Our most excellent compadre Brian Miller (Foot Village, Deathbomb Arc etc.) has composed, as True Neutral (and in collaboration with Brian Chippendale from Lightning Bolt and Ezra Buchla, ex-Gowns and EMA contributor), the score for an Audiobook of Patrick Wensink’s new book, ‘Broken Piano for President’. Being the thorough journalists that we are, we have done a bit of research and found out that the main themes of this book are alcoholism, burger-drug-wars and the ‘need to chose happiness over work and security’. Wensink himself is compared to Christopher Moore and Thomas Pynchon.
If we had succumbed to our fantastic/un-journalistic impulses to place ‘Call on the Herd’ in the trans-media literary canon, we would have selected Philip K. Dick and David Foster Wallace as references.
The reason for this is that both authors portrayed the tensions between the evolution of Economic, Organisational and Techno-pharmaceutical structures, and the emotional and social needs of the individuals embedded within them, and that is the vibe that we get from this droid power-ballad. Its weird echoes of Motown (Mass Production), Big Star (Stagflation), and even GladOS’ swan-song (Portal as Kafkian situation) are not a coincidence, in our view.
We love it very much.
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True Neutral – Call On The Herd
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True Neutral – A Few Lights On The Wall (featuring Brian Chippendale)
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The cassette includes both the audiobook and music on it’s own. You can buy it here. You can also stream/buy it digitally here.