Year Four (Episodes 137-184) Year 2000

Episode 137: World War II (in stereo) Part 2 (1/3/2000): (Full Staffed) First hour continued where our last WWII show left off, but this one focused more on the music and radio shows of the time, and less on the statistics, speeches, and dismal radio ads. We also mixed in some hyper right winged monologues on the war in Vietnam to add a little light humor to the program. The second hour consisted of a brand new Ryan Report, on which we discussed the problems caused by some clocks not being able to wind backwards. The third hour was more elaborations of the first hour, but a tad less dense with the musical collage, and more focused on the dialogue within the sound environment of the mix.

Episode 138: Genesis Astrology (1/10/2000): (Full Staffed) First hour was a collage/mix/talk show hosted by doctor of astrology, Dr. Louis Ramsey from Carnegie Mellon College. Second hour began with a rerun of a Capricorn relevant Ryan Report that hasn't aired since 1994 when Paul Ryan V was working in Erie, PA during the early years of his career. It was all about why some pencils have erasers and others do not. The rest of the show was a very odd mix of astrology relevant samples, Jewish people telling Jewish jokes, dramas for 12 year olds, and very unusual phone calls from Uncl Rus, whose star sign is Orion.

Episode 139: Shwinklewankle Bucket (1/17/2000): (Full Staffed) Special guests from Oberlin College: Robert Reich (who played with us back when Pauline Oliveros visited) , Jarred MacAdams (who has played with us a couple times before) , and Kristen Waite (a very talented female who is capable of playing many more instruments than I knew existed.) . These guests combined with bizarre phone calls from the Evolution Control Committee made for an incredible audio hodge podge of champions. Instrumentally, hour one began with a super electronic manipulative mix of accordions, violins, samplers, and guitars whereas hour two had harmonicas, a drill (yes, the tool) , recorders, and organs. Hour three had keyboards, record players, chimes, and singing...specifically, one song was a country song about Mr. T, Apollo Creed, and Rocky Balboa drinking Coke, buying jewelry, planting seeds, and saving factories. Lots of other songs happened throughout the mix, and lots of spoken banter about Snoopy Cows, Shwinklewankle Buckets, ideal dates, and dinner plans. Okay, the order of events listed above aren't 100% in order, but they all did happen making this our most entertaining show of the year thus far.

Episode 140: Nature's Toothbrush (1/24/2000): (Full Staffed) A collage of natural found sound, most of it was professionally recorded in high quality digital formats. There were rain forests, rivers, whales, squirrels, branches being walked on, birds chirping, crickets, monkeys, wind, leaves, and rain. All of this was mixed, sampled, pitch controlled, processed, and fed back into itself. This show also featured an all new Ryan Report with special guest Dr. Berndt R. Katz to discuss "the whole speed enforcement issue," i.e.. methods used by the police to catch speeders and ticket them. The doctor was really afraid of ginger bread cookies, and his mother turned out to be a witch (she was one of our callers.) Near the end of the show, an intriguing discussion about psychedelic within nature involving the usage of the all natural plant "salvia" emerged...rather poetic and in a Shakespearean soliloquy fashion, two people spoke among themselves, one in the left channel, and another in the right channel...all about nature, natural drugs, growth, life, and afterlife. Somewhere in there the two conversations emerged as they recognized each other as Satan and Jesus Christ...a must hear!

Episode 141: CBS Morning News with Dan Rather (1/31/2000): (Full Staffed) As of January 19th, 2000, CBS's general counsel sent a letter to Mark Gunderson of the Evolution Control Committee issuing a cease and desist of ECC's 7" record called "Rocked by Rape," which samples both AC/DC and Dan Rather throughout its entirety. They demanded proof of written permission to use CBS's Dan Rather within 2 days. Since then, Mark and many others have responded to CBS's legal department as well as Dan Rather himself, go here and check it out for yourself. This radio show was dedicated to Mark's efforts, as we took the B-side of the "Rocked by Rape" 7" which was composed of all the spoken word Dan Rather samples he gathered to make this song possible, and sampled it ourselves. Using cassette taped samples, minidisc samples, phrase samplers, drum machines, and keyboards....we made entirely new "Rocked by Rape" versions ourselves, proving that new humorous and satirical works could be made with them, as well as meditative, psychedelic, and electronic trance songs. We have the right to sell copies of this show just as well as Mark has rights to sell copies of his record, because both are protected under Fair Use, as defined by modern copyright law. To further prove the point, we spent about a half hour mixing AC/DC songs, too. None of them were played normal, no more than a few seconds of each song were played, and if you heard the new songs we made with them, you'd realize our renditions sounded nothing like the originals...rather they were parodies, they were silly, and lacked any of the same top 40 appealing rock & roll magnetism the original tracks captured billions of fans with. Fair Use is a major help, but still needs to be more specific with regards to non-satirical audio collage. We firmly believe recycled art can be made and sold for the sake of being ANY kind of art....and shouldn't be limited to parody or satire. In addition, parody and satire is not clearly defined.. Copyright law is there to block total piracy, and nowhere in those laws does it state that copyrighted material cannot be recycled into something completely new and innovative. For a great essay on what "Fair Use" is all about, click here. For a strict legal definition of current U.S. copyright law, click here. For an elaborate and informative list of links about Intellectual Property Issues, Negativland has provided us a great one here. As of this date, ECC is under the gun of CBS. We ask that you research these links and then go to ECC's website, then take down all the email addresses and phone numbers for the CBS contact list currently provided on his site, then write them WELL THOUGHT OUT letter based on your feelings ECC's issue, keeping in mind what you've learned about Fair Use and Copyright Law.

