​This was based on a bassline that Martin came up with, and then the rest of us did whatever we felt like on top of it. To me that meant saying the Danish words for "yes", "no" and "oh well" over and over again as the vocals; and Felix, the young guitarist and keyboard player did these weird floaty things around the melody on whatever instrument he played. When I played guitar too, I usually just laid down the riff, so he could be playful with his guitar, but most of the time I just sang. Kenni, who I played with in many bands now, functioned as a drummer, but mostly as a bully to the rest of us, playing wrong beats on purpose. So we often had a Yamaha Portasound keyboard with built-in drums playing too, set to "Rock", and most of the time in the same tempo too.
It's a strange thing that anybody actually liked us, but most people did find us to be funny, even the ones who didn't appreciate the music for what it was agreed that it was pretty funny. There were even live concerts.

My favorite concert we did, did not get filmed to my knowledge, but we had half the audience on stage saying "yes", "no", and "oh well". A Local Death metal band got on stage and sang growling vocals they made up on the spot, and Kenni and myself gave our instruments to random punks, then left during the gig to get some beers, then came back. Probably the most chaotic gig I ever did too, but everyone was happy at the festival, no angry people, just drunk stupid Danes late at night rocking out to the lame last band on the bill.

I traveled with my old friend MC Ildebrand to the island community of Langeland lately, since he told me he needed inspiration for recording again. Langeland has many visual artists going there. Since there is water on all sides, and the light falls a specific way, that they find inspiring. I figured this would inspire him too. On the way down there we listened to the Mortiis Album ”Født til at herske” on the car stereo over and over again to get him in the mood of creating epic music. The old house he recorded in was inherited by my father from my grandfather. Neither my father, nor grandfather went there much, just a few times every year to repair damages and cut the grass, and the locals say it is haunted.

MC Ildebrand set up his 8-track Tascam recorder under the stairs of the house, and I left him there until he told me he was finished. This is what came from that. The 90 minute tape ”Midekongens Ø-rige” which means the maggot king's island kingdom wasn't prepared in any way. No ideas were written down beforehand, and all music was made up as it was recorded. The goal was for him to create some ”Epic music” inspired by dungeon synth but it was allowed to do whatever he felt like doing. I lent him my PO-12 drum machine but he mainly used a Yamaha Piaggero digital piano for the creation of this tape. Recorded as it is supposed to be listened to: in complete darkness, just a few candles lit and with a bottle of wine and a locked door to keep the outside world away.

Hey EC riders. Or something!

I recently spent a lot of time messing around with the Teenage Engineering
PO-12 drum machine and some old square wave synths I got at yard sale. After making a bunch of instrumental tracks, that I originally didn’t plan to ever release, I got an idea while listening to the heavy metal CD Probot. Probot is made up of 12 tracks recorded instrumentally at first, then 12 different singers sang on a track each. I was going to get seven friends to sing on a track each, then put it on Bandcamp.

Contributing singers included these EC Community members:
Aimee Naworal, Jeremiah Paddock and Little Fyodor of Walls Of Genius.

...
and by the way 
Here’s a 

MASSIVE DISCLAIMER!!!!!!
PLEASE STEAL MY IDEA!!!

​I mean, it’s not really my idea in the first place, but I hereby challenge every EC member who would like to do a similar EP to go right ahead!
Hell, Carlos Santana did it too once!

All lyrics on the EP are written by the person who sings them (that is, if they sing lyrics) , all instruments played by me except the flutophone, which was played by Little Fyodor.

The cover art is a piece of mail art by Jeremiah Paddock, that I got in the mail a while ago, but put through an invert effect and in grayscale.

Eric Lappe also known as Goemon047 on the Internet, is a comedian, musician, journalist and videographer. Once on a drunken night I decided to send him a random friend request on Skype, and he accepted, which was beyond me, but he did. Random friend requests are rarely accepted, because there's so many wackos out there. But that's the kind of guy Eric is. He doesn't assume you're insane right away. Since then I had many conversations online with him about electronic and experimental music, video games, Japanese art and language, Basically all kinds of things. I discovered his music through his YouTube channel, and really liked his sound, even if he disclaimed in the video description that he didn't like it himself that much, considering he got better at it since.

Eric's ”Band” is called De-structure and it started out really lo-fi, but it had a nice percussive and somehow asian feel to it (?) not sure what that even means, but he has a lot of good tunes. He sent me a CD of his album alt-esc-world in the mail which has been on heavy rotation in Chateau de Stilletid ever since.

