1. cocksocket - la vacanza
2. david byrne - a long time ago
3. daft punk - daftendirekt
4. citizen cope - contact
5. beastie boys - pass the mic
6. arson garden - mind talking
7. butthole surfers - pepper
8. bob dylan - you're gonna make me lonesome when you go
9. cypress hill - let it train
10. dr. octagon - blue flowers
11. 50 cent - in da club
12. citizen cope - salvation
13. die warzau - amphibious
14. bloodhound gang - hell yeah
15. barry adamson - everything happens to me
16. duran duran - 911 is a joke
17. 2pac - papa'z song
18. aphex twin - come to daddy (little lord faulteroy)
19. beach boys - i just wasn't made for these times

Heard On The Messageboard
Matt: Last Saturday I fished in the pond located outside my condo for the first time. After 2 hours of casting and reeling I landed a whopper of a fish. I did have the foresight to take along the camera and did have Son-of-Matt snap a beautiful shot of this sea creature. However, after some dicking around with the left over bread bits and a dumb-assed move on Son-of-Matt's part, the picture of this great beast has been lost.
MightyWeb I bet it was over 10m long and had a weight at 35kg... You can be sure that one of the free reverse phone lookup things developers.

Linkage
halaka
epitonic
lycos 50

From Camp Tufu
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Tufu was attempting to create some sort of biological container to haul his warped twisted "self" around in.

Raining

I did post this song last month, but the earlier version was a mono mixdown that actually undermined the nature of what was intended. This new version is a more faithful rendition. I may put this one up also at music.download.com, which is now active.

Spent plenty of time in the past couple of weeks digitizing the old studio source materials. Right now, the first 6 4-track tapes have been converted, one track at a time, to .wav format. The recording quality has held up very well over the years; the quality of the music itself is (at times) underdeveloped. But hey! Thank god for sound editing software and effects. Something good is bound to emerge from something at some point, right?

There are a few other recordings that cannot be unlocked by means of the new Tascam. Some reel-to-reel stuff, a couple of torn cassettes, and some ancient synthizer / MAC work that has languished on archaic media. Don't know about any of that really; it mostly predates the Socket.

Well, there's basketball and a massive road trip in the near future. See you when I see you.

Alrighty then. A quick cloud of improductivitation has descended upon the new studio developments. There are simply too many things to organize and deploy, and I am therefore paralyzed by overstimulocity. A manifold problem has emerged:
a) I do not have a stereo input into my sound card. Or, if I do, I am unable to figure out how to use it. Therefore what I am able to mix-down and edit digitally consists of a single channel;
b) the mono mix-down is very easy to do so that, as I am rifling through and reintroducing myself to the backlog of 4-track cassettes, I am spending most of my available time producing these under-produced nuggets, however (as mentioned before),
c) a lot of what I have done relies to a great extent on stereo channel separation. And if I am to maximize the quality of the material I must go through the process of digitizing each track individually, controlling for the wildly variable amplitude levels, somehow re-synching the tracks back up, and producing a stereo mix of each song. This type of mixdown provides far less immediate gratification, using up an estimated 4x or 5x the time required to produce a mono mixdown. On top of all that,
d) the original motivation behind revisiting the 4-track materials was to preserve them by translating the perishable magnetic encoding into a more durable, if not immutable, digital format, a motivation which lends itself to serious devotion of time to the single-track digitization method. Of course,
e) free time is at an all time premium college essays

So clearly I can't get a goddam thing done. Sorry kids.

In the meantime, you can sample some of the temporary mixdowns, riddled as they are with their unique sonic impediments. One plus: it is all well-endowed with a healthy dose of Organica

• Shoulda Been Gone - found a turntable in the dumpster and tried to use a collection of 45's recently acquired from the local flea market
• I've Got A Pilot On The Line - schizophrenia is different from multiple personality disorder.
• The Jelly Snatchers - The Puma was suffering from super group highness, and The Schanen therefore said something terribly entertaining, and the Sega Genesis used to get played a lot. Mr. Seed was involved

It's all coming fast and furious, and I'm doling them out like 3rd-party checks at a Cincinnati flea market. Can I get a "woo-woo"?

If you want to, you can now listen to the enigmatic instructional message otherwise known as Iaphragm Day.

First, you get no background on this song, as it has always been intended as a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, dipped in secret sauce. Even before this phrasing suggested itself.

Second, as I continue to review these archival materials, I am struck by how much these songs rely on spatial effects. A straight mono mixdown is a pretty simple affair. For me to inject the necessary channel separation, I will have to work much harder. Just so you know, that is where I am headed, but I can't resist launching some of this crap in mediocre form in advance of the final products.

Finally, looking through the source material, I have uncovered the following statisticalities:
The archive contains...

• 41 cassettes
• 206 songs + 1 hidden bonus song
• 10 Hours, 15 Minutes of music

Now, then, Tascam 234 has been officially retired. I acquired a fine replacement today; this one is called Tascam MK414, or some such shit. Whatever. This new-style Tascam has made the following rendition of Cocksocket's hallmark first single a reality. Listen right now to...

Raining

This was originally intended as a spatial masterpiece, benefitting from a more meaningful stereo, and possibly quad-ready mixdown. However, in the interest of expedient sharing, the channel-shifting portions of the composition have been, well, foregone.

Whatever, yo?

