Ragman Records Archives

In the latter Ragman days, Jeff Moravec and Matt McGuire put together a very interesting group that most people referred to as simply “The Circus.” They wrote circus-music-style instrumentals influenced by some kind of Turkish folk music, built around Jeff’s keyboards and Matt’s accordion, performed with a shifting cast of other instrumentalists and performers, many pulling double-duty between an instrument and playing a role in dramatic vignettes, with costumes and things. Among the regular contributors was Julie Lamendola (now of Ching Chong Song) on singing saw. The whole thing was based on a concept of the history of a fictional traveling circus. The shows were pretty impressive affairs. This is a recording of the only live performance I ever did with them, playing trumpet and melodica, at the Vibe Cafe. I recall also being involved in some recording sessions being laid down on ADAT but so far I’ve heard of nothing coming of them, though it was said that they were planning to release a combination album/storybook and there were even talks of buying an old school bus and doing a tour. I also have what appear to be some early 4-track demos I could post. If there are song titles, I don’t know them; I remember each piece being referred to simply by a number.

The_Spectacle_of_Klumpffnhauser_and_Louisons_Amusements_and_Oddities-The_Death_Of_Louison.zip (111.5 Mb)

During much of the time Leah and I lived on Kingsley, I was kind of floundering around for a coherent band or music project. This would have been between The Cactus Rats and Radio Dramamine I suppose. Anyway one thing I tried was putting something together with Shawn and Jason Nelson. I had Tyler Vincent’s drums and he didn’t seem interested in playing them so I thought it might be fun to have a go at being a drummer again. The three of us got together a few times at the Dental Studios basement (the Nelsons’ practice space for many years, in the basement of where they work) and started jamming and seeing if we could turn these drowsy post-rock jams into loose compositions with a lot of room for on-the-spot reinterpretation. We came up with the name Sindu, had a few songs, I made these rough recordings on a portable recorder, but we never quite made it to the point of playing shows. Don’t really know why. It was fun, though.

Sindu.zip (85.4 Mb)

Tyler Crew and Bret “Poopy Pants Jenkins” Philp were looking to form a new band and needed a bassist. Not sure how I found out about that, but I’d known these guys for years. I came down to Tyler’s mom’s place, they showed me a couple of songs, and I was in. From there I sort of ended up taking over the band, as I also became the lead singer and wrote a lot of stuff. I started using a very guitar-like style of bass playing. We played shows, mostly at the usual Reverb, but also at this place in Oelwein called The Dancing Lion a couple times, through the good graces of the folks in Grave Corps and Dylan Shiv and the Shanks. We had a really cool sci-fi goth-punk thing going that I used to describe, elevator-pitch-style, as “Philip K. Dick talks Sebadoh into raiding Joy Division’s medicine cabinet,” and I think we were well received, but Tyler’s tendency to get excessively drunk and play sloppily, then cheeze out on helping us load-out, started to grate on Poopy and me, so after probably not even a whole year Radio Dramamine kind of petered out. Poopy and I started working on doing my songs as a two-piece, and ended up recording stuff together that became most of The Small Slate-Colored Thing, then I ended up having to move to Des Moines. Here’s our self-produced/self-released EP and a couple shows.

Radio_Dramamine-The_Mind_Is_A_Terrible_Waste.zip (18.4 Mb)

Radio_Dramamine-Live_1-19-08.zip (52.3 Mb)

Radio_Dramamine-Live_5-10-08.zip (65.8 Mb)

So here’s where it all starts for me, making music and doing the tape label thing. My old high school buddy Seth Thomson and I used to goof around recording funny made-up radio shows and songs and things, some we’d record together and others we’d record separately and trade copies of with each other. During high school we recorded quite a bit of music, a mix of songs we’d write and on-the-spot improvised jams, recorded on boombox or portable cassette recorders, all incorporating the warped sense of humor we were always developing between us. After Seth graduated a year ahead of me and went off to college at Iowa State, I took up the bass guitar, and my family moved to a different house where I had most of the finished basement as my room; Seth came over with his acoustic 12-string while he was back in town for Thanksgiving break, and I had borrowed a really sweet cassette deck and a couple microphones from the school and set it up in a little “extra room” behind the furnace, and we went in there and recorded a bunch more shit. It was all just something we did for our own enjoyment, and originally I don’t think we ever considered making it available to anyone else.

I graduated and went off to my first unsuccessful attempt at college, also at Iowa State, after Seth dropped out and stuck around Ames. We hung out quite a bit and he had formed a duo with a flute player named Bola King called The Blues Miracle and were playing at various hippie-ish bars and the like. I played bass with them for a short while, co-wrote a really depressing pseudo-political song with them, but it didn’t really work out. But I also got wind of the whole lo-fi tape label movement that was going on, both the indie-folk and loony noisecore parts of it, and I thought hey, these guys are putting out this stuff, maybe some folks will like the stuff Seth and I had recorded. So I named our band Gok (an acronym for “Gee, Okay”), compiled three 45-minute albums from our various jam session tapes, made up inserts for them, and started up TapeSNotRecords.

The Gok story, and the story of my year in Ames, are far from over there, but I think it’s best if I continue it later. The short version of it is that I eventually dropped out of ISU and went back home, did a zine for a while, then ended up in No Consensus and Ragman. Seth ended up moving to Nevada (the town in Iowa, not the state) and working various IT gigs in Des Moines. We kept in touch for a number of years, and I probably annoyed the hell out him multiple times. Eventually I lost track of him. A couple times I’ve found his phone number and tried calling him. Both times I left a message on some machine, and never heard back. Since moving to Des Moines I’ve wondered about him a few times, but I get the feeling he doesn’t want to be found.

Gok-Explosion.zip (59.7 Mb)

Gok-Stop_That.zip (67.2 Mb)

Gok-Fish_On_Fire.zip (62.6 Mb)

Here’s the first E.D.I.T.H. show, which I mentioned on an earlier post of E.D.I.T.H. and Exit Drills stuff. You’ll note there is material here that was mercifully killed off later.

E.D.I.T.H.-05-26-99.zip (65.8 Mb)