Mutual Skies is proud to present on streaming services and compact disc: Unicorn Family, by Nonconnah.
After my cousin was killed in the Beirut barracks bombing of October 1983 (one of the “Rhode Island Nine”), we visited my grieving aunt up in Maine, and I spent most of the time playing with this crazy organ in her garage, called an Optigan. To me it had a huge…gas pedal under it, which was strange and betrayed that I never took piano lessons as a child. But it was an enormous, extremely heavy expression pedal covered in thick slotted rubber, like an upside-down L.L. Bean duck boot. I don’t know if I can sufficiently impress upon you how little there was for a kid to do in rural Maine in the mid-1980s, but the slate of available activities began with lever-action target practice and ended with jumping off the barn roof onto hay bales. I think they could get one radio station and it was pretty much Merle Haggard FM.
So I spent a lot of time in the garage fiddling with the Optigan, which was a whinnying solid-state organ with loop-based pre-recorded accompaniment care of an optically-read floppy 12”. The thing’s an app now, I won’t bore you the granular details (or that Rob Crow project) but it had a series of haunting drone loops and the somewhat-infamous “Movin’!” break, which, as an aspiring drummer with no kit, I spent most of the time restarting and pitching around with the Optigan’s pitch wheel. Yet I know now, it was that Violins loop that was always groaning somewhere in the recesses of my mind, waiting to take the wheel.
Two years later, an English kid moved to my town with a clutch of alien compilation cassettes called Now That’s What I Call Music (volumes 3-6). We became fast friends on this basis, as well our shared obsession with Apple computer games (I had the middling, middle-market //c, his family the imposingly powerful IIGS, as his father theoretically used it for business purposes). Anyway, the NOW cassettes, as we’d shorthand them today, were a bizarre mix of treacly ballads, edgy new wave cuts and novelty records like the (for an American) incomprehensible-by-two-degrees “N-N-Nineteen Not Out,” a cricket parody record modeled on the (for its time) cynical anti-war synth hit “19” by Paul Hardcastle. I dubbed my favorites to a Maxell XL-IIS (not the one you’re thinking of, or the other one you’re thinking of) via the family TEAC W-430C, resulting in the following mixtape:
Before you knew anything about music, there was no craft to making a mixtape, it was predominantly “home taping is killing music” - a means of copying things you didn’t own from someone else. And done for those reasons, it had the potentially deleterious effect of associating totally incongruous songs. In this case, given the relative sameness of the pop charts by the mid 80s — post-Hi-NRG rave-ups, bloated orchestra-stab arena anthems and ponderous “Sophisti-pop” — I made it out relatively unscathed, but there is a massive wince at the end of side two.
I had never heard or heard of the Cure, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, any of that by this point, certainly not Siouxsie & the Banshees, and so assumed they were some hilariously overcooked one-hit wonder like Real Life. And so for a very long time and even today in the wrong or perhaps right circumstances, I will expect to hear Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” at the close of “Cities in Dust.” For the evil they have wrought, I suspect our algorithmic overlords will not play so cruel a trick on future generations.
I didn’t develop a self-directed, exploratory relationship with music until another couple of years down the road, in the summer of 1988 when Nothing’s Shocking, “Peek-a-Boo” and “Stigmata” hit MTV all at once. I became totally consumed by music’s capacity to reflect everything I felt back to me, all at once. It remains the greatest form of emotional reassurance and homecoming I’ve experienced, if it accomplishes this trick less often as I reach the back half of the game.
As I approached some level of competency in terms of the lineage of alternative music, Nirvana took off, which while initially exhilarating — and I never turned my back on them — naturally spawned the urge to outmaneuver and out-cool the casuals who traded their pegged stonewashed jeans for cargo shorts and flannel. So began my pretentious and often insufferable slide into indie, post-rock and electronica Top Trumps which ran for the better part of the ‘90s, and also saw me in and out of a dozen almost entirely unremarkable bands.