Episode 142: Celebrity Mug Fest (2/07/2000): (Full Staffed) Contrary to the show's title, this program began with the staff members walking around the studio with Walkie Talkies patched into a police scanner in the mixing board which acted as a repeater transmitter for the listening audience so everyone could hear the conversation. The conversation had little to do with celebrities, but about adjusting the broadcasting equipment for optimal fidelity. The staffers each walked to their cars to listen to the broadcast on their car radios to ensure the quality of the broadcast and the clarity of various instruments, mixing studios, and microphones. This lasted about 20 minutes, but then went full throttle into the "Celebrity Mug Fest" format, which was a huge sound collage of celebrity news, interviews, movie trailers, and advertisements. Before the third hour a new Ryan Report was aired, during which we heard Paul, Dr. Asbestos, and every man broadcasting from the space station Mir, offering an in depth discussion on why "Teenwolf" was a completely terrible piece of film work. The third hour completed the Celebrity Mug Fest theme, using lots of witty sample communication to make its point....we are constantly forced to desire the lives of celebrities over our own because of the perpetual bombarding of their personal exploits in the national medial. It makes them look more important than us, and many of us believe they are. It removes our individuality, and places ourselves below them. At least, that's what they media is trying to make you believe so that you keep watching these important people and what they do with their lives. Much of this news is senseless and your lives are no better or worse regardless of your ignorance or wealth of knowledge on these subject matters. A final point to consider is the question of whether or not those who take a liking to celebrity news are "wasting" their lives. Certainly, their time could be better spent doing something else. In our case, we gave an example of taking this material and recycling it into something new. To sit idly by and do nothing more than receive this material in awe appears to be excessively non-productive , much in the same way people are criticized for watching several hours of television or reading several fictional books that will offer no useful information towards their future. We find that it's not so much that you observe this material and pay attention to it, but it's what you do with it that counts. If all it does is inspire you to watch more or read more about the same information about the same kinds of people, then it is harming our society as a whole. Why is it we care more about Dan Rather's personal life than the news he delivers? You can blame the media for this, and if you look deep enough to the bottom of that same trash can you will most assuredly find a dollar bill.

Episode 143: The Seventh Chime (2/14/2000): (Full Staffed) A full remake / revision of our original Episode 122, The Fourth Chime...mostly because our recording of that show was missing the last 90 minutes! We also wanted to point out that NBC was kicking around the idea of a seven chime song, versus the next revision which had four chimes, before the final revision which of course has three. It was hardcore old time NBC radio relevant material until the end of the second hour, during which another Mr. T show tune was performed for about ten minutes. It got less relevant in the third hour, during which a radio call in show aired on "NBC-red," the non-profit division of NBC, set in the year 1936...the profit division back then was called "NBC -blue." This call in show asked the immortal question: If, while going to the bathroom, you look to your right and a bowl of salad dressing on a table, what kind would you prefer it to be? Based on the answers from the callers, the hosts would determine their personality and their future. Warning: This call in show frequently mentioned bestiality! The show had two hosts, and a tall dark haired bathroom attendant standing to the left of your toilet bowl. Last caller of the show was Uncl Rus, calling in from Hollywood!

Episode 144: $19.99 (2/21/2000): (Full Staffed) Show began a very weird talk show which summoned callers to compete with one another over how weird they were. This lasted about 5 minutes and then turned into a giant collage of Paul Ryan's voice reading some of his economically successful short stories and essays. Twenty-four minutes before the top of the hour began a brand new Ryan Report, which lasted until approximately fifteen minutes after the following hour. From that point on the show took a turn for the "artist formerly known as Prince" as it remixed the living hell out of the song "1999" and almost every other hit by that man who refers to himself as a symbol, and rumor has it he is now going by a name people can actually speak. Added to this collage was the Evolution Control Committee's CD compilation called "Party Like It's Only $19.99." The third hour was perhaps the most bizarre hour of programming ever aired to date. It contained an apprentice DJ (who is temping at The Button Press, Inc.) reading a short story written by Paul Ryan on top of musical fragments from several Prince songs (left over from the second hour) , and Paul Ryan's voice reading other pieces of his work. What made this so strange was the incredibly bizarre content of this story, and the fact that the temp read it in a seriously narrative voice without ever flinching. The last ten minutes of this hour were filled with sound bites from the recent Droplift compilation that we're on.

Episode 145: Public Radio Should be Public (2/28/2000): (Full Staffed) As you might guess from the title, this entire show consisted of remixing and collaging media taken from National Public Radio broadcasts. This was really a rather musically ambient type show, if words can be ambient...at least, that's what parts of the show were really going for. Some interesting live callers turned the topic briefly to bacon, glue, and Grape Nuts. The show started out slowly as we were training an apprentice DJ who elected to be mentored during our timeslot. In the second and third hour, he became part of our "band," so to speak, and things really picked up, as we had FOUR people remixing NPR broadcasts! Just as things were ambient and trance-like, things were also very dense at moments. Still, those dense sections were separated enough to be clearly audible for the listener.

Episode 146: The Replacements (3/6/2000): (Full Staffed?) Press The Button staff members are REPLACED this week? So it appeared for the first two hours when all we heard was some philosophical talk show that jumped from topic to topic by a couple of unfamiliar voices. The Button Pressers "returned" from Columbus, OH for the third hour giving a live performance of the show they apparently did just 3 hours ago in Columbus, as they were the opening act for the Evolution Control Committee! Whether or not all this actually happened is up for grabs, but regardless....this show should prove to be a fun listen for those who enjoy a mixture of inane craziness, music, talk, and noise. The last hour broke the record for the weirdness scale. This show is not available for purchase per our studio receiver having gone bad. Episode 146: Bumperama/Blunderama (3/13/2000): (Full Staffed) The first two hours of this show contained a great mix of radio station bumper music, drops, and ID's, with the exception of the second half hour which contained an all new Ryan Report!This week every man and Paul Ryan explain to you the technical reasons why each Ryan Report varies in length.In the process, every man dies.In the third hour of the show, we discover that our radio receiver is no longer capable of recording in stereo! The radio show sounded fine to all our listeners, but to us, we couldn't hear any stereo separation. Apparently this has been plaguing our audio tapes for the past two weeks, and therefore will not be made available for purchase. Hopefully by next week this will have been resolved. Our record archives are soon to become 100% digital.

