The other night I was reading about how caterpillars turn into this sentient goo substance when they enter metamorphosis. The idea held me, and for a second I imagined myself having led a different life – instead of being the captain of the varsity football team at my boarding school (that’s football played with feet, plebs) and the heir to a fortune made in imported beeswax for vanity soaps and rifle lubricant, I was a fragile boy who couldn’t stay outside long due to severe asthma. I would watch as my overprotective mother carefully cultivated different species of caterpillar in a large wooden cage in our den. When they transformed into butterflies, she would smother them in chloroform filled jars, and pin them in straight rows on ivory paper.
I fell asleep to this fantasy, while Danny Clay & Karl Fousek’s collaborative tape on Phinery Records played in the background. I dreamed I was swimming in a sentient goo, the pale green of mucus, which spoke to me through my skin in pings of electricity. When I woke up I discovered I had actually been awake for two weeks, pen in hand, madly scrawling measures and staves onto the walls, trying to decipher the arrow of these abstracts jaunts of modular synthesis and pipe organ. The music was sad at times, but any brazen emotion eluded me as if it was the communication of a species I couldn’t understand. The warm familiarity of a pipe organ, over which the modular continues to thrive, pushing the boundaries of a cassette.
• Phinery Tapes: http://www.phinery.net
• Danny Clay: http://www.dclaymusic.com
• Karl Fousek: http://karlfousek.com
More about: Danny Clay & Karl Fousek
