Member Since: 08/04/2007
Band Website: http://www.myspace.com/thequaranteenssiteb
Band Members: (For 4 more songs by the Quaranteens, visit their b site by clicking on the link above) Kurt Danielson sings, and Craig Paul plays keyboards and guitar; the latter also does all the electronic stuff: sampling, programming the drum machine, etc. Dan Mansfield plays drums on the first session (represented by the first and last two tunes posted here now), which Martin Feveyear recorded in Seattle at Jupiter studios. As is pointed out elsewhere, Craig does the music, almost all of it, and Kurt writes the lyrics and sings; Craig sings backups/harmonies on most every song. Besides the sampler and the drum machine, Craig also plays an old Yamaha keyboard, and there are guitars and a bass, which Kurt plays on some tracks. Craig plays most of the guitar parts, and Kurt plays bass on a few songs; Craig does the rest on the keyboard. Kurt's bass-playing on these recordings amounts to some fuzz bass in "Valley," and a couple of minimalist melodic bass parts: one being a bitchin and mercifully brief bass solo (in "Hover," which is now posted on the new page that Kurt opened due to the welcome requests of a few really cool friends: http://www.myspace.com/thequaranteenssiteb). Sean Hollister of Valis/Screaming Trees fame contributes percussion to a couple tracks from the second session, which was done at Uptone in Tacoma w/ Wes Wersche presiding over the proceedings. The tracks done with Martin Feveyear (the first sesh, done a year earlier in Seattle at Jupiter or rather on Jupiter) involve his contributions on keyboard and backing vocals; thanks go out again to Wes and Martin for their inestimable assistance, generosity, and priceless advice. Yes, the Quaranteens are very different from TAD; their music may surprise or even disappoint some TAD fans. Why? Because we are talking about a species of musical sophistication of a rudimentary, even pop musical style. Vulgar? Perhaps. Would Vincent Price have invited Kurt to dinner on the strength of it? We shall never know the answer to that and other nagging questions. Anyhow, to get back to the story, the idea was to wring blood and soul out of circuitry, tubes, chips, and samples; nevertheless, organic instrumentation inevitably leaks in here and there through the cracks, like sweat beads falling off the double chin of a perspiring bureaucrat that plummet into the cracks in the sidewalks on the hot side of the street in late afternoon, if only because it is right; some times the smell of hot pavement is right, and a corpulent bureaucrat can't do a damned thing about it. In any case, these incursions by non-electronic instruments occur only rarely. The 'Teens focus on a minimalist, drone aesthetic, creating a tension that forms the foundation for melodic patterns, each pattern consisting of a layer of sonic skin, mosaics of aural lace that are added and removed, seemingly at random but always according to some mysteriously enigmatic but strict ritual and pattern, the adherence to which, theoretically, incessantly builds the tension, albeit slowly, some times subtly, a few times with a knuckle swelling volatile punch to the hyena jawbone of complacency, until...well, nothing; the tension is always there. It never gets resolved. To reinforce this tense ambiance, the 'Teens keep the songs short, so as not to overstay their welcome (they always feel a little alien and unwelcome on this hostile planet, where they crashed while on a reconnaissance mission that originated on a planet orbiting Sirius B; this is serious). Since the expression of alienation was the main effect the 'Teens were after, it seemed like it would be pretty simple, and the 'Teens might have pulled it off if it weren't for a few miscalculations. Unfortunately, for example, somewhere along the way, they accidentally kicked their rehearsal habits--instead of those that were intimately and inevitably intertwined with deep and absorbing lucubrations in the area of chemistry, studies that focused on the psychological effects of certain chemicals on certain receptor sites in the brain--and this was not good. But enough of such prattle. Adrian Makins played in some early versions of the band, but then the band turned into another band, and Adrian also played in other bands, and sooner or later Adrian wasn't in the same band the others were in, like a man who steps out the door and finds himself in another dimension with unknown properties, limits, laws, and so on. Twilight. So it went. Kurt wants to emphasize that Martin Feveyear sings backup vocals/harmonies and plays some keyboards on the early material from that first session at Jupiter Studios in Seattle. Without his efforts, those first sessions would have been a dour affair indeed. The later material was/is far more experimental, mainly because rehearsal just wasn't part of what the 'Teens were "about" at that particular time, and the results are obvious, especially in some songs that will remain under lock and key until the 'Teens can fix 'em. Some tunes survive the ill-advised psychic investigations performed by the 'Teens during this epoch, but most of this second session requires plastic surgery: if only James Brown could rise from the