Track 5 on Southwest Passage, my Triplicate Records album release.

Rise & Levitate

Track 2 from my Triplicate Records release, Southwest Passage.

Southwest Passage

Capistrano

Portami Roma

Track 9 on the Triplicate Records release, Southwest Passage.

The Subjunctive

Abiquiu is where the artist Georgia O'Keeffe built a home after years of visiting New Mexico and living on and off at Ghost Ranch in the southwest U.S.

Abiquiu

I needed some shorter/lighter pieces for Southwest Passge so I went back to the beginning for an idea, all the way back to an 8-bar riff I wrote in 1987.

Flora & Fauna

Track 11 on my Triplicate Records release, Southwest Passage. https://www.mixcloud.com/tripfm/trip-fm-june-14th-2021-curated-by-time-rival-feat-gary-rees/.

Tombstone

Furtive Hubris

This is a 2002 interpretation of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, taken from Barber's original 1936 score. The piece was arranged in Cakewalk 9. Synth sounds are from a Kurzweil K2500 keyboard.

Adagio for Synths (2002, From the Archives) An Interpretation of Barber

Very pleased to bring you another tasty treat from master musical baker, @dough-factory, and yours truly. Second collab and an exquisite pleasure.

Popsicle in A - Dough Factory | Gary Rees

Sahara

From the album Southwest Passage.  https://triplicaterecords.bandcamp.com/album/southwest-passage

Purgatory

A Heart Made of Glass

It was a pleasure creating this one with Deep Blue Cat.  Cool cat, cool music. :)

Cross-posted by @deep-blue-300620120.  Send some love to his profile, too!  Thanks!  :)

Swingin' Joint - Gary Rees and Deep Blue Cat

Deep Blue Cat @deep-blue-300620120 and I discovered a new cache of catnip and plead guilty to writing stuff on a cat's high. Slide on up and give us a purr.

Slide on Up - Gary Rees & Deep Blue Cat (2020)

In late 1992 I was developing a passion for what was then called Industrial music.  Lighter fare than what we use the term for today.  Sometimes I called it Techno back then.   But I was just doing my own thing without all that much outside influence or regard for genre.  I was also starting to make samples, map them to keys and use my own sounds in compositions, not just those patches you bought on a 3.5" 1.44mb diskette.  I was pretty focused on this at the time and made a couple dozen tracks like this one over several months.  Thanks for checking out one of these oldies. :)

Obscurum (1992, From the Archives)

In late 1990, early 1991, I devised a plan to submit some music to a record label.  But I wasn't making Rock music or R&B or Country.  No, I was making Electronic music which didn't exactly have an outlet. The closest thing back then was called New Age music, an umbrella for Light Jazz and what we today call Ambient.  So Light Jazz it would be.  I made three tracks to put on a demo tape.  It was a painstaking process to produce my very best work up to that point.  But I never did get that demo tape together.  This song is one of those three.  In the end I decided I didn't want to spend my time dreaming up contrived light jazz anyhow.  But perhaps you'll enjoy this little "New Age" number. ;-)

Berlin (1991, From the Archives)

© 1974 Genesis

Another cover from the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the 1974 double album by Genesis.  Previously I posted my cover of Back in N.Y.C. (https://soundcloud.com/gary-rees-since-87/back-in-nyc-a-semi-experimental-cover-for-my-fellow-fans-of-old-genesis).  I'd love to cover the whole album eventually.

Thanks to my man Junez @pannican-flyswatter for listening to a couple of earlier versions and for his encouragement.  Credit to freemidi.org. 

Those who know Fly on a Windshield and its lyrics will understand why I only covered the latter part of the song at this time.
-------------------------------------------------
And I'm hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway.

Echoes of the Broadway Everglades,
With her mythical madonnas still walking in their shades:
Lenny Bruce, declares a truce and plays his other hand.
Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand.
Sirens on the rooftops wailing, but there's no ship sailing.
Groucho, with his movies trailing, stands alone with his punchline failing.
Klu Klux Klan serve hot soul food and the band plays 'In the Mood'
The cheerleader waves her cyanide wand, there's a smell of
Peach blossom and bitter almonde.
Caryl Chessman sniffs the air and leads the parade, he know in a scent,
You can bottle all you made.
There's Howard Hughes in blue suede shoes, smiling at the majorettes
Smoking Winston Cigarettes.
And as the song and dance begins, the children play at home
With needles; needles and pins.

Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974 (Genesis cover, 1974)

In posting my cover of Broadway Melody of 1974 I sensed some surprise among those who know my other work that I can sing. I started singing when I was 11. My parents couldn't afford a piano or lessons on any instrument.  My voice was my instrument and it was a no-cost by product of having vocal chords and an abundant musicality.  Fast forward to 1991.  I was 26, in my second band as keyboard player, self taught and just starting to develop a little confidence in my chosen  instrument.  By contrast I had an abundance of confidence in my singing ability.  I was all-state in high school choir and paid my college tuition on a choir scholarship (yes, such things do exist).  

In my second band I did some solo writing for the group and brought the songs to the guys for consideration.  This is one of those songs, a band demo or proof of concept for the band to write to.  One giveaway is the 30-seconds without vocals or guitar at about the 2:30 mark.  It's an open space for a guitar solo.  Solos, whether for guitar or keyboard, were still essential elements of writing for live performance back in 1991.  I had some solos of my own.  They always made me very nervous because I never had piano lessons and I wasn't all that good a keyboard player.  

One note about the production. When I opened up the files to tweak the mix I realized I had added a drum loop to this at some point. It certainly wasn't in the 1991 version, but it looks like I enhanced the rhythm track with this loop in 1999 as part of migrating the song off of the 4-track cassette and on to a digital format.  So this is 90% original to 1991 and 10% enhanced in 1999.  In a good way, I assure you. ;-)

Hope you enjoy this early example of my vocals.  My voice has changed a good deal over the years and I'm quite out of practice.  But at one time I was a pretty decent singer. :)

------------------------------------

Walked the skies - for at least a hundred days
Followed you - Running at your pace
Led by your advances - Reading from your lines
Moving through your dances - Tripped by your design

Falling in your eyes - Falling for your lies
Falling, I realized you would never fall for me
Calling out to you - Calling me a fool
Calling you, calling you mine

I can't see what's driving you away
I'm drifting tipsy lonely - Translating all you say
Charging with emotion - Lust and mind compete
Pained by clashing passions - Can't stay on my feet

Falling (1991, From the Archives)

Carpe Diem Amicis

Poem by Allen Ginsberg, 1955 - Music and reading by Gary Rees

Howl is a seminal and very lengthy poem by Allen Ginsberg.  He's considered a major figure of the Beat Generation, along with Willam S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.  This reading is perhaps 20% of the whole poem.  I intend to record and release the rest in future segments. These 20 or so stanzas are from Part 1 of the 3-part poem.

Full copy of Howl here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

Text of this reading:

I.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,   
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts

==

On 5/14 I uploaded a replacement for the original wav file.  It contains a re-recording of 3 stanzas to correct reading errors, several audio fixes and a boosted bass track.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Allen Ginsberg's Howl - 1 of 6

Nights of Euxoa Auxiliaris

© 1955 Allen Ginsberg

Text for this installment of my reading of Howl is below.  Full version of poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl.

Parental Advisory added because of several sexually explicit references.
---------------------------
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,   

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

Allen Ginsberg's Howl - 2 of 6

1776

© 1955 Allen Ginsberg

Text for this installment of my reading of Howl is below. Full version of poem here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl.

The four preceding tracks in this series make up Part 1 of Howl.  Parts 2 & 3 are single tracks, repectively.

Part 1 of Howl followed Ginsberg and his fellow Beats as they blazed a trail of non-conformity in mid-1950s America. It introduced Carl Solomon and related some of the experiences leading to Ginsberg's and Solomon's commitment to a psychiatric hospital.

Part 2 delivers the metaphor of Moloch.  A  biblical God of the Canaanites known for child sacrifice by fire, Moloch is a stand-in for the blooming military-industrial complex that would define Eisenhower's America.  Moloch is the establishment, "the man", and the dehumanizing force of industrialization.  This section of  Howl strikes me as Ginsberg's indictment of 1955 America. I think it still resonates today.