Episode 147: Border Radio (3/20/2000): (Full Staffed) A unique found sound collage tribute to the incredible contributions to the modern world of radio brought to us by Bob Smith, better known as Wolfman Jack. Interviews with Bob and his friends, original air checks, commercial readings, hoaxes, phone calls, and his infamous voice screaming on top of his songs while he spun records are all featured in this music packed thrill ride. Also featuring seriously rare oldies records (previously tossed from radio stations in the 50's) , brought to you by Paul Ryan's genuine antique record library! This was an abbreviated program, for the last half hour of the show contained an air check demo from our new apprentice. This is our first show digitally recorded straight to CD!

Episode 148:Musical Mocha (3/27/2000): (Full Staffed) Began with an all new Ryan Report! This show was filled with musical collage, i.e.. a collage of "musicals" or "show tunes." Some of the resulting cut-up combinations were hilarious, others were very thought provocative. Also made music out of their music, doing somewhat of amusic/text combo. This made for pleasingly original results. The last half hour was given up to the apprentice DJ for his air check, so this was a 2.5 hour show.

Episode 149:Musical Mocha II (4/3/2000): (Full Staffed) Part two of last week, but without the Ryan Report. Instead, we had some nice technical difficulties literally ripping out the first 15 minutes of our program. Outside of that, this mix turned out pleasantly well. Again, the show was truncated a half hour due to the constraints of the AP (apprentice programmer) program of the radio station, so the AP had another air check to do in the last half hour of the show. This was a 2.25 hour show (truncated further because of the technical difficulties.)

Episode 150:Year 2000 Telethon (4/10/2000): (Full Staffed) Show began with a very strange Ryan Report!Our staff intern played the role of Paul Ryan, Dr. Asbestos played the role of Stanley, Paul played the role of Dr. Asbestos, and Stanley played the role of the phone callers. Very, very strange...but worth it to hear our intern yell with a rather conservative monotone "mother fucker!" The rest of the show was a live mix collage of past shows, CD's, and not yet released material from The Button. The last half hour was given up to the apprentice DJ for his air check, so this was a 2.5 hour show.

Episode 151:Noodle Mutilations (4/17/2000): (Full Staffed) Special guests Mark Gunderson from the Evolution Control Committee and King Wilson from Chicago, IL, who we've met and worked with online. The first half hour of this show contains a rare interview with Don Joyce from Negativland from around 1992, because half of Press The Button were on their way back from SEEING Negativland play live, and this made appropriate filler. From that point on, however, a nice thick mix emerged among the Press The Button staff as they played along with the trance-e-delic music of King Wilson's, and the goofy talk show format hosted by The ECC's Grootnik P. Bargelights. The topic of the show was "Noodle Mutilations" and eventually became "Noodles that Rhyme with Seven, but Not the Word Heaven." We had a lot of interactive participations from the phone lines, and at the end of the show we were happy to received a pleasant surprise call from Negativland's David Wills! He played into our mix for awhile with K-mart ads, and then sadly announced the saddening situation of his cat "Big Butt," who was very sick at the time. He revealed the reason he wasn't on tour with Negativland, and discussed methods of ridding termites from his house. This was a full three hour show, but will be sold without the first half hour, since we weren't doing the interview with Don Joyce, and it wasn't fragmented or mixed over that often. This show contains a tremendous live remix of King Wilson's remix of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by The Beatles.

Episode 152:Trimming Around The Christmas Tree (4/24/2000): (Full Staffed) A mixture of a Christmas talk show and a live Christmas sample mix, exhibiting the various extreme differences in the music of Christmas past. A lot of these various Christmas messages blatantly contradict one another, and when layered together, the intentions of both pieces change...a new piece is created, followed by a new message and FEELING for the listener. We find this to be a new kind of "sample communication" within our show, whereas the samples don't complete each other's sentences, but rather become complete opposites. You get about 90 solid minutes of this, with an intermission of Paul Ryan and Stanley Salashy (who is the every man of Christmas past) doing a talk show about Christmas, asking what everyone got, or would have wanted to get for Christmas, not to mention what they gave to others. Needless to say, the talk show left the topic several times because muppets and elks kept invading the studio asking for bowling balls and PCP. The last half hour was given up to the apprentice DJ for his final air check of the semester (which was an interesting experimental public affairs show about homelessness) , so this was a 2.5 hour show.

Episode 153: News Bites (5/1/2000): (Full Staffed) Our first full three hour studio mix in quite a long time! The show featured "sound bites" of all too familiar current news events, but remixed and remastered in such a way that the statements like "Tom Brokaw's prostate fell in the dumpster" evolved. Actually, this show wasn't very funny, but rather scary and depressing upon hearing the blatant contradicting statements like "More people get their news from NBC than any other network" followed by "More people get their news from ABC than any other network." This show really made you question today's media, and the value of the media's current events. The mix was a serious interactive stereo panning collage that went on for nearly three hours with very few breaks, mixing together music and news from the popular network and cable media affiliates. In the next to last half hour, the show was more musical and carried more of a heavy Vietnam theme. In the final 25 minutes of the show, we received another surprise call from Negativland's David Wills! David told us more about his termite problems, his on the job entertainment working with his cable company, his curiosity as to what our theme was...he did sound checks with his elaborate audio setup, discussed Negativland's tour,and expressed his feelings on possibly playing in an upcoming show in California...all while we mixed and processed his voice all over the sound board. With the nearly three hour news mix, the over 24 hours of production and planning, and David's processed phone call, this show turned out to be super thick in content, going from super silly, to super serious, to super insane. A definite worthwhile listen. Simply performing the show taught us a lot about ourselves, the media, and the way we find ourselves commonly interpreting what we hear, versus what is being said..

