Tracklist

1	Untitled (Back Room, Flint, MI 5-98)
2	Untitled (Back Room, Flint, MI 7-98)
3	Untitled (Back Room, Flint, MI 7-98)
4	Untitled (Back Room, Flint, MI 7-98)

Credits

• Performer – Artemis K (tracks: All), PBK (tracks: All)

Notes

Track 01: Opening for Con Demek, Tracks 02-04: Opening for Kid606 & Lesser. Remastered/edited in 2010 by PBK (original source: stereo cassette)

Notes from website: "Both live concerts represented here were recorded in the same year, but contrast startlingly different sides of the work Artemis K and I did together.

The first performance is from May 1998 and we were opening for ConDemek. It was Dirk Serries (aka Vidna Obmana) who first introduced me to ConDemek's music when he recommended their excellent 'Disgorging Elements' from 1987. Artemis and I met the group in Paris at the Experiences Festival (11/96) and we became fast friends. So, when they were going on tour in '98, Artemis made arrangements for them to stop in our town: Flint, Michigan. We played at The Back Room, now called The Loft, and this bar has a storied history in Flint. Many bands coming through mid-Michigan had played there, some historic punk bands, some Detroit natives such as a young, flat-top wearing rapper named Kid Rock, Insane Clown Posse, etc. More recently when Wolf Eyes played in Flint on several occasions we convened afterwards for drinks in this bar!

The first track, as Artemis has pointed out elsewhere, was the opening improvisation of a 90 minute concert performance. This is all soundscape and noise/drone with very little of the overt rhythmic/melodic content that Artemis was interested in establishing in this band. There are some vocal snippets (an obvious one from Lynch's 'Eraserhead') and in the latter half a low-frequency rhythm fluxes throughout the piece. This was recorded on a live mic, so you can, at points, hear the audience.

(Recently, Artemis K has produced some video clips from this performance which I have posted here. I was very pleased to see these clips and I'd forgotten that he had arranged to have it videotaped. In my opinion, this was our best live concert.)

I always find it interesting to think of that time (mid-to-late 90s) in relation to playing live noise in Michigan. What is now taken for granted just over a decade later, i.e. a local 'noise scene', did not at this time exist. So, the things we did in public, performing live abstract music, were pretty much unprecedented around these parts.

The second performance was recorded at the same venue, only two months later, in July. Artemis had contacted Kid606 and Lesser through the Vinyl Communications label, so when they were doing a national tour, he set up a gig for them in Flint. In opening for these underground glitch bands we apparently decided to do a set based around Artemis' rhythmic sequences. This is quite different from the performance in May. In this case, my improvising of random noises doesn't exactly mesh well with Artemis' heavy rhythms, at times the squalls I'm creating swallow up his sequences. Artemis K's compositions definitely owe something of a debt to Cleopatra/Wax Trax-style industrial music, with a nod to Gary Numan's influence as well. To be honest, the melodic and rhythmic content in these tracks seem to perhaps have been composed with the thought of including a vocal track. I know Artemis was trying out some vocal material on his solo work at the time. At times it seems like we are so out of sync that my sounds are corrupting the directions he is moving in. But this becomes the most interesting aspect of these recordings, in my opinion, the clash between extremely rigid sequence-based rhythm/melody and freely improvised noise fluctuations. These tracks were not recorded with a live mic and there are no audience sounds."