It probably seems like I am throwing up every sound I ever recorded here online. This is like an audio Blog and a photo album—and you, courageous reader, are stuck listening to all of this in an effort not to hurt my feelings. Don’t be so careful. Be non-morbidly curious about a person you rarely meet.

These college experiments follow my early teen years of buying vinyl records and recording them to tape. I had an old Fischer stereo. I could mix the radio, a cheap mic’ and the turntable together and make collages. Once college came I was prepared to make more tape recordings, influenced by art-house, William-Burroughs cut-ups, 80’s new wave music and something called “hip hop.”

alice the phallus

Incept Date: Probably 1988 or 1989.

I was really, really irritated by my raging hormones. It was really like a lust hate relationship that eventually exploded into the birth of children. This “song” makes itself into a sex-crazed, rough, rough demo for that garage band that never really found me.

I did perform with a few garage bands in Isla Vista (the college-town next to UCSB) but I was also a big black teenager from Inglewood, CA so I “failed” a few cultural barrier tests and flunked out of anything resembling the school of Toad the Wet Sprocket.

big piano brain

Incept Date: Probably 1988 or 1989.

I tried to play my mother’s spinet all through childhood. Something called Proposition 13 removed music instruction from public school and that really cut me from formal music training. I am told that this can be a positive thing.

This piece is an excerpt from a larger piece that reveals my theatrical side, omitted for the better. Trust me.

shtetl

Incept Date: Probably 1987 or 1988.

This is actually recorded with my mother’s piano. I think it sounds like the ravings of a polish peasant, living up off 54th and Cimarron.

skeleton man comes to congo

Incept Date: Probably 1989–90.

I was no stranger to hip-hop and this cut is the proof. I recited this one at the one meeting of the UCSB English Club I attended. They were stone silent when I finished, louder than a bomb.

I started working on a new version of this song for commercial release in 1996 but lack of funding and MIDI Orchestrator Plus were not cutting it.

the boom of the bomb

Incept Date: Probably 1989–90.

Both this song and “skeleton man comes to congo” were recorded by the legendary R/Kain Blaze. He went to UCLA while I stole mines at UCSB.

Blaze was the brother who started The Good Life hip-hop open-mic’ up off Crenshaw in the early 1990s. So when you remember Freestyle Fellowship and Rage against the Machine remaking Pistol Grip Pump, then you know a little something about Blaze.

Credits

Original Music, Words and Flow by . . . . . . . Bryan Wilhite (c. 1988)

Interactive and Visual Design by . . . . . . . Bryan Wilhite (2005)

Streaming Audio Engineering by . . . . . . . Bryan Wilhite (2007)