Remembrances of Things Alfred

When I think of Alfred, I think mostly of bedroom floors covered with wires and crappy guitars and crappy synths and crappy guitar synthesizers. And everything running into that Yamaha 4-track cassette recorder.

It was 1997. OK Computer and Come To Daddy were blasting from our car stereos. The future was so bright that we didn't even need shades because they wouldn't have helped at all, that's how god damn bright the future was.

There were basically five of us, all in college but in five different states (NY, CT, MA, VA, MI). Usually we would get together at one of our home bases in suburban northern NJ, and sometimes those of us based around New England would trek to Whitman's place in Worcester. Due to problems of geographic nature, Katz (Michigan) was inevitably left out more often than not, but he was our Spiritual Advisor so even when he wasn't *there*, he was still *there*, y'know?

Moutenot (Harrisonburg) was usually able to make it wherever we were -- he and Whitman were the two founders. They'd started in the fall of 1996 with the 4-track, a Casiotone, one microphone and Moutenot's white guitar. It was probably October. I don't really know because I wasn't there yet. Anyway, this is what you hear on Volume 1.

Puchalik (Albany) joined shortly after that, probably November. The recordings started getting more noisy, more wanky, much longer, and much weirder. Hook up the Sega Genesis to the 4-track? Sure, why not. That's Volume 2.

Volume 3... two sessions with Whitman/Puchalik only. A lot of interesting experiments with dialogue and just letting the tape run while they played cards, then recording some sounds to accompany it later on.

Spring break, 1997. Whitman told Puchalik to bring me along for a session in Hillsdale, so I went. Katz was there too -- maybe for the first time, I'm not sure. We recorded that afternoon in a room that smelled like cigars, then broke for dinner and family obligations, returning for more recordings that night (minus Katz, plus Moutenot). All of that is on Volume 4. ABTBE now had five off-and-on members, and that's basically the way it would stay until the end, about a year later.

Our roles? Whitman was Director of Emerging Technology and Relatively Expensive Toys, a role that would grow over the course of Bizarro's brief existence. He was also the only one of us present for every ABTBE session, he owned the 4-track machine, and he kept the tapes. So that made him our de facto leader, a fact not lost on the rest of us when we christened him 'Stalin Bizarro'.

Moutenot almost always played that white guitar. I personally don't remember him playing much else, but he didn't need to because he was the most brilliant non-guitarist ever to play guitar.

Puchalik played guitar SOLOS, but there were always so many effects in the chain that you could never really tell.

Katz, like I said, was our Spiritual Advisor. When he contributed sonically, it was with voice, or sometimes tentative slide guitar.

Walz -- that's me -- brought loops, droning consumer synthesizers, and squeaky toys to complement Whitman's Expensive Toys.

One night in Worcester, Whitman invited a classmate named J. Brandt. We called him Techno Boy, a name which he reportedly did not like. He came by for a few hours and played techno music with these awesome little portable synths and drum machines, and we filled out the sound with banjos and broken snare drums and penny whistles running through analog delay... we freaked him out until he left. Listen to Volume 5 for clarification.

In May we played live to a group of uninterested college students in a large Worcester gymnasium. They milled about and paid little attention to us, and when they did they only stared and shook their heads. An understandable reaction. Five of us were up there, with Katz holding court on the drum riser yelling conspiracy theories about the letter 'W' and the number '7'. Later he walked off the stage and moved around the gymnasium provoking people... and despite our attempts to win over our audience with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (tongues firmly in cheek), they flashed the stage lights to make us stop. It was the first of only two times we would perform in front of living, breathing people. (Un)fortunately, the audio tape has gone missing, and the Hi-8 video tape shot by a friend of the group has mysteriously been erased. "W... 7.... a number... and a letter..."

We now enter what I think of as the First Golden Age of Alfred Bizarro (Volumes 6/7/8), although the chronology here gets a bit confusing. It was summer, we were all home in NJ, and we were filling tape after tape, week after week. These tapes (Maxell XLII's... only the best, kids) were labeled by Whitman scribbling directly on them with #2 pencils. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to read and decipher dark gray writing on a dark gray cassette? Especially ten, fifteen years later?

