Around this time I met a guy named Chris Carneal. He was in a band called Pelce which was sort of an atmospheric quitar band that seemed to be heavily influenced by Cocteau Twins or My Bloody Valentine. I don't remember how I met him, but I know it was pretty much a necessity to meet people with an interest in music production if i was ever going to do anything aside from drum machine midi driven monotony. My mom took me to Chris' loft apartment where he had a bunch of guitars, mixers, drum machines, a Juno 106, and an Ensoniq Eps 16 Plus. I was blown away that anyone could accumulate so many fun toys. I was particularly impressed by the Eps. I set up my two pieces of gear and we began tinkering. We had the two drum machines synched to the Eps' sequencer. After making a few rudimentary drum patterns we began taping. We had a pretty good chemistry. My sweeping pads and sound effects blended well with Chris' rhythmic control. He would blend different basslines and drum sounds using delays and reverbs. It was all improvisational, but came out sounding like The Orb meets the creepiness of Skinny Puppy.

A week later I went back to play some more. This was all during my year of B-movies. My friend Charles and I spent the most of the year trying to find the absolute cream of terrible cinema, which was considerably less depressing than circling around Lexington 100 times every night trying to find something worth doing, though we had made a nice tradition of pushing shopping carts 50 mph with my car into parking blocks and making them flip into ditches. The winner of our cinematic adventure was "Troll 2," but a close runner up was "Food Of The Gods." In the movie there was this yogurt/cornmeal looking stuff that would bubble out of the ground which mice and wasps and other animals would eat, causing them to grow into giants. There was an overly pious lady that used it to raise giant chickens. She put her gift from "THE LORD" (as she looked to the sky every time she mentioned his name - approximately once per 5 minutes throughout the movie) in a large mason jar labeled "F O T G" for "Food Of The Gods." When I told Chris about the movie and how terrible it was he found it particularly amusing that they would label the jar with that. Our band name became the pronunciation of the letters themselves. Effoti-G.

Chris had a Pelce show booked at a small place called "The Virtual Gallery." He suggested that we could be the opening act since he was booked to play anyway. I brought a strobe light, a slide projector with a single slide that I had found in a parking lot of an extremely obese woman getting her enormous gut rubbed on by a man in scrubs, and two 20 inch tvs that showed a video montage that I had spliced together (mostly video from Tetsuo the Iron Man, 2001, Lupo the Butcher, Altered States, and anything else that I could get my hands on). We played for an hour. It went well. Chris had a good time. I was 19.

I bought an Eps 16 plus since I liked Chris' so well. That week we had another show lined up. It had been a couple weeks since the last time we had gotten together to play. This usually didn't matter since we seemed to play quite well off each other's leads. Tonight was different. Chris had taken an interest in Coil. As I attempted to maintain some order or even a rhythm, Chris was having the time of his life making the sound of pots and pans falling incoherently down the stairs. This time we played for about 30 minutes since there was a DJ coming on after us. As I was loading my gear in the car Chris was beaming. I on the other hand was still a bit in shock. The first show had been amazing and well received. After about five minutes of this one I just wanted off that stage. It was ok though. I now had a sampler with a sequencer and effects, and hence, the ability to work alone.

After I added a Roland MKS 30 to my setup, I started playing out on my own. My first real rave gig was "Smile" New Years Eve 93 in Louisville, Kentucky. The promoter had spelled my name incorrectly on the flyer (VIGER) and put me on the floor in the crowd. All night I had to keep stupid people from using my gear as a place to lean. During sound check the promoter came up to me with a nitrous balloon. I had a sequence playing to check my sound and as I exhaled the nitrous the beat went "boom boom boom boom wooom WooooWM WOOOWW WWOOWW WOOOOWW!" I played a 30 minute set which included early versions of "Drift," "Quark," and "Broken Dream," along with some improvised stuff and a shortened version of "Angels." There was almost no light where I was and I had to get around my gear by FEELING. After I played, the people who gave me a ride in their truck wanted to leave. It was about 1:30 AM and the ride home took 2 hours. I packed all my gear in the truck and went looking for the promoter. He wanted me to stay until the end of the party. He kept saying that he didn't know if they made enough money to pay me the 50 dollars I agreed to play for, despite the fact that about 500 kids paid 10 dollars a head to get in. After chasing him around until 4am, with my ride growing more and more irritated, he finally paid me 50 ONE dollar bills.

Three tracks from my set at Smile 93
If you're going to download one thing from this page you should probably skip over this. It's old and the audio is kinda poor. :P Check out "Mollusks" instead.

v-ger-zamfir's crunchy universe.mp3
v-ger-underwater.mp3
v-ger-broken-dream.mp3

I played out about another half dozen times around the Lexington/Louisville/Cincinatti area. I taped a show I played in a coffee shop which was a pre-party for a rave called Escape Velocity, and sold the tapes at the rave the next night, seizing my car's engine in the process.

The best of my shows was Interstellar Outback in 94. All sorts of people were on the bill, from Josh Wink to 187. There was a cd pressed to promote the event. The party lasted for 3 days at two different campgrounds. I played an hour-long set the first night. It was at a Kentucky state park with an angry ranger who didn't know what kind of event the park had been rented for. He tried to kick everyone out. I told him, "I'm part of the entertainment." He replied, "AHH DON' GIVE A GOOD GOLL-DAMN WHO YEW ARRR!" as the spittle flung from his rodent-like incisors. He called his superior and was promptly fired, allowing the show to go on as long as we could find a new location for the second and third nights. I played a one hour long show, right after DJ Tron and before Theory Collapse, who used my mixer. I recorded the show to DAT. Finally, in 99 I got around to cleaning it up in Soundforge and encoding it to MP3.

v-ger_pearls_01_in_flight.mp3
v-ger_pearls_02_crash.mp3
v-ger_pearls_03_the_grip.mp3
v-ger_pearls_04_a_place_both_wonderful_and_strange.mp3
v-ger_pearls_05_broken_dream (purple remix).mp3
v-ger_pearls_06_quark.mp3
v-ger_pearls_07_angels.mp3
v-ger_pearls_08_drift.mp3
v-ger_pearls_09_the_rain.mp3
v-ger_pearls_10_mountains.mp3

bonus track
Added to the cassette to preserve continuity. (side two track one)
v-ger-naughty_bitz.mp3

About that time I started getting more bogged down with my job and other aspects of my personal life. I still worked on music, but not to the extent that I would have liked. In about 96 I started a track called Mollusks for a CD that was supposed to be a follow up to the Interstellar outback CD. The track had samples of Earth Wind and Fire, Dead Can Dance, and a phone conversation that I recorded using a police radio scanner. The producer, however, was ineffectual in rounding up work from some of the other contributors and the CD never materialized even though my track was in on time despite the fact I felt it could be improved. I started experimenting with integrating my computer into the mix, but I finally decided after a couple of years that software sequencers like Cakewalk, etc. were too buggy to perform even simple tasks like "RECORD" and "PLAY" without hanging notes, stopping in the middle for no reason, adding notes at random spots, losing audio tracks, etc, and that the only email that they would return is "Buy our NEW software," I hooked up my midi setup the way it originally was, minus the computer, and finished Mollusks.

v-ger-mollusks.mp3

That was the end of Kentucky.
That was the end of v-ger...

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