Jouhou Notes: Like so many of the other DA releases, when we got to the studio, the songs changed. The music, the lyrics...everything. This is the most accurate representation of what is on the old records. Some of it is kind of embarrassing now but bear with me. It was the early 90's ^_- Thanks to the power of dictionary.com this should also be typo free. I've appended each song with a few stories, notes, etc. Hopefully you'll find them enjoyable as well ^_^ Vertigo Index Alienation washes over me, downloading world apartment horror Wheezing through tea stained lungs comes a voice piped in from a vacuum A tiled grove of telephone wires, rabbit ears and power lines Insinuated in the residential disintegration that assassinates the sky And now my being is networked To be shared among us all. And my world falls back into place Or do I fall back into place In my world. Notes. This one was written only 2 or 3 weeks before we recorded Jouhou. We finished it in the studio after like 30-40 takes. The lyrics had to be completely redone since there was a whole ending to this song(another 5-10 seconds) that we chopped off at the studio. The song didn't have any resolution without the last measure so I rewrote this on the spot, based on the original. Panoptic Plain clothes Duck decoys Continue steady Observation Rapt in the expansion Of an impregnable circle Imminent circle Canceled eyes scan For like minded divorce A dance with the damned with carpal tunnel syndrome My binary self-portrait operates like a traffic jam With obsessive resolution...pressing on. Damned. Step up foresighted blindness to a Panopticism Player piano spits out Pollyana noise Rehearsing for the death...of Gilgamesh. Growing out of patterns of ruin and grey into a knot that resolves itself But lifeless to your touch, I am content to distribute torque. Notes. This was written as three separate songs by Rob and Dave and then reassembled into Panoptic by Witte later. We would record our entire practice session, then take the tapes and splice songs together out of the cool parts. There were so many versions of this song written (lyrically) that I mixed 2-3 versions of the song by accident when recording it. By the time I finally got this one, I was so exhausted I didn't want to do it again so this version stands. Every time we played it live, I always screwed it up differently. Whoops. There a bunch of references to Philip K Dick and assorted DC comics in this song. Aperture of Pinholes Eyeless turrets survey Picture perfect soot post cards Flat silvers, dull panes Anti-personnel impersonal Do paper targets Get a premonition Up and down Escher's chutes and ladders? Clay pigeons on hangars Track left and down, zoom the finder Every inch fortified By its aperture How long spent against the grain Before concrete soul gives way In concerted surrender we play dead but never really die Notes. I end songs with the word "die" way too much. My metal roots show through again. Sigh. The lyrics for this one came from looking at an MC Escher exhibition right after reading "Now Wait for Last Year" by PKD. Information Sniper Reassure my, security obsession Beneath column headers and appraisals Pages and pages to define The eclipse of averages Intently grinding in a circle Piece by...piece There's no joy on the nail head When the hammer hits. Dutifully hand over Or regularly confiscated A hit forfeited for a delusion Or extra paranoia insecurity Notes. Originally released on the Melt Banana split 7", it was the first song we wrote after break-up number 3 (the one after Ulterior for those of you keeping count). This grew to be a "fan fav" and I've heard over a dozen covers of it via tape trades and MP3's mailed my way. Carcass Lottery Paper covers rock Rock blunts stone Paper covers rock Paper covers rock Paper cuts rock Trading paper cuts Tattooed design Name fucking Dearly ordained Gouged out behind But am I Privy to your Anemic antipathy Vacuum ready Paper covers rock Paper covers rock Paper covers rock Paper cuts rock Paper cuts scissors Rock blunts stone A legible price quote the only death certificate Throat slit silent, spin the wheel of misfortune Carcass lottery one room four walls When displacement takes you out, on the killing floor. Notes. This song made sense to me at one point. Now I read it and can barely tell what the hell I was thinking. I do know at some point the second measure made sense. It may be because I had to rewrite half the song in the studio as Mr Witte changed the time sig for the "mosh" measure as we were recording it. It was/is really hard to sing to. Live we always played it without the weird time changes and it sounds better. Come Apart Together, Come Together Alone Engineer the archetype of forgery With insistent protocols that won't take no Technical support is complimentary In suicide parlors where channel surfing is vogue Admire the diorama of a sweetened death From behind a blindfold, a smile fixed in nails Borrow emptiness and make it yours But dot the i's and cross the t's Scoring the wings of angels to feather and bone With scotch tape and paper clippings Mind gets recycled backwards Through the navigational delusion Until this trojan hearse It terminates...its thread. Notes. This is so "Fahrenheit 