Anyway, what you hear on Volumes 6/7/8 consists of the sessions that we would use as source material for Please Alfred Don't Hurt 'Em, our first and only attempt at making "an album". It was a rambling cut-and-paste nightmare inspired by the first few Mike Keneally albums (look him up). We finished it around late July, sending it to several hip radio stations, with some (such as the legendary WFMU) even playing it on the air a few times. Future, bright, shades, etc.

We performed 'live over the internet' on a few occasions around this time (see Volumes 9/10). Pretty much nobody listened, but we did have one fan. I think his name was Meatface or something like that. At the time I remember being horrified at how terrible the whole thing sounded, but listening back many years later, I find it to be some of the loudest, craziest, most honest stuff we ever did.

ABTBE gave each recording session its own title based on some item or event that influenced the session. The Hanson and Spice Girls sessions featured magazine covers of said artists prominently on display while we recorded... Cheese Fries and Donettes were named after our sustenance on those particular evenings... etc.

Volume 11 contains the Hanson session, featuring "While We're Burning", a beautiful, epic piece recorded by the trio of Whitman/Moutenot/Walz late one night while Puchalik was outside taking in the fresh nighttime air. The moment he returned and picked up his guitar, the tape stopped. Clearly traumatized by this experience, he didn't show up at all for the next recording session (No Rob on Volume 12). The Whitman/Moutenot/Walz trio coupled "Lecture" (from No Rob) and "While We're Burning" and released them as an ABTBE side-project called Perfusely. A few CD-R's were distributed, and life went on.

The long and productive summer of 1997 was coming to an end. We met in Hillsdale one last time in late August before heading back to college and decided to record everything in the backyard (Outside, Volume 13). The human neighbors didn't seem to mind, but the neighbors' dogs could not grasp what it was we were going for and reacted quite negatively. Luckily, the performance (dogs included) was captured on videotape.

We tried to get together in Worcester one weekend in mid-November, but a blinding snowstorm closed the Mass Pike, forcing Puchalik to turn back to Albany. I, on the other hand, risked life and limb and managed to make it to Worcester from the south. It was only Whitman and I (Withnail couldn't make it either...) so we chose not to record as ABTBE, but rather as yet another side project, Stapple. [editor's note: This session is not included here, but will be featured in a forthcoming anthology on FSR].

ABTBE proper did assemble a few weeks later on Thanksgiving weekend (Plunk on Volumes 13/14). We tried to wrap our heads around Whitman's new really expensive toy, an Akai MPC sampler. There were a number of great sonic moments in that session, but it was the last time the four core Bizarros (Whitman, Moutenot, Puchalik, Walz) would ever play together.

The following February, Whitman, Puchalik and I performed live on a college campus TV station. There were colored lights, smoke machines, and a loud sound system, but the MPC and turntable -- not to mention the high-end Kurzweil synthesizer "borrowed" from the campus recording studio next door -- only served to throw us off our game. And it didn't help that there was the possibility of, y'know, people actually being forced to listen to us again. It was broadcast live over the air, but the TV crew forgot to press record on their shiny new Betacam deck until halfway through the performance. Listen to the best surviving bits on Volume 16 (Alfred Bizarro vs. Ed McMahon).

During spring break of 1998, exactly one year from when I joined ABTBE, three of us met up in Hillsdale. As Puchalik wasn't present again we called this Perfusely II. We recorded parts of it in Whitman's car, with our Yamaha 4-track powered by a cigarette lighter, while driving to the Rockland Bakery to get bread.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that was it. The spring and summer came and went with no Bizarro activity, so Puchalik and I, in the desire for some sort of "closure" but lacking any ABTBE 4-track master cassettes, decided to take an incredibly distorted VHS source of the Outside session and release it as Deck on Forty-Seven Records, our new free CD-R label.

We all paired off into a myriad of projects. Whitman and Moutenot played around the Boston area as Blitter vs. Gimcrak. Puchalik and I launched the iot project. Then there was the aforementioned Stapple, later to become Minnow.

Eventually I inherited the 4-track ABTBE cassette archive from Whitman. Those 76 tapes sat in my closet for years... I didn't know what to do with them. After a number of false starts, I finally came to the conclusion that EVERYTHING should be released. I began logging the tapes, figuring out what was what.

Four years later, here we are. One Way Doomsday Trip To Nowhere: The Complete Recordings of Alfred Bizarro To Be Exactly 1996-98. Listen to some of it. But please, please... don't try to listen to all of it.