Episode 154: God, the Devil, and J. R. "Bob" Dobbs (5/8/2000): (Full Staffed) Yet another uninterrupted three hour collage mix by The Button, with some new audio equipment in the mix too. The theme was rather philosophically deep, but had plenty of humorous moments. The point was rather specific in regards to the silliness of the Catholic church's stance on the roles of"god" and "the devil." Appropriately mixed in this, were many snippets from a special local college talk radio program (on WCSB) called "Einstein's Secret Orchestra" which was hosted by a good friend of ours, Reverend Ivan Stang, founder of the Subgenius Church..(Reverend Stang,, who now resides in Cleveland, OH, is credited for inventingJ. R. "Bob" Dobbs....see how it all fits together now?) His church has been honored by Newsweek magazine as being the biggest hoax of the 20th century. After listening to three hours of this odd collage, you quickly discover a very fine line between "praise god" and "praise Bob." That's where the humor really kicks in...this ESO show we sampled Stang from also was co-hosted by "Sweet Ass Sassafras" who is normally the full time host of WCSB's "669" show...which could be described as a creatively pornographic generation X late night music/talk show...so I'm sure you can see the important significance in blending him within the mix about god and the devil. We also must not forget the samples we took from ESO's "Lonesome Cowboy Dave," who is, I'm convinced, the world's most spontaneous INANE spoken word artist, and we got a lot sound bites from him regarding "religious perversion." We were heavy in the stereo panning throughout the entire program, keeping the entire theme as polarized as possible. This was easily one of the best mixes we've done in the last couple of years.

Episode 155: Prologue without a Story (5/15/2000): (Full Staffed) Additional special guests from Oberlin College: David Levin, kate peterson, Jarred McAdams, and Vin Calianno. This is also the last performance we will ever have with Jarred McAdams, per his graduation from Oberlin this year. The instruments used by the Oberlin students are too many to list, but noteworthy ones are two SK1's, various keyboards, three accordions, Vin's laptop, various drums, David's electric guitar with amplifier, a standard whistle, a non-standard flute, kate's singing voice, and Jarred's sense of humor. Plus, The Button staff had even more additional musical toys to bring in this week, which we're not even going to go into. This show was one hell of an outstandingly extreme musical experiment, emphasizing the meaning of the sound versus the meaning of the words. This certainly doesn't mean we didn't have any spoken word samples. In fact, Jarred's hilarious spoken word improv made it impossible to stay locked into the show's gripping trance. Nevertheless, the emphasis was heavy sound manipulation, not completely disregarding text manipulation, but giving it at lower priority than usual. For instance, despite the fact that we gave out the interactive phone number during the show, we never thought to check for calls. The show remained quite thick without them, exhibiting very few dull moments. In fact, it got more interesting as the hours passed by, especially in the last half hour which was captured by the beautiful harmonious droning vocals of kate, Jarred, and David. That's not all! This show was a special treat, because weaved deeply within the mix was featured a recording (which we sampled entirely in reverse) of a live show from "Solid State," an underground electronica band....perhaps more noteworthy to the public because ECC's Mark Gunderson is a member. Farewell and best wishes Jarred! You brought great spontaneous humor and music with your every appearance, only to improve each time. The Button Press will miss you.

Episode 156: The Conservative Mind (5/22/2000): (Full Staffed) The Press The Button staff reveal the truth about the IRS, like the fact that they have over 435,000 employees, including its own SWAT team!Did you know that the government is funding 62 other SWAT teams for various federal agencies? Did you know that their salaries are coming from tax payer dollars? Does the government want to come out with the "Internet II" for the purposes of "education and dissemination of governmental information," or do they simply want an internet they have full control over? And how accurate do you think this disseminated information will be? Do you think perhaps it will be misinformation? If you can't control something then make your own, right? It worked for Microsoft, didn't it? Why not the feds? Find out the truth about the government phone tapping, not for your voice conversations, but for your DATA transfers over your modem line. Find out the truth behind those suspiciously out of place slow download days on the net. Also find out the truth about guns, the economy, and the abortion issues we hear about on the news every day, and what the US government really doesn't want us to know.This show is 70% sample mix, and 30% talk show. Warning: includes amoment in which talk show host Mark Guy Findley pees himself, goes to take a shower, continues to take calls FROM THE SHOWER using a cordless microphone, and then finally becomes part horse, part pig, and part female porn star. (Actually, I believe he was each of those things separately for awhile.)

Episode 157: You Bet Your Bite! (5/29/2000): (Full Staffed) Special guest Darrick Servis from KDVS in Sacramento, CA. This show started out as, and ended up being, an extremely thick collage show using sampled sound "bites" from the You Bet Your Life! radio/TV show hosted by Groucho Marx, while receiving interactive callers into the mix. A few such callers in the middle of the show turned this into a more surreal talk show about peanut butter mixed with peanut jelly, "all good horny aliens" going to Heaven, and the holy trinity being a ham sandwich. I believe this was going on while some confused 17 year old girl was on the line. Darrick added an incredible sonic nostalgia to the mix using a reel-to-reel player as an analog sampler. This is an excellent show both musically and sample-speaking.

Episode 158: Flying Solo I (6/5/2000): (Full Staffed) This week, all three full time Press The Button staff members produced their own hour long program, without intervention from the other staff members during the week. Each hour was completely different from the next, and yes, we still took phone calls over the mix. It started out with Paul's work in the first hour, which was a rather serious political satire comparing 60's national politics to the campaign 2000, mixed with intermittent songs composed of breakbeats and off the wall samples. The next hour was Sam's, which started out with a rather insane 5 minute remix of his song "Take a Deep Breath" from an upcoming Button album. The rest of the hour was filled with tons of shortwave radio samples mixed with electronica that he produced himself. The third hour was Jay's, which was composed mostly of family tapes, spoken word from archaeological digs, and family road trips. Despite what this sounds like, the samples were all extremely short, seemingly random, and almost musical in parts. Music was made out of the sound of a car door being held open with the low key "the door is ajar" sound effect going off, and harmonies were made from the people in the family tapes singing. The second and third hour seemed strikingly drug influenced, and the first hour sounded (with kudos to Paul) as though all three of us were performing that section. The show ended with a pleasant surprise call from Negativland's David Wills, who played numerous funky samples through various sound processors and an SP808 over the telephone.