451" and "Brazil" it's almost embarrassing. I think the opening was written by Rob after I introduced him to Minor Threat. On another note, I use the word "delusion" way too much on this record. Thank god you can't understand most of the words anyways ^_^ Rain Perimeter I hear the Water Backfire Drawn to the clouds Violently dilapidated ozone Can't hold ultraviolet from the sun back In anticipation of a dead half life Chlorine deep inside of me This pale outcropping of water Sounds a death rattle for us all PCBs For everything a last time. Notes. Inspired by Neal Stephenson's book "Zodiac". After reading that I went out and did a stack of research into the effects of PCBs when not properly disposed of. FUBAR doesn't even begin to describe that situation. A bit of trivia, on the first DA vid (that we sold at Fiesta Grande) when we play this song you can hear me and Rob going into Panoptic and Dave starting this. Whoops. A Broken Tomorrow Cat scans inside, conducted, without soul, or are you Deep inside, piece of you, fragmentation, variant Sunbaked you, fossil soul, counts misfortune, one minute old After you've, hacked your way in, you can show, yourself. The fucking way out. Information jet lag Kills me on a dime Riding mice Into a brave new world. Notes. The original words to this made sense...no, really. Well at least more sense than this. But once again the original flow didn't work as well when we got to the studio and heard them naked against the music. So I improvised the whole part. Never did it the same way twice live either, except for the last measure and the "After you've hacked..." part. This is another song that was severely chopped in the studio. Originally there were two more parts after the "end" of the song...they were blasting but the song is actually better without them. You can hear the intro to this song on several other CDs/records as it has been copied by a bunch of other bands (grind, metal, etc). Have a good laugh when you hear them. Attrition Infinity I recall tomorrow presently, corpse to corpse Like cut out paper knitted close tied dead souls Chain smoking number crunchers, one step forward two steps back I've grown fluent in a language Whose literacy is classified. Death glossed over into joint Notes. Written in the studio. Wins vote for the song we wish could've left off this CD. Not bad but so obviously filler. Nikola Tesla Notes. Our first collaboration with Merzbow. I remixed about 30 seconds of a DAT Masami sent me and interspersed it with samples from my fav video game of the time, Gun Griffon for the Sega Saturn. This was played as an intro live when we played the Fiesta Grande in 97. Flow My tears The Policeman Said Information certainly detained Paranoia near omniscient Updated files accessorize Flow my tears, the policeman said. Flow my tears Along the platform track, narrow blind line Hostage management a formula, for a new kind of lifeless life Assimilation seen through To an incomplete, a prototype, rote. Infocentric time line driven Ready? Die. Notes. Originally from the split 7" with Plutocracy, we were playing it so much faster and nosier live I wanted to re-record it. Instead it turned out to be too noisy. Dave couldn't hear Rob and end the song on time so he played it "clean". Just another road stop on our trip to disaster that the "Jouhou" recording session was. Once again I end a song on "die". Pitiful. Jouhou A triage of thought Stripped down to syllables Each character, each letter Every word Cataracts, in a doll's eyes Coded into dialects, diverging vernacular Duality intrinsic Stitch me together Yet I fault you For even trying Cataracts, in a doll's eyes Silhouettes, that destroy themselves Equally stalemated In the opposite direction And to this tower of babble I pay homage, To rape the senses. I fall short Into emulsion scratched Have a good look now (Bats) Because both sides match. Notes. Inspired by the fate of Harvey Dent, aka Two Face, in the first chapter of Dark Knight Returns. Also there was a bit of Roland Barthes floating around in my head. I always thought he was over rated but made some interesting points. This was Rob and Dave's favorite song going into the session and one of the few we nailed on take number one. Damage Style Information gophers set in sightless task To doctor my history and bug my dreams Carefully placing the wire tap So I'm at my peak when I'm on my knees Fanatically crank out a record as a witness for you Just you and every word, my guess is this, I am a worm. Damage Style Asthmatic threshold Is the spearhead against my second wind Merry go nowhere routine It's all...end. Notes. Blast, blast, blast. I intentionally FUBAR the scream in the song since it's about my shitty health in case you were wondering. Another product of tape splicing. Aether Scalpel I sip lithium from the nape of a glass As is standard operating procedure Aether Scalpel Gaslight powers vision as clackers count Atom-ic minutes Championing the cluastrolodex Shredding teeth like documents Authored by circuits between the churning threads Air grows thin And the band plays on with Three blind mice (x4) Ice-driver rivets Hack network dolls Into scaffolds Notes. As we were screaming through random garbage at one session, Rob