Eric and I exchanged a few letters over the years, and most recently I got him into the music of Bacon Grease (Andrea Knight) and sent him the Stilletid split tape, but we sent each other NES games before, like that time I sent him the Europe and Japan exclusive game Road Fighter.

Eric is a funny guy, and I encouraged him to make straight up comedy videos before, which were not rooted in video gaming or music, and hopefully someday he will make a comedy classic to rival the Marx Brothers! I am sure he will, but his ”Audience” is very video game-centered. I will share the classic ”What the fuck is clam juice!?” with you thought to show you his raw talent!

All in all Eric is a great guy. He's always looking to enjoy new sides to life, which I admire him hugely for. He doesn't seem to ever sit still, unless he is playing a video game or making music on his laptop. Then he doesn't seem to sit very still at those times either.

Viva La Let's get!

Neal Retke submitted a few albums to me for review, and I chose this one.

The opening tracks, "Signed, Epstein's Mother Part 1 and 2" are somehow percussive without the use of actual percussion or any drumming. There are no electronic drums either, as far as I can tell, but it has a percussive quality to it. Like when playing an electronic piano percussively. There is more than one instrument on this but they all work as a percussive electric piano in my ears. Quite an interesting feel to these two tracks. Even the vocals have a drum-like quality to them without becoming rap-vocals, which often happens in this scenario.

These are followed "Alas! The Great Horned Owl Shirked And Doddering Under Ripening Clouds", a spoken word track, which reminds me of something from Walls of Genius tapes of the 80's but in a way, not at all. A modernized version of these yelling-pieces by WOG perhaps? I don't know how else to describe it. I love it though!
"Big Black Goddamn Car" has samples of what sounds like monkeys accompanied by bass guitar arpeggios with a short delay-type effect on them. Then what sounds like vinyl record noise is introduced to give it an analog feel, and short synthesized keystrokes build up into...silence! The track is over, go home please!

"Mother Of Drugs I: The Hissing": the hissing has a lot of ambient pad synths and drums and strings coming in once in a while and cutting out again seemingly at random, but sometimes it sounds like they're played backwards for just a split second before re-introducing the pad synth. 
Then "Mother Of Drugs II: The Line" starts with reading of a poem that could have been created with Burroughs' famous cutup technique. A single low key on an upright piano (either MIDI or actual) repeats through the song in the background while sounds are being played backwards in the periphery of the soundscape, until it eventually builds up into the repeating vocal mantra ”The Line” being spoken in a loop fading into...

"Mother Of Drugs III: The Doom Prophet What Is Known As Skippy"
This sounds almost like Gregorian chants and backwards turntable scratches with echoes on them delaying for a while, then a muted guitar through a delay pedal being plucked without any chords being played.

"Hallway Of Glass" starts out with breathing sounds that has been tuned to a keyboard through a sampler (at least that is what it sounds like to my ears). After a few seconds heavily reverberated reversed sounds enter to make a swirling effect almost like an old-fashioned Leslie for an organ. The breathing sounds are percussive in the same way that I heard on the first two tracks of this album. Not worrying as much about the tonality but more the percussiveness of it. I could zone out on this for hours, but unfortunately this track is only 8 minutes and 20 seconds long.

The title track starts out with scrambled voice samples ending in what sounds like "What's up?", then a low almost growling voice accompanies some high pitched notes singing lyrics, which I can't make out but they sound divine. Then the high pitched voice starts emulating a muted trumpet and saying "yes" once in a while, and then the whole symphony of voices (probably the voice of the same person) goes on to a grand finale in the next approximately 8 minutes to invoke all the spirits of the dead in the room and make sure you have nightmares for weeks. The reverberated echoes make this even more potent. I wouldn't recommend listening to this one if you're in a psychotic state; it might convince you to kill the hippy king.

The final track "Bigger Blacker Goddamnerer Car" has a lot of panning going on. It has a woman's voice saying "Big Black Goddamn Car" in different earphones; then a man's voice enters in the middle repeating these words out of sync with her creating what sounds like she is doing the delay effect. A guitar is to be heard in the distance but only a snippet of it , and it sounds like it is pitched onto a keyboard. All in all this sounds like something I'd love to do a cassette release of on Stilletid. I noticed it is 45 minutes long so I sense a split cassette is in order! Neal! Get back to me on that.

4 and a half stars out of 4 and a half stars!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In his post from January 22nd Ditlev requested that Ec participants send items for review.

I started a writing exercise lately, which is basically this: think of a person who inspires me in any way, then write whatever comes to mind. I prepared a few of these for future posts, but today it’s about Indre, who has a weird Lithuanian last name that I can’t spell correctly, so I am not going to try.

