Zephyr Device

Target Market

Authors' Commentary

Andrew:

She would have 'memories' charge to the forefront of her mind that were in fact dreams and would feel as if she was dreaming when she was actually awake and walking around...

In all fairness, I must admit that most of the lyrics for this piece were written a few weeks before Bill, Adam, and I decided to start the Zephyr Device project. I don't feel guilty, however, in using them for this project (one that aimed to only utilize brand new material) because we needed a starting point, some piece to help us feel out each other's experimentation styles and better understand what types of music/lyrics each of us liked and didn't like. This piece served this purpose well, because after working on it, I decided that fast, slam poetry lyrics would best fit the feel of the group as opposed to more structured Verse/Chorus type lyrics.

This song is about pharmaceutical companies and doctors raping the individualism and mental health of American children in the name of profit. Before I start explaining the lyrics for these songs, let me first say that when I write, I write with images as my units of lyrical measurement. I bounce from image to image and try to explain each image in detail. Sometimes, certain words or rhyme patterns or single sounds will lead me from one image to the next. The first image in this piece is one of a carnival-ringleader-esque pharmaceutical salesman perched atop a soapbox calling all children to his feet for an announcement. I pictured a sort of new age circus, one with no elephants or acrobats, which has one main act: the salesman's pitch. I tried to describe intelligence as a new commodity, something that can be bought and sold, something that collects dust if not ingested in time, some synthetic product that tries to pass itself off as genuine, one filled with "pharmaceutical love." I like the analogy of inflating flat tires filled with holes that I used to describe doping up kids to try and fix the effects of faulty child rearing and/or a kid's simply average brain wiring.

I worked at a gourmet Asian fusion restaurant in Montclair for two years in college, and during that time, I was able to wait on numerous pharmaceutical parties in the restaurant's upstairs private party room. These dinners were paid for by various pharmaceutical companies and were used as a way for doctor drug reps to pitch new drugs to big wig doctors in the medical community. Most dinners involved wine drinking, slide-show watching, eating fancy meals and ordering meals to go for hubbies, and asking questions. These dinners showed me the slimy underbelly of the pharmaceutical industry, one that is fed and made plump with favorable drug studies and coerced support from hand-picked doctors. The conversations I overheard during these parties influenced parts of this piece.

Everyone seemed to think that his prescription cocktails "worked best" when he was completely sedated and calm at all times.

I had a classmate in a creative writing class who once told me that Prozac blended her waking and dreaming lives. She would have 'memories' charge to the forefront of her mind that were in fact dreams and would feel as if she was dreaming when she was actually awake and walking around. She eventually stopped using the drug because it annihilated her personality and creativity and turned her into a zombie. Our conversations influenced some of the lines in the piece, particularly the section about "fake landslides in the corners of your eyes" and "day and night blend like puddles of soupy cum on a slutty bed."

The second section about the zombie nation is a jump into the future. I like the image of perfectly shaped little children being used as stable building blocks for large buildings in the future. I absolutely love the way the music compliments the rapid lyrical delivery during this second section. The main image I described during this part is one of drug lab scientists assuming the role of modern priests in a new, drug-fueled religion. The congregation in this new religion: hopped up Little Leaguers, doped up high school cheerleaders, and thousands of other children wired from morning until night. I tutored a child with multiple learning disabilities for two years. The child's mother was a crack addict, and because of her addiction, the child was born with a number of cognitive problems. He was medicated 24 hours a day and was constantly switching medication cocktails. Everyone seemed to think that his prescription cocktails "worked best" when he was completely sedated and calm at all times. Over two years I watched him build tolerances to different medications, show small shreds of wild creativity that proportionally increased with the development of his tolerances, and wallow in drug-induced states of exhaustion while experiencing a blank, empty, focus. My two years with this child also influenced this piece.

I love the line, "The blind leading those with dilated eyes." Imagine the sight of a parade led by pharmaceutical drug reps and scientists for drum majors and small, wide-eyed, silent, children devoid of facial expression for members of the marching band.

I'm really pleased with the way the instrumental drop fits with the long "Evvvvvvvil" in the third section. I tried to mess around with the rhyme scheme in that last part to get the "internet babysitters" and "transmit clips of pop culture" sections to flow by stressing odd syllables. I really like how this song sounds like it has three distinct sections. The image of a child rolling around in the shadow of his parent's large career was interesting to play with. One of my strongest messages in this piece is contained in the line "We fuck up our children and then get mad when they act fucked up." I honestly believe this, and after teaching high school English classes in North Jersey, I can see that so many parents want easy solutions to years of neglect and bad parenting. I started really resenting the fact that, in America, teachers and drugs are expected to right the wrongs of incompetent parents.

Adam:

And so it begins. This song started the entire journey with some words, a hand drum, and a poorly amped bass guitar. There is a demo of that floating around somewhere on the internet. Do we want to include that in the notes for this song? I think so. It will really show how far this song came from conception to birth to adulthood. The bassline wasn't anything special if you ask me. I just wanted something that rolled forward and seemed to stumble a little bit as it seemed to fit the tone of the first part. Which we then buried in an avalanche of mulitracked guitars. I wanted the guitars to come in and out as if a DJ were controlling the guitar parts with a fader.

“ Those damn hand claps make the whole album for me. That's it, I can die happily.

I told Andrew that his words felt like something analogous to "Stepfather Factory" by El-P, especially the delivery and angle in the first part of the song where we're selling THE PILL. "As you know, money can buy this kind of happiness." He actually wasn't familiar with El-P which just leads me to believe that great minds just arrive upon the same ideas. "Every street a straight line, every building the same height..."

