Blown Out Easy Listening Mp3s From Jessica Rylan's Can't

Marty McSorley showed me this CD a few weeks back, and I was completely blown away - as powerful as this simple concept is, there are precious few examples of appropriation music that simply take a crappy song and blow it out. To me, there's no better possible music than this! Can't Vs. The World, posted in its entirety here, was an early project of Jessica Rylan, who's gone on to collaborate with tons of top-notch improvisers, participate in the bent festival, learn to build synths as an electronic music MFA, and release a ton of...well, releases.

Rather than describe Can't any further, here's Jessica's own thoughts on the project...

Honestly, that cd is my favorite thing I ever did. Which is kind of weird I guess, it's so simple-minded. But it really described 100% how I felt at that time in my life, and it was immediately understandable by pretty much everyone. As opposed to a lot of my other music, which seems to confuse people.

The original idea came to me in 1998 when I used to work at a free health clinic giving AIDS tests. I also had a night job djing and sometimes booking shows at a prostitute bar. There was a little mall behind the clinic and I would go in there most days to get lunch from a burrito cart. One day I was standing in line, super hung over, and totally depressed about my awful job and the omnipresent misery in my life. They started playing "You're the inspiration" by Chicago over the p.a. - not loud at all, but from tinny speakers way up on the high ceiling. And I just had this wave of horror come over me - I hate that song so much, the lyrics are cloying and the guy's voice is so grating - hearing this song was physically painful in a totally different but much more upsetting way than the Merzbow show that was still on my mind from 1996. And then the music just blew out in my mind.

I had a really hard time getting that thing pressed. At the behest of the duplicator I was trying to us, I actually paid for mechanical reproduction licenses, which are what you pay when you record a cover of someone's song. (I told the guy at the duplicator that it was a cd of covers.) The licenses were $300, which was about the same amount as pressing 300 cds at the time, and a huge amount of money for me at the time. But then when they sent it to the plant, the plant refused to do it. I went in to the place, and the guy was yelling at me, accusing me of trying to get them in trouble, and also accusing me of trying to make a bootleg mix cd - he attributed the distortion to my being incompetent at mastering!!!! hahaha seriously that's got to be the funniest thing ever.

So in the end, I sent it to Lucas Abela (aka Justive Yeldham, the guy who plays a contact mic on a piece of glass which usually ends up cutting his face) in Australia, who worked at a pressing plant and ran it after-hours without incident.

Oh yeah the other thing that happened with that cd, is I had made an earlier tape called "DJ Totale" which was similar but in active voice - I was using a dj mixer along with some distortion and external eqs to make a sound collage. Unfortunately I (inexplicably) threw that tape out - really sad! - but anyway when I did Can't vs the World I spent a long time tuning the distortion and filters for each song so the songs could play all the way through without me changing anything.

Anyway a little bit after I sent it off to Lucas, I went to see VVM perform in Boston. Towards the end of his set he had a blown out pop part, I forget which song now. But it made me really excited and I was like "ok I'm not a total freak after all, or the only one who's ever done this!"