Trail Markers on the Path to Weird Music

All the weird things that don't fit into place.

Introduction

Throughout my late twenties and early thirties, I started having experiences where external stimuli seemed to interact with internal thoughts and emotions in ways that felt significant. Of course, all of these were generally met with an internal exchange of:

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a coincidence.”

“But is there any way it could have not been just a coincidence?”

“No.”

Well, okay then. Case closed.

I later wrote about one of the more affective instances in my TW essay “Finding Godot.”

When I first started working on Weird Music, there were several things that stuck out as super random but that felt connected. Before I even started writing music and editing the interviews, I tried to write about these events to document and make sense of them. After I’d written a few pages—not a few; I tracked down the file and it’s 13 tightly packed pages!—I was starting to feel lost and went back to the beginning to read it through. Absolute garbage. None of it made any sense. They were the ramblings of a crazy person.

I spent the next decade-plus rationalizing away any feelings of synchronicity while also mentally tucking them into my back pocket just in case anything resolved in a meaningful way down the line. Many of these instances seemed to connect to Weird Music, but it was never clear how or why.

I of course turned first to Jung to see what he had to say about the phenomenon, but it didn’t really make me feel like I wasn’t crazy, because most of it seemed pretty unhinged. Not to be dismissive; I also love me some Jung.

In 2024, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron was the first book I read that encouraged people to pay attention to and document their experiences of synchronicity during the act of creation. Maybe I wasn’t crazy. They’ve always felt like trail markers on some unseen path. Or maybe an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole.

Unfortunately, it’s also the type of thing that when you try to relay it to another person, the magic is simply not there. Even though a lot of people know the feeling of uncanny coincidence, merely relaying the series of events almost surely won’t cause those same feelings to arise in someone else who doesn’t have the same biographical reference points. Because these things seem to resonate along multiple lines in one’s self-narrative.

This made me want to go back through the stuff that I had originally thrown in the trash to see if any of it made any sense now that I’m at the end of my Weird Music voyage.

There’s no resolution or payoff here, however, things do seem to take on “theme” qualities. I don’t always know how they relate to the work itself, but I will point them back as much as I can, and I suppose they give a backdrop to my life while working on this piece through many years. We’ll start at the beginning.

Part One

Do you ever feel like the TV is talking directly to your inner dialogue? I do. A lot.

Do you ever feel like books are narrating a metaphorical version of your own life? Yep. Sign me up.

This was especially so when I started Weird Music in 2009. I was making a lot of music that sampled heavily from movies, TV, and audiobooks, and there were many instances of getting caught up in the autobiographical feelings that some scenes would bring on. So several of the connections here are sample-related: one snippet from a book, movie, or show will trigger another and then another, and then in some way interact with real life.

I should mention that I was in a strange creative in-between, having finished one large project—Battling Green Eye Shades—and shifting about for another big idea while working on smaller ideas. I should also mention that most of this feels now, and felt at the time, crazy-making.

I think it pretty much started with the letter, though, that I got in the mail one day, with no idea who sent it or why.

On a scrap of paper in an envelope addressed to John was a handwritten note which said, “P.S. I love Ghostbusters, too. I'm watching it right now. Go ahead. Put it in. We can watch it together. -Alice” and then next to that “A. Danger” with a little drawing of the skeleton of a fish. It also includes a poem about someone asking Scotty to beam them up, but Scotty has already beamed himself up.

I found out later that my bandmate Tris had bet my address on a poker hand while on tour, and somehow this came out of it.

Let’s unpack some references, though. Ghostbusters, Alice, Danger, and Scotty. Besides having experienced my first kiss while watching Ghostbusters in a friend’s basement, the movie itself had no particular trigger at this point. Confusing. I don’t know if the person who sent this letter was actually named Alice, but it sets off thoughts about Alice and Wonderland. Nothing else on that one. We lived in the Danger Danger House at the time, and I wasn’t sure if the “Alice Danger” part was referencing that or not. There’s the obvious Star Trek reference for Scotty, but it also for me personally set off thoughts of Scott Scanlon, David Silver’s best friend in the early seasons of Beverly Hills, 90210 who accidentally shot himself in Season 2.

