Introducing Jack in the Bucket

(or, Why Sacajawea has to work on the side)

Cats Cradle Robbers are very pleased to present our second collection of electroacoustic constructions, Jack in the Bucket.  

This album collects together material spanning our first seven years of making music together, from the very earliest tracks (Kelley’s Loss, Attempting Electronic Reprisal) to material that was significantly developed expressly for this release (Lita, Mille Boba).  We’re very proud of the music that has resulted from our eclectic bag of stylistic tricks, and we hope you will too.  Here is some insight into the material on this record, which is now available for digital download on Amazon, ITunes, Spotify, and many other channels.

All music is by Nick “Snake” Dallett and Ed Essey, except for Electrullabye (DJ Essey’s solo) and Ujjayi (Snake’s solo).  Also, because all of our music starts with improvisation by the participants, guest artists share in the glory or shame of their tracks, and therefore writing credit can also be imputed to Sumit Basu, Steve Markowitz, Joe Breskin, Tomo Hoku, as well as to Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham from whom we borrowed riffs to build Mille Boba.

Many thanks to our wives for putting up with this madness twice a month plus snow days.

DJ Essey mixed and mastered it all.

Jack in the Bucket (feat. Sumit Basu)

DJ Essey: Trombone, SSE (synth, sequencing, effects)

Snake: Trumpet, Dobro, Vox, breaking glass, keys

Sumit Basu: Trumpet, Vox, champagne bucket

On June 25^th, 2009, Michael Jackson passed from this earth.  On that day, we had already planned a Cats Cradle Robbers session at DJ Essey’s Seattle bachelor pad (aka Cats Cradle West).   Microsoft Senior Researcher Sumit Basu joined us to see what we were up to.  He and DJ Essey became acquainted at MIT, and Sumit was playing with an automated music authoring software project called SongSmith.

At the time, our production process was still in its infancy, and we were more focused on the creative process than the final product.  For example, rather than using headphones, we were playing a burgeoning track through speakers on a loop, and recording additions live in the room.   Each track has the rhythm tracks playing in the background, which adds a certain ambience to the track, but this is any audio engineer’s nightmare.  Luckily, everything fell together, and this track happened in the space of 2 hours, from initial drum loop to final configuration – practically “live” from our perspective.  These days, we use headphones and proper isolation techniques that allow us greater freedom in how we use and modify samples in our constructions.

Inspired by Michael Jackson, Sumit sang a variation of the chant “ma ma ko, ma ma sa, ma ma ko sa” first used by Manu Dibongu in his 1972 song Soul Makossa, and later used by Jackson.  The lyrics on this track were ad-libbed and are prone to subjective interpretation.  Here are the lyrics as I understand them:

Ma ma se  Ma ma sa  ma ma ko sa

Ma ma se  Ma ma sa  ma ma ko sa

Ma ma se  Ma ma sa  ma ma ko sa

Ma ma se  Ma ma sa  ma ma ko sa

Champagne bucket a bucket a buh

mamase makossa

Champagne bucket a bucket a buh

mamase makossoft

Jack in the pocket it’s just a question of time

You got a rock in the pocket you got a rock in the rhyme

Jack in the bucket, you got a question of time

You got a rock in the pocket, you got a rock in the rhyme, gotta

Sacajawea she got to work on the side

(unintelligible)

Sacajawea, she got a working design

(inscrutable)

Mille Boba

Snake: Dobro, SSE, Vox

DJ Essey: SSE

Sometime in 2007 or 2008, the band went for a pre-session dinner at Szechuan Noodle Bowl and unexpectedly ran into DJ Essey’s friend David and his wife Millie.  We combined forces, and after dinner wound up at Gossip, where Millie introduced Nick to Bubble tea (aka Boba Tea) and thus forever immortalized herself in song. 

Originally entitled “Immigrant Millie Bobo”, the track was our first experiment using miked samples and was released on our website in its original form in 2009.  Snake played two classic rock riffs on his dobro – Jimi Hendrix’s gorgeous melodic line from Third Stone from the Sun, and the ostinato from Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song – and we mashed ‘em up, adding an original guitar line, both straight up as Snake played it and diced up by DJ Essey.  The track remained in that state for about 5 years until we pulled it out to include on this album.  Snake added bass and rhythm guitar to harmonize the melody two new ways (once in E major and again in C# minor), and we replaced the original Immigrant guitar part with the same ostinato using a piano sample.  The final song title came about through our typical associative process, dropping a word here, changing a vowel there.  The result, “Mille Boba”, is a Sino-Italian portmanteau that translates to “One Thousand Breasts”.  Make of that what you will.

Something We Ate (feat. Steve Markowitz)

DJ Essey: SSE, breath

Snake: guitars, wine glass, SSE, breath

Steve Markowitz: piano, words, breath

Snake’s association with composer and improvisational pianist Steve Markowitz (as “Polyrhythmics”) predates the formation of Cats Cradle robbers by several years.   We always have a lot of fun with Steve – he’s playful and uninhibited, and we share a nice musical chemistry.

This was the first of several sessions with Steve.  We got together at Cats Cradle East, where DJ Essey captured Steve’s improvisations and singled out the loop that forms the backbone of this track.  We followed that up with a number of versions that progressively added new layers, new sections, and finally led to what you hear on the album.

Electrullabye

DJ Essey: SSE

DJ Essey’s first solo outing for Cats Cradle Robbers started as an experiment in animating pitch in Ableton.  

He built that seed into a lovely electronic lullabye that aspires to answer Philip K Dick’s titular question.

Hush little baby

Don’t say a word

Poppa’s gonna buy you

A mockingbird

Swan Station 5

DJ Essey: SSE, leaky shower

Snake: Bottom drawer, ceiling fan, piano, bass, SSE

In May 2009, DJ Essey joined Snake’s family on a trip to Port Townsend to experience the Rhodedendron festival.  The band set up shop in Essey’s room at the Swan hotel where they proceeded to disassemble and sample everything in sight.  The bottom drawer of the dresser became a bodhran, the brass ceiling fan a tabla, the screen window insert a shaker, the dripping shower an alarm bell, a disassembled curtain rod an agogo.  Did Snake play the ceiling fan with chopsticks or with his bare fingers?  Snake remembers it one way and DJE another.

Several tracks began on that trip, but none harnessed Essey’s inspiration like this tango-flavored construction.  Featuring bandoneón, viola, and cello samples, we also took the time for Snake to learn and record Essey’s sequenced bass and piano tracks verbatim using real instruments.

The Swan hotel, combined with a common preoccupation with the first season of LOST, inspired the title.

Ujjayi

Snake: Piano, classical guitar, SSE

Snake’s solo outing, like Essey’s Electrullabye, started as a learning experiment in Ableton Live.  Snake took a simple loop and added live guitar and piano samples to evoke a trancey yoga mood.  The ujjayi (oceanic) breath is approximated by a found shotgun sample and lots of reverb.

Attempting Electronic Reprisal

Attempting Electronic Reprisal is based off of our very first Ableton Live set, called Attempting Electronic, made during our first jam session with Kelley Vice.  As Snake and Kelley played, DJ Essey created electronic loops to accompany the guitars.  The second set made during that session, The Tyranny of the Drum Machine, has been lost to time (and a dropped laptop that clobbered the harddrive).  Attempting Electronic Reprisal is one of only three tracks that survived the lost hard drive (the other two were La Voie Lactée and a track called Spirit Hole Skydive which was our first experiment with a live instrument).

 Stealing Candy (feat. Joe Breskin)

DJ Essey:  SSE

Joe Breskin: Guitar

Snake: Guitar, Lindsey guitar, Big Bad vocal, SSE

On another trip to Port Townsend, Snake, and Port Townsend guitarist Joe Breskin took guitars and recording gear to the Boiler Room for an impromptu performance.  This track started with a couple of samples from that evening, but the main action revolves around a guitar riff of Breskin’s called “theme from the Pfeiffer River beach”.   Joe discusses the creation of that tune on his website (search the page for “Big sur” here).

Stealing Candy also features an experiment in Augenmusik (“eye music”).  The synthesizer break partway in includes a MIDI track in which the notes are laid out to spell the name of the track.  This results in a series of tone clusters and glissandi that underlies the more composed melodic chimes.  The effect of the combined tracks sounds like a summertime ice cream truck, or candy truck perhaps.

Kelley's Loss

The original sessions that led to the formation of Cats Cradle Robbers were conducted in the summer of 2007 on the back deck at Cats Cradle East, and included a third founding member: guitar virtuoso and technical writer extraordinaire Kelley Vice.  Kelley lasted two sessions and was a no-show for the third, when we put together this loop.  Were we bitter?  Is the title a little passive aggressive?  Maybe.  But we’ll see how Kelley feels when the royalties start pouring in!

Kelley remains a friend and we stay in touch on Facebook, but he hasn’t participated in a session since.

Weftovers (feat. Tomo Hoku)

Tomo Hoku: ili’ili

DJ Essey: SSE, pu’ili

Snake: Bass, ukulele, flute, dobro, harmonicas, uli’uli

Tomo Hoku is a friend, Japanese translator, hula teacher, tour guide, and world traveler.  She also happens to write a column for a Japanese language periodical out of Chicago called Prairie Magazine.  She came by Cats Cradle East in 2009 to interview the band and see how we work.  She brought along some traditional hula instruments for us to try out - little did she know she would get roped into participating.  For the Japanese speakers in the audience, here’s the resulting article. 

La Voie Lactée

Another one of the early “spirit holes”, this loop also started life as an Ableton exercise – this time focused on animating tempo.  The base loop does not change anything but tempo –starting off at a moderate walk, increasing to a brisk trot, and finally tailing off to nothing.  The name comes from a surrealistic French film by Luis Buñuel – for reasons lost in time, Snake was reminded of the film by the track or the process.

This track is notable as well for including the melodic phrase that became – either by subconscious suggestion or by coincidence – the opening melody for Boiling the Ocean.

Boiling the Ocean

DJ Essey: SSE, frying pan, chips, ice, coke, salsa, toaster, vitamins

Snake: wine glasses, bottles, steaming flask, knife on steel, kettle bass

Snake dreamed up a project when he was leading improvisational ensembles in the 1980s, which involved taking a group of improvisers through somebody’s house, playing music in each room using only objects found in that room.  While this was never accomplished using live musicians, the project is being realized by Cats Cradle Robbers under the name “Real House Music.”  Boiling the Ocean is the first track from this project.  It was built by sampling sounds produced by items in Snake’s kitchen, and the process was documented in a video which you can find on YouTube.  We have since “boiled” Snake’s bedroom (Salumba Parte, released on the album Abewsing The Mews), Shed (Honeydew Waltz), and laundry room (The Dry Sound of Atonement).

Lita

DJSE: SSE

Snake: Lindsey guitar, Gibson L6

In 2008, DJ Essey's love of tango and salsa dancing had him out late dancing nearly every night of the week.  He'd come home, late, and still fired up from a night out, and put his hands on the keys.  Those were very much bachelor days, when the Cradle West kitchen was a full time music studio with amps, mics, and control surfaces hooked up everywhere. 

With blood still pumping in his veins and beats in his limbs, the DJ would sit down at the control surfaces and build loop-based scenes.  One was based off of a dance fantasy conceived as Lia… but since the piece was so small, and the vibe inspired by Latin vibes, she was dubbed Lita, a very spunky little seed. Most of our seeds never go anywhere, but this seed was so vibrant, Snake had to work with it.  Snake picked up his guitars and laid down a few riffs.  They were a totally different direction than DJ Essey had planned to take it, and the piece would lay dormant in creative tension for years.  

Sometimes Lita came out to play, only to be put away with little progress made. Magical forces happen when a team agrees to "stop starting and start finishing," as when Cats Cradle Robbers applied kanban principles to our music.  As Jack in the Bucket turned from an EP into an album, we were committed to raising Lita together, and she sprouted into the piece released today.  As with most of our tracks, this collaboration led to something that neither of us would have created individually, proving that one and one can equal three for very large values of one.