A room full of music to choose from, we'll say it's been accrued throughout something around 3/5's of my 28 years of life. That's a long time, plenty of memories to be made and certainly enough to allow general likes to solidify themselves. Why then, is it often so impossible to decide what to listen to? I blame the freedom of choice. If too abundant, it's a hinder more than it's not.
With an ever growing stack of incoming cassettes, and a new replacement deck for dubbing that is begging for an excuse to get plugged in, "a tape" it is, and that narrows it down. 25 or so cases, full of tightly wound sound, stacked neatly, waiting for their turn in the triage area, underneath my record player, far away from their eventual placements in the cassette racks on the wall to their right.
I am sick today, stayed home from work. I don't do this often, only when I really feel horrible, and even then, I force myself to go in if my absence is going to cause too much stress. In the past four days though, things have definitely not been going well for my sinuses, nor my throat. The varieties of mucus that have left my body, if collected and smeared around would make for just the perfect cover art if Totem Mold Growth were needing an alternate.
I wanted something long, so their 92 minute offering seemed just about perfect. No thinking for an hour and a half. I could lay on the floor, stare at the ceiling. I could fall asleep, though maybe only halfway. Cook a meal of some sort, just vegetate, does not matter. I will not pick something else to put on for an hour and a half.
And so the perfect soundtrack for my struggle is realized shortly after pressing play. Repetitive electronic tones, synth-secretions that are unknowingly divorced from the membrane, they are occasionally smooth - wet, oily glops the splatter across the floor. At other times, things chop in and out, around them or maybe through them, it's hard to tell.
Does this bring to mind a series of recordings I had made at age 12 or so? Sure: ones which were childlike, perhaps because I was a child at the time, efforts at controlling an ancient Korg and it's satellite bank, which I understood even less. Horrible sounding alarms that would occasionally be reduced to buzz-saw signals that were perhaps so loud that they began to seem quiet.
Here, these sorts of things are not looked down on. Instead, they are embraced, and allowed to roam amongst each other, colliding at times, peacefully coexisting at others - and every now and then, something even more foreign than these oddball electronics is able to sneak through: sound samples ranging from a damaged folk song, sci-fi chit chat, an occasional percussive section, the theme and first few minutes of an episode of The Facts of Life, folding over (and over, and over) on itself. Crackly noise slices into the contaminated plasma as well, sometimes washing over or fluttering alongside the plethora of gurgling tones and saturated sines.
Supposedly, this is Totem's alternate soundtrack, or I suppose score, to a 1993 movie called Freaked, apparently starring Alex Winter from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. It rang no bells for me either, but a simple internet search can confirm it's existence: "A vain actor, his best friend, and an activist end up at a mutant freak farm run by a weirdo scientist". You'd think that's me talking, somewhat tired and pumped full of prescription medication. The fact of that matter is that it's actually the bio offered by IMDB, which will also inform you that Brooke Sheilds, Morgan Fairchild and Randy Quaid are stuck in there somewhere too.
I planned on making this profound statement about how this cassette is really a perfect score for what's happening inside of me, Cephalxin makes it's way down with some Gatorade, the large red capsules that smell like they are composed of fish guts and dust, breaking down in my stomach and and sifting through fever, cornering disease, engaging in a battle that's seeming to be a bit too evenly matched. Progress is being made, but my symptoms are still present, tissue after tissue, with occasional cough into toilet, as well. "Verl Splurt", if this inner-conflict had audio, would just be perfect.
Unfortunately, after seeing if it's intended influence did in fact exist, I took the next illogical step. With Totem Mold Growth rotting through the speakers, completely aimless and sounding ever so irritated at the start of the B-side, I decided watch the trailer for Freaked.
And so now there is a new plan, a new way to eradicate my condition, a new activity, a new way to break my own rules. Watching a movie, after all, it's not something that I do often, but I myself have been known to make an exception for the overly artistic or unbelievably bad, that latter of which - in case you are wondering, is what would apply here.
As luck would have it, this thing is available to stream with Netflix, and there's another laptop in the other room, username and password are sure to be saved. A good mix will be found, between this tape and the audio from this film, and to cure myself from all that ales me, Freaked will soon be viewed with "Verl Splurt" coinciding. Did Mike Haley ever think this would happen when he packed this up and sent it my way last month? I'd be willing to guess that the answer is no, but that he will be very proud that is has.
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