I made an Easter egg for the Battling Green Eye Shades DVD where I rescored that 90210 episode with electronic music. I showed the result at the Danger Danger Gallery and also performed from it around that time.

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The name of the file where I originally wrote about all these connections is called myopicbiopic.rtf. That’s right. RTF.

At the time, I was also making an audio piece that I named “Myopic Biopic” that served as an odd overview of what I had made up to that point and my relation with the work. Through the words of other people, of course.

The ideas that would lead to Weird Music were vaguely in the back of my mind at this point, and I knew that I wanted to re-read the section in On Writing about telepathy, so I found a copy of the audiobook on cassette from the library. Before I got to the telepathy section, though, I came across the part where Stephen King talks about how he got the idea for a story called “Happy Stamps” in his youth, and I sampled it for “Myopic Biopic.”

I had also had the idea to mash together lines from The Simpsons parody of The Shining—particularly “No beer and no TV make Homer something something…” “Go crazy?” “Don’t mind if I do!” and “The Shinnin’” “You mean, the Shining?” “Shh! You want to get sued, boy?”—with lines from On Writing about writing The Shining. And of course, I wanted to reread The Shining because I hadn’t read it in a long time. There were no available copies at the libraries, so I asked my mom to mail me the copy the I had at home.

When the box arrived, my mom had placed seventeen Simpsons stamps in the upper right-hand corner of the package. I stood there and stared at the box. Full of magical feeling, my mind got stuck in a loop: “Coincidence!” “Significance!”

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After I was initially electrified by my eureka moment coming up with the idea of Weird Music—which I talk about in more detail in “When Ideas Float out of the Ether”—I started listing people I would want to talk to about creative motivation and payoff, and then trying to hunt down contact info. One of the first emails, if not the first, went to Matmos, and it was quickly followed by many more. During the initial couple weeks of trying to reach out to people for an unknown project with no publication support, I received nothing aside from a couple rejections and radio silence from the vast majority. I started to concede that maybe this just wasn’t going to happen. This was going to be another one of those ideas that never pans out. Fair enough.

My brother Dave wrote me out of the blue at this point. I told him about the project idea and that I was getting deflated by the lack of response. He responded by encouraging the idea, saying that it was a good question why people create when mostly nobody enjoys the result, oftentimes even the creator themself. He ended the email with a quote from Women by Charles Bukowski. When a fan visits, she asks Henry Chinaski if he would still be able to write with her around. He says of course he would. “There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.”

On my way home after this communiqué I stopped by the A-Space free bookshelf, which was my habit (detailed in “Finding Godot”) and walked directly to a bag on the ground among the tables of giveaway stuff. On the top of the pile was a copy of Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski in seemingly untouched condition. I walked away feeling dazed, and then when I got home I had an email from Matmos saying that they’d be down to participate in an interview.

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By the time I had started planning for these interviews, I knew that I wanted to ask a question about art as telepathy. Did the interviewees feel like there was anything in the idea? I didn’t lead with that when requesting interviews, though, it was just something I planned to ask.

Scheduling with Martin over the phone, he said, “And you can take part in one of our telepathic sessions.” He was referring to the Ganzfeld-inspired sessions that they were collecting for their upcoming album, The Marriage of True Minds.

I had a moment of this-is-too-weird silence. Finally I said, “It’s really weird that you would say that because things have been sort of lining up oddly going into this project.”

We agreed to explain ourselves when we met.

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Towards the end of working on Batting Green Eye Shades I made the album Pink Wine during a particularly difficult time in my life. It contains a lot of cryptic references to what was going on internally and externally, and ends with a sample from Wet Hot American Summer where Christopher Maloni says, “Look at me, Ma, I made it! I’m okay!”

Two years later, on August 9th, 2009, I was embarking on my first two interviews with Matmos and Ches Smith. Riding the trolley from West Philly to 30th Street Station the music on my iPod seemed to be setting a fitting soundtrack from Matmos’ The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast and Eyvind Kang’s Atlantis, and I thought about the rest of the plan for the day: train to Baltimore, interview Matmos; Bolt Bus to New York, interview Ches Smith; back to Philly on the Chinatown Bus.

