'Kiki Kaikai'

A Trip To Kunlun

There was an arcade game way back when by the name of Kiki Kaikai.
Kiki Kaikai is a Japanese expression meaning "Stranger-than-strange world". It's set in a kind of medieval Japan and involves a bunch of adventures trying to save the Daimyo (lord).

For about 3 weeks, our nascent band really go into it and we were throwing our coins into it like there was no tomorrow. The imagery was kind of absurd and the handicap of getting monkey on the back of your actor was indeed stranger than strange. It even seemed counter to vjedeo Christian beliefs that the protagonist had to try and save 'the Lord'.

Around that time I was reading a book about Kunlun, which is the basis of Shangri-La and also the place where Iron Fist goes as a child to learn his amazing Kung Fu. A legendary place that supposedly does not exist where everything is wonderful and hey, that's worth fighting for even with monkey on your back. Somehow the mysticism inherent in the Kunlun story made its way into the bridge of this song.

Our drummer then was Al, who was really in to the idea of "East Meets West", and thusly he was very motivated to go travelling in Asia. I think it might've been him that wanted a syncretic pan-Asian lyric as part of a conceptual unity for this song. I found it a stretch but when you're young, you're sort of scratching around for ideas to stitch together so you do it. Arcade game Medieval Japan with ghosts, monsters and monkeys, and Holy Lands in Chinese mysticism, all in the one song with no particular relationship to one another.

There's really not much more to it than that. Sometimes a song is a song is a song, just like Gertrude Stein's rose.



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'Life In The Dome'

"More Like Life In A Bubble"

We had these premonitions of a terrible future where climate change would ruin everything and humanity would end up living in domes underground. It's largely crap and while the vision has been made into films and TV shows there's still no sign we're at such apocalyptic ends. That's not to say we won't end up there.

In any case, cheesy Sci-Fi fodder was our bread and butter so we had this little number we whipped out when we wanted to be 'down and heavy' during our sets. We had a drummer who used to milk the half-time and double-time changes like he was playing for Zeppelin, and that made for tremendous fun.

It's hard to say why we had such apocalyptic visions but I do remember seeing the distant horizon to the west at dusk when crossing the Gladesville Bridge one night on our way home from rehearsals. There had been bushfires and the smoke had created a layer of green light in-between the twilight inkblot black-blue and the ding twilight orange over the horizon. It was an eerie sight which stuck in my mind.

Now that Australia's up in flames it seems incredibly quaint now that such an ephemeral inkling of an image made its way into this song. It really was there for a brief moment and by the time we had crossed the bridge it was gone.




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'El Dorado'

The Glory Road To Nowhere

When I quit (*ahem*) Med School, my chief band mate was distressed. I was traumatised over other things so I couldn't tell at the time but he was distressed that I'd gone and flushed down a whole career that other people would dream about. He was shocked in a way that ran completely tangential to my own feelings about the situation, as to make conversations about it with him very stilted and strange.

To be frank, nobody got it. It's a bit like that song 'Too Many People' by Paul McCartney on Ram where he sings

That was your first mistake 

You took your lucky break and broke it in two 

Now what can be done for you? 

You broke it in two 

You're not supposed do that shit but I was actually at the end of my tether with the faculty and my conversations with the faculty about my state of mind and engagement with them had reached a nadir.  When you throw in a bad breakup and then betrayal by friends in the faculty that destroys your faith in people, you kind of have to shut things down and have a deep think.

While I was having my deep think we kept jamming and my chief band mate wrote out the words to what became this song. I think it was an expression of him trying to wrap his head around my predicament. It was like a protest song, but the protest was deeply personal. There was no Vietnam War going on, and the renewed military adventurism of the USA was still some time ahead. The world was still largely at peace, even if the Cold War was stifling and the USSR still had some credibility as the counterpart to the charade. History, was in a lull.

You can't really undo your fuck ups. I don't regret quitting Med School at all, but the fuck ups that happen, you kind of have to own. You convince yourself it's all for the better, that you're headed to a city of gold. It's probably crap, but to fight through the terrible moments, you have to muster up courage somehow.
And so you go looking for your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It's not exactly the way things worked out.