=======================

II.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! 

Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Allen Ginsberg's Howl - 5 of 6

© 1955 Allen Ginsberg

Text for this installment of my reading of Howl is below. Full version of poem here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl.

Part 1 of Howl followed Ginsberg and his fellow Beats as they blazed a trail of non-conformity in mid-1950s America. It introduced Carl Solomon and related some of the experiences leading to Ginsberg's and Solomon's commitment to a psychiatric hospital.

Part 2 delivered the metaphor of Moloch.  A  biblical God of the Canaanites known for child sacrifice by fire, Moloch is a stand-in for the blooming military-industrial complex that would define Eisenhower's America.  Moloch is the establishment, "the man", and the dehumanizing force of industrialization.  I believe this is Ginsberg's indictment of 1955 America. I think it still resonates today.

Part 3 closes Howl with a reflection on being institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. Rockland refers to the Rockland State Hospital in New York.  Ginsberg's device, repeating "I am with you in Rockland," is not a literal statement, but both Ginsberg and Carl Solomon, to whom Howl was dedicated, are said to have spent time in a psychiatric hospital.

=======================

III.

Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
   where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Rockland
   where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Rockland
   where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in Rockland
   where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland
   where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
   where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland
   where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland
   where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland
   where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I’m with you in Rockland
   where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland
   where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland
   in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Allen Ginsberg's Howl - 6 of 6

© 1987 Depeche Mode

Although I bought a synthesizer in 1987, I didn't discover Depeche Mode, or any of the other 80's synth bands, before 1989.  I had just been talked into joining a band and the drummer heard me fooling around on the keyboard and asked if it was Depeche Mode.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  I was only just emerging from a lifelong cocoon of prog rock and classical music.  I came to love Depeche Mode deeply, along with a lot of other groups my band mates introduced me to, dragging me out of the 70's one record at a time.  So here's a tribute to the boys from both bands, many years later.  Hope you like it.

Behind The Wheel (Depeche Mode cover, 1987)

Hey Siri. Sing Me A Vocalese.

The 7th collab for Gaz (Gary Rees) and Nige (Windscale Blues Experiment @windscaleblues) writing under the Nom de Plume of Windtronix.  We take you to a N. African Souk and into the soul of the marketplace.  Follow the brilliant woodwinding way with Nigel's amazing, enchanting soprano sax and flute accompaniament.  We hope you enjoy!

Soul of the Souk - Windtronix (Windscale Blues Experiment & Gary Rees)

This will be my last SC posting for a while. I'll be focusing on material for a new album.  I'll be on SC here and there, but not posting or listening all that much.  See ya in the spring, or sooner.  Catch me on Twitter in the mean time. :-)  https://twitter.com/conmemoravi

© 1995 Radiohead

Where do we go from here?
The words are coming out all weird
Where are you now?
When I need you
Alone on an airplane
Falling asleep against the windowpane
My blood will thicken
I need to wash myself again
To hide all the dirt and pain
'Cause I'd be scared
That there's nothing underneath
And who are my real friends
Have they all got the bends?
Am I really sinking
This slow
My baby's got the bends
Oh, no
We don't have any real friends
No, no, no
Just lying in a bar with my drip feed on
Talking to my girlfriend, waiting for something to happen
And I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy
I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen
Where do we go from here?
The planet is a gunboat in a sea of fear
And where are you?
They brought in the C.I.A
The tanks and the whole marines to blow me away
To blow me sky-high
Baby's got the bends
We don't have any real friends
Just lying in a bar with my drip feed on
Talking to my girlfriend, waiting for something to happen
I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy
I wish, I wish, I wish that something would-
I want to live, breathe
I want to be part of the human race
I want to live, breathe
I want to be part of the human race, race, race?
Where do we go from here?
The words are coming out all weird, where are you now?
When I need you

The Bends (Radiohead cover, 1995)

New album releasing on Bandcamp on October 29.
A Wormhole World release: Things That Go Bump.

Gary Rees

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