Timmy Taylor of Brainiac
Brainiac latest Touch and Go release, Hissing Prigs in Static Couture, has some of the weirdest sounds on any recent rock record. Girls Against Boys' Eli Janney produced most of the songs, which were recorded at Water Music in lovely Hoboken, New Jersey. Steve Albini had to get a piece of the action, so he put "Nothing Ever Changes" to tape in his basement. The creepiest and catchiest song, however, is "This Little Piggy," which features an electric voice that sounds like the computer in that old Matthew Broderick movie War Games.
That's a Texas Instruments' home computer, the TI-994. I got that when I was 11 years old. We had it up in the attic for years, and I remembered that it had this speech pack, a metal box that you snap into one of the ports on the side. Then you type in simple sentences. I didn't have any of the books any more, so I just started going around to thrift stores in Dayton and by luck one of them had a complete TI set-up with this book that explained how to program it. I didn't want to pay the 25 bucks, so I stuffed the book down my pants and went home and learned how to program in basic again. I was able to write a simple program where you could feed sentences into it. It was really laborious-we had to feed it, then find the point in the song and punch it in. It took like three hours to get it all on tape.
Doug Scharin of Rex and Him
Doug Scharin, formerly with Codeine, now drums in Rex and spends his spare time in his Williamsburg, Brooklyn apartment fiddling with his 4-track while creating the electro-dub sounds for his project Him. Both Rex and Him have albums on Southern Records.