Episode 159: Flying Solo II: Threesome (6/12/2000): (Full Staffed) Once again, all three full time Press The Button staff members produced their own hour long program, sort of....this week they did it in rotating 15 minute segments, so every 15 minutes you'd hear a quarter hour section from a different Press The Button staff member. The sections were incredibly varied, ranging from bizarre talk shows about rubbers, Bill Cosby sounding vocally idiotic, Mr. T theme songs, and 6 layers of short wave radio tracks...to instructions on how to listen to Mozart, Peter Jennings saying "F--- You Microsoft", and a brand new Ryan Report! -- The new Ryan Report was actually an explanation on why there hadn't been Ryan Reports for the last few months, which ended up revealing the fact that Paul had been in a state prison for a faked armed robbery of a federal depository to get attention from one of his recent lusts, who unfortunately was an underage 17 year old juvenile delinquent which got him in further trouble. As usual, live interaction from the listening audience was present with phone calls on top of the mix.

Episode 160: Flying Solo III: Playing With Ourselves (6/19/2000): (Full Staffed) Like last couple of weeks, all three full time Press The Button staff members produced their own individual pieces for the show...only this time they each did three 15 minute songs, and divided up their remaining time pretending they were DJ's in between songs, claiming that they were playing CD's from other bands, and not in fact themselves. Every track was played in order of staff member, to make it even more mixed up. Some artists supposedly included in their playlist were the Evolution Control Committee, Philo T. Farnsworth, 61 Fantastic, Mike DeVine, Operation Big Beat, Brian Eno, Iceberg 42, and the Thunderbunnies. Again, I reiterate, these weren't the actual bands played, just the bands we claimed we were playing. 100% of all the music DJ'ed during this radio show, the Press The Button staff members produced by themselves during the past week.

Episode 161: Consider Plaid (6/26/2000): (Full Staffed) This show was a recording of a 3 hour live performance The Button did at a big ol' swingin' PLAID party in Columbus, OH at Mark Gunderson's house (of the Evolution Control Committee.) The theme of the party was plaid, and the rules were "you don't have to necessarily be wearing plaid to fit in, but at least somehow 'consider plaid' to fit in." Our contribution, aside from the fact that we all brought vinyl records with plaid designs on them, was a song about plaid, and a sample disk loaded with samples making some mention of plaid. As far as our live performance went, most of the material played was new, and if any of the material wasn't entirely new, then it was full band performance remixes of our "Flying Solo" material from the previous few weeks. Also, some sound clips from the party itself from a few secretly planted tape recorders made for some interesting changes of format...especially considering we got to hear an inebriated Mark Gunderson try to explain our music to an even more inebriated crowd of people. As always, we took live calls over this mix...which made the show even more odd, if that was possible.

Episode 162: Flying Solo IV: Playing With Each Other (7/2/2000): (Full Staffed) Like previous version of this concept, all three full time Press The Button staff members produced their own individual pieces for the show...only this time they each did ten 5 minute songs, and divided up their remaining time pretending they were DJ's in between songs, claiming that they were playing CD's from other bands, and not in fact themselves. Every track was played in order of staff member, to make it even more mixed up. This week, some more Operation Big Beat and Thunderbunnies, as well as Renaldo & The Loaf, Culture Cutters, The Remediation, Mike DeVine, Russell Mast, and let us not forget the immortal legendary blues singer Damon Miles. Lots of other bands were played, but you'll just have to listen to find out who. As an added bonus, over the ENTIRE third hour of the show we were literally bombarded with calls from Negativland's David Wills, who played us some interesting behind the scenes Negativland answering machine messages, like Mark Hosler calling Dave and asking him to do the voice over for his track on the Dispepsi album, and Peter Conheim calling Dave to tell him everyone is broke and that they need some money, and rather embarrassing messages I, myself, have left on his machine in the past and didn't realize he kept.Lots of snippets in there of Wobbly calls, and some terribly persistent guy who calls Dave's machine every half hour, and has been doing so for the past three years. This was a really hilarious show, all in all.

Episode 163: Flying Solo V: Playing With You (7/9/2000): (Full Staffed) Unlike previous versions of this concept, all three full time Press The Button staff members split into two groups to produce their own individual pieces for the show. Dr. Asbestos wrote a one hour piece, and Paul and every man combined efforts to do their own two hour piece. The first hour was a creative deconstruction of a local gothic female talk show host, exploiting the fact that half of her dialogue is giggling hysteria. Also featured during this hour, live phone callers rapping, Turkish found sound art, and Dr. Asbestos's best home grown ambient electronica. The next two hours were a satire on the whole Microsoft versus Apple Macintosh debate, featuring a collage of samples promoting both the Mac OS and Windows 95/98/2000. The music bed made this far more interesting, as it was entirely composed of music used in modern commercials. Ironically, the samples layering on top weren't selling what the original stolen commercials were. For instance, the music used in recent Honda commercials was the background music to a discussion on how many steps it takes to setup a networked printer using Windows 95. Clairol commercial music was behind a technical discussion of Windows 2000's Active Directory service. Eventually each commercial reveals its true identity which takes you by surprise...one of them was an iMac commercial! In the show's last ten minutes, Negativland's David Wills contributed a phone call with a neat electronic noise performance of his own. It perfectly fit what we were doing, and when the show ended we were hungry for more!

