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TracksRonnie Camaro goes to college
Eyeballs
Samson & Denial
Old Enough
Stockpiling for the Post-apocalyptic Garage Sale
It's definitely more night than it is day
There ain't no reason
Sweep me up
Percussion in Eightball
Spiritual Amnesia
Ode to wormwood
All of the people are turning to stone
Thorazine Shuffle (last call for Haldol)
Consciousness Isn't Necessary
Feel your hair grow
Everybody out of the pool
Babble
Hyperactive-Atrophy
Overseer of the Mice
At night all cats are gray
Don't hurt my life
It's definitely more night than it is day (pop format)
Sun my lizard (for Herb)
Someone left the door ajar for Suction-cup Man
...and they all went off into the desert
Captivity's the best
Smoking cigarettes is like talking to God
Credits
Recorded by P.M. and tim Parker for 835 Records on ADAT
Performers:
Jerry Lloyd (some creepy vocals on tracks 6 and 14)
Steve Gigante (subsequently mutated guitar on track 27)
Joe Goldmark (pedal steel on track 24)
Tim Parker (guitars on track 24, background vocals on track 10, "mee-mee" voice on track 3)
Geoff Reed (percussion on tracks 6, 7, 9, 14)
Rahul Parson (guitar on track 20)
Ronnie Camaro (mouth harp on track 20)
Main Voices:
Molly Tascone, Floyd Labar, Molly Nance, Nancee Kim, Vonn Scott Bair, Gwenn Sinnott, Rahul Parson, Don Kraus, and many years of microscassette "field recordings".
copyright Eddie the Rat 1998.
Reviews
Negativland's anti-commercial dada stance inspires a manic anti-pop collage that turns contemporary electronica into fresh modes of satiric theatre. While it has its roots in late ’60s works like Zappa's Lumpy Gravy, Eddie the Rat's sonic inventions draw freely from commercial culture as diverse sound bites intersect with samples and spoof grooves like the mock drum & bass "Eyeballs" with its kazoo solo, or the parodic techno beats of "Samson & Denial." While not a dance record in any conventional sense, this audacious sonic montage draws freely from contemporary electronica and trance-dance idioms to drive home its subversive point. Eddie the Rat sounds very much like Firesign Theatre in the age of the infini-loop and the sampler.
David Lewis, Exclaim!, http://www.exclaim.ca/index.asp?layid=23&csid1=1076
You have never heard anything like this before, and that's probably the highest praise I can give this creepy, disjointed project. I use the word project because there are few real "songs" here, so be warned. Eddie the Rat (aka Pete Martin) uses found noises,homemade instruments, snatches of conversation, and stoned nursery rhymes to create eerie sound collages. Some will call it profound, some will call it insane, most just won't know what to call it.
Built upon a barrage of juicy, scatterbrained soundclips and outlandish, mood-inducing background music, Eddie the Rat wastes only a few moments with the opening track's introduction before pouring an unnerving ruckus of inspiring filth onto your lap. This self-titled release is meant to be experienced in is entirety, as the journey from track to track is predicated upon a symbiotic relationship of gregariousness, rude utterances and smartly placed pop culture sounds that nudge, slap and poke your brain into a state of aural submission. "There Ain't No Reason" combines Aristotelian philosophical statements with musical backing resembling racy Carl Stalling big band charts that have been sent into warp speed. Other "tunes" in this 27 track journey through aural hell do everything from wage sonic warfare upon your eardrums ("Ronnie Camaro Goes to College") to applying a gentle massage of rolling, surprisingly cordial soundwaves ("Thorazine Shuffle"). Need a little dash of anarchistic leanings, or perhaps a grim beating of passionate proportions? Readers, man your xylophones and tape decks and let the brouhaha begin! Eddie may be a rat, but he's the only company you'll have for the next 50 minutes -- so get used to it, and expect the unexpected!