I walked into 30th Street Station, and as I was taking a seat on one of the pew-like benches in the main open room I locked eyes with a man across the room. Clear as day in mind, my inner dialogue said, “Holy shit. Christopher ‘Smear-Mud-on-my-Ass’ Maloni,” referencing another of his lines from Wet Hot American Summer. We exchanged a nod with each other that I think acknowledged I knew who he was and he knew I knew who he was, but it’s tough to know. There was definitely a nod, though.

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At some point leading up to this, I’d read Nexus by Henry Miller and Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. These books instilled a kind of mantra in my head: “Listen to the old man.” Nexus is the last book of the Rosy Crucifixion, published as Miller was nearing sixty, and I felt like it was the most concise and wise of the three books. Earthly Powers, also a later book published when Burgess was in his seventies, provides a kind of spiritual retrospective of the life of an older writer.

On the train in Baltimore in 2009, I was reading 1984. Just as I was rolling up to the station I got to the part where Winston was badgering the old man, feeding him beer and asking if life was better when the old man was young. His answer does not satisfy Winston. I chuckled to myself, that theme coming back, “Listen to the old man,” wondering if it would apply to the interview at hand.

During the interview, there’s a part where Martin talks about the unauthorized sale of digital copies of 1984 for the Kindle. I point out that I’m reading it, to which he responds, “Nice!” with a big smile.

And the interview ends with him saying “I’m 45 years old. It is a different thing for me to tour now than it was ten years ago. Because we make weird music, we will never rise above a certain level. I know what that’s like because of our time with Björk, and yes, it’s possible if you have a million dollars to tour when you’re a tired old man.”

I was hearing that at the age of 28, but as I write this, I’m about four months away from 45. And it is indeed a different thing for me to tour now than it was ten years ago.

After the camera cut, he got momentarily agitated, and I could tell that I pushed something too far. I was Winston, insatiably asking questions to which there’s no answer.

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I’m not sure what year it was, but during one of our trips to the CMJ Music Marathon, there was a note on the column outside the building where we had to register for the festival. I remember it as being small and handwritten, but that seems highly unlikely. I said something to the effect of, “Please join us for a viewing of the classic 1984 documentary Ghostbusters, in which three scientists rid New York City of spirits.” I’m only confident about the “documentary” and “Ghostbusters” parts of this wording.

This felt like an inside joke to me at the time because we had gotten into the habit of calling anything on TV a documentary, sometimes going so far as to claim that it was live TV.

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Numbers also occasionally played a part in my feelings of synchronicity, usually taking the form of just seeing something everywhere and being like, “Why am I seeing this number everywhere?” 11:11 is an obvious one that people gravitate towards, almost to the point of trope or cliché. But there was a point where it seemed to be showing up way too much and kinda driving me crazy.

Then one day we were driving through a town of some sort—for some reason in my mind somewhere between the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest—and I saw on a classic old theater marquee “Stephen King 11/12.”

For narrative purposes, I feel like I should situate this scene on either our tour with O’Death or our tour opening for Man Man. Or maybe on our tour opening for Sea Bear, during which I interviewed XBXRX and Joe Meno. But I can’t confirm any of those, nor do I remember.

Another number that seemed to mean nothing to me but kept popping up early on was 219. Matmos’ subsequent two albums, The Marriage of True Minds and Ultimate Care II, came out on February 19th, 2013, and February 19th, 2016, respectively.

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Eventually I did watch Ghostbusters. And the beginning starts with a telepathic experiment using the Zener Cards that J.B. Rhine used in the 1930’s. I hope you hear an echo of Stephen King—“folks like J.B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time it’s been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe’s Purloined Letter.”

In the scene, Bill Murray’s character Dr. Peter Venkman is testing two subjects with the Zener Cards, openly flirting with the attractive female participant who keeps getting everything wrong, and repeatedly shocking the nerdy-looking male participant who keeps getting everything right.

When asked what’s he’s testing for, Venkman answers, “I’m studying the effect of negative reinforcement on ESP ability.” In a sense, that’s part of the core of Weird Music. If art is telepathy, what effect does the lack of remuneration have on your art?