The Tascam 234 is no more. Well, it does exist, but it doesn't do anything useful. I finally dug that bad boy out of the closet last night, hooked it up, popped in the first tape enmeshed (as I was) in the hopes that I could get that song "Raining" up on this here webite, and lo! Nothing doing.

The problem lies in the playback, which now occurs at a highly variable speed somewhere between 3 and 30 IPS. All the recordings were made at 3.75. At first I thought that the tapes themselves were "fujeewinkled", but now I think the source material is fine and that the pestillence lies in some rotting rubber belt buried deep within the machine.

This is the second time that Tascam 234 has fallen ill. The first time, not even a year before it was mothballed, it munched up a couple of my tapes. I lost (for example) a great Australian joke told by the inimitable and fantastically inebriated Australian classical scholar Daniel. The joke was about a rabbit who got sick from "mixing his toasties". Tascam 234 was thereafter forced into an immediate "sabbatical" and a visit to the "Tascam repairman".

Anyway, I can't risk the archives with a renegade like Tascam 234, right? Nooooo! I need an alternative. I thought at first that I would just pick up a replacement from the fine sellers of Ebay. After checking the inventories, I am underwhelmed. Do I really want to plop down a couple of Benjamins to get a 20-year-old rack-mountable chunk of metal? I mean, my unit was mollycoddled like a mofo! 2 owners, heads de-magnetized and cleaned before each use, minimized presence of dust in the environment, etc. The answer, again, is nooooo! I need a new unit (keep your mind out of the gutter...).

Last time Tascam went down, I promptly picked up a Fostex X-14 from my local 4-track store and skirted it off to the nether regions of the home studio. It was with the Fostex machine, in fact, that I mixed down and digitized the bulk of the older material that appears on this website. The Fostex was good for mixing, but not so good for recording. Once the Tascam had been repaired, I sent Mr. Fostex to the home of Toby in the hopes that he might recover some of the brilliant Cocksocket materials which he had produced.

To make a short story long, I have decided to buy an entirely new machine. My 3rd 4-track. Frankly, I have always had such a fascination with the very idea of the multitrack recorder that I view this purchase as something of an adventure. To me, a big piece of this fascination has to do with the material involved. So I can't really get to the concept of a "digital multitrack recorder", which are proliferatering in the home recording marketplace.

In fact, there are only a handful of new, multitrack, cassette-based recorders. And only 2 function at 3.75 IPS. So I am deciding between the Tascam 414mkII and the Tascam 424mkIII. The respective price points are $250 and $330 -- although I am told by the fine folks at the Guitar Center that the prices are "completely negotiable". I can't wait to find out exactly how completely the price can be negotiated.

Well, writing about all of this has made me entirely bored. But, like a mutant spider scurrying forth and across the floor with the p-pit-piter p-patter of 10 hairy legs, the past decade has pushed forth to plunge its sharpened, furry years into the neck of my musical sloth and delivered its potent, toxic, and ostensibly non-lethal venom into the nipple of the Cocksocket.

I finally got my grubby little paws on this year's most unlikely HOT MEDIA PROPERTY: Chappelle's Show, Season 1. No commercials, uncensored, uncut, and not one goddam commercial. Brilliant! And, furthermore, there are no commercials. New York Boobs!

Accompanied as I am by an incessant need to reflect upon times past, it has lately occurred to me that Cocksocket is on the verge of breaking violently through its 10-year anniversary. In May of 1994, I inherited a piece of equipment that was able to record things, then record things over top of the things that were recorded before, and then even record additional things on top of that mess, fulfilling the dreams made clear to me as many as ten years before that. I am talking, of course, about the Tascam 234.

The acquisition of the Tascam 234 was a breakthrough in many ways, not the least of which was the birth of the Cocksocket. At nearly the same time that said Tascam machine was acquired, and as I was walking down the street, across a typical small city intersection, a certain soundflash entered my head. "Cocksocket" it said. And thus was Cocksocket born, nearly a decade ago.

Woo-Hoo!

Among the songs now available on this website, Love Ballad For Tabitha Soren dates back furthest -- probably to just before Spring, 1995. I always considered the first song (called "Raining") to be something of an accidental masterpiece. 4 tracks of math-driven guitardation. Poor little song, trapped as it is in the magnetic scribbles of a cassette tape. I can see it from where I sit. I hope it hasn't given up the ghost yet.

Yup, just up there in my closet sit the untold, unsung hours of Cocksocketonian history -- "Maximized Time". Undoubtedly these things do not possess an unlimited shelf-life.

Whatever.

I have heard the rattlings of a new music service -- "son of mp3.com" a.k.a. music.download.com. I have submitted my shit and am told that everything will be launching soon. Sounds like they will have more strict music police than mp3.com, so that let's out the majority of my catalog.

Again, whatever.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, for some spring cleaning. La Vacanza was a terrible success, lending one in every three words ever published on this site. However, self-imposed format restrictions force me to put on La Vacanza on ice. With luck, you will find a link to La Vacanza over there to the left. If you like, you may download the Vacation song here.

As the j-tag is somewhat impaired, it shall be removed temporarily from this place.

Regarding March Murder, once the results have been fully tabulated, they shall be represented hereunder:

The Running Joke:
Q2.2003
Q1.2003
Q4.2002
Q3.2002
Q2.2002
Q1.2002
Q4.2001
Q3.2001
Q2.2001
Q1.2001
Q4.2000
Full Commentary