"Me For No One" Music Video:
vimeo.com/373549176/description

In 1999 I recorded some music on a 4-track and put it on a CD-R called “George Korein’s Unholy Assortment”. The music has not held up well, to say the least, but the process of recording music on my own for the first time was revelatory. The title reflected the lack of a unifying theme: it was just a collection of what I’d recorded within a period of time.

By summer 2001 I’d met Alexs Vallejo and Nagle, who inspired me to delve into drum machines, vocals, and metallic antics. A kid’s science magazine laying around at my dad’s house had an ad for “TRILOBITE! Eyewitness to Evolution” by Richard Fortey. I was amused by the notion of “Memoirs of a Trilobite” and made a little image of a trilobite at a typewriter saying “I tell it how it is.” Colin borrowed a basic digital recording interface and we made the Infidel?/Castro! album “Case Studies in Bioentropy”, and recorded songs for "Trilobite". One morning Bill Marston had NPR on and Colin heard Richard Fortey talking trilobites, and thoughtfully recorded the interview, which included passages from the book narrated in his charming, professorial voice. We sampled this quite liberally for my project. We put out “Case Studies”, but the Trilobite record didn’t quite feel finished.

In 2003 I got my own recording interface and started making songs at home. By 2005 I decided to pay for a CD pressing, and if I was going to do that, I figured, I might as well jam it 79 minutes full with almost everything that had piled up — an unholy assortment indeed. With a diagram woven into the tracklist I hoped to make “Memoirs of a Trilobite” not seem like an undigestable monolith but instead a set of nine two-sided singles, plus an intro, outro and interludes. Each single ostensibly corresponded to one of the eight orders of trilobites, to which I’d attributed arbitrary attributes. After nearly being judicious enough to leave off my embarrassing forays into hip-hop, I got the news that a ninth order of trilobite had been classified, and felt compelled to include a dubious pair of songs to match.

1000 copies costed scarcely more than 500, so I went ahead and ordered 1000 and sent a 30-box each to every one of the many contributors, including Richard Fortey, who said they attracted considerable interest in the paleontology department of the Natural History Museum of London. Years later I uploaded a superior 60-minute digital version and threw out the other hundreds of copies — no more physical media for me.

In 2008 I was in London with Liz to see part of the Sparks concert marathon, and managed to land an interview with Richard Fortey at the Geological Society, where he had become president. He asked me if there would be a sequel to “Memoirs…”. At first I wasn’t sure, but I thought it might be a nice thing to get around to someday. Eleven years later, I had made several albums that I feel are more mature and developed and thematically organized, and also many songs that didn’t quite fit into my other concepts. Could these be gathered together? Some of them bore traces of the old trilobite DNA, and some of them were almost as old as the original album — downright paleontological. Once I started reading about the centennial, the sesquicentennial and the bicentennial, I had a title and a sort of frame story. I wrote a cartoonish sci-fi monologue for Fortey to narrate as intro and outro, which he agreed to record upon his next stay in the US. This turned out to be in California, and thus the whole thing was done by lo-fi digital phone call anyway.

I realized the way to break this 56-minute digital album into two sides was to split it into two albums, “Trilobites at the Tricentennial” and “Trilobites at the Sestercentennial”. There did seem to be lyrical themes after all, relating to time and the century -- as well as good old absurdist fun. "I Got It Done" concludes with a stated need for an extremely extended lifespan -- at the time of the tricentennial, I will be 93 -- only to be followed by the slapstick death visions of "Hazards". “We Die Higher Than You Live” has some lyrical kinship with “Kill People, Go Shopping”. The lyrics to Pineapple Boot are a transcription of something Hattie said when she was 4.

Some of the music is more complex and sequenced than my more recent material. A composition I wrote around 2007 for the chamber rock ensemble Normal Love finally arrives: where “Memoirs” had my 12-tone piece I wrote for a homework assignment, “Tactless Dyslexic Carapace”, “Tricentennial” has my quartertone endeavor “Pragmatic Intuitive Edifice”. “Thissed By That” is a manic take on gory death metal, with the gore, death, and metal removed.

Stay tuned for part two (or is it part three of a TRILOgy?), “Trilobites as the Sestercentennial”, which should arrive around February.

As the second song goes: I GOT IT DONE — only ten years after it was due!