half-pint demigod is a collaboration between two artists who have never worked together. Performed by musicians who didn't listen to any of the material until months after they recorded their parts. Produced by a guitarist who didn't play a single note on the album, and didn't have
anything to do with recording the material. And written by a songwriter
who didn't hear any of the music until the album was already done.
In this corner: Shawn "Yogi" Farley, a singer/songwriter/guitarist who
has built a rabid cult following by defiantly releasing albums of
melodic-yet-intricate hard rock songs. Yogi's music is made up of equal
parts pop-song brain and hard-rock brawn, flaunting instrumental
virtuosity, catchy vocal melodies, and elaborate live band arrangements.
His debut album Any Raw Flesh? was a surprise breakout hit amongst a
largely online fanbase; made piecemeal over three years in small
independent studios, and released independently, it won near-unanimous
praise from fans and critics alike – Guitar Player magazine observed
that Any Raw Flesh? contained "… a truckload of inventive music."
In that corner: Andre LaFosse, an instrumental guitarist, producer, and
chronic desconstructionist. His obsessive experiments with gene-splicing
the seemingly disparate worlds of instrumental musicianship and post-DJ
thought have won him acclaim, controversy, and more than a few puzzled
looks from his listeners. His iconoclastic first CD, Disruption Theory,
juxtaposed live electric guitar against intricate electronic
programming, and was greeted with both serious critical praise and
serious commercial obscurity.
Farley and LaFosse crossed paths and bonded over a shared cultural
lineage of '80s heavy metal, Star Wars, comic books, Internet message
boards, and white male American myopia. It was probably inevitable that
they'd try to collaborate in some way; it was probably impossible that
either of them could imagine how complicated the ensuing project would
become, and how utterly unusual the musical result would be.
It all started innocently enough: Yogi invited Andre to produce remixes
of the material from Any Raw Flesh?. Quickly sensing the possibility to
snatch a difficult defeat from the jaws of easy victory, Andre proposed
taking this familiar concept for a highly esoteric spin: he decided that
the only sounds he would use in his remixes would be the actual musical
performances which were recorded for the original versions of those
songs, during the making of Any Raw Flesh?
There would be no drum machines, no synthesizers, no outside samples of
other artists, and no new instrumental performances by Andre, Yogi, or
anyone else. Shawn, a Seattle resident, would mail the original live
band performances from four of the songs from Any Raw Flesh? to Andre as
computer files on dozens of CD-Rs. Andre would then put these
performances through the digital ringer on his computer in Los Angeles -
editing the tracks into new shapes, cross-pollinating and combining
performances from all four different songs into new pieces, warping the
original performances beyond recognition, and re-constituting them as
new material.
Sometimes the recorded performances of Any Raw Flesh? drummer Chris G
were chopped up, filtered, and tweaked so that they sounded like
breakbeats sampled from an old vinyl record, or were rigidly edited to
resemble an ancient drum machine. Sometimes Yogi's guitar parts would be
cut-and-pasted, like sentence fragments in a word processing program, so
that completely new riffs and songs were fashioned from scraps of the
old ones. Sometimes two different bass lines from two completely
different songs would end up playing at the same time in a new remix.
One of the four songs Andre requested files for ended up containing a
few lines of hidden vocals, which were turned into lead vocal parts for
two versions of a "new" song.
During all of this, the only time Farley and LaFosse spent together in
person was a couple of hours in a movie theater at the very beginning of
the project, watching the film Memento; Andre ended up basing one of
the remixes around the structure of that film.
After many months, countless CD-Rs, a few novels' worth of emails, and a
seriously swollen hard drive, half-pint demigod emerged, at a whopping
11 tracks and 74 minutes, as what may be the single most conceptually
overloaded - and least efficiently produced - remix album ever created.
It sounded very little like Yogi's original songs, even though obvious
traces of his music had been carefully woven throughout the entire
album, as easter eggs to reward the attentive Any Raw Flesh? fan. It
also bore little resemblance to the jungle/guitar gene-splice of
Disruption Theory, although it shared some of that record's aesthetic
sensibilities (and a lot of its art-school pretentions).
Running orders were compiled, mastering sessions were booked, audio
commentaries were recorded, preview MP3's were uploaded...
...and then half-pint demigod was put on the shelf, unreleased, where it
sat for three years, while the two core artists behind it resumed their lives.
Shawn went on to release additional CDs of his melodic rock songs, and
continued to grow his following. Andre got tired of making music by
pointing and clicking a mouse, started playing live solo gigs with a
guitar and a digital Echoplex, and went on to make a second solo album
called Normalized, which sounded very little like either Disruption
Theory or half-pint demigod.
But the abandoned, psychologically-burdened, red-headed stepchild of
this musical odd couple was never forgotten, and half-pint demigod is
finally being given the chance to see - and be seen by - the outside
world. Stuck halfway between solo album and collaboration, existing as
equal parts art statement and party soundtrack, it raises a number of
questions: What does the album "mean" for each artist at this point in
their respective careers? How will it be heard by their respective
audiences, or by those unfamiliar with either Yogi or Andre?
And for that matter, will it be even be heard at all?
half-pint demigod, the music of Shawn "Yogi" Farley remixed by Andre
LaFosse, is released December 6, 2005 on Wonky Records. |