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'Chatswood Revisited'

Not Exactly Brisdehead

Back in the day we had this little ditty that we had written about being on the dole and going up to the local DSS office - the precursor to the modern day Centrelink - to hand in the form in exchange for unemployment benefit payments. It's long ago and from the era when Australia had such things as recessions and economic downturns and 17% youth unemployment. It was a certain way of life. It certainly was grungy and presaged Nirvana and all that grungiest alienation. Nobody thinks at the time it lasts for ever but I know some cases where it's gone on for a long time. Should one judge? Depends on how wedded you are to capitalism and neo-liberalism, I imagine. If you can make it last, maybe that's an eminently epicurean way of life? Not everybody's built for this capitalist, dog-gets-mortgage sort of world.

Anyway, Chatswood was the centre of this kind of stupid existence being a NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) and just living an indolent lifestyle. It wasn't exactly me, but there were people in our orbit living that dope-smoke-filled life of the indolent ne'er-do-well, living in mum's basement, turning it into an orc's den and just skating along on this thin ice of government and social largesse. The easy consumerism of Chatswood was sort of enticing as well as laughable. Hence the original song, which, this is not that song. 

Fast forward a few decades and I found myself working in Chatswood and of course everything has materially changed. It's simply not the town in which I grew up any longer. It's very alien and exotic. I can see some of the structures but they are buried in the mass of newfangled developments that have doubtless helped commerce but not so much the culture.

Okay, I complain because I'm a being obtuse. But this song, I assure you, is not.




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'Scanner Darkly'

Spying On Myself and Me

In the wake of 'Blade Runner', we were really into the writings of Philip K. Dick. Before the internet, information took a long time to circulate the world, and even then was all very uneven. You kind of had to hunt down books, read them, lend them and then discuss them. It's a far cry from the instantaneous superfluous opinion generation in the era of YouTube and Facebook.

We were particularly drawn to this book 'A Scanner Darkly' which depicted a near future where the drug culture kind of permeated everything and nobody seemed to be quite straight. The 1970s counter-culture vibe of the book stood in stark contrast to the protestations of a Reagan USA. And so we set out writing this song which largely describes the psychotic elements the book.

Had we been inundated with everybody's bloody opinions about Philip K. Dick like we are today with any particular topic on the internet, we may not have embarked on such a venture. We even added in gags of our own. I guess you had to be there to understand the dynamic.

In the 2000s, Robert Linklater made his rather interesting film based on the book and of course we were surprised that he chose to concentrate on the other details that we didn't put in the song. Maybe Barris was miscast. Maybe Charles Freck was miscast. Winona Ryder as Donna most certainly seemed miscast. It's a fun movie but we had already experienced the transmogrification of trying to make sense the book and then explaining it in another medium.

Anyway, this song comes from a time way before the internet made everything so overly explained.




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'I Chased Dreams'

Right Over the Cliff

Happy New Year peeps. Hey Happy New Decade even.
Okay, we're all sad in Australia what with the terrible apocalyptic bushfires which were neither unforeseeable nor unpredicted. The government was warned. Scomo the Denialist PM was fully warned by everybody with a brain this was going to be a killer summer for bushfires. And what happens? Exactly what was predicted. What can you do with that kind of obstinacy that has so much caused death and destruction? And guess what? We voted them back in. We are such suckers for punishment.

The screams of Koalas are burnt into my ear and I'm very unhappy about our politicians, even more so than normal.

Might not be the best time to reflect on one's misspent youth, but this whole album 'Monstrous Gaussian Regression' is exactly that kind of venture. These are the songs that have been rattling around inside my head for decades and have kept me tied up on some level. Without doing these I can't get past my own history, so to speak.

They're songs from the band Satellite City which was the band I was knocking around in back in the late 1980s. Somehow through a process of attrition, I ended up being the custodian of the intellectual property, mostly though dint of remembering them, and holding on to old cassette tapes. Yes, it's that kind of archival thing.

The drawback being the repository of this ancient music is that you have to do something with it, and really, I couldn't not do them, given that I now had the means of production. Until you get this out of your system, it just goes around and around in your head. You can't imagine what that's like but when you have like a whole band's catalog in your head, it can drive you bananas not to get it out.

I mean, this is it, the emotional record of how I chased dreams right over the edge.
Don't try this at home, as they say.



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