We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Unsustainable Industrial Spread '97 (Doze Barn Down)

from Peculiar Songs for a Particular Audience by John Snell X

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $1 USD  or more

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Peculiar Songs for a Particular Audience…Home 4-track recordings of John Snell the Tenth 1997-2001
    with one ’93 (Drive and Guitar…), a ’95 (Sinner’s Soup) and two ‘96s (Two Miles from the Middle of Nowhere; Mad Cow Disease)
    First off, I would like to thank “The Intellectual Babbler” Marco Dacio for extracting this album from me. Without him these recordings would have gone unreleased. I never would have thought to show the world this lunatickle Inner Self.
    Dang. The World. Are you out there?

    Nothing inhibited my insanity from escaping forcefully onto the tape.
    Peculiar Songs was an opportunity for my muse to make an album without me. Recording myself allowed me to drift completely from the outside world—no engineer to derail my stream of conscious—nothing to bring me anywhere near society (except some inbound phone calls. One phone call birthed Hello? J.A.C. Auto, and another can be heard at the end of I’m in a Tent Version 1). Mixing the songs alone in headphones allowed me to get totally inside the music. The sound would make up the ground I sat on and the walls and ceiling around me. Then I would mix the songs from inside that room! Whoa. Dude. Where am I> I think I just left the real world again…


    My home recordings often start out as a serious effort to demo a song, but this sporadic je ne sait quoi leaps out of me and messes things around to make something different. I’m in a Tent is a great example. Version 3 represents what I had in mind when I started Version 1, but for some reason I spontaneously used a whole track to describe the scene out my window. Well, Version 1 is what it is, and I like what it is, though it’s certainly not the song I set out to record. What really forced these recordings into being is that I have a hard time taping over anything—especially sounds that came out of delightfully unexpectedly. With only 4 tracks to work with, I would often be left with no room to finish a song as planned. Frustrated, I left many recordings without handing down to posterity what I set out to accomplish. I didn’t mix the songs or even go back to listen to many of them until years later (when I got enough money for Christmas to buy a used mini-disc recorder). Then I spent the following January going through my old tapes and mixing songs to mini-disc. I realized the recordings I ended up with may not have been exactly what I intended to document, but they were definitely interesting. I mailed some of the mixes to my friend Marco, and his immediate response was an enthusiastic, “When is the album coming out?!”. Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all! Album> What album> My impression of these recordings was that they were not only unreleasable demos, but they were unreleasable failed demos! But I was intrigued by them, and interesting is interesting, art is art, and any open window to a muse can be mind-expanding. So, paradigm shifted. Seed planted.
    All the mixes for Peculiar Songs are performances in their own right. I took some of the more involved recordings (I’m in a Tent V1 & V3; Unsustainable Industrial Spread, etc.) to Soliton (Bloomington, MN) to get help mixing from Jeremy Ylvisaker. At times, both Jeremy and I were hunched over the mixing board, both adjusting volumes and rotating stereo effects. My notes from mixing I’m in a Tent V1 read: “I played the vocal and electric guitar and Jeremy drove the car!” (in reference to what “instruments” we were in charge of during the mix). Ye’ol Ylvisaker is just chock full of ideas, and he knows how to execute anything. And wherever we differed on liking part of a mix, whoever liked it would simply argue, “It’s good because that’s where the song falls off an underwater cliff”, or “That’s just a happy person driving by”.
    So! Thanks for your interest and attention to detail, don’t forget to listen through headphones (!) and I hope you’re the Particular Audience for which I’m searching.