Episode 164: Science Fiction Horror Show (7/16/2000): (Full Staffed) Our first true return to the live studio in six weeks! An incredibly dense mix of well over 3,000 prepared-in-advanced samples from science fiction B-movies and underground cult horror flicks. The show explores this odd fascination we have with the suspension-of-belief, and the negative results this has brought our world. The mix was heavily interactive with the phone callers, which were oddly right on par with the sound quality of our sample sources...it was nearly impossible to tell the callers from the mix. Hearing the show in retrospect as a listener, it is that much more difficult to discern due to how dense all the samples were. All of the samples were roughly 3 - 5 seconds in length, and the show contained very little music filler. This show was by far the most "sample dense" Press The Button show to date, collectively fueled by over 60 hours of production in the previous week.

Episode 165: Dadaism...For Dummies (7/23/2000): (Full Staff minus Paul) This past week Paul had a birthday out of town with his family, Jay went to Burning Corn, and Dr. Asbestos moved from Utah. Needless to say, this was a less intense, more freeform Press The Button show.For its entirety, we hit you with a half improvised, half planned collage of over 40 records containing elementary level short stories for three straight hours. By the original definition of Dadaism, this show does it all with sound...everything from "making randomness work for you" to "planned coincidence." Also, for extra special fun, the third hour was a combination of the first two...the first hour in the left speaker, and the second hour in the right speaker. This was an outrageously fun show to listen to, for the accidental perversions, the inevitable bulk of nonsensical dialogue, and the often witty "planned coincidences." The show, without Paul, was a bit of a flashback to our original spontaneous approach to found sound art many years ago, yet showed how much we have improved our sense of timing effectively using our "pause policy" to our advantage.

Episode 166: Sports Jocks & Disc Jocks (7/30/2000): (Full Staffed) Alan Freed once said that a white left hand and a black right hand combined make Rock & Roll. In this program, a baseball cap on one head and a backwards baseball cap on the same head combined make for three hours of non-stop athletic sports collage. We covered baseball, basketball, football, bowling, car racing, and even ping pong. On top of that, we inserted rare footage of 50 year old commercials featuring major sports celebrities, talk radio phone callers talking about sports, and radio talk show hosts talking about themselves. One noteworthy clueless phone caller rang us over a dozen times, constantly said "HELLO?", and threatened to come down to the station and harm us since we wouldn't verbally answer him.

Episode 167: Elton John's Mix-up (8/6/2000): (Full Staffed) This was an all-request show, sort of.We spent the entirety of the program taking callers who for some reason thought we were a reggae show, or an R&B outfit, or a classic rock radio station. We actually did take their requests, only we "re-mixed" them, as the callers would call back and bitch us out on top of the song they requested. Sometimes we even got dedication requests, some of which were completely bizarre but sounded quite genuine. The guy on the air after us showed up 45 minutes late, so this ended up being nearly a 4 hour show. Alas, due to recording problems, we only got about the last half of the show.

Episode 168: Always Room for Cello (8/13/2000): (Full Staffed) Special guests: Oberlin College's Jim Altieri and his cello playing friend Tom Graves. This was a nearly 100% musical Press The Button show (though as always we took callers on top of our mix.) We had several instruments in the mix, an Apple notebook computer being used as a sampler, two accordions, several keyboards, a real sampler, audio processors, drum machines, turntables, and of course, several microphones. One noteworthy and rather comical highlight was when Tom was plucking at his cello in harmony with the demo song on Paul's keyboard at the beginning of our third hour of broadcast. The show was musically dense, ambient, and incredibly fun to take part in...I believe that fun showed through in the end result.

Episode 169: Metallica Starts with "Me" / Napster of Puppets (8/20/2000): (Full Staffed) First two hours were a giant tight collage mix of Lars Ulrich interviews, Napster news, public RIAA statements, copyright infringement articles, and of course, Metallica. Listen as we make beautiful new music out of Metallica's less than interesting guitar riffs, and Ulrich's less than interesting statements about Napster. many parts of this were absolutely hysterical, and other sections were outright sad and emotionally moving. The last hour featured a brand new Ryan Report! Well, sorta new...it was the annual Paul Ryan Awards Banquet which technically aired many months ago but was never actually heard by anyone until now.

Episode 170: Will You Seek Graceland With Us? (8/27/00): (Full Staffed) While Jay is out in the Nevada desert seeking artistic enlightenment while recording the sound cacti make when they grow, Paul and the good Doctor press onward manfully, but not too manfully, collage-ing together the results of what happens when a gay man and a straight woman live together on an NBC sitcom.Yes, you guessed, it’s “Fraiser”.No no, no really, it was “Will and Grace”, brutally hacked apart and then reassembled into horrifying, and yet strangely still funny, shapes in this delightfully dense three-hour program.Special features include the odd absence of the laugh track, bringing up an unusually serious and genuine tone to the dialog, splattered here and there as with a shotgun.Dozens, if not tens of dozens, of strange and beautiful verbal coincidences occur, making this a must hear!

Episode 171: Brian Eno Had a Farm. . . . E-I, E-I, O! (9/3/00): (Full Staffed) With the good Jay still missing in action, sticking his microphone down desert rat burrows, and under the tails of scorpions, Dr. Asbestos and Paul Ryan Stage heinous mutiny at the radio station, and pull a fast one on poor Jay. Instead of doing a “Brady-Bunch” spoken word collage, this treacherous twosome laid down a massive three-hour sacrifice to the mighty Altar of Eno! All Hail! All Hail! Witness the many musical instruments, the many MIDI keyboards, the bagpipes and accordions, the steel balls and rings, even then ultra-special “radoiophone” which was invented and built especially for this broadcast!Listen in terror to the mighty scat excreted by Paul Ryan and the trials and tribulations of the man on the planet-“of his own design” made of glass beads and coffee tables!Observe the pernumations of Dr. Asbestos as he dips into the secret vault of uttered mumblings! Lay in wait for the violin solo, PLAYED SIDEWAYS! Will this become a rouge album on behalf of two thirds of the Press the Button Radio Community!?!Will Jay Ever return from the wilds of most arid Nevada!?! Will my cat ever let me pet his tummy!?! The answers will come to you as you buy this episode!

