Ragman Records Archives

The_Sno-Mans-This_Is_So_Cool (49.2 Mb)

The Sno-Mans’ main album. Includes such classics as “Eat Your Parents.”

Passage_Of_Deformed_Man_Supermarket-you_are_never_full_yet_you_look_for_fillers_and_values_according_to_the_envelope_of_your_own_harvest.zip (21.5 Mb)

Another very cool PODMS release put together by Phil and Tom, released on 3″ CD-R in a hand-made heavy paper sleeve with a thick string tied around it. Each band member was assigned to contribute a 15-minute track of sound, and then Tom created something quite different by editing them together.

Passage_of_Deformed_Man_Supermarket-Passage_of_Deformed_Man_Supermarket.zip (54.9 Mb)

An excellent PODMS release, consisting of a single 38-minute live performance (June 9, 2005 at The Reverb) as a single CD-R track, wrapped in super cool artwork. These sold respectably, considering. PODMS was kind of popular for a little while, it seemed.

June_22_2002.zip (66.2 Mb)

Depending on your point of view, this is either the final No Consensus show, or something else completely. Among the odd gentleman’s agreements hatched among the members of No Consensus, one of the last was that Joe Riehle was to henceforth own and control the name and identity of the band. He booked a gig at The Reverb without consulting the band’s normal members, and wouldn’t you know it, I refused to do the show because it was on my wife’s birthday. So instead, Joe assembled a cast that included some of the traditional No Consensus members in conjunction with James “Rock’s Chosen Warrior” Mackey, Jeff Moravec, and a few others, and put on a show that combined individual and group songs, dramatic skits, poems, and percussion improvisations, taking place not only on the stage but throughout the bar. The Reverb’s proprietors were not too pleased, believing they had been hoodwinked somehow, but it was just the sort of thing No Consensus fans would like, and did an even better job of confusing those unacquainted with the band than No Consensus usually managed to.

Fornicide-Shitstupidnoisecoredethpunx.zip (42.4 Mb)

Tyler Crew, Poopy Pants Jenkins, and I were listening to Captain 3 Leg‘s “Unreleased Crap” cassette when we got the idea for Fornicide. Over the next couple days we got together in Tyler’s room in his Mom’s basement, de-tuned a couple guitars completely at random, and started rattling off noisecore songs that, while inspired by Captain 3 Leg, probably more closely resemble Rectal Pus.

Flight_Attendants-Yeah.zip (108.7 Mb)

The second Flight Attendants tape of the Ragman period, a lot of this was actually recorded in Joe’s room. — he had a 4-track and I still didn’t. I had started trawling thrift stores for discarded cassette tapes that might have interesting sample-able material and considerable use is made on this album of between-song banter from a live recording of some Christian band playing for middle-schoolers. There are three extra bonus tracks included here, among them “Cell Damage,” a piece recorded partially on a karaoke machine in Tim Bennett’s apartment at 4 AM or so, an excerpt of which was featured on the Zyon Records Shroud cassette compilation.

Flight_Attendants-Nightmares.zip (42 Mb)

After dropping out of ISU, the next Flight Attendants release I put together was made in my basement bedroom at my parents’ house on a 4-track borrowed from Mark Wilson. The first two tracks use sequenced drums and synths I had left over from ISU that were done on a Macintosh computer, but after that you can really start to hear the “lo-tech industrial” genre I sort of pioneered with Flight Attendants, although Fallen Man was pretty lo-tech too I guess, having been done mainly with analog equipment. But no longer having the ISU Electronic Music Studio at my disposal, I made do with guitar effect pedals, Casio keyboards, and an Apple IIGS computer. I also start doing what for me at the time were some pretty far-out noise/collage experiments like “Obligatory Helllow,” the kind of thing Flight Attendants would feature more and more of in the coming years.

Flight_Attendants-Fallen_Man.zip (59 Mb)

I think it’s relevant to include on this site music that I was involved in during the years before I met Joe and everything else that brought No Consensus and Ragman into being, as well as some of what happened after. Flight Attendants was my one-man “industrial” project started in early 1994. I was a student at Iowa State University, majoring (ostensibly) in Music Composition, and while I ended up finding most of my classes dull enough that I mostly stopped showing up, one really caught my interest, an intermittent offering called “Intro to Music Technology.” During that spring semester I learned to use analog synthesizers, mixing boards, and multitrack recording, and the course had individual, completely unsupervised lab sections in the school’s Electronic Music Studio, where all these things could be found, including a TEAC 80-8 8-track tape machine and a Polyfusion modular synth. I decided the situation was right to record my best music yet. I went so far as to crash at a friend’s apartment over Spring Break instead of going home (the dorms locked students out during breaks), so that I could spend the whole week in the studio with no one else around. I took some songs I’d written around lyrics Seth Thomson had written back in high school, along with a couple of my own, and borrowed a guitar fro him besides, and the result was Fallen Man. The band came to be called Flight Attendants because one of my major sources for clippings to use for cover art was a Socialist Workers Party newspaper that had lots of stories about striking flight attendants, so it was a phrase I could find lots of clippings of. I kept up the basic concept of Flight Attendants self-releasing cassette tapes for many years afterwards, though with more homestyle equipment (4-tracks and Casios instead of 8-tracks and synths).

Bwang-One-Track_Punkifier.zip (22 Mb)

Could be an appendix to the Sixogy, could be just a bad Angry Cops side project. What it’s billed as is a brief goofing on hardcore punk, Bwang! style.

The_Cactus_Rats-The_Band_Isnt_Helping_expanded.zip (100 Mb)

The Cactus Rats were the band I started with Tyler Vincent after we met at the Wal-Mart he worked at, I invited him to my birthday party, he actually showed up, and mentioned to me that he played drums. For a couple years in the mid-’00s we did a kind of indie garage rock thing wherein we played about 50% covers, which was intended, at least on my part, as kind of experiment in being at least partially a cover band, yet totally not your traditional cover band — mostly I wanted to be able to play house parties and provide a whole night’s worth of music that would include a few not-too-obvious crowd-pleasers. Former Green Party Jedis/Police Cops member Blake Badker ended up joining up after I ran into him at Bob’s Guitars, then later on one of our post-practice drink sessions we met saxophonist Jason Lippard, who we asked to join as well. Then-future Thee Almighty Handclaps guy Joe Derderian somehow found his way to us as bassist but soon found the drive up from Iowa City to be a problem; we went bass-less for a time, then Blake brought in his old bandmate Jay Johnson. It was a demanding project, and we learned a metric shit-ton of songs besides the ones we were writing and worked on them tirelessly. We had marathon practices weekly at Blake’s parents’ house in the middle of nowhere outside New Hartford, which usually involved a fair amount of alcohol, which interfered with Blake’s schizophrenia meds, but strangely enough, most of the weird disasters and psychological upheavals that seemed to be always befalling the band at practices and shows had little or nothing to do with that. Eventually the band broke up because I got sick of Blake’s shit, as he concentrated more on dancing around like an idiot at our shows than on playing his guitar, and would thus play like total shit. The Cactus Rats were doomed from the start, you might say, and the title and art of our second CD-R release The Band Isn’t Helping reflected the way we felt we were spiraling out of control, scared as hell yet kind of reveling in it. This file also includes all of the first CD-R EP Kicked Out Of The Scene plus a few live and practice takes of some of the covers we did.