The whole record has a very nineties alternative rock feel, which is one of my favorite feels ever. It's some really wonderful rocking.

This is the latest self-effacing theories EP, which I recorded in some of my spare time at the 2009 Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain. This is an intense two-week study program/camp on a remote mountain lake in southwestern Oklahoma, for nearly 300 of Oklahoma's most talented high school artists. I worked there as a counselor and performed other duties as well. It was a great time.

I went in with two instruments that would fit in my backpack: a ukulele and a Roland Groovebox MC-307 synthesizer (we call em "grooveboxes" in the biz). I took a list of 14 songs I wanted to record. I finished 6.

I recorded these songs in a wide variety of locations around the Institute. Most of the synthesizer work was done on my bed in the bunk room I shared with nine students, while the students were in their classes. Part of the ukulele parts were recorded in my room in the camp's lodge (a hotel room kind of setting) in which all of the counselors stayed the first week before the students arrived. I couldn't do much that required a microphone in the bunkhouse, which I lived in the second two weeks, because there was a fan or noise of some kind in every room that was impossible to turn off.

So I had to go around to several different places to record the rest of the ukulele and percussion. The ukulele on "the labour" was recorded on top of one of the mountains with a little pickup I brought along. The pickup turned out to be more sensitive than I hoped, which created an overdriven effect I liked for this song. Run-ins with rattlesnakes and centipedes one day compelled me to not try this again, though. It's not easy to make a record in the wild.

Among other places, I ended up recording the rest of this in a car, a storage closet, and thirty feet in the air on a catwalk in the Institute's performing arts center.

That makes it sound like I had a lot of spare time, but I really only had about an hour each day to work on this.

They're certainly not perfect performances, but my rule was that I wouldn't do any additional tracking after the Institute, so I didn't redo anything. Most of the songs turned out to be quite jammy, but I have no problem with jammy.

It's an old group of songs for the most part. The two "chickens" tracks are based on a song I wrote and recorded back in 2002. I thought it would be fun to make an instrumental version of it, and I ended up with two. The future shock reprise version is the only song on the record done entirely on the groovebox.

"Samson" is maybe a year younger than chickens; and it was never recorded. It had lyrics back in those days around the turn of the century, but I decided this ought to be instrumental for this record as well. My favorite part of the whole record is the wall of ukuleles jam in the second half of this song. You might want to just listen to that part and put the rest of it away.

"The labour" is probably three or four years old, and the last two tracks were little things I came up with while I was there. "The labour" turned out to be the strangest one in my opinion, on account of the long synthesizer freakouts.

"A classifying animal" sounds like something you might play at a luau or if you were Harry Belafonte. "Catwalk" is the most jammy song on this record, but I guess that's what made it so much fun to record. I plan to try the digital delay on a xylophone again in the future.

This record is also notable because it's the first one I've had professionally burned and printed. Until now, all my cd's and their packaging have been made with inkjet printers, block prints and home cd burners, but those days are over, I'm afraid. Speaking of that, make sure you get hand-printed copies of previous self-effacing theories, animal or vegetable and vu ray robers releases while you still can! They're sure to become collectors' items.

I hope you and your friends like it. It's only $8. If you don't have $8, you can download it for a price of your choosing or even for free.

And don't you forget about nurses vs. nurses!   Keep reading..

That's right. The second release from animal or vegetable is finally ready. It's called nurses vs. nurses. It has seven tracks. I wrote three of them. Jason Lambeth wrote four.

For this cd, Jason and I picked songs from each other that had not been released at that point. Jason chose 'climbing a tree,' 'birds' and 'hotrods;' all songs that I wrote in 2002-2003 and were performed several times by vu ray robers (shaun lynch, torrey prince, ben strednak,
kasey willis-lynch and me) during that time.

I chose 'a song sings' (one of the best songs ever written), 'midwestern child' (another great one), 'persecution blues' (with one heck of a lead guitar part from jason) and 'go see dok.' On 'go see dok,' we took the original demo recording jason made in 2004 and squeezed
and pulled it from a number of different directions. Then I recorded bass and guitar parts. This is one of my favorite songs Jason's made, and it's been in heavy rotation on my itunes since I first heard it. It was great fun to be able to jump into the recording I've enjoyed so much
over the past few years.

On all of the other songs, Jason (who lives in Madison, Wisconsin) and I (in Oklahoma City) exchanged tracks via email and an ftp account. I then took all of the tracks and stared at the computer and fiddled with knobs for weeks and weeks, with the help of Jason's discerning ears.

We both ended up playing guitar, bass, keyboards, singing and percussing. Two other Madisonians, Connie Jordan and Tom Teslik, helped on 'a song sings' with vocal harmonies, handclaps, and a wonderful xylophone performance from Tom.

Jason did the cover art. Connie and I assisted in the graphic production. The package looks great. Everything is hand-made. Jason even came up with a cassette version that looks and sounds quite fetching. I think there are about twenty cds and five cassettes remaining, so act fast.
This is probably the last of the DIY packaging for Jason and me (we're all grown up), so enjoy it while it lasts.

It couldn't have been done without the tolerance of friends, family and cats. A million thanks.

It's nurses vs. nurses. It's finished. It's $6.
Or you can download it for free if you're into that sort of thing.

10. david byrne- lead us not into temptation
9. blonde redhead- melodies of certain damaged lemons
8. monade- socialisme ou barbarie
7. beck- midnight vultures (released november 1999, close enough)
6. devendra banhart- cripple crow
5. radiohead- kid a/ amnesiac
4. yo la tengo- and then nothing turned itself inside out
3. tim gane and sean o'hagan- la vie d'artiste
2. sonic youth- sonic nurse
1. stereolab- sound-dust

We may have screwed everything else up, but what a great decade in tunes!