Today’s Found Audio! (The First, mind you) is an auspicious one indeed. For you see, once upon a time I was a guitarist. A rock guitarist. Well, rock tinged with my initial classical training, my later hair band music training and my super faggy personal proclivity towards the art-punk aesthetic of B-52’s, DEVO and Talking Heads. And as a young rock guitarist is wont to do, I tried to form many unsuccessful bands. Though all things are doomed to failure on a long enough timeline, these bands were particularly fleeting, often lasting no more than one or two rehearsals. 

Imagine my surprise when I find that tape exists of one of these bands. I honestly don’t remember most of this. I remember the drummer, Matt Sweeney. An exceptional drummer, particularly for his age. I had to have my memory jogged for the name of the singer (Troy Carlton, who is apparently still singing for bands. Hopefully now on key). And nobody remembers the bass player, but isn’t that sort of always the case?

So despite the fact that the last thing I want Found Audio! to become is a navel gaze into my personal misadventures, the first tape I happened to grab out of the giant box of cassettes in my Watson-Taylor Storage Unit was this one. Unmarked save for the word “Mellow,” which I assure you it is not. In fact it isn’t really good either. The tape consists of two versions of the one you are about to start listening to (and then abruptly stop), and two halves of different songs, which I may post later. I barely recall, but I seem to think that we would all collaborate on the music and Troy would hastily scratch out some lyrics. This was to a decent punk effect on this song: This World of Mine (Makes no Sense), but was used to much less effect in later compositions like Candy Girl and No Feeling, the latter which ended with a Jim Morrison-esque rant of “Fuck me! Fuck you! Fuck your mother!” and most inexplicably, “Fuck your grandmother!” 

As a side note, I initially wanted the first post to be a track by the Swinging Erudites, who I’m fairly sure never appeared on anything other than vinyl. But the cassette in that shell was instead a bunch of Shep Pettibone 12” Club Mixes of Girl From Impanema Goes to Greenland.

So here it is, Found Audio! #1. A nameless band of which I was a member back sometime in the early-mid 90’s. The recording isn’t very good, the song is worse. But taken out of context it’s pretty punk rock, isn’t it? I think so.