The Electronic Eggplant - Aristotle, 1988 [.zip archive, 52MB]
The Electronic Eggplant was one of several solo-home-recording aliases for John Beekman, a sonic wizard and founding member of the band Fly Ashtray (1984–1998.) I have a mini-stack of John's tapes, ostensibly submissions for my Lo-Fi program, but also quite obviously the necessary ventings of an over-fertile creative mind weaned on 60s-70s rock and post-war avant-garde composition and electronic music. The Electronic Eggplant was the experimental, "anything goes" foil to John's more song-oriented recordings under the name Skooli Descartes.
This tape, Aristotle, melds Pierre Schaffer-like sound collage (presumably done using a stereo cassette deck and pause-button magic) with electric/acoustic guitar riffage, blasts of tape noise, chanting and other vocal hijinx—the whole thing peppered with clips of the artist's own pre-teen audio vérité. There's also some excellent guitar-driven mantra rock in the mix, with the track "Boy Ling Be-In" being a personal favorite. Though Aristotle strings together a mass of shorter pieces, it unquestionably has a cohesive artistic vision, one, I might add, that is best enjoyed through stereo headphones. The tape also came with a gloriously hand-decorated case and insert that I have to assume are both one of a kind.
These days, John usually operates under his Azalia Snail-given moniker of Hyena Sparerib. At that link, you'll also find some recordings of John's longstanding collaboration with James Kavoussi, the Bosco Brothers.
(Note: Though multiple individual track titles are provided for this tape, seeing as the material just begs for the "sonic continuum" treatment, each 15-minute side of the cassette has been ripped as a single mp3. Track titles are provided on the scan of the insert and in the "Comments" field of the mp3 tags.)
completists will note that track one, side two - "Donkey Balls" here - was later included as one of the bonus tracks in the CD version of Fly Ashtray's "Clumps Takes A Ride" LP, under the (more evocative) title "Angel Dust Party."
Posted by: hyena | August 14, 2007 at 11:11 PM