    Mixed from cassette to DAT in 2002 and earlier by John Snell at Home or by John Snell & & Jeremy Ylvisaker at Soliton. Mastered July 2003-January 2004 by Tom Herbers at 3rd Ear (Minneapolis, MN). Final tweaks continued through Nov. 2005. Artwork & layout by John Snell the Tenth. All instruments by JS10 except: some cat food crunching by Toppsy in I’m in a Tent (Version 3), Amy Cavanaugh singing “Ahh” in Mental Capacity, and Gia Campbell reading 2 lines in Unsustainable Industrial Spread.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Peculiar Songs for a Particular Audience via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ... more
    ships out within 4 days
    edition of 250 
    Purchasable with gift card

      $20 USD or more 

     

about

Recorded in Athens Georgia on my four track in 1997.

lyrics

“Doze Barn Down/Mettle-Treaded Unleaded”
Song will be on John Snell’s next album Peculiar Songs for a Particular Audience

I’ve got a mettle-treaded, unleaded bull to doze the dirt round.
If you’ve got a farm, I’ve got the bull to doze your barn down.

I built this steel, I-beamed crane machine to change the scene.
It constructs a building’s frame, attach a ball—it knocks the frame down.

The time will come again when all that exists and all that occurs will be a direct result of natural forces. Through time earth’s conditions change and the variety of organisms able to survive on this planet are shuffled. Inevitably humans will eventually be discarded along with the hundreds of species that disappear each day. Mother Nature is too powerful a card player to allow the deck to be stacked against her. Cleverness cannot conquer time. A species need only be defeated once to be defeated forever.
The time frame by which this world naturally evolves is difficult for humans to grasp. We work in a different dimension of time based not even on our existence as a species, but on our existence as individuals. We have taken geologic time – the relative time by which the face of our planet naturally changes – and replaced it with our own Human time scale.
Because the human time scale is a norm for us, we are left foolishly comfortable with the relative speed at which the world around us in changing - even though it’s changing at a rate millions of times faster than ever before. Every day throughout all parts of the world bulldozers, cranes, and blue, cement-pumping trucks are used to turn beauty into industry.
Industrialization has spread from country to country – similar to a spilt watercolor rinse imbedding brown waste into a colorful landscape painting. Eventually the brown waste will spread thin. There will not be the flow of water needed to continue the brown revolution, nor will there be enough water to keep that which is already brown wet. The polluted paintings will dray, warp, and harden.
----Unsustainable Industrial Spread----
It’s growing, building towards some climax like atoms smashing in an atomic bomb. It seems we are working harder and faster towards our destruction without even knowing it.
What then will become of everything we’ve made our world to be? Without the input of directed energy our complicated world of structures and of high order will melt in the mouth of time. In our concept of time the world will be deathly still. Freeways as silent as dusty riverbeds. Berlin, Montreal, Elsalvador, Minneapolis, will all stand empty and useless. Every building’s doors will stay closed. Escalators will remain motionless. Homosapien’s Disneyland will be a picture frozen in time. Brightly colored shallow faces on the ceramic statues left smiling for no one.

I bought a flat, latex, yellow wall-paint gallon can today
To paint these white, sheet-rocked walls—delay decay.

The surfaces of the lily pads are as wet as the bottoms.
Tall, thin cottonwoods are dancing, metronomecly nodding to the band once called wind.
Others dancing are small grains of clear and brown sand.
“Take that you big bastard building!”
I’m here, sitting cross-legged on the cement looking up beyond the Twin Towers visualizing their burial. It’ll happen.
Rain rain, wind blow, earth shake. Nature will work patiently to bury all of our structures under the same materials used in their construction.
But I’m not waiting here hoping to wittiness a burial. You see…there’s a race.

(©John Snell X 1994 & 1997; JohnSnellX@Juno.com)

credits

from Peculiar Songs for a Particular Audience, released October 10, 2006

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

John Snell the Tenth Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minnesota native John Snell (the Tenth) started writing music when he was just fifteen, but his musical admiration was apparent at an even earlier age. John's mother can attest to him dancing to the hum of the vacuum cleaner while he was still in cloth diapers. Since these early days JS10 has written over 200 songs, grown out of diapers, and released more than 6 full-length albums (& 1 unreleased) ... more

contact / help

Contact John Snell the Tenth

Streaming and
Download help

Shipping and returns

Report this track or account

If you like John Snell the Tenth, you may also like: