Con Tex & The Forgotten Jam (w/ Jeff Balter & Max Holbrook filling in for Zach and Dave)
Live @ The Midway Cafe
10/7/14

this show also featured:
Sun Young
Every Kim Parcell
Sausagemeng Soup
Dead River

Con Tex & The Forgotten Jam (w/ Jeff Balter & Max Holbrook) Live @ The Midway Cafe 10/7/14

Ostrich Song

Here's a cover of "I Want To Tell You", one of George Harrison's songs from Revolver, for a comp some friends are putting together

I Want To Tell You

Playing around with my new USB mixer, decided to try to work out one of my favorite Zappa/Mothers tunes.

...I think it's your mind.

What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?

Come Whatever

Finally putting this out in the world. This one is several years in the making, from when I wrote it living at the Whitehaus in 2014 to working out an arrangement over time and finally finding the exact right place/time/way to record it. I'm very proud of this song, and I hope you like it.

This is the first of a dozen or so tracks I recorded while I was home in Upstate NY for winter 2017-2018 that I've been trying to perfect over the last year or so. They're all over the place stylistically so I've been unsure what to do with them. I think I'm just going to put it all out there because it's all me and what's the point of sitting on it? Expect more releases soon...

Big thanks to Phil Racz, who came to visit me in Upstate NY for a couple days and helped out on this recording, playing bass and accordion.

Natural Trend

Another track I recorded back home in Oswego over the winter of 2017-2018.

This one's a lot more of a rocker than Natural Trend. I hope you dig! 

It was completely written/recorded in my bedroom in Oswego. It's very much a studio creation, though it's one of the more arena rock-sounding tracks I've ever recorded. It's the sound of me getting comfortable with the recording software and seeing what I could do, creating a whole song from scratch using the software as a jumping off point instead of the other way around.

It's amazing how your instincts can work to create something more honest than what you mind consciously create when filtering your ideas through what you want them to be. This song rings at least as true for me as Natural Trend, when that song was written and refined over a period of several years, whereas this one was mostly written and recorded within 24 hours.

A Piece Of Mind

This one, like Natural Trend, is in some ways a long time in the making. The words for this are from a piece of cut-up writing I turned in as a short story for a creative writing class in college. The professor's comments were "This is great, but you know I can't grade this."

I had always wanted to put this to music (if you really scour my back catalog, you'll find manipulated tapes of me reading this in the background of some past tracks), so when I created this piece of music in Logic and didn't have any words to go with it, I decided to give Out Of A Clear Sky a shot. I liked the result, and I hope you do too.

Out Of A Clear Sky

Downer songs are definitely a mini-genre within this batch of songs, and this is one. What can I say? Sometimes the best way to get things off your chest is to put it in a song. I know a lot of people I know have a disinclination toward downer songs or things they perceive as whiny, which I can understand from a certain perspective, but unfortunately this is how I, and a lot of other people, feel fairly often so sometimes it comes out in song form. I try to at least make it interesting and make a soundscape to match the mood. I hope this helps anybody who might be feeling the way I was when I wrote this.

Down Down Down

Another one of the downer tracks of this batch. Again, sometimes this is just the sort of thing that comes out when I sit down to write. I'm sure there are many people who feel this same way sometimes, and hopefully this resonates beyond my own depression and self-pity. It's just a feeling of having let everyone down. If this resonates with you, great. If not, good for you. I don't always feel this way, and sometimes I feel ashamed of feeling this way, but sometimes I feel this way nonetheless and what is writing for if not to try to express some of the thoughts that go through your mind?

Stranded

This is another mini-genre within this batch of tracks - pure fun playing around with Logic and seeing what I could make. This is probably the closest thing to a dance track I've made to date, but it probably exists more in a weird midi synth world more than anything recognizable as dance. It was a lot of fun to make, and inspired by the obsession with Jeopardy! I fostered while home in Oswego the winter of 2017-18. I hope you enjoy!

JPRDY (DLY DBL)

Another example of me just having fun creating something with the software - getting comfortable enough to play around and see what I could do. Just a fun little interstitial piece for the eventual album.

Enjoy!

Residential Trend

This was one of the earlier tracks I recorded in the Natural Trend sessions. It's one of my first attempts to create a song from scratch using Logic as a launching pad rather than a filter for ideas. I've always wanted to make write more identifiably psychedelic songs, so this was a fun experience. Enjoy!

Where Nobody Knows

This is a spoken word piece I've been performing live in varying contexts for 5-6 years now that I finally, while I was home, was able to record it and create a sonic environment fitting for I wanted to do with it.

Releasing it now, while everybody's holed up in their houses because of a pandemic, seems fitting, since the general theme of the piece is ignorance surrounding the media you consume and the consequences that can result from that ignorance. Mostly though, it's just a fun (if kinda morbid) story in the voice of one of my favorite characters to write for - every townie you've ever met (the royal townie, to use the parlance of our times). This character is 75% of the adults in my town when I was growing up (and probably yours too) so it's just fun to explore that voice and that mindset and have some fun with it.

Hope you enjoy!

Them Fuckin Costa Rican Trees From Newsweek

Talk at me

m.conrad.benjamin@gmail.com

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