- Andrew Magilo, Splendid E-zine
Perhaps you sometimes get weary from absorbing one signal from the television or radio through passive osmosis. Maybe you've tried turning channel surfing into an art form - giving each station a few seconds to say its piece and then cutting it off in mid thought, sometimes establishing an arbitrary connection between two separate ideas from two neighboring channels. (An armchair cut-and-paste jam session, if you will.) If every channel was filled with eerie, synthesized music and comic non-sequiturs, you might even have as much fun as you would listening to the eponymous album from the mysterious entity Eddie The Rat. The first half of Eddie The Rat is filled with voices: smiley-faced commercials, answering machine messages, marmalade-voiced restaurant hostesses and all sorts of debased rantings. (The droll come-on "Do you own any books on self-love?... Have you written any?" on "Stockpiling For The Post-Apocalyptic Garage Sale" is one of the many highlights.) They come and go so fast that your brain barely has time to process them; don't expect to listen to Eddie the Rat without pressing rewind a lot. A pair of scissors can be heard on "Old Enough," a subtle nod to the essence of Eddie's enterprise. Eddie The Rat is closely associated with the notorious "sonic outlaws" in Negativland, but the comparison is a bit too obvious. Both bands specialize in the same sort of found-sound recontextualization, but Eddie doesn't suffer from Negativland's obsessiveness. While Negativland often sounds like NPR's "This American Life" on acid, Eddie is far more abstract and haphazardly funky, echoing the best of college radio. These days, Negativland bases its sound collages more and more around built-in messages, but Eddie's barrage of voices lack any sort of context or explanation. You're left to extrapolate continuity and meaning in your own head, examining your own perceptive processes as well as the outside stimuli. The second half of Eddie The Rat becomes more, well... musical. The voices drop into the background and you're left with a rotating sequence of brief synthesized interludes, sometimes oddly infectious and sometimes hauntingly pretty. The easiest reference point would be the Residents, but several passages sound more like lost excerpts from They Might Be Giants' "Fingertips." The voices slowly resurface near the end, building up to the denouement "Smoking Cigarettes Is Like Talking to God," which wraps up the album with a schizoid piano figure and the bumpersticker-worthy suggestion to share the pain with your friends. Eddie The Rat is the sort of cynicism-buster that will allow you to flip channels and rummage through your record collection with renewed curiosity, although you might not be able to pay attention to any one channel or tune for more than ten seconds at a time. (1920 Monument Blvd., PMB MF-1, Concord, CA 94520)
- Emerson Dameron
I used to self-consciously like "weird" music - but after a while, I just got tired of music that strenuously insisted on its "oddity" or "weirdness" as if such a quality were a virtue in itself.
Or maybe the music just got worse - because I rather like Eddie the Rat's CD, which reminds me of Zappa's tape collage work, early Residents, and Negativland (on whose label this CD is released) circa A Big 10-8 Place. The trick is to compose your odd sounds with a sense that they are, in fact, music rather than just noise. Too often, the collage approach bores because it really does seem like a mere random assembly of objects. (This can work for maybe two minutes but pales for any longer than that.) Eddie also is able to arrange his sounds in coherent rhythmic patterns, sometimes lurching and ungainly to be sure (this ain't no dancefloor fodder) but seldom devolving into mere randomness.
- Jeff Normon/Architectural Dance Society, http://www.uwm.edu/~jenor/EddieRev.html
Eddie The Rat’s self-titled release is a bold adventure into the art of audio collage. Each brief song has a distinctly different texture from the others, yet all are united through the strangeness of it all. Collectively, the tracks are a hodge podge of everything from carnival music to rock and the twisted manipulation of everyday sounds. In short, it reminds me of Cornelius or Coldcut in its style. Definitely the kind of music that makes you take note, yet Eddie the Rat is not for everyone. If you enjoy "Livin’ la Vida Loca," this album might not satisfy you. However, those who are truly loca will probably do as I did when I first heard this album and listen gleefully, marveling at how anyone this far out ever got a contract. Well, I for one am glad that someone had the good sense to recognize this strange new brand of music and I hope they all make a lot of money.
- Nicolas Hartshorn/The Creature
Pete Martin is essentially Eddie the Rat, which on this self-titled CD sounds like a disjointed, obtuse version of audio collage expert Negativland. Not too surprisingly, Eddie the Rat is released on Negativland's Seeland label. Each track is a vignette told with warped digital audio fragments, eerie tape loops, and mentally disturbing bits and pieces of spoken samples from a variety of sources. Whether a theme runs through these 27 cuts is not clear, but as a whole the CD sounds like the soundtrack to some post-millennial nuclear disaster. Each track seems to have its own narrative, at least by way of song titles, such as "Stockpiling for the Post-Apocalyptic Garage Sale," "Someone Left the Door Ajar for Suction-cup Man," and "Smoking Cigarettes Is Like Talking to God." The first cut, "Ronnie Camaro Goes to College," has the character entering the world of unending bureaucracy, as told with short sound clips representing endless phone-loop hell. Although the narratives are often hard to follow, a sense of dark irony, verging on twisted comedy, touches each. This is not mindless listening, as it requires some concentration on the listeners' part. But these audio montages are both intelligent and thought provoking, and there is always something new to discover with each listen.
- Marlene Goldman/ Tipworld: Alternative Releases
Eddie the Rat crafts schizophrenic, vaguely melodic, short attention span sound collages that any self-respecting lunatic would back up with a loud, resounding, head-scratching, glue-sniffing “What the hell are you talking about?”
- Summer Burkes, San Francisco Bay Guardian
Eddie the Rat is intriguing, certainly, and sometimes even astonishing. There’s alot of weirdness here, and it sees to get worse the longer the disc plays on. Highly entertaining if you like your brain bombarded with all sorts of ideas...one of the more stimulating approaches to sounds I’ve heard in a while.
- Jon Worly/Aidding & Abetting
Eddie the Rat strikes me as extremely musical, and at the same time it has great freedom to incorporate non-musical elements and musicalize them..you asked for ideas as to what direction you should take in marketing it.... Boy, I haven’t a clue about that.
-Bart Hopkin, ed of Experimental Musical Instruments