CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
Why combine a haunted grandfather clock, Tesla spirit radio, and grand piano? All is explained (and then some) in Prof. Oddfellow's Penetralia. (Hear Neons Gone Mad on Bandcamp.)
The full show is archived here, with our set beginning at 28:20 (snippet player below). Thank you, DJ Heather Perkins, for identifying our music as coming from a parallel universe and for calling our Prof. Oddfellow work "amazing ... you will not be disappointed."
We're honored to have received a triple-"cool" approval from Yeeflex on our remix!
Let us know -- did any stopped clocks begin ticking while you listened to this music? Did "time fly"? The song is just under 5 minutes long, but did you experience any sense of "timelessness" along the way? Whether or not you can verify a temporal anomaly, we had fun creating this video to share some time with you.
The original version of "Sunrise" (by Meizong & Yeeflex, via Argofox) is here: youtu.be/-GurRvqxg3I
Thank you, Jonathan Beckenstein, for writing, "A most welcome unique take on EDM. Feels and sounds great. And that hallway... Cocteau would be proud."
And thank you, George Parker, for writing, "I fell in love with the music!! I'm putting it on loop. The sound, the rhythm, superb. And the video as well as usual."
What happens when a spirit radio's strange clockwork music mingles with eldritch mutterings in the VIP room of Prof. Oddfellow's Penetralia?
We're honored that VJ Bat (a.k.a. the electro-goth industrual pioneer Xorcist) debuted on his live Twitch show our clockwork remix of Michael Ash Sharbaugh's "Fog Rise Echo." To create his 8-bit light show overlay, VJ Bat has in the studio an Apple 2e computer with special hardware that listens to the room during the set and displays the waveform of the music on the side of the screen. In the dead center of the screen is a live feed from his Atari C-240 Color Light Organ decoding the audio signal. Surrounding that is his Radio Shack Color Computer II with a Music Kaleidoscope hardware cart also decoding the audio feed. Both the Atari and Radio Shack video feeds are combined by a Gefen video mixer. All 3 of these feeds are then sent to a separate computer that has a 4xHDMI PCIe input card and OBS where the APPLE 2e feed is layered. The whole mess is then sent to his VJ laptop, which streams as an NDI source while Bat performs.
Thanks to Michael Ash Sharbaugh, who said: "I am blessed, Gents! Thanks! It is soooooo great! You gentlemen have outdone yourselves: the video is spooky, comical at times, and well orchestrated and planned out. I am humbled, and appreciate it!" Here's the video of Neons Gone Mad's clockwork remix of "Fog Rise Echo":
DJing music from a parallel universe: the spirit radio connected to a haunted grandfather clock picked up an alternate version of "Cross Purposes" by Silly Pillows.
KlingonCaptain kindly asked, "So... When is the album coming out?" That brings up another question: what would such an album be titled? A band in England once asked me for weird words for album names, but they ended up not taking any of my suggestions. (Sad.) I suggested Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious (meaning "very good," from a slang dictionary of the 1930s), Pentadecylparatolylketone (the chemical composition of limelight), Poluphlosboiothalasses (from Punch magazine, 1859 ... I don't recall what it means), and "Hysterico Vaporous Hypo Megrins" (a fictional diagnosis for a condition in which one is unstuck in time; the patient is lost to the present even as the future and the past loom up before his half-closed eyes. This phrase appears in a poem entitled "Heroic Treatment," by a certain G.A.K., printed in Harper's, Aug. 1887).
Lord Entourage wrote: "It was fun looking up the original song's lyrics and comparing them to this version from a parallel universe. As Ornam Rotem said, 'Different worlds can overlap and interact and they need not have well defined boundaries. Works of art can be considered as worlds, as can genres or whole media. Worlds can be imaginary or imagined.'"
Is an electro-spectre a ghost who haunts currents of charged particles? It’s also the name of a Norwegian band who invited me to transmogrify a new song through my haunted clockwork for an album of remixes. I could hardly believe the sounds that came out when I attached the spirit radio to the grandfather clock via a strand of cobweb. Don’t ask me how that even works — I’m just rolling with it myself! You might recall from a previous episode that the clock face has inexplicably been pulled backwards, beyond the back of the cabinet, and a ghostly face floats within. All I know is that it transmogrifies better music now. I wonder if I can tune into the clockwork version of Electro Spectre’s song, to find out if you agree how astonishing it is.
It's the cover version that left the band Vaylon utterly speechless: "Numb" by Neons Gone Mad:
A brief explanation of how we approached recording a cover of “Numb” by the Danish band Vaylon: we hear the line “As I walk along the shore” to be the key, because the songwriter is in a timeless moment as he reflects upon his past, his regrets, his addictions, his disgraces. His mind, as he walks, is outside of time — he’s in a sort of “eternity” of the soul. And that makes the shore, perhaps, like the River Styx, for the songwriter is at a threshold or liminal zone, trying to separate himself from the chains of the past. He is tied down by his habits, not really able to progress or to find a new freedom. He is so full of doubts bottled inside him that he can’t fully detach from his old life. And so we hear these lyrics as describing a state of existence described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which a soul finds himself in the in-between existence of “the Bardo.” Because the songwriter keeps trudging forward against the wind, we made the chorus #2 and chorus #3 more and more far-away, more and more ghostly, as if a fading signal on Tesla's spirit radio. The songwriter ever walks along the shore and finally leaves the listener behind. The listener inevitably loses the songwriter, but the songwriter surely finds eventually himself. We created the rhythm out of clockwork sounds, to symbolize the relentlessness of time. Even in limbo, the seconds click away for the songwriter with each step he takes down the shore.
In the music video we created for the cover version, two paranormal investigators are trying to tune into a frequency to make contact with that distant shoreline. By the end of the song, when the singer has finally drifted into the mysterious ethers, the investigators realize that Vaylon was never there (meant to be something of a joke, in that this wasn’t Vaylon’s original recording but rather a cover version; plus, some folks will recognize it as a quotation from the David Lynch film Fire Walk With Me, when David Bowie makes a cameo appearance but doesn’t show up on the security cameras because “he was never here.”)
We should note that we changed only two words, “being social” to “hollow seashells” … the seashells being a hint at the shore mentioned in the chorus, as well as literally being Tibetan horns (further tying into the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Don't miss the original track: vaylon.bandcamp.com/track/numb
