if this is your first visit here, we have two main blobs of music on the internet right now; you can click to hear/download them :
you can also learn more about us on Facebook and our informative Website.
greetings
snorko & bill
i woke up yesterday and saw somebody doing that outside my window. puffy winter jacket, face wrapped up in a scarf like the invisible man. he stopped next to a tree stump and reached out with his finger and sort of poked the tree stump, which was covered in snow. and then he stood there motionless, for ages, in that poking position. i wasn’t really sure what was going on so i went away and had a shower.
we’re back again with some new music!
two new tracks for you, long ones.
1. norilsk
2. ai-petri
or you can download the whole thing here, it’s called VOSTOK. that is a zip file with a picture and a cute little textfile.
we’ve been travelling, east, and we are still going. but do say hello on facebook if you’d like to swap a story or two!
have a lovely evening :)
- snorko & bill
ilovecharts:bdotdub:tinydesigners:
Utility Journal: Tip Sheet: Tea
Now this is an infographic.
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THE STORY OF TEA
THE TOAST TO WARM THEIR MUSICAL JIMJAMS
AS TOLD BY BILL
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PART II: BEYOND THE DESERT
(Read Part I here!)
Stuck in the desert, all we could do was to try and hitch our way out. But there were no cars for about two days, so we took to the shade under my car parts and ate cacti. At last we got picked up by a guy in a cowboy hat, who took us all the way to New York. He said he was going to the city to become a hustler. We gave him our email addresses. He said he’d be in touch, but I haven’t seen him since.
New York was our home for about a year. We started off living somewhere called Bushwyck. But there were too many crazy topless women and angry people around, so we moved on pretty quick. After several moves, we ended up in Astoria, sharing a quiet apartment with a Mexican guy called Pablo. He was extra friendly to us when we told him we’d come from New Mexico. “I’ve never been to New Mexico but I bet it’s just like Mexico. You guys are my brothers.” After that he would always give us free food, and we helped him with a delivery service he was running. He didn’t mind us jamming; we did it up on the roof where Snorko could plug in to the neighbours’ electricity.
We started picking up some gigs in Brooklyn, where people would crowd into the bars and take a lot of photos of our gear. Snorko’s machine took a battering one night when someone crashed their bike into the stage. Apparently it didn’t have any brakes. I was wondering how they got the bike into the bar at all, but the bouncer told me that if they let bikers in, the bar gets some sort of tax break from the city.
By that stage we were getting pretty famous; there were videos of our gigs floating around, and we were playing nearly every night with more and more people squeezing in to see us. They’d bring 9V batteries with little glowing filaments attached, and sway them in the air above their heads. By summer 2007 we’d recorded an album and were booked for a sold-out show in Madison Square Garden.
It was about that time the Dumpmaster showed up again. We were sitting at the Tea-shirt stand after a gig and he came up to us with a big hairy guy whom he introduced as “the man from the Pitchfork.” They wanted $10,000 protection money, “or we guarantee you won’t sell a single copy of that dumb album.” We didn’t even have $1,000, so we were pretty worried.
Luckily Pablo came to our rescue. He said he delivered to the Pitchfork guys all the time, and he thought they were pretty reasonable. Then he went out of town for three days. I’m not sure what he did, but the Pitchfork didn’t bother us after that. Pablo’s a great guy.
The Madison Square gig was amazing. We got rich! With the money we made, we could probably have paid for eight successful albums. But we already had other plans.
Neither Snorko nor I had written any new music since we’d arrived in New York. We were feeling that the city was eroding our creativity. A friend of Snorko’s, a young pianist, had tried to convince us otherwise. “This city can inspire you; just remember: concrete jungle, wet dream tomato.”
Wise words. But as I repeated this mantra to myself, I began to realise that this was precisely the problem. New York was too big and crazy a place for us to ever find a real sense of purpose. It was time to leave.
***Where to next for our intrepid teabag baggers? Find out next week in Part III!***
THE STORY OF TEA
THE QUEST TO FIND THEIR MUSICAL DESTINY
AS TOLD BY BILL
~*~
PART I - TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
Hi, Bill here. I’d like to tell you a little more about what’s happened to us since Snorko landed up in New Mexico four years ago. It’s hard to think we’ve been on the go for this long already, but a lot has happened. I will spin this out over the next few weeks; I hope my memory will serve me reliably.
In Truth or Consequences there wasn’t much you could do to put food on the table, and Snorko and I both went to work sorting metal in the dump. It wasn’t really as bad as it might sound. Sometimes you’d find cool stuff, which you could bring home if the dumpmaster wasn’t looking.
One day Snorko brought home an old signal generator; strangely enough it still worked when we plugged it in. Using an array of salvaged car batteries and homemade resistors we were able to hook it up to a new keyboard adapted from the front panel of a microwave oven.
Our new music machine had sine waves, pulse waves, alpha waves, houndstooth and splash waves. We would jam on it together for hours every evening, as the resistors warmed our TV dinners. Snorko was particularly enthralled and started to skip work just to play on the machine all day, and eventually she lost her job at the dump. But she soon became the master of the machine.
Over the course of a few weeks, I started to pick out some good-sounding car body panels from the dump, smuggling them home at night-time. I sewed up a special pair of pants with extra large pockets just for this purpose. Finally after sneaking away with the hood of a ‘76 Eldorado, I had a complete drum kit and could accompany Snorko on her virtuosic musical peregrinations. This was the genesis of TEA.
We wrote a lot of tunes in those days. It was really exciting to work on these new instruments; we were always surprised by the sounds that would come out. Sometimes Snorko’s machine would break down, but the dump always provided us with spare parts. Every night we’d play for hours together; we’d get into a vibe that would crawl into your head and make you climb invisible ladders, up and down til it got bright and I had to go to work again.
Around the end of October we got a small Thursday night gig at the Stone and Cactus, which unexpectedly ended up in us leaving town forever. The dumpmaster was at the bar and he recognised our stolen gear. Naturally he fired me first thing, and demanded all of our gear back. We wouldn’t part with it, so he called the Sherriff, and they chased us out of town with their shotguns.
We were glad to have escaped, but now we were stuck out in the desert with a bunch of heavy gear on our backs.
***How will TEA get out of the desert? Tune in next week for PART II!***
