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Charles Rice Goff III
Pink Wooden Bodies

DOWNLOAD @ ARCHIVE.ORG

CHARLES RICE GOFF III EXECUTED EACH OF THE RECORDINGS IN THIS VOLUME BY INCORPORATING EITHER A PINK MAHALO UKULELE OR A PINK MATTEL BARBIE VIOLIN (OR IN MANY CASES, BOTH) INTO THE COMPOSITIONAL PROCESS. ALL PIECES WERE COMPOSED, RESEARCHED, PERFORMED, AND PRODUCED BY GOFF III DURING THE FIRST HALF OF 2006. MANY OF THE MELODIES AND THEMES OF THESE PIECES WERE REVEALED TO GOFF THROUGH DREAMS. Copyright 2006 by Taped Rugs Productions

Watch for review in a future posting.

Interview by Bryan Baker on 10/14/2010

Do the non-musicians close to you understand your recordings?
The concept of "understanding" covers a lot of space. I think that many people who know me get the "why" aspects of my recordings, which, in my own understanding, are reactions to environment and circumstance. As for the "what" aspects, it's clear from the thousands of wide-ranging responses to my recordings that a lot fewer people see those in the same way that I do. Most of my artistic expressions are layered with multiple meanings. I assume that after producing this variety of art for over 30 years, my brain simply must be wired to create such elastic intercourse. Perhaps the most consistent "what" to understand in my recordings is the concept of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Regarding the "how" aspects of my recordings, my compositional processes tend to be organically designed for each individual artistic expression. They often stray very far from one another and very far from convention. No non-musicians get the "how," and it's rare that the musicians get it either.

How did you come across the ukulele and violin featured here?
In the autumn of 2005, I won a contest which was put on by the Public Transit Division of the City of Lawrence, Kansas. The City chose a graphic for a t-shirt which I designed to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its local bus system. (I have attached a jpeg image of the graphic to this email.) I got all sorts of gift certificates and other treasures for winning this contest. I used some of my victory booty to purchase the ukulele and violin. I chose these instruments for their size, color, weight, and versatility, in anticipation of my tour of the Southeast USA, which I took during the summer of 2006. Much of the music of PINK WOODEN BODIES was created as I familiarized myself with the sonic potentials of these instruments.

Tell us about making "No Commercial Interruptions".
First off, while many of the recordings on PINK WOODEN BODIES incorporate melodies which I dreamed and later interpreted, this piece was instead sculpted from a variety of sounds and ideas which were very much a part of my waking consciousness. I produced the digital keyboard sounds with a Casio KA-20 that I had personally modified back in the early 1990's (long before I had ever heard the term "circuit bending"). The string sounds on the piece were my attempts to harmonize the rhythms and pitches that I produced on the keyboard with a bit of ukulele improvisation. I recorded the thunder storm sounds from the porch of my Lawrence, Kansas, home. The most prominent verbiage in the piece comes from actual commercial interruptions of a Beatles internet show that I used to listen to on "Live 365." Every broadcast of this show was periodically interrupted with annoying announcements to tell me that they wouldn't interrupt the show any more with these annoying announcements if I paid them for a VIP subscription. There are also vocal bits in this collage that I personally chanted. I lifted the non-English language verbiage for the piece from somewhere that I can't recall (possible sources: a cassette tape that I purchased from a Salvation Army store, another Live 365 internet show, a shortwave radio broadcast). All of these elements were cut up, overlaid, effected, and edited by yours truly on an early 21st Century version of Cool Edit Pro computer software.

Where do you get your found sounds, or how do you record them? Do you have a way of archiving them for future use?
Again, all of my compositions are organic to themselves, based on reactions to environment and circumstance, which means that just about anywhere sounds exist can be a place for me to "get" them. If I record them on tape, I keep the tape as a storage place for them. If I record them digitally, they eventually end up on my computer hard drive until I use them. I have been incorporating "found sounds" into my recordings and performances since the 1970's, often manipulating and arranging them far from their original contexts to fit into my artistic expressions. These sonic machinations have provided many of my works with multiple layers of "meaning" which never possibly could be conveyed otherwise.

Tell us about the artwork.
I created the art for PINK WOODEN BODIES by manipulating a couple of high-definition photographs that I shot of my Mahalo Ukulele and my Barbie Violin. I used the computer software: "Adobe Photoshop" and "Corel Paint Shop Pro" to bend and shape these pink wooden instruments into appropriate forms for this album's cover art. I recommend that interested viewers see all four panels of the CDR cover to get the full effect of my visual experimentation (link below): http://www.archive.org/download/PinkWoodenBodies/PinkWoodenBodiesFullCover.pdf

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