1) Magnetic Fields Forever
2) Taped To The Jolly Cross
3) Easter Variations, I
4) Easter Variations, II
The four recordings presented on the cassette album entitled: "Lobhia aur khumbi" were created by Charles Rice Goff III and Hal McGee on Easter Sunday, April 12th, 1998, in and around McGee's home recording studio in Gainesville, Florida. The name of the cassette album refers to the name of the main course prepared by McGee for Easter dinner that April. As McGee recalls, "The full menu consisted of homemade naan bread, lobhia aur khumbi (a tasty dish of black-eyed peas, mushrooms, and tomatoes), some spinach dish I can't remember the name of, Basmati rice, and a way yummy cauliflower and potato dish that is one of my favorites." The appetizer served previous to the dinner was a special pancake prepared by Goff, which had a lingering effect on the two artists as they experimented with sounds and ideas during the rest of the day.
Goff and McGee employed unique and impromptu compositional methods to achieve the results exhibited on " Lobhia aur khumbi." All of the final mixes and some of the original recordings were made on a Fostex XR-5 4-track cassette recorder.
Some Specifics:
1) Track 1: "Magnetic Fields Forever," is a mix of two improvised recordings on which McGee played a Moog Theremin and Goff played a Micronta Portable Biofeedback Monitor. Because both of these “instruments” create their sounds without keys, frets, mouthpieces, sticks, picks, etc., the performances which produced "Magnetic Fields Forever" resembled dances, in which Goff and McGee moved about like members of an avant garde ballet troupe.
2) Track 2: "Taped To The Jolly Cross," looked more like a sporting event than a dance as it was being created. To produce this piece, the two sonic experimenters went out to McGee's apartment complex handball court, where they energetically smacked and kicked tennis balls and tin cans. Portable tape recorders were set up at either end of the court to capture the sounds of this free style match. The two tape recordings were then mixed together to create the final piece for the album.
3) The "Easter Variations" tracks on "Lobhia aur kumbi" are unmodified keyboard improvisations. A Moog Rogue synthesizer and two large Casio digital keyboards were set up in a way that allowed each player individual access to one keyboard and shared access to another. These two recordings project dark and dissonant atmospheres which exhibit some of the distances that low-cost Casio technology can be stretched when put in the hands of inspired sound artists.
A third "Easter Variation," recorded during the same session as the two archived here, was locked away until the year 2000, when Goff mixed it into the huge collage album entitled: "Glue," which was co-released by Taped Rugs Productions and by FDR Tapes of Des Moines, Iowa. Glue is archived at the link below:
http://www.archive.org/details/GlueTapedRugs
Hal McGee's HalTapes released "Lobhia aur khumbi" to the public in 1998 on cassette and re-released it on CDR soon after the turn of the 21st Century. Cover art from these releases and a PDF snapshot of a webpage from 2010, which McGee had produced to promote the album on the internet, are included in this archive.
Copyright 1998 by:
HalTapes (www.halmcgee.com)
and
Taped Rugs Productions (www.tapedrugs.com)
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