1. Private Places              (3:41)
2. Lucky Whale Dident         (32:10)
3. Sin Is Sin Blood 3.2       (10:41)
4. The Gimp Comes Of Age       (8:40)
5. Señor Sabadillo            (38:21)
 
 

    All tracks by A.Thornton except "Sabadillo," featuring the vocal talents of Kevin McLellan.  Packaging, mastering (May 19'93) and duplication by Thornton.  Original cover picture "Janet Locke Holding Dog" provided by Cat.
    Greenman warning: these tracks are not for everybody, and may be considered boring, monotonous, pointless and unfriendly for radio.
    Keep that in mind.
    Note on volume: ideally, peak levels are achieved during the "what difference does it make?" segment of "Sin."  In practice, however...just practice.
    And don't forget: every one of these tracks is DENTRO DE TIMPANO!

    TECHNOLOGY
    * A Roland 8-20 sampler midi'd with a Yamaha RX-17 Digital Rhythm Processor
    * Filtered through a Marantz amp (AM tuning for sound sources) and recorded on a Teac dual deck
    * Source recordings with an SR 3000 Mini-Cassette Recorder, CKMS mics, an anonymous VHS machine, and reams & reams of archived material
    * Revox reel-to-reel machines for reverb and other effects
    * CD players for peak looping
    * Mixed on Studio A/B boards at CKMS (interpolating shortwave)
    * DAT players for final mastering
    * And other misc. items (a lead bar and three-hole punch for holds, Ring-o-lo bags, squeaky chairs, baby monitor for feedback squealing, turntables for booms...)

    THANKS TO
    Thanks must be extended to those who directly influenced this product in various round-about ways:
    The Mindsculpture Posse [Jared & Neb, and Jim], Mark S, Adrian B, Kevin M & Cat M [who offered their opinions & support], The Support Group [Penny & Kitty, Sheik Sukie Binbay Purr, Bronwyn A].
    BIG thanks to Sean [for the invaluable equipment, patience & friendship], CKMS [also for their equipment], all the Bears and Golden Retrievers...and most of all to Ernesto: we tell it like it is, don't we buddy.
    (Obligatory no-thanks to the annoying individuals...Ugly Kid and Monkey Boy come immediately to mind)

    NOTES ON PRETENSION
    Ernesto is an animal (a dog-rat, actually) and, like most animals, he wants to be taken at face-value.
    The Greenman does not wish to make any political, musical, or philosophical stances in this work.  Ernesto is not a post-modernist symbol for the age of information, and the stylized bones are not phallic symbols.
    Does this work exhibit talent?  Good question.  I have a biased opinion.  But it might be interesting to someone, and hence: the tape.
    Incidentally, this cassette was NOT recorded with any sort of noise reduction, but it CAN be played on Mono devices, and it does NOT need to be played loud.  Indeed, playing it loud could be dangerous...the levels are not engineered to perfection!

    LUPUS ENTERPRISES
    Lupus Enterprises has released ten issues of a small-press fanzine entitled "Lost."  If interested, or curious about other Greenman works (which are normally heard between 4 and 10 every Wednesday morning on CKMS, 100.3 FM) write or call...
 

    The original idea was that "Ernesto" would come with an attached list of All Known Sources.  This didn't happen, because it was difficult to make the print small enough to fit everything on a little insert, particularly with a dot matrix printer.  So the attachment was never made and some of the sources have been lost forever.
    "Private Places" was partly Miranda Sex Garden and partly an odd dialogue recorded off of AM radio, which turned out to be from the film "The Reflecting Skin."  "Lucky Whale Dident" was originally 3 separate tracks ("Something To Worry About," "Bush Echoes" and something else) which were overdubbed repeatedly on Wednesdays between 5am and 6am, before The Freak Show started.  Some of the tapes which were used were also recorded off of FM radio, or were from highschool projects or the Heady Days of The 1970s.  That's Frankie, Tommy and I -- with Sheba the dog -- doing the disco dancing, along with Tommy's catchy impromptu refrain:
        Baby baby, make me dance,
        Baby baby, make me dance.
        Make me poo in my pants.
    For those interested, Tommy was later arrested for doing terrible things to an innocent young couple in Waterloo Park.
    Eventually, the three parts of "Dident" came together over an obnoxiously skipping whale record, and the first part was removed because it was terrible.  Hence, 'Dident' instead of 'Trident,' if there is such a word.
    "Sin Is Sin Blood 3.2" was also endlessly overdubbed, at various speeds, partly in the Blackhead/Whitehead bedroom (where it was combined with a vacuum cleaner early on).  When GREENman met Mindsculpture, this was the first track offered up in collaboration.  Jared and A.Thornton sat down with it and laid beats and keyboard sounds on top, which sounded very, very bad indeed and was never released.  I understand that at some point Neb Rakic added flute, but I've never heard that version.
    Many of the live Mindsculpture shows of 1994 contained a portion of "Sin is Sin Blood," and it eventually appeared (in a live version) on Mindsculpture's "Eight Uneasy Pieces" cassette.  This track was remixed for The True Story Of Muffy St. Jacques, as was "Private Places," though the latter didn't make the cut for whatever reason (until the Dog From A Rat's Ear MUTE8).
    "The Gimp Comes Of Age" stands up pretty well -- at least, the original version.  For some reason the version on Ernesto has been overdubbed with an awful skippy-bippy sound.  It was, essentially, just a bunch of cut-up monologues from films, combined with revox feedback.  The cut-ups were made using a Teac deck with a fantastically soft pause button.
    The only track from Ernesto that really showed promise -- and the last one recorded, significantly -- was "Senor Sabadillo", another collection of disconnected weird-outs (Miss Universe, Eraserhead, radio sources, Tod Browning's "Freaks," even some keyboards).  Kevin McLellan -- a busker from the University of Waterloo -- showed up one morning and was asked to lend his voice.  Last I saw of Kevin (a few years ago) he was playing guitar outside of Waterloo Town Square, and no doubt he's forgotten he even did this.
    Ultimately, Ernesto turned out badly: far, far too long for it's own good.  It was given to a few friends, most of whom smiled politely.  This was just at the beginning of the whole Mindsculpture '94 thing, so there was still a lot to learn.  Performing in Mindsculpture and producing the Philler radio shows at CKMS helped focus things, ultimately.  Plus, Sean returned from Vancouver and needed his equipment back, so more appropriate technology needed to be found...