started playing the part that came to be known as "three blind mice". I guess in retrospect it barely sounds like that calypso piece but we thought it was the best thing since sliced bread at the time. Ever since, we've always had Mexican hat dance blast parts on every record ^_- Also features our first emo part ^_^ (or so we've been told anyways). A Crack in the Cataracts Depleted uranium in chrome and snow The cutting edge is bleeding Concertina like clipper chips Trash your soul till it's no more Thrown by arthritis appended with obsolescence Just don't fall down the rabbit hole to hell Another crack in the cataracts So brilliantly dull It's just a white out Notes. The tape splice strikes again. Harder to play than you would think too. Numb(ers) Going back forth at the indelible pace of erasure, stifled and filed human staple Paper weights Chambered Into everything at once, now Well all chime in like metronomes, fluent in scale, submerged in mercurochrome, dribbling air Double Lie Identity Squared. Blind deafen deaden, a new retreat syndrome, that acknowledges compression, with a nod its head But Presses Backwards Just the same Statistical chains are fitted with teeth, in a harping audit that never will end To calculate The value Of life's net worth. Ambient claustrophobia hangs like a drop of ink in the air beneath dead halogens Bound to expire. Notes. I always liked the words to this one. One of the better songs in that department. This was another marathon song that took like a dozen tries to record. I think it was so hot and shitty in the studio by the time we got this far (we recorded this album in order and the AC failed the first day we got there) we had to break for the day or kill each other. I know for myself, I had clearly gone insane by this point. Ashtray Ballpoint Scuffed displays, care take artifacts Of dandelion seed and bone Condensations forms on a metal skin A piece of something, in a mercurochrome Melting ice cubes at room temperature A finite suffering prolonged The desiccated sperm of Prometheus Some ashes for you to dine on. Anxiously Disseminated Into the middle Of nowhere Ashtray Bound. Notes. My fav song on the LP, this also appeared on "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" 7" comp put out by a friend of ours, Rene, in Germany. This guy was die hard, he flew over to see us play at least 2-3 times. Really nice fellow. His label, Insolito, is still active I think. Typeface In the pilot tunnel Arranged printers blocks Slowly deranged Contours twice removed Amputated from myself Asbestos head rush Flushes memory Registration marks (Of) memory. People fonts Social Typeface Template Armageddon Scaled to one. Disposal protocols for a human typo In a library operating backwards. Notes. Rob Marton's epic thrash trilogy brought to life. In the hiatus between the Pluto/Banana session and the Jouhou session Rob wrote this. It was the first song he wrote entirely on his own and was the beginning of totally new working methodology for the band when we started work on TID 3 years later. If you listen carefully you can hear the two guitar tracks are off just a hair from one another giving the song a weird effect if you listen with head phones. No one noticed this at the time as we were so wired on Mountain Dew and Jolt that we just wanted to keep bolting through stuff(we went through over 10 cases in 3 days recording Jouhou). My obsession with typography comes through on this one big time. Reciprocity This broken arrow points to nowhere Close ended, clusterfucked and emotionally plowshared Glove compartments and paper clipped files Conjugated heart can't even sigh. Tapping catheter in rolling black out grids Survey the blood, a labor of old To what end do you pyramid? Another entry in the phone book With paperwork always a given Every form filled out in triplicate squared Intense pacing of attrition Inside out Of a digitally retouched identity A choppy ending With synch sound rekeyed Foreshortened autonomy I reciprocate beat. Notes. I love this one but we always played it way faster live. When we were touring with Steve Procopio, after Rob quit the band, he refused to play the rock'n'roll ending that we all found so hilarious (and a nice pause between this and "Appleseed" which normally followed it live). Reincarnation Reincarnation, is a dead refrain So this what it's like to be a butterfly Reborn Dead. Is this the gift of fire? Or the making of a perfect diamond Digital climber plummets In a canceled dive. Like a flower petal in autumn I'm brittle to the touch disintegrating the pieces swim. Intelligent toasters, troubleshoot through caffeine Backwards engineering a death span, without dreams. Invisible shadows slip into mirrors through ceilings and out into floors. Notes. The last song on the LP was another "fan fav" and we played it at every show after we wrote it. We were going to play it on the last tour but we forgot to relearn it. Whoops. This song also had a much longer break in the middle (the whole bridge between the thrash beat and final blast part was like 2-3 times longer but we killed it before we got to the studio). It's much better shorter ^_^ The whole ending is inspired by an anime called "Magnetic Rose" by Koji Morimoto. [ back ]