Episode 172: Burning Man 2000 (9/10/00): (Full Staffed) every man (Jay) has returned from the Nevada desert with 20 cassette tapes of field recordings from his week long experience at Burning Man 2000 with fellow found sound artists the Evolution Control Committee. Many of the sound clips come from the bus ride to and from the actual event, so you can hear the bus, the conversations, and the sound of nature when the bus stopped for gas (28 stops both ways.) Features recordings of Rev. Ivan Stang of the Subgenius church, Puzzling Evidence (who substitutes for Don Joyce's Over The Edge broadcasts on KPFA) , and Rev. Howl (who does the Subgenius radio show on KPFA to help San Fransisco keep the faith in "Bob.") Other artists recorded and worth mentioning are Jack Dangers, Gwar, and the Orb. This radio show was a three hour long collage, composed of 30 hours of source material!  I'm sure most of the recordings never aired...but the randomness was outstanding, in that it all couldn't avoid being centered around a common theme, no matter how many hours of source material there was. Lots of deep philosophy, noises, chatter, music, power generators, natural dust storms, burning men, and driving buses made it to the mix. If you missed it, there's always next year...or for a couple bucks you can email us for your own copy instead!

Episode 173: Hip Hop Hall of Fame (9/17/00): (Full Staffed) A full three hour hip hop party mix dedicated to the electronic evolution of R&B, rap, and soul. The mix features lots of interviews with various pop rap artists like Snoop Doggy Dog, Dr. Dre, Grandmaster Flash, Run D.M.C., LL Cool J, E.Z.E., and Ice Cube. Penty of news coverage (by none other than Ted Copple) was added to the mix as the perfect seasoning to this amazingly undanceable hip hop salad, with live callers thrown in as the croutons. Our samplers, keyboards, drum machines, turn tables, CD players, minidisc players, and cassette machines were all in full scale phrase sampling loop mode on this one! Nevertheless, our voices, phone calls, processors, whistles, kazoos, and stereo panning mixing boards made this show nearly impossible to dance to...so there is in fact a good chance your god exists. This show was NOT recorded properly, alas. We will do it again sometime. Episode 174: Behind The Brady Bunch (9/24/00): (Full Staffed) Featuring an all new Ryan Report! Paul explains why there hasn't been a Ryan Report for so long, and the reasons have something to do with his infatuation with a 17 year old girl, his prison sentence, actors armed with nerf weapons, and the FBI. Nevertheless, that gets sandwiched with a Brady Bunch collage...lots of behind the scenes stuff, interviews, music, parodies, strange phone calls, impersonators, made for TV movies, made for cinema movies, and NO actual brady bunch shows whatsoever...hard to explain why that happened, but it did....and it was intriguing anyway! I mean, how could a brady bunch collage of this sort not be? I pose this question to you rhetorically. At any rate, buy it...it was a good Ryan Report.

Episode 175: Patently Absurd (10/01/00): (Full Staffed) It's all about INVENTIONS my friends....failed ideas, patents, and absolutely absurd concepts that seemed like a good idea at the time, but yet still failed. This show was more of a talk show for a change, accepting live calls and input from the listening audience. Needless to say this show induced a few "what the fuck are you guys on?" calls from some first time listeners, though we got some unique invention suggestions from the less culture shocked portions of our society. Within the mix we broke out into song three different times, sampling and mixing ourselves into our already mixed up collage. Paul Ryan made a surprise visit, too!

Episode 176: The End Zone Twilighter (10/08/00): (Full Staffed) Featuring an all new Ryan Report! Paul explains--well---complains, about drivers abusing the highway's passing lane. Then we break into a 2.5 hour audio montage insight into the life of Rod Serling, best known for producing the insightful 50's television series, The Twilight Zone (also conceived the Planet of the Apes.) This show reveals a dark, depressing, and psychedelic look into one of the world's most creative screen writers. The collage features music and spoken word documentaries all stolen from sources relating to Rod Serling...along with your calls, of course. The DJ following the program showed up an hour late, so we took that opportunity to re-do the Ryan Report, giving it an alternate ending.

Episode 177: Technically Difficult (10/15/00): (Full Staffed) A 3 hour collage made from over 13 hours of thrifted material! Much of this came from the pirate radio show (recently shut down by the feds) in Columbus, OH hosted by Grootnik P. Bargelights, of the Evolution Control Committee. Much of it was our own.  Heck, some of it was both! We DO live very close by, you know, we're bound to thrift in some of the same places every now and then. At any rate, we decided to let multiple years of hard work at thrifting pay off in this unusally dense and amazingly odd collage of literally found sound, mixed in with Grootnik's often hysterical commentary that he so customarily used to give when he had his own pirate radio show. So good to hear his voice on the air again, but as a bonus, you often hear it layered on top of other multiple layers of Grootnik commentaries, all completely unique from one another in content. No cheap shots or short cuts pulled this week, gang, as we had over 13 hours to squish into a mere 3 hour time slot! All dense, all original, and often hysterical...this gem will make the feds grit their teeth wishing the laws were tight enough to stop completely legal NON-pirate radio stations from re-broadcasting and celebrating illegal pirate radio broadcasts. Here's over a half-day's worth right atcha, chopped up, diced, boiled, simmered, drained, and rolled up into three delicious little buttons!