A personal push with this project was to start deviating away from copyrighted material to material that I created and owned—“You want to get sued, boy?” However, when I sat down to write the rough draft in 2010 or 2011, I started and ended it with the actual audiobook of On Writing with the hope of getting permission. Then, like an addict, I also sampled from numerous movies, television, and other audiobooks. And of course one of those was the scene from Ghostbusters.

My final version and recording of Weird Music is absolutely free of material not created by me, the people I interviewed, and my uncle Thad playing drums.

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Grandchildren’s 2010 album Everlasting was released by Warner subsidiary Green Owl Records. They had also released a record by the underground rap group Ninjasonik, and during one of the years around this time Green Owl rented a house for SXSW where we stayed with Ninjasonik and I think at least one other band, the So So Glos.

I’m not entirely sure if this happened before or after I sampled Ghostbusters for Weird Music, but in my head it’s after.

In any case, Grandchildren and Ninjasonik played at the same venue, although on different nights. The night after we played, we went to go see Ninjasonik, and during their set I looked behind me to find Bill Murray standing there. I casually turned back around while my head screamed, “Holy shit! Bill Murray is right behind me!”

After a few minutes of sharing space with Dr. Venkman, one of the members of Ninjasonik yelled from stage something to the effect of, “Y’all, I just want to point out that Bill Murray is up in here. Bill motherfuckin’ Murray!” and pointed down at Bill Murray (I might be borrowing the “Bill motherfuckin’ Murray” from Coffee and Cigarettes, but in my memory it also was used in this moment).

Immediately I was edged out of the way by swarms of people trying to take pictures. Murray looked annoyed and slipped out the side door, where he hopped in a rickshaw—there was a small rickshaw company there that year—and rode away. In my memory he was with a much younger lady friend.

Part Two

In 2013, Grandchildren’s drummer Roman set me up on a blind date with my future wife. Shortly after our first date, I performed the beginning of Weird Music for the first time with my friend Nate doing a noise track over the top of everything. It happened in my living room in West Philly for maybe 20-30 people.

In 2015 I married Olivia and we bought a house in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia after I’d been living in West Philly for 12 years. We bought a fixer upper and lived in the smallest room while renovating all the other ones.

First I set up my equipment in the makeshift living room/dining room. Then I ripped up all the carpets and staples and tack strips in one bedroom, cleaned it, and set up my equipment in it while I did the same to the other rooms plus patching the floorboards.

Eventually I made improvements to the basement and set up down there.

This is how I worked out the next several parts of Weird Music.

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In February of 2018, the Eagles won the Super Bowl for the first time. Two months later, my son Henry was born.

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As I neared the end of working out all the pieces of Weird Music I saw a listing for the Extraordinaires and Tavo Carbone at PhilaMOCA on August 9th, 2019. I decided to check and see if I could also hop on the bill. I told Olivia, “If I get this, it’s only due to the magic of the fact that it’s the ten-year anniversary of the first interviews I did.” Sure enough, it went through and I got to perform the end of the piece for the first time on the tenth anniversary of the initiation of the project. It went swimmingly.

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Grandchildren went on hiatus after Aleks and Shari got married in 2019. Since it was the first time that we wouldn’t be touring in March in over ten years, I scheduled a “tour” for March 2020—quotation marks because it was really only four shows. Obviously, it didn’t happen. During the time period when I was supposed to be playing shows, I instead wiped my Mac Mini, rebooted it from scratch, and installed a copy of Logic Pro 9 from DVDs that my brother had given me. I had to keep the operating system at a specific version, otherwise it wouldn’t support such an old version of the program. This was to be my dedicated recording computer.

During the first year of the COVID lockdown, I recorded the final version of Weird Music.

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I started attending shows again in 2022, with masks, and then at the beginning of 2023 I decided that I wanted to try to plan another “tour.” I put together four shows, starting at Valley of the Vapors in Hot Springs, AK, an old stomping grounds of Grandchildren’s. This was the first time I performed this material outside of Philadelphia. It went fine, and felt like I was emerging from the confines of my basement into the open world.