Then, I wanted something that sounded vaguely martial that was in the same key as the first part. The thought of zombie children marching down the streets of some random suburb still amuses me.

Our choice for the third part of the song was to strip the idea from part one all the way back to its basic elements, and I think it's terribly effective for only being a bass, guitar, drums and voice. It lacks the clutter and zoom of part one because the lyrics are now coming from someone who has a sane view of the subject at hand, whereas the first part was spoken in the voice of a seriously deluded salesperson.

Adam in his thug life days.

Andrew speaks alone and then BLAM!

We drop the fucking West Coast hip-hop on that shit. Yes. We intentionally ripped off West Coast, but goddamn did it feel good. I wanted those hand claps to sound like twenty five clumsy men with giganticism in a bathroom clapping to Tupac Shakur. Those damn hand claps make the whole album for me. That's it, I can die happily. That's Bill and I on the "mm chickas" and claps. That ending with the delay on the last snare hit, uh yeah, I stole that from Martin Hannett, specifically a Joy Division song. I'll give a mexican peso to the first person who can figure out which one. A rollicking way to start the album.

Billy:

When Andrew first read the slam piece that we built this song around, Adam and I were totally blown away. I'm going to let Andrew describe the background of the lyrics for you and say a bit about innards the tune.

I originally played the djembe on this song the night we wrote and rehearsed it, the part being closely related to the fast beat in the first and second movements.

We all heard what we thought were distinct parts in the piece, and figured we could use those as musical "movements" (a concept that ended up being applied to almost all of the subsequent songs we wrote together). At first we just played this break beat kinda drum beat and bass line along with Andrew's whole piece. Once we agreed on what the movements were, we just kinda went at breaking the song up, looking gor variations on the main part that suited the various parts.

I'll say right now that we didn't have a lot of time to do any of these songs. We basically had an evening to write and rehearse each one, and we allocated just one evening or afternoon for getting together and recording them. We ended up getting in way more recording later on, despite that. But in the time between when we first wrote Target Market, and the time we got to recording it, I had been working on the other tunes with everybody and working on drum programming for Target Market and a couple of the others, so I had never taken the time to write guitar parts.

So all the guitar parts on this song are written immediately prior to, or during their respective takes, as psuedo-improvisational parts.

For the first movement I was determined to fill your ears with grooving but vastly disparate and disorienting sounds to match the subject matter, so I recorded these two main parts - one is a noodling Hendrix-meets-Fugazi part, and the other is a funk guitar. That funk guitar part, I wanted it to be spastic and almost random sounding like David Byrne's choppy guitar parts in "Born Under Punches." I had also been listening to Fela Kuti a bit. I was funking that guitar as hard as I could, and the strings were tearing into the skin of my index finger and ripping up my cuticles. I recorded these two parts throughout the first movement so that later Adam could mix them back and forth to get the panning and mixing effects we were seeking. Didn't know if it would work, but that seemed like the best thing to try, and it came out great.

"Inflating egos and ability like flat tires / when the pill wears out, out floats the know"

You'll hear me crank a really disonant chord, and the chord will repeat and descend in pitch in a doppler effect. Remember the song "Stellar" by Incubus? I don't like Incubus, but the guitarist pulls off this disonant chord with a delay that is just beautiful and I had been waiting for a place to use something like it, but here I actually cranked out the chord and then gradually turned down the repetition speed on my delay effect, which gives you the doppler effect by bending the pitch down.

"Brilliance! Wits! Smarts!"

Andrew wanted bling, and nothing says bling like E-bow and delay pedal, although it took me a few minutes to nail down the chords, and then quite a few takes to play them well; running the e-bow vertically across the pickup just so and at just the right speed isn't the easiest thing to do.

"Watch as your focus grows and becomes erect like a big sex organ you never knew you had!"

I love that line. The guitars that come swirling in there are something like three or four e-bow guitars on which I was persuing a Siamese Dream kinda sound to be taking us into trip-out land.

For the second movement I used my acoustic guitar to add another level of disorientation (when your ears pop and all the sounds you hear are now muffled or clearer). The slower section of the second movement was originally to have the feel of a slave-galley dirge. But I started fiddling with my acoustic, and came up with a Spanish-sounding thing that made me want to play a speedy flamenco (if I could play flamenco) on the faster part. From there I just took off, forcing myself to write some licks that I could improvise off of, and that run at the beginning of the faster tempo. That run took a number of takes, another finger bender; I should practice my scales more. But that run is the only part I knew would be set in stone, the rest of the movement is me working off some chordal ideas and some riff ideas and just trying to keep it interesting without being as in-your-face as I was in the first movement.

The third movement was originally just drum machine (or djembe), a bass line, and Andrew's vocals. The goal was to create a very thuggin, Bad Boy Records, Ready to Die kinda hip-hop part. We knew the night we recorded the bass and vocals that it wouldn't be enough and that the part needed more instrumentation. When Adam and I got together to record more parts, we didn't exactly know what we were going to do, but we had a few ideas. Adam wanted Hot Hand Claps, and I wanted some old-skool hiphop funk guitar, with palm mutes. And while we were recording the hand claps it hit me: I knew what we had to do. Jesus himself blessed me with the obvious and undeniable destiny: beat boxing. Honest truth. So much fun to record. You should try it.

Listen to a demo version of "Target Market"

Zephyr Device

"Departure"

Lyrics

Authors' Commentary

Target Market

Authors' Commentary

Andrew:

Adam:

Billy: