I recorded this stuff in 1997 on my primitive Mac PowerBook.

I was living at Allambie Heights and South Narrabeen Beach, whilst being a ‘dad at home’ with our first son Liam.

Usually I would record either during Liam’s sleepy breaks or late at night sessions when everyone was asleep.

I used to average about 4 hours sleep a night at the time, which of course produced a particular phased out and fatigued ‘state of mind’, which I think is reflected in these recordings.

These recordings were my second attempt at doing a solo LP of music with voice.

What could have been?

Who cares ?

I was working on three other projects at the same time as these recordings:
• ‘Astructured Music’ (my rosetta stone of unreleased soundscapes)
• ‘The Great Deception’ (experiments with deconstructed King Crimson loops)
• Material for a potential Ya Ya Choral LP.

I used a mix of both analogue and digital recording programs.

The samples I used were constructed on my ‘not so trusty’ and about to fall apart grey Mirage DSK-8 sampler.

Nowadays the Mirage is buried at the tip at Kimbriki along with my original vinyl collection. I wish I still had it.

After all these years when I listen to this stuff, I am surprised.

I can no longer see how they were constructed, and so the magician’s ‘tricks’ now continue to deceive me.

I guess, with the primitive technology available I must made instant decisions, used first takes and intuitive hunches … rather than pulling it together with post production.

Having said that, for this edition I have edited some of the beginnings and endings for this collection and tidied up some bits with the occasional real time drum part.

Overall, as the magician deceives us, I am happy to say this music has its own logic and rules. The songs exist in their own worlds. Bar the odd 90 degree turn here and there, I think there is a common soundscape and mood across these tracks.

When I was recording, I was conscious of trying to be quiet, so as not to wake up Fiona or Liam. I made this noise mainly on headphones; with a ‘quiet’ vocal style and trying to carefully avoid obnoxious pop melody but still retaining ‘hooks’.

For the backgrounds, I was determined to limit my own real time ‘playing’, instead use samples of other people’s work, to come up with things that weren’t limited by my own musical chops and note pathways. Though there are a few exceptions where I do ‘play’ everything.

Throwing caution to the wind, I carelessly constructed soundscapes and beats using field recordings, loops that were culled from King Crimson, Morton Feldman, movie soundtracks, Scott Walker, Jon Hassell, Little Feet, Henry Cow, and electric Miles Davis, plus loops of my own playing on keyboards and acoustic guitar.

During a review of these tracks in 2000, I added a few ‘field recordings’ of our children at play, in the background.

I think most of the recordings finished when I returned to work, at the conclusion of an extended parental leave.

One of the joys of working in the community sector, for little money, was at least I got 12 weeks paid parental leave.

At the time, when I listened back to what I had done, I just threw up my hands in despair. ‘Egads what have I done’.

They seemed too self-indulgent, dark and out of step with the zeitgeist at the time, so I shelved them.

I also shelved the other projects I had been working on including ‘Astructured Music’.

Same for the ‘Great Deception’. While I had been in contact with Robert Fripp for a brief exchange of wit, doh, I forgot to get permission to do something with ‘The Great Deception’, so for copyright reasons that was archived too. I lost my connection with Fripp, so I never followed it up.

Meanwhile in the realm of Ya Ya Choral, Fiona and I decided to concentrate on being parents. Earlier our publishers Warner Bros / Chappell, had been very generous with studio time, but didnt understand us and they weren't doing anything.

So YYC also went off-line.

Instead, I switched off music and instead turned to academia, eventually working on my Doctorate. During the early noughties I made some reckless attempts at compiling some of these recordings on My Space and then Bandcamp, but they didn’t seem coherent to me.

Returning to these recordings in 2022, I was taken aback by how coherent they were.
They sounded fresh; like I recorded them last week not twenty-five years ago!

As I have said elsewhere, most of my stuff I really get excited about whilst I am creating, if I don’t get it out quickly then I hate it and warehouse it. To be rediscovered later.

At the time, I had no reference points for my work, no zeitgeist or companions or comrades in thought out there who I could be sound buddies with. The soundscapes are lonely and internal, the vocals sounded unconvincing to me.

I don’t really like the sound of my voice, but stepping back a bit, I can now can hear a resonance with some of the more organic Psychic TV droney tunes, a bit of later Scott Walker, the gruff Tom Waits and Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence’s Oar LP.

Perhaps even an economical version of what Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have been doing just recently, without their traditional chord progressions and Nick’s brilliant storytelling.

But I don’t sing like any of them.

Trying to be quiet and not wake up the kids certainly had an impact on the vocals and mood of the recordings.

I have always loved creating rhythm loops that are impossible to play, because I was always subject to the limitations, imaginations and techniques of drummers and those horrible early primitive drum machines.

Yet I also do love the warmth and lack of precision and mistakes of ‘real drummers’.

I love repetition. Repetition is change.

I suppose, some of this stuff is probably too long, but I really enjoy where after a certain duration, the repetition puts you in a trance state. A spiritual place where time stands still.

You barely notice that in fact things in the pieces are still slowly changing and morphing, rather than being entertained by the vulgarities of ‘verse, hook, verse, hook, change, build-up, hook, outro etc’.

Clearly, at the end of the day. I realise I am not a musician. I am not an entertainer.
I am not a singer songwriter. I am nothing special.

Like me, there are lots of people doing this sort of stuff in their particular obscurity.

I have nothing to communicate, but plenty to share if you are interested.

I just do stuff with sound for my own amusement.

If you are interested, I do have a few comments to share about the individual tracks:

‘Your scattered bodies go’ benefits an additional real time snare that I popped in, sometime in 2017. Referencing a great piece of fluff text by Philip Jose Farmer … the Benny Hill of Sci/Fi.

‘Metaman’ was the fourth version I made, based on a neat Mirage loop sample taken from Gavin Friday’s ‘Shag Tobacco’. The words are a response to ‘Waiting for my man’, messed up with being a parent and offering euthanasia.

‘Secrets’ is built on loops of my own performances with some real time drum wonkiness. All the voices are me.

‘Long forgotten groove’ based on a Mirage loop of Miles Davis live after reading a ‘Thousand Plateaus’ by Deleuze and Guatarri. Couldn’t make up my mind whether this one was for the next YYC album or a Michael Tee track, so it has previously appeared on a YYC release through Bandcamp.

I can’t remember how I made ‘Naked Brain’, ‘Wind Up Girl’ and ‘The ontological fireplace’ but I can hear David Bowie and Scott Walker’s voices amidst the murk.

In ‘Feety foot’ I was trying to create and collage impossible to play music by using loops from a Little Feet live LP (because in pre-drum machine days they kept pretty good tempo. I used to do this back in the mid 1970’s on my cassette players. Editing out the nonsense words, verses and choruses and extending the grooves.

‘Macchennio’ is assembled from multiple loops, which I have long forgotten. However, I think starting at 47s is my ‘best loop ever’. It never fails to send shivers down my spine, which I suppose is good.

‘Boom and kitchen stinks’ is built on a drum loop from somewhere, probably LKJ alongside a bass loop played by me, trying hard not to play to tight on the beat.

‘You look like … ‘ is a bit of a joke that somehow sounds authentic to me now. What I call ‘mock jazz fusion’ collage. It’s almost like a sonic Picasso painting. There are a few Henry Cow loops in there, a random bass line from somewhere else, some of my doom surges and some loops of my guitar and vocals to close the song.

Field recording of Liam and Tom fighting added later.

‘Till there was you’ was another song that I couldn’t decide if it was a YYC song.

It is built on self-generated loops.

‘Been watching the sun’ is built on self-generated loop and random sax samples.

‘Themes from ‘Retreat’ is a collage of some of the Retreat outtakes recorded prior to 1997. It is the debrief / rest and respite track.

‘Turn of the enlightenment’ starts sad yet offers new hope at the end. I found this file in a folder marked ‘rejects’, so I was quite surprised. I have long forgotten how I made it.

Cheers

Michael Tee
August 2022