At some point proximal to graduating from college, I went on a major walkabout socially, emotionally, etc., which is a common side-effect of being told you’re about to enter the “real world” and have to pay for things like rent and electricity etc. and all your friends are moving three thousand miles away. The last essay I wrote for one of our releases addressed some memories of that period, but not the part where I stopped paying attention to whatever was happening in the various music scenes I’d woven in and out of, and tried to become a bedroom studio wizard. This was a template that really didn’t exist yet but in pure electronica, but would later be all-but fully explored by Dan Lopatin. In college, I knew not one but three guys who were essentially proto-0PNs, and thought, “Well, I’m already doing the hermit bit…”
I got hold of a Casio SK-1 at a yard sale and started playing around with its sampler function. Key inspirations here would theoretically have been Magnetic Fields’ stellar run up through The Charm of the Highway Strip, which, along with Holiday, I was positively obsessed with, but I wanted to go in a darker and more pseudo-orchestral direction. And to a certainty, I could not sing.
So I started sampling stuff, slowing down loops to try to disguise their origins, and I think I made about eight sketches on a friend’s Yamaha MT120. They are positively rudimentary but did end up coming out on Audio Dregs in 1998. And that whole catalog as far as I know is distributed by The Orchard, so it is unbelievably on Spotify. The title of this one is autobiographical and goes part of the way to explaining why five or so years later The Wind-Up Bird’s Whips would have a devastating psychological impact on me.
Making these songs brought me back to the Optigan, and reminded me of the bizarre outsider art on the Christian songbooks scattered across the nearby tables in my aunt’s garage. And then in the summer of 1997, I was listening to Excursions in Ambience (The Third Dimension) for the millionth time — for Seefeel, for Aphex Twin’s “Stone in Focus” and Spectrum’s “Pulse Drone (Neon Sigh)” — when I noticed Steve Fisk’s name. His song is pretty chintzy gurgle techno, not really cutting it for the time, but I was like, “Hold up is this the guy in Pell Mell? The Nirvana guy?” Pell Mell were one of my favorite bands in the ‘90s, I’d bought the “Bring on the China” white vinyl 7” on a whim and it was exactly what I was trying to do in one of my high school bands, unapologetically instrumental jangly guitar pop. And then years later, when I was running my college radio station, Pell Mell put out an incredibly uncommercial and amazing record on DGC. I give the unending ‘90s hagiography a wide berth when you consider that a major put out Interstate and serviced it to college radio.
At any rate, still unsure if this was really the same Steve Fisk, I noticed an entry for Steve in the K Records CD insert catalog for a record called Over and Through the Night. I found a copy…probably at Mystery Train in Boston but can’t recall for sure, and between Over and Through the Night and some of the Cluster/Roedelius/Eno stuff that Gyroscope had just reissued, I didn’t listen to much else that summer. It still blows my mind that he was making this stuff in the mid-’80s. Full respect to John Oswald and all the other innovators and hermits in this lineage, but there was something so arch and deeply American and devious in Steve’s best material, it just wrapped my entire life experience up in a picnic blanket and dumped it on my doorstep. The sonic nuances and editorial choices were so on-point, it’s just never left me. It’s one of the few recordings I own that can bring back memories — non-musical, personal memories — from that far back in my life for the deeply neural multidimensionality of its source texts.
(Apart from the Flock of Seagulls sample, but hey, it was slim pickings trying to cop an original beat in those days).
Perhaps more than any other genre, the value of experimental and especially collage-based music lies in the eye of the beholder. For my part, all judgments of the form are unapologetically subjective and informed by my earliest exposures to sound collage: Sonic Youth’s “Providence” and Dinosaur Jr.’s “Lou + Lou alone in his room”’s “Poledo.” And you can see that in the historical lineages of experimental music I’ve chosen to follow. I adore the coursing drama of Glenn Branca’s linear early works, and the curious, playful and shy brilliance of many Arthur Russell pieces, but there’s that editorial aspect missing. Perhaps in avoidance of dating a thing, an artist would discount being so direct. And it can tip to cutesy silliness and novelty as Evolution Control Committee and so many other collage artists often do.
The best collage music for me has the explicit presence of an editorial voice, and hand, but not in broadcasting the cleverness or sophistication of its owner, rather in spectrally reifying a version of one’s own reality, a past presently reimagined or an altogether imagined past. If you have those tools, you have the right, and you will get it right.
Nonconnah have been getting it right for years. We’re just catching up.