dead as a plastic surgeon, fully formed, and do their bidding. Well, it doesn't matter. When you're from Sirius B, you get used to such things. The bottom line here is that Craig and Kurt ended up working simply as a duo for the duration of the second batch of sessions (done at Uptone Studios, in tony Tacoma), although Sean helped on drums for "Valley of the Flies." The rest of the later stuff is all electronic (meaning the 'Teens use only sampled drums; but there are some acoustic drum overdubs). In general terms, these last recordings need to have the chaos and chemical distortion drained from their sonic colanders so that the aural topography of the melodies and rhythms may stand out in sufficiently sharp relief. In other words, the dynamics need to be focused a whole lot more and the bones of the songs themselves need to stand out much more starkly from the background static of the big bang that obscures them from sonic view. See, the 'Teens were more concerned about chemical research then than they should have been, and one consequence was that rehearsal became very rare. The entire ambiance of the second sesh was redolent of a locomotive burning down the tracks steadily towards the hapless 'Teens. So it came and so it went, leaving the 'Teens as it found them: alone and just a little fucked up. Still, maybe one day, the project will start again, like a white wedding on eternal replay. Kurt saw the lights of LA from Timothy Leary's front yard at night, spread out like a black tumid reservoir reflecting the fuzzy amber toenail moonlight from the incandescent crests of miles of waves lingering like floodwaters behind an invisible damn that held back the night from crashing in and drowning out the vividly bright and glinting metallic grid of yellow street lights that shimmered, phosphorous in a hot, negative white and friable inland sea, where salt is harvested in the dead metal heat of summer before a molten sulfuric horizon, like crystal methamphetamine (as in the Salton Sea), where skinny sore-covered crack-head elephants snort jumbo lines of a golden brown powdery substance off an enormous mirror held by a tightrope walker at the climax of the big show under the big top under the bright lights deep under the oil-marbled ground. The night smog made the flickering city lights seem as if they were submerged beneath pond scum with the translucence of a lemon rind that's been in the fridge for months. It was as hard as quartzite that had somehow, while in a liquid state, engulfed the dreaming city's grid of luminous nocturnal neighborhoods before crystallizing around them, a thousand cathedrals encrusted with thousands of gargoyles, griffins, potato-eaters (as in Van Gogh), and burning salamanders wearing LSD-friendly permeable membrane costumes and gas masks charged with nitrous oxide cannisters. It was grotesquely beautiful, as when you suddenly notice that the old man you've been speaking with on the street corner for a moment or two has an eye lens clouded like a bruised blue thumbnail that makes him blind in that eye but no less able to exude an air of sharp, avid, attentive cordiality,the sartorial splendor of his fur coat and black fedora eccentric but elegant, his words clear and well modulated, like the white hair parted at the side of his head and the bow tie like a trained but poisonous black butterfly attached affectionately to his larynx. Kurt had just walked outside through the sliding glass door when the acid hit. He smelled the grass and the perfume of magnolia blossoms and eucalyptus and carbon monoxide. That's mainly what he remembers: how the valley broke into cheers of lights as night fell like a vast and thick sheet of black glass, and the acid blew a nonexistent wind smelling of magnolias and cut lawns through Kurt's hair. Someone said that Billy Idol had just left, and Kurt looked in to see the Keith Herring table with no one standing anywhere near it, yellow and glossy (how long had the room been empty like that?), the wobbly red and blue figures dancing beneath bottles of Stoli and a vast spread of refreshments that were sweating in the warm night air, and the condensation-blistered cold cuts and cheese slices had never before seemed so human and fiberglass pink, so virginal and radiant in appearance but deep down merely props arranged in order to heighten the hallucinatory aspects of the evening (it was Mr. Leary's birthday party, his last, Kurt believes). Hence, the reference to a white wedding: memories coming to life, and it's a banquet, but the bride and groom have already flown away, taking their green violins with them to a marriage bed welded to an asteroid's veins of iron. Chemicals connect. They're still intact. Owls fly from high branches that clutch at the stars, white gowns flung away, reflecting for a fraction of a second the light of the moon, that other cyclops.
Influences: All of my influences are listed on the myspace.com/danielsonenator page, but I can't speak for Craig. It seems logical to presume that our tastes overlapped to the point where we clicked, and this music was the result of that.
Sounds Like: Raymond Burr, naked, rolling around on a wet vinyl surface, crazy as a water bed bug.
Record Label: unsigned
Type of Label: Indie