DOG Days Part One: origins of the Doghaus

     At the ripe young age of five I had one of the creepiest and most impactful nightmares of my life. That night, I woke up screaming in terror from a dream in which I was drowning my childhood dachshund & terrier mutt of a pup at the insistence of the talking head of a massive, intimidating black doberman pinscher which hovered in front of my face like an evil spectre from hell. As I pushed my yelping dog's head beneath the sink water, I was sobbing profusely and asked the master dog head who he was. He replied, "I am God." Practicing my sight words at that age must have subliminally led me to the conclusion that DOG spelled backwards was GOD. However, as a young, impressionable kid who watched horror films with his mom and dad since the age of three, I was convinced that this was some sort of sign from the devil.

                       Click Here for Video: The Severed Head: A Story circa 1988

      15 years later, I bought my first 4-track recorder, a Yamaha MT2X after 10 years of succumbing to the shackles of pay-by-the-hour recording studios and I was finally free to experiment without watching a clock. I quickly learned to make the most of the limitations of my equipment and recorded my first full length multi-track recording as the sole performer, writer, producer, and engineer. The year was 1988 and the music was a concoction of distorted guitars, drums via a Roland TR-505 drum machine, synthesis provided by a Roland D-50 synthesizer, and several stomp boxes and rack-mounted effect units all rigged together with borrowed power cords. I dubbed my new bedroom studio the Doghaus, and my new project, which was an amalgamation of 80s metal, synth pop, new wave, and goth, was to be called DOG, courtesy of my childhood nightmare. I was especially fascinated with the backwards masking effect I learned to achieve by turning the tape over and recording on the opposite tracks in which I would play back when I replaced the tape to the proper side. This helped to symbolically solidify the connection between DOG and GOD...the yin and yang of my creepy glam-drenched horror rock.

                                         
                           Click Here for Video: She Makes Love to Serpents circa 1988

      After playing the album for my lifetime friend and fellow musician, Andres Karu, whom I first met in 1973 just before starting kindergarten, he handed me a recording of his own which was the creepiest, darkest instrumental track I had ever heard at the time. What really blew me away was the fucked-up, slurring backward voice that bled through due to the fact that it was recorded on an old 2-track reel to reel recorder on an aged tape he found lying in his basement amongst a bunch of old books and records. DOG quickly became a duo and we began to expand the Doghaus piece by piece, collecting used electronic goodies and a multitude of instruments of all kinds. By 1993, we had a full fledged 8-track studio with a collection of electronic, electric, and acoustic instruments and we had moved the studio into the basement of my parent's rural pine-barren home. The studio, which we painted entirely black, ceiling and all, became our cave of creation. The room was always reeking of incense and strewn with various macabre curios I collected from a unique little voodoo shop which was situated behind an African American hair boutique in Lakewood, NJ. The Doghaus also had its northern wall covered in mirrors. As I write this, my parent's pine barren abode, which was home to the Doghaus, is sadly about to go on the market. The old studio is now covered in boxes of old photographs, books, and music equipment, and will not likely ever again be used to create the lovely dark madness it once inspired.


                                  Click Here for Video: Get off My God circa 1994