For Indre

My friend Indre from Canada, that I had an email-based band with once called Ace Ventura Overdrive, and also tried to produce a pilot for a TV show with (OctagonTV ended up too weird to really be seen by anyone though), is a very talented artist. She draws, paints, writes, and even has a singing voice that will make you cry. Even when she makes up little songs out of thin air like “Socks really Suck” or “Get out of the strip club”, these little simple ditties run around my brain for many years. Unfortunately for the world, Indre isn’t very known beyond the confines of Toronto, but I am proud to know her and call her my friend. Often times I have had weird Skype convos with her about Martians, seafood, love, language and art. The video below is based on a conversation we had about behind-the-scenes documentaries ending up ridicilous and spoiling the magic of the finished movie:

I feel a special kinship to Indre, because we’re both pretty much loners. It’s rare that someone gets my weird jokes, but most of the time Indre does. I bet all of the readers of this post feels a kinship like this to at least one person in their lives, and in this digital age I think the internet really can bring us together instead of tear us apart, if we connect with the right people.

The photo for this post is based on another strange conversation, this time about body fluids. How human drool might actually be the same as extra-terrestrial semen, and maybe they don’t reproduce like we do through the genitals, but instead through the mouths, and vomit their young into the world. While we were talking about this she drew me circa 2016 drooling into green alien men’s mouths...yeah. 

Figure from ground — figure from ground
Game of life label
​Review

Claude Alduos sent me some review material!!!!

Interestingly, all tracks on this release were recorded live. Whether that means with an audience, or live in the studio I am not aware, but it most definitely sounds live. Whatever that means. The opening riff to "April 1 no. 4" sounds like an effected guitar but could just as well be a synth. What instrument it is doesn't matter as much as what it sounds like. To me it sounds like a high-pitched upright bass, that insists on not playing the bass role in the song. Synths enter one by one to remind me it is probably a synthetic bass sound too, and continues to drone on until the end, adding layers and layers until it echoes out in what sounds almost like a human voice. i'd like to know what synths they used for this, it most definitely doesn't sound synthetic. "April 7 no. 1" and "April no. 4" are more ambient pieces with metallic springlike sounds and LFO's. It sounds much older than it is. I read on the Bandcamp page these are 2019 New Yorkers, but could just as easily be Berliners from 1978. It has a krautrock feel to me. Especially bringing Faust to mind. At first glance I think they achieved this by using old Moog synths and the like, but as they say most of it is in the fingers, and they might just as well be using analog ribbon synths from last year. The way it is balanced in the headphones is quite interesting. Just when I start to expect the next move, it changes and does something weird in the left earphone, which travels to the right. "January 20 no.2" starts off with what sounds like field recordings of industrial machines, but soon breaks up with sounds of raindrops. At least it sounds to me like raindrops onto a manhole. There's something very large about this piece. Large like a big city, not large like a symphony. The use of reverb and delay almost turning into feedback is very interesting, and just before it breaks into the noise territory it is interrupted by a bass frequency like a kick drum. The same goes for the last piece, "January 27 no.2" which sounds like a rainy day in the country, and I think this is a good piece to go out on. All in all this is a great ambient album you can listen to while having dinner, or while having illegal drugs. Which is a very rare quality in an album. I think only Vivaldi's Four Seasons has that same quality.

Hey Electronic cottageers!

​It’s been a while since i posted, mostly because i had nothing new to bring to the table for a while. So now i got an idea. Send me your tapes, cd-r’s or digital release download codes, and i’ll review them!
My address is

Stilletid
Centervejen 15
1.sal, lejl.7
3230 Græsted
Denmark

Or contact me on email
Jensenlasse.lj@gmail.com

In the meantime heres a split between my good ole boy alter ego Wank Hilliams and Bacon Grease out of Orlando , FL, USA!
https://stilletid.bandcamp.com/album/split

listen in streaming audio — 256 kbps mp3
​and download WAV file

This is an open letter to EC
Contact me! 
I lost all my local  friends lately, and i’m just a lonely guy who likes to talk to people once in a while to break up the monotony. Call me and introduce yourselves. Maybe i can interview you? If you have Skype my Skype name is allnameswherealreadytaken (with the typo) if you have whatsapp call me at +4561281589 (international calls are free on whatsapp)
And if you use Instagram add forlaget_stilletid and call me through there! I’d love to talk to all of you! If the timezone prohibits me from answering it is only because i’m asleep!