Episode 178: FM to AM (10/22/00): (Full Staffed) The Button threw their stereo out the window! Not physically, but literally! Three hours of mono this week challenged our three friends of found sound to fill the single channel pork roast void as best they could without over cooking their harmonious meat. The beauty of stereo is how much sound you can fit in two channels without making the listening experience difficult for radio land, but with ONE channel, you need to better trim and shave your messy audio hair a bit, and John Cage might suggest you insert a nice relieving splash of "Silence" cologne while you're at it. Silence is golden, yeah, we've all heard it...but have we LISTENED to it? The samples are spaced out evenly and harmoniously his week, as The Button offers you a three layered main course without the usual single layer and two side dishes. Layer one is commercial bed music stolen from the major broadcasting networks over the past year.  Layer two is synthesized samples of bells, voices, and dramatic movie theme music often found in tear jerker dramas during prime time. Layer three is exceptionally weird, but is the portrait over the other two landscapes. If this were lasagna we were making, then the first two layers are noodles and sauce, and this third layer is the peas, carrots, peppers, and meat (unless you're a vegetarian, then try onions, spinach, or broccoli!) The third layer is true spoken word, and in this case...professional announcers doing rock & roll history success stories, lawyers talking about how their clients can save their expenses, children talking to each other about a guy named "Shnazzy", European gentlemen insulting one another about being poor, and live phone callers from the Cleveland area. The secondary theme of the show? You guessed it, "M-O-N-E-Y."

10/29/00 - WRUW transmitter down -- gave us a chance to work on the material released in Episode 181!

11/05/00 - WRUW transmitter down -- gave us a chance to work on the material released in Episode 181!

Episode 179: MarxLennon (11/12/00): (Full Staffed)  This episode of Press The Button centers on Jesse James MarxLennon. Best known to late night listeners as Jesse James, Mr. MarxLennon was a media darling in Cleveland during the 80's and early 90's. Besides his late night blues shows on local radio, his late night TV showcase for local blues talent, and the columns written for both the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Scene, his Webpage (at http://www.members.tripod.com/~MarxLennon) gave an interesting twist to the presentation of family history. On the air, we hear about what he's done and what's he doing now. The first hour was the most "normal" hour we've ever aired in terms of production. However, the second hour has every 6th syllable removed from the interview, and the third hour has entire words removed at random!

Episode 180: Dinner at Tommy's (11/19/00): (Full Staffed)  Three manipulated hours of recordings of the Press The Button staff members (and Jesse James MarxLennon) having dinner together at a public restaurant. Hour one presents the left and right channels having separate pitch bends throughout the hour, making the left channel the conversation in the future for a few minutes, and then suddenly it slows down, and then the right channel becomes the future conversation. This is quite fun when the two are very close together, giving off a nice delay effect. In hour two, it's quite simple...one hour of entire conversation remains in the left channel, and another hour of completely different conversation is in the right channel. In hour three, we broke the hour down to four 15 minute chunks, and then split each chunk into 99 parts. We mixed all these parts with other parts from the other 15 minute chunks, and reassembled them to a giant one hour piece composed of 396 random pieces. The results were hysterical.

Episode 181:  Midnight News Spots (11/26/00): (Full Staffed)  This was quite a special show! For the past three months (mostly during the couple of weeks WRUW's transmitter was down) , each of the Press The Button staff members worked rather vigorously to make their own hour long pieces using the exact same 28 minutes of an Erie, PA local newscast dating back to September 1991!  One hour resembled The Orb, while another sounded like the Spacemen 3, and another was more like Merzbow. Yet, as would be expected, they were quite unique and incomparable. Certainly this is the most ambient and transcending work produced by The Button to date, which is odd considering how straightforward, mundane, and dull typical local news casts are. The voices, music, and sound bites of the newscast were heavily sampled, manipulated, processed, looped, 8-tracked, and reassembled into a three hour long journey into a sonic realm never before traveled by The Button.

Episode 182:  Mormon Tabernacle Television (12/03/00): (Full Staffed) All three staff members did their own hours again, but this time they didn't restrict their source material. First hour was a mix of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, 70's television programs, a perpetual fading in and out of native African drum beats, and experimental jazz, all heavily panned around your two channel stereo speaker system. The second hour featured classical music records having their beats-per-minute electronically synchronized via computer software. This is what we feel clubbing should have been like in the 1700's. The third hour was extremely mysterious, psychedelic, Turkish, and resembling old Brian Eno styles of electronic experimentation. This show is a great listen! Instead of being dense and thick with spoken word, it goes easy on the message giving, and heavy on the spiritual feelings of sound. Turntables are used like an accomplished jazz musician would play an instrument, with feeling and emotion. The slider controls on the keyboards allow for flexible electronic oscillations, so they may be played like a blues musician pulls at the guitar strings. The spoken word in the first hour composes a non-artist trying to teach himself poetry, depressingly so, through advertising jingles. It's thought provocative, and emotionally stimulating in many sections. This one definitely needs to be heard from beginning to end.

Episode 183: Adver-teasing Ad-Vantages (12/10/00): (Full Staffed) This rather dense cut-up special is all about old and new mass consumerism and local, national, international, and global marketing. It features classic commercial and industrial pep song musicals from the 50s & 60s, genuine major media interviews with corporate theorists, jingles galore, and commercials from Raymond Scott's Manhattan Research - electronic music scores for commercials of the 60s. Contains great debates about the Sony Playstation 2, baby dolls with artificial intelligence, 3D virtual reality video games, and their impacts on today's youth. 

Episode 184: Forward to the Past (12/17/00): (Full Staffed) Many, many collage pieces from our archives, dating as far back as 1997. Also, this was all mixed with some seriously confused live phone callers.  We don't make this type of format a habit, so it only made sense to try it out and culture jam ourselves. It worked out quite well, considering this would be our last show of the year...made it like a "Year In Review" format. 

12/24/00 - Substitute show - We were out of town for the Christmas holiday. 12/31/00 - Substitute show - We were out of town for New Year's Day.