Songs of the South: Voodoo, Racism, Tori Amos & Harry Belafonte

     In the summer of 2007, during a visit to my parents' home in the New Jersey pine barrens, I set up my recording equipment on their backyard deck with the intent of creating some new atmospheric ambient noise which would center around samples created with my recently acquired Ipod. During that period I was back to using my Tascam 8-track cassette recorder along with a custom-made 2-tiered guitar stompbox pedalboard for manipulating sounds looped from the Ipod. At the time I knew nothing about mashing, but I guess that is exactly what I was doing when I surrounded a classic Harry Belafonte slave song with the dark melodic piano and machine-driven drums of Tori Amos. My childhood backyard that formerly consisted of a vast landscape of sand dunes and several acres of scrub pines in which I would run around pretending to be lost on some uncharted planet straight out of an Issac Asimov novel was now gorgeously landscaped with mile-high shrubs and trees, multi-colored flowers, and lush exotic grasses. My mounds of rigged recording equipment piled up on my mom's plastiglass picnic table shrouded with a massive beach umbrella looked ridiculously out of place with the suburbia meets national park atmosphere of my parents' beautifully landscaped pine barren pride and joy paradise. This was just the setting I needed to create my twisted vision.

     Sometimes the greatest moments created during a work of art are the ones that begin with an "oh fuck" or  a "you have to be fucking kidding me." My 14-year old 8-track recorder decided to take a shit after recording nearly 6 hours of new tracks for "I Think I Met the Devil in New Orleans," the opening track of Songs of the South. It was the best thing that could have happened to the recording, which is still one of the creepiest pieces of music I have ever recorded thanks to the intermittent technical annoyance which caused the machine to temporarily slur like a dying, old drunk. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure if it was the tape I was using, the recorder, or the fluctuation in temperature and humidity during that summer, but the glitch lasted long enough to add an eerie slurring and start/stop effect to the track. Try as I might, it was an effect in which I was never again able to recreate. After that day, the recorder worked perfectly as it had for the past 14 years. Perhaps it was the voodoo, which seemed to envelop the entire recording.

     Songs of the South is an album that reflects the dichotomy of the Southern United States: the beautiful landscapes and warm hospitality of its people crossed with the brutal history of racism and the often misunderstood practice of voodoo. The music was created from the obvious to the obscure samples culled from my massive, eclectic iPod music collection manipulated with analog stomp boxes and crude 20th century recording techniques. The instrumental themes range from slavery and racism ("Cotton" and "the Hanging of Jordy Brown") to dark religious overtones ("Mississippi Voodoo Queen" and "I Think I Met the Devil in New Orleans"). Another track of note is the reworking and ambient interpretation of Billie Holiday's immortal classic, "Strange Fruit (revisited)." Looking back, Songs of the South opened new artistic doors for me in a number of ways including recording "on location" as opposed to confining myself to the often stifling confines of the quintessential recording studio. I also began to embrace the use of sampling technology and combined it in ways I had never imagined before. Mostly, Songs of the South represented a new way of approaching dark ambient and experimental noise thematically for me with its focus on the darkness of nature as well as the dark side of human nature.