Bite the Wax Tadpole: mind-melting soundtracks for movies in your head, combining whupass guitar rock; avant-garde free improv; loop-based electronica; spiky modernism; fiendishly intricate postmodern folk tunes; and spoken-word narratives.

17 MP3 Songs in this album (69:02) !
Related styles: SPOKEN WORD: With Music, ROCK: Psychedelic

People who are interested in Tom Waits Shriekback Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band should consider this download.


Details:
Formed by Mark Dery and Darren Smith in 1985, in New York City, Bite the Wax Tadpole was in some ways symptomatic of â80s information anxiety: taking its name from the mangled tagline of a Chinese ad campaign for Coke, the duo sprang from the homebrew cassette revolution and NYCâs downtown music scene. Although BTWT played East Village art-club gigs (with Sophie B. Hawkins sitting in on drums), the group mostly toured Smithâs Jersey City bedroom, composing and recording songsâsoundtracks for mental movies, more accuratelyâon a four-track tape deck.
âEver since childhood, Iâve always wanted to make music that defies categorization,â says Smith. âMarkâs spoken-word stuff was not quite poetry, not quite rap, not quite prose, andâwhile reminiscent of Laurie Andersonâtotally unique. He was the Rex Harrison of the avant-garde (thatâs a compliment!) and, in his willingness to bend genres, a kindred spirit. Soon, with Mark telling stories and me exploring every instrument at my disposalâhexaphonic guitar, cornet, balalaika, dumbek, banjo, fuzz vocals, and amplified Cheeto munchingâwe were collaborating feverishly.â
This was music made by men in small rooms, with all the twitchy-eyed, Lee Harvey Oswald intensity that implies. Smith, a guitar, trumpet, and synth virtuoso who had studied South Indian vocal music, Balinese gamelan, and electric banjo (with Peter Tork of The Monkees!), proved an ideal foil for Dery, a chronic word-aholic whose spoken-word performances were somewhere between William S. Burroughsâs deadpan monologues and Jack Nicholsonâs scenery-chewing rants in The Shining. The landmarks on Smithâs mental map ranged from Bartok to Bollywood, Ice Cube to Meredith Monk, Barton Fink to Godel, Escher, Bach; Deryâs foremost influences were Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and J.G. Ballard. Together, the pair made music full of dark humor and quantum weirdness, with a dream logic all its own.
The group released two titlesâBetween You, Me and the Lamprey (1988) and O.D. on Bourgeoisie Boy Milk (1990)âon the underground cassette-only label Sound of Pig, garnering college-radio airplay and critical accolades: âwonderfully funny...a wild and wooly trip through bizarre mindsâ (Factsheet Five); âstunningly original and disturbingâ (Option); âa masterpiece...a uniquely bizarre little gemâ (Ear). In the early â90s, BTWT recorded an albumâs worth of material (much of which appears here) with Lower East Side scenemakers Elliott Sharp, Christian Marclay, Yuval Gabay (of Soul Coughing), and Samm Bennett (of Chunk).
Turn Me On, Dead Manâthe title is taken from the backwards-masked phrase supposedly lurking in The Beatlesâ âRevolution 9ââanthologizes the best of Bite the Wax Tadpoleâs early years.
âWe were musically omnivorous,â says Dery, âmashing up ideas borrowed from garage-sale oddities and our own overheated imaginationsâhip-hop, Led Zep, musique concrete, obscure ethnographic recordings like The Bororo World of Sound, unintentionally hilarious LPs like this 1950sâ instructional record called A Manâs Work, (âThe World of Men. The World of Work. Itâs big. And itâs got all kinds.â) But we werenât just another cut-and-paste collage band. I was writing these voiceovers for imaginary moviesânot really poetry, but not exactly songs, eitherâand Darren was composing these mind-melting soundtracks that encompassed whupass guitar rock; avant-garde free improv; loop-based electronica; spiky modernism; and fiendishly intricate postmodern folk tunes, showcasing his two-handed tapping and hot-rodded Hexaphonic guitar. Our connection was damn near telepathic. It was a marriage made on Mars.â
Twenty-odd years later, he and Dery are still pushing the conceptual envelope, says Smith. âLooking back on Bite the Wax Tadpoleâs golden years, Iâm proud of what we did, especially in light of the conformity of the Reagan era," says Smith. "And we had a fucking blast doing it.â

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Five Reasons You MUST Order a Copy of Turn Me On, Dead Man :

1. Sixty-nine minutes (and two seconds!) of chewy nougat and chocolate-y goodness. Itâs flavoriffic!

2. A six-page CD booklet, printed on high-quality paper, overstuffed with lyrics and commentary on the diskâs 17 songs, and featuring the ironic yet insouciant graphic design of Carlos Morera. Buy this stunningly designed artifact of the Late Caligulan phase of the Bush imperium for Moreraâs work alone; sell it on eBay a decade from now, when your 401k has turned to ash and youâre spending your retirement as a minimum-wage barista at Starbuckâs.

3. Bite the Wax Tadpole builds Vocabulary Power! Can you define âmagnificat,â soldier? How about âskirlâ? Or âtrepanâ? Or âlancetâ? This is the only CD intended to be listened to with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy. The only collection of alt.huh? songs that includes a tune about a febrifuge. (Look it up, sailor. Or you could justâ¦buy the CD!)

4. Forget Cultural Literacy; Turn Me On, Dead Man contains enough grad-student literary allusions, obscure historical references, smartypants wordplay, knowing riffs on pop culture, and deadpan meta-whatever to give Jacques Derrida a spastic colon.

5. Where else can you hear a full-tilt rocker about a tyrannical boss who thunders, âYouâre gonna be a dissected crayfish, and Iâm gonna be the man in surgeonâs greens wiping your entrails across my lapelsâ? A bizarre monologue by a worker on some David Lynchian assembly line (or is it a slaughterhouse?) that churns out an unspeakable product involving creatures with âsucking discs on the tops of their headsâ? A musical suicide note, narrated by the Nazi nudnik Rudolph Hess? A techno elegy about the sinking of the Titanic, set to a sampled loop and sung by the ship itself (âA prunefaced corpse, his features blurring, sits crosslegged on the ceiling of my ballroom, warming his hands by the chandelierâ)? Weâre just sayingâ¦