I failed at getting something in Birmingham, but my former Red Rocket/Rad Racket and Grandchildren bandmate Adam lived there, and after the second days’ performances in Hot Springs, I headed towards Birmingham and stopped in a random hotel. I was placed in room 219.

On my way to Adam’s the next day, I saw a red car with a license plate that said “RAD RED.” We spent most of our hang that night and the next day digging through all of our old band’s recordings and trying to figure out how we felt about it.

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Somewhere in here I started going on walks at night after I would get Henry in bed. For about a solid year, I would see red foxes on these walks. Usually just one, but sometimes a few. It got to the point where it was like, “This feels weird. Is this weird? This is weird, right?” I figured, we must just have a large fox population in my neighborhood. That must be it.

Then Olivia and I went down to stay at Bethany Beach, DE, with her family and went out for a walk one night. Again, a fox just standing off in someone’s yard.

As a spirit animal, seeing foxes means that you should be taking their lessons of cunning and slyness as a hint that you need to be leaning in that direction more. Apparently.

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When Wild Robot came out in September 2024, we decided to buy it at an exorbitant cost while it was still in theaters. We reasoned that it would still be cheaper than going to the movies with all three of us, we could hook up my projector and watch it on the wall, and Henry could rewatch it as much as he wanted. Like his old man, he’s an obsessive rewatcher.

I really connected with Fink, the fox character. A bit thirsty for love, but looking out for himself because of his previous experiences. He’s begrudgingly loyal to others and altruistic with some light prodding from Roz.

I reliably cry during this movie at several scenes.

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As I’ve said in other places, I’m a sucker for the Free Library bookshelves that people put in front of their houses or businesses. One day, in front of the Mt. Airy Learning Tree at Greene and Hortter Streets, I found a copy of the 20th Anniverary Edition of On Writing. There was a piece of paper wedged in next to the book on which was typed in big font: 11/12. I took the book, of course, and I reread it for the tenth or so time, along with all the extra parts at the end.

One particular quote that stuck out at me in this reading, from an interview with his son, Joe Hill: “ I sometimes think that it’s a basic misunderstanding of my dad’s work that he sells fear. Politicians sell fear. I’ve always thought that my dad’s stories sold bravery, that they essentially were making an argument that, yeah, things might get really bad. But if you have some faith and a sense of humor, and if you’re loyal to your loved ones, sometimes you can kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.”

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There’s a part in the extended edit of Weird Music where Billy Dufala says, “Ryan always wants me to climb on top of my vibes and rip my shirt off and do that shit from Lost Boys where the dude’s on the beach and he’s greased up, doing the saxophone thing.” The actor who played that role is named Tim Cappello, and he started playing shows at underground venues in the 2020’s. I saw one of his performances listed at PhilaMOCA around this time.

I played some shows in March 2024 through the southeast. One of those shows was put on by my friend Jeff Blinder in Greenville, NC, for his Spazzfest event. I was playing first out of a pretty long list of bands, and when I got to Alleycat Records, there were multiple acts set up in different places around the stage. Since I was first, I figured I’d wait until everyone was mostly settled, set up in front, and then drag all my shit off to the side after I played.

While I was setting up my gear and plugging stuff in, there was a sax player setting up with several flat screen monitors on stage and he just started wailing on his horn. I was immediately like, “That’s the dude.” I hadn’t realized going into the show that Jeff had booked Cappello as a secret set at the end of the night.

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In November 2024, on our way to the hospital while Olivia was in labor with our second child, Rosa, two red foxes passed in front of our car, running across the road. They were a few miles apart.

I started to think that maybe the foxes represented my children.

I didn’t see any foxes after that, but I also stopped taking nighttime walks because our bedtimes now had a constant juggle of two children, meaning neither of us generally get much of a break during bedtime.

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Two months later, the Eagles won their second Super Bowl. Olivia’s sister was convinced that our children’s births were the good luck charm for these Eagles victories. Of course, I know that my children are unofficially anointed gods of Philadelphia, who have bestowed great bounties on our beloved Eagles.

During the second Super Bowl win, a commercial came on with Bill Murray looking into the mirror and seeing himself as a dog. They provided an email to send ideas about why Murray would have seen a dog in the mirror. It would’ve provided more narrative symmetry if it’d been a fox.