang. This is old school - we were one of the first people I knew who had a sound card for our computer and this was the result. I think the background music is from the NES game Deadly Towers. The other thing that sticks out in my mind from that sound card was playing Might and Magic 3 and listening to the music.
That finally leads us to the last track worth mentioning, M.T.T.S.. M.T.T.S. stands for Mission To The Sphinx. I’ll let Mike explain that some time - there was a whole mythology built up around it.
Mike: Legend has it that the Egyptian Sphinx has a mysterious chamber that holds information concerning a secret origin of the universe. If a living mortal were to learn this information, they could control, even destory, the world. I approached a colleague about the matter and we decided to launch a self-funded mission called Mission to the Sphinx with the goal of breaking into the Sphinx, retrieving and destroying its contents so as to prevent these most awesome riddles from falling into the wrong hands. If the mission was a success, we were both fairly certain that someone would commision a company to make action figures of us. At the time when our action figures were made, we’d end the mission, even if we hadn’t yet managed to break into the Sphinx.
Part of the mission involved holding raffles on public access television and taking 50-odd lucky winners with us on our adventure of death, mayhem and destruction. These 50 winners would be our crack Sphinx break-in-team. Of course, we had lots of enemies such as Jungle-Worm and Cortez, the Man of Gold, who prevented the mission from ever getting off the ground. In addition these mortal foes, my colleague and I were both pretty busy at the time. I for example was watching Godzilla movies and he was very busy drinking and getting into fights.
Of the many of things that I’d yet like to do, officially launching the Mission to the Sphinx is still pretty high on the list.
Anyway, M.T.T.S. is a song that was way to ambitious for us but we did it anyway. We shouldn’t have in retrospect. It’s also one of the few songs that have live drums and one of only a handful that featured the great Abebe Gedamu on the throne.
This isn’t reverse psychology or anything (what a dumb term), but I really wouldn’t recommend listening to the last 3 tracks.
- Opening Act - The Verve
- Entrance Theme
- The Bells
- Dear Evander
- Italian Dan
- Our Reply from Comedy Central
- Circus Lupus (Circus of Wolves)
- Chris is Enamored With His Own Shit
- Bear’s Log Cabin / Track 1
- Day@work
- Song of the Dark Druid
- Korea
- Mike Tyson - Straight from the River Styx
- Samus
- Bear Bought a Shotgun
- Hobbit Public Radio
- Lester - On the Job
- Slowbear
- Potogold
- Tommy’s New Year
- Never Gonna Eat
- Mixmasta Blax: Euro Club Hits, Vol. 1
- Peesock
- The Police (NPR Sessions)
- Music Inspired by The Sun (Parallel or 90 Degrees)
- Big Bear Blues
- Ultima
- One Way or Another
- M.T.T.S.
- International Swank
- 3000 lbs.
- Yam Pirate
- Slurp 2
- I Saw Shub at a Phillies’ Game
- Yellosub
Posted in Songs
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October 23rd, 2006 @ 9:33 pm
“Dear Evander” — as it did the first time I ever heard it, brought tears to my eyes because I laugh so hard. I have no idea why I find it so damn funny, but it works for me.
October 24th, 2006 @ 12:35 am
Potogold was indeed Deadly Towers music.
I’m looking forward to hearing the MTTS story again.
October 24th, 2006 @ 8:44 am
Well, that should be something Mike can whip together quickly if he doesn’t draw it out and make it needlessly complex. Send him an email to do a sloppy, quick write up of it.
October 24th, 2006 @ 6:19 pm
Dick - I put some info up about MTTS in the body of the post.
October 24th, 2006 @ 9:08 pm
I’d think the toughest part of M.T.T.S. would be weeding out that rogue element in every Sci-fi channel made for TV movie that’s tagging along not to destroy the secrets contained there-in but to coopt the mission in a bid to rule or destroy the world.
Also: “Jungle-worm” is a cool name for a monster. Don’t be suprised if you encounter one on an RPG adventure in the near future.
Also: Strangely at this point in my life I’ve somehow heard The Police NPR sessions so many times I feel like the third Police officer sitting silently in the background.
Most of these songs have very apt titles. The River Styx was my favorite Tyson one, and it’s exactly how I would imagine an endearing ear-chomping maniac sounding as he raved in that subterranean region. Similarly I found “Shub at a Phillies Game” to be mindbendingly nausiating in about the same way I envision a real Shub encounter would be.
And all the “bear” jams are just pretty nice listening IMHO.
October 31st, 2006 @ 10:53 am
Some of the songs (particularly stuff like “Chris is Enamoured…” and “Yellowsub”) on here remind me of something and I just figured out what:
Year of the Alfano - That CD I found in the back of your car that you made me listen to.
October 31st, 2006 @ 8:16 pm
Ah yes. Troy Scott, the legend behind Year of the Alfano. Where is the man now? I always found him inspiring. He was a performer without an audience (from what I could gather). Yet, that didn’t deter him from churning it out. The whole Reldni site went down sometime in 2001/02. I’ve no idea what became of him.
Periodically, I get on Google and search Troy Scott and Reldni, hoping to find some sort of lead, or maybe even a new Reldni site resurrected from the old one’s ashes. At one point, I was in contact with another fan of Scott’s, who went by the nickname of Spug. Spug ran a site dedicated to Vinnie’s Tomb , a game that Scott made. It was actually the game that got me into Reldni in the first place. When Scott went AWOL, I wrote Spug and asked if he knew what was up. Spug didn’t. A couple months back, during one of my periodic Reldni searches, I decided to write Spug again and ask what was up. And get this - Spug’s email was dead! Even Spug is gone.
Did you ever listen to the “Long Trip to South Point” (I believe that is the title)? If you haven’t you should. In my mind, that’s his masterpiece. It’s mesmerizing, especially after the 20th or so listen.
November 1st, 2006 @ 12:31 am
Looks like you’ve hit a causality dead end with Scott. There was something there, a phenomena with Reldni that could’ve been experienced at one time but the world never came in contact. Like an unused network connection it’s been pruned by the server of existence and can no longer be accessed in the phenomenal universe.
Spug was just a prop, a piece of the set designed to interact with Scott and Reldni, and now that they’re gone there was no use for him either and the stage crew finally struck the set.
I remember you talking a bit about Long Trip before, but don’t think I ever listened to it. It’s the one where they’re hiking through the woods I think, right? I only remember hearing the one about the chip kid who makes his own work and a few bits about Alfano’s lawyers.
November 1st, 2006 @ 8:43 pm
That is the album. I’ll see if I can’t dig it out from the CD Tupperware tub.
January 25th, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
Just wanted to mention that I’ve had the “Bear” songs from this album on regular rotation in my iTunes at work for quite awhile now and really enjoy them, particularly “Big Bear Blues” and “Bear Bought A Shotgun”. They not only have a nice sound, but are not distracting to listen to whilst I’m editing protocols and such.