IPECAC - IPECAC Picks

Jon wrote the music, and I wrote the lyrics (which make fun of complainers). It's a sloppy shambles. For some reason we liked it enough to put it on Best of IPECAC as-is.

Jon's sleeve notes for the Kim Edition of Best of IPECAC:

Better Drumsticks (Jazz/Fusion riff)

This song demonstrates a special effect which involves speeding up the tape. You will notice the almost superhumanly fast tempo as well as the abnormally high pitch. The vocals were not accelerated, however.

I don't remember why we called it "Better Drumsticks". Maybe the implication was that if we got better drumsticks, we'd play more pointless percussion jams?

Jon and I traded off vocals in the second verse, which was kinda a neat effect. It was often hard to coax him to sing.

The Trav-on-sax thing wasn't working, so we moved back to our proper roles. This time, we decided to try to make something tuneful and rhythmic. We sketched out a rough idea and then kicked into a long disco-y jam.

Despite the long, atonal intro, and sloppiness, there are parts in the jam that are really funky. I liked this song enough to later propose it as the opening track of an instrumental best-of album (which we never created).

This ended up being one of my favorite IPECAC songs from 1988.

This is our remake of "Apostrophe Song" (on Gourmet). It's a lot leaner and tighter than the original. Jon's solo is pretty cool; you can tell he'd improved tons over the past couple months.

Jon's sleeve notes for the Kim Edition of Best of IPECAC:

The Apostraphe Song (Band Theme)

For those of you who are confused, it might help to realize that IPECAC was originally called APOSTRAPHE. This is a fairly early song.

Nice spelling, Jon!

This upbeat instrumental jazz-rock-funk was my proof that I could "rock" on keyboards. The mix is gritty and the performances, though a little off in bits, are energetic. I really dig this. I wish we had done more songs like this.

I liked this so much that I remade it almost 2 decades later (see "Third Take 2" on Mouseculine).

This was our first rap. It was completely improvised. It was fun to record, and still enjoyable to hear (at least for me).

We added bits of the lyrics to "How Ya Is'n", which later made its way to the Anchovies. So these silly, improvised lyrics got a lot of mileage!

The buzzing is from a signal generator which was Jon's idea for a "poor-man's electric guitar". Jon wrote the lyrics that he sang, and I wrote mine. We had different music in our sections too. The song feels schizo... like it's possessed by something (ha ha ha).

I think "Mayflower of death" was a reference to a computer game Jon had written. In his game, a Mayflower was a colonizing space ship. As for the "death", well, maybe it had guns or something?

It's funny that Jon flubbed "leaping leper limousine" both times. We later named the album after that line. If he hadn't flubbed it, would we still have named the album after it? I guess we'll never know.

It sounds like I played 2 piano parts. Unless I sprouted a demonic third hand for this song.

This was a simple jazz ditty that I had written previously. The title came from a play we had recently read for English class. We both liked this a lot, and later re-recorded it for Best of IPECAC 2.

"Numb" was yet another attempt on my part to push IPECAC away from jazz and towards pop/rock. You see, I wanted us to be a rock band, and Jon wanted us to be more of a jazz band. I think as long as IPECAC failed to meet either of our expectations, neither of us felt "gypped". "Numb" had nice lyrics, and a solid melody, but it failed to make us rock stars. Sigh.

I liked this song enough to end up recording it four more times: twice for IPECAC (on Best of IPECAC 2 and Fake Reverb 2). and twice as Tripecac (on Archives and College Collage). Unfortunately, none of the versions made me happy.

The panning is extreme. Jon's sax was in one ear, and my keyboard and voice were in the other. I don't know if this was intentional or not.

This was half making fun of sample-heavy rap music, and half trying to emulate it. Rap was a compromise between my desire to rock and Jon's desire to play jazz.

Jon sang (basically) the same line over and over, and then I joined him about half way through. We then overdubbed vocal sound effects later. Real macho, guys!

This was our second version of "My Familiar", which originally appears on Fake Reverb. I like this version a lot better. It's super-sped up, though.

I sampled the narration and monkey noises for a later Tripecac song: "Millions of Monkeys" (on The Hermit).

We open the album with a sad story of alcoholism and gambling. Heavy topics for IPECAC! Hey, I couldn't help it; whenever I finished songs in those years, I brought them to IPECAC, and later the Anchovies. I put my solo efforts on halt during those times. So the heavy lyrics had to go somewhere, and IPECAC was my default outlet.

Meanwhile, my writing and playing had been improving over the months since the last album. I was taking jazz piano lessons and playing semi-regularly with the Anchovies. The music felt relatively full and natural, but my arrangement for this song left no room for improvisation, so it never gets very intense.

On an aborted album cover (where I called the band "Usupers"), I saw that my piano teacher, Art Wheeler had helped me write some of the music for this song. I don't remember which bits he contributed.

The "Usupers" cover was dated 1989-02-17. This suggests that at least one version of the song had been recorded before then, but I'm not certain. I'll guess for now that it was the IPECAC version although it could have been an early solo version. I know for sure that I recorded my Trex version (included on Wino Three Girls) on 1989-04-11.

Jon wrote this music for an English class project with me and Luke Marshall. It was the background music for the closing credits of our sequel to the Shakespeare play "Twelfth Night"

The music is atonal, but memorable. It was hard to play (lots of wide fingerings), but I came to really enjoy listening to it. This was the last song that Jon wrote for IPECAC (or the Anchovies) and it was, in my opinion, his best by far.

This particular recording is a short version that Jon and I recorded by ourselves. As we did with "Anchovy Rock", we were trying to create a "cleaner" version of the song than the one we had recorded with Luke (on "Extras"). Yes, it's cleaner, but it also feels a bit empty; I prefer the full version.

Jon wrote most of the lyrics. Other bits were improvised, and there's a quote from "All This is True".

Musically, it's very simple, just drums and a heavy bassline. There's occasional sax (during the chorus) and keyboard (during solos) but for the most part we were focused on the vocals. The only weird bit is at the end, where Jon launches into an incredibly adventurous sax solo and then the rest of the music gets abruptly shoved into the background.

We liked this song so much we brought it to the Anchovies. It was a favorite from day one.

This kicked off our final recording session. Our idea was to sound "live". The distortion is horrible, yet somehow I love this song. It's the closest we ever came to "rock", which had been my dream.

This is my favorite IPECAC song. It's slow and mellow, but the solos are outstanding (for us at least).

We pretended that we were being backed up by a band called "Ammonia". This was supposed to explain the overdubs. We were trying to convince our listeners that we were a real band.

I like the relentless bass line. My solos are only decent, but Jon's sax work is great!

This was our only pre-written song on Live at Carnegie Hall; the rest were developed in the studio.

Unfortunately, the production is pretty bad in bits. The volume drops off near the beginning, and one of the keyboard overdubs is too high in the mix (and with no reverb). I also flubbed the bridge a bit by playing in the wrong octave. I still like it, though. It ends well, and finishes off Live at Carnegie Hall smoothly.