Alfred Bizarro To Be Exactly

(October 1996)… BW and CM start a group, call it Alfred Bizarro To Be Exactly, begin recording 4-track improv/noise/freejazz…

(December 1996)… RP joins, adds more guitar... and the vocals of SK, who acts as "spiritual advisor"… relentless guitar solos, difficult listening, but the sense of humor is there… inspiration taken from Zorn, Glass, Lynch, Donettes, Westwood Diner…

(March 1997)… MW joins... they amass piles of analog delay units, fretless basses, banjos, homemade synths... J. Brandt (known as 'Techno Boy' to ABTBE) joins for one session, then disappears into the cold Worcester night, too frightened of what he has heard...

(May 1997)… First public performance at a festival in a large gymnasium in Worcester... cheers turn to screams of horror as 6 seconds of the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" riff segues into a chaos of overwhelming amateur improvisation... SK holds court on the otherwise empty drum riser, spewing conspiracy theories about "W7"... the P.A.’s power is cut after 30 minutes... it really is amazing what survives on the internet...

(Summer 1997)… Boxes of 4-track tapes... collaborators come and go (Ms. K. Wheatley on bass)... from these summer sessions emerges their masterpiece, Please Alfred Don’t Hurt ‘Em, 72 minutes of loops and noises and voices, issued on their own LMDF label... copies are sent to local free-form radio station WFMU on CD-R (those days when CD burners were not common).. receives airplay for a while, creates a minor buzz through certain circles... a few months later Hrvatski (Keith Fullerton Whitman) makes an entire album of Please Alfred remixes although he'd probably deny it now... the bubble bursts when they head back to college, in five different states, hundreds of miles away from each other... momentum suffers… (snif)...

(Thanksgiving 1997)… Four of them manage to get in one place at one time for another session... new elements added... laptops and software being replacing pennywhistles and Casio mini synths…

(Christmas 1997)… Another session... only three members, but still good...

(February 1998)… Second and final public performance, this one at a New England college television studio... more new elements – turntables, samplers... again only three members... music is unfocused, confused... TV cameras staring them down... somebody forgot to press 'record'... it will be the last time they ever play together...

(Afterward)… The members pair off into a myriad of projects… BW and MW become Stapple, then Minnow… MW and RP form iot (etc)... BW and CM, the original core of bizarro, make noisy appearances in Boston clubs…

(Summer 1998)… RP and MW, uncomfortable with Bizarro's death, assemble Deck... it is one of the first releases on the then-new FSR label...

(2000)… FSR inherits the now-defunct LMDF archives... hundreds of hours of material contained on 4-track cassettes lay in a big box in FSR’s homebase… it takes several years of spare time to catalog the beast...

(November 2003)… The first archival release - Bread, Volume 1…

(October 2008)... Work begins on a box set, tentatively titled Caesar Was Squishy: The History and Collected Improvisations of Alfred Bizarro To Be Exactly...

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Discography

Thunderation! (1996, out-of-print)
Alfred Bizarro vs. Techno Boy (1997, out-of-print)
Please Alfred Don't Hurt 'Em (1997, out-of-print)
Perfusely [ABTBE side-project] (1997, out-of-print)

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Deck. (1998)
On a hot and windy August afternoon in 1997, ABTBE gathered at a New Jersey backyard to record some stuff on 4-track. But this was no beer-swillin' acoustic BBQ jam. They dragged all of their amps and guitars and fx and things outside, and they set up a VHS camcorder on the lawn. They fed the audio from the 4-track machine (line out) to the camcorder (mic in... oops). After they disbanded several months later, two former members found the VHS tape (with extremely distorted audio) and watched, and listened, and smiled, and edited, and EQ'd, and released.



1. Prologue
2. Second Piece
3. Third Piece
4. Fourth Piece
5. Dog Sequence
6. Fifth Piece
7. Sixth Piece
8. Seventh Piece
9. Eighth Piece
10. Epilogue

download album and artwork as ZIP file

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Bread, Volume 1: Okie and Outside (2003, out-of-print)