The Crazy World of andernestborgnineasdominic!

November 24, 2009 7:25 AM

A strange, cryptic compact disc was found while hiking in Joshua Tree National Park.

Found by Swan Fungus, the music seems to be a interesting hybrid of Negativland, the voice manipulations of Aphex Twin, and drugged out psychedelic guitar jams, akin to Vibracathedral Orchestra.

posted by gcbv (81 comments total)

DJ finds mixtape, film at 11.
posted by Ironmouth at 7:28 AM on November 24, 2009 [8 favorites]

I am less impressed by the music than by a CD that hikes.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:31 AM on November 24, 2009 [14 favorites]

The disc, "chicken scratch message, and treasure map" are most likely a viral ad for a ski resort. In Taos, NM. AMIRITE?
posted by ericb at 7:32 AM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

The insanity of the recording -- with one or two kind of pretty moments -- mirrored the obsessively constructed feel of the package.


I also wouldn't say that it is very good, but it made for an interesting listen.

This seems like a worthless thing to care about.
posted by OmieWise at 7:32 AM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

That map is really convincing, too. Ye Olde Sharpie. Doesn't he know you're supposed to soak it in tea and crumple it a little?
posted by leotrotsky at 7:33 AM on November 24, 2009 [3 favorites]

Art school called. It wants its project back.
posted by ob at 7:38 AM on November 24, 2009 [14 favorites]

The Blair Witch (Studio) Project
posted by mazola at 7:40 AM on November 24, 2009 [5 favorites]

Probably left by a Jokerman.
posted by Balisong at 7:41 AM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

This seems like a worthless thing to care about.

You don't have to like the music for it to be an interesting experience. Delìrium Còrdia by Fantomas is an album that comes to mind.
posted by infinitefloatingbrains at 7:43 AM on November 24, 2009 [3 favorites]

I found a CD while dumpster diving once. Turns out I really like Johnny Cash and wouldn't have known otherwise.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:56 AM on November 24, 2009 [9 favorites]

So I'm the only one who went to "audio-version of Ringu"? Really? Huh.
posted by The Whelk at 7:59 AM on November 24, 2009 [6 favorites]

So some kids get high, record wacky music, and then lose some of their stuff in the woods.

Nostalgia!
posted by Theta States at 8:00 AM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

FWIW, the gmail address, "[e-mail]" apparently refers to Airwolf.
posted by sensate at 8:01 AM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

Is this the same guy who “found” that secret beatles album awhile back?
posted by Think_Long at 8:03 AM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

This is in fact the new model for releasing your music. R.I.P Radiohead Model 2007-2009.
posted by naju at 8:05 AM on November 24, 2009 [4 favorites]

Seemed perfectly interesting to me. A lack of coherence, a random finding, messy and incoherent sounds, a reference to Airwolf out in the middle of the desert...even with your highly evolved cynicism and jadedness, I would still find such an object a curious, original artifact.


I am less impressed by the music than by a CD that hikes.

Once again, I typed faster than I thought.
posted by gcbv at 8:08 AM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

My enthusiasm for your forthcoming video game has been intensified by this mysterious find.
posted by fire&wings at 8:08 AM on November 24, 2009 [3 favorites]

I am not sure I want to dump this into my iTunes library, but the whole package is pretty cool!

And yeah, the music isn't what I'd necessarily call good, but it is interesting.
posted by egypturnash at 8:09 AM on November 24, 2009

Actually let me amend that, 'The Seventh (Clubbed) Seal' is really quite pretty and may make me decide to stick this in my collection after all.
posted by egypturnash at 8:16 AM on November 24, 2009

Oh, that. It's the master for the Bacon Brothers/Yoko Ono concept album. I guess we didn't bury it deep enough.
posted by spacely_sprocket at 8:18 AM on November 24, 2009

For those of you born after 1990, the CD was encased in a 5 1/4" floppy disc shell. Those used to store a maximum of 1.2MB worth of data. Entire programs used to fit on one disc with room to spare - like word processors and spreadsheet software.

It would have been better for the sake of nostalgia and my ears if this disc only contained as much of the music as would have fit on the original 5 1/4" disc.
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:19 AM on November 24, 2009

I found a CD while dumpster diving once. Turns out I really like Johnny Cash and wouldn't have known otherwise.

Now THAT'S an interesting anectote.

-
posted by General Tonic at 8:20 AM on November 24, 2009

So I'm the only one who went to "audio-version of Ringu"?

When you finish listening to this CD, Milli Vanilli ooze out of your speakers (in stereo of course) and force you to build back their music careers for them, eternally.
posted by Iosephus at 8:21 AM on November 24, 2009 [5 favorites]

Think_Long: "Is this the same guy who “found” that secret beatles album awhile back?"

If you're talking about this one, he didn't find it and it wasn't secret. He stole it from an alternate dimension GET IT RIGHT.
posted by Plutor at 8:43 AM on November 24, 2009 [5 favorites]

Well, it doesn have the total awesomeness of question mark and the mysterians, like the blogpost suggested, that's for sure...
posted by ouke at 8:44 AM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

What a weird tribute to Ernest Borgnine.

Art school called. It wants its project back.

With that map, it's more of a summer school art class project. Who burns their maps any more?

When you finish listening to this CD, Milli Vanilli ooze out of your speakers (in stereo of course) and force you to build back their music careers for them, eternally.

But which Milli Vanilli? The Voices or The Faces?
posted by filthy light thief at 8:56 AM on November 24, 2009

The helicopter was eventually sold after the show ended and became an ambulance helicopter in Germany, where it crashed and was destroyed in a thunderstorm on June 6, 1992. All three crew members died.

It must have been that red helicopter.


And that map is obviously Oregon's coastline. I believe a Mister Copperpot had a copy of it.
posted by Atreides at 8:58 AM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Content aside, I could do without ever reading another blog post in that certain "City-paper extremely-poor-man's-Hunter-S.-Thompson grizzled-old-white-guy-who-was-maybe-in-rehab-once-for-the-credibility-and-has-seen-some-stuff-man the-editors-are-on-my-back-but-I'm-gonna-tell-it-like-it-is" style ever again.
posted by drjimmy11 at 9:22 AM on November 24, 2009 [5 favorites]

Downloaded a few tracks. Listening to them right now. Good after hours chill-out stuff, I guess. I do like the notion that this is what distributing one's music has come to.

Reminds me of local Vancouver band from the early 90s, Wicked Swimming Dog. They had a half-assed label that pressed a thousand or so copies of their CD and then proceeded to do a mostly useless job of distributing it. Then one day, the band's van got busted into and, among items, a box full of 200 CDs was lost. For years afterward, I would see that CD showing up in the most random of places (small town truck stops, pawn shops, flea markets). Now there's a distribution network that really reaches the people.
posted by philip-random at 9:32 AM on November 24, 2009 [4 favorites]

Two or three years ago I bought a CD done by a guy named Tim Kaiser that was sleeved in a 5 1/4" floppy disc shell. It was mainly random noise stuff though and didn't sound like the material on the "mystery CD".
posted by cropshy at 9:34 AM on November 24, 2009

Airwolf references? Sharpied map? CD inside a floppy disk? My God he's found the shard of the evil hipster god known to the ancient Germans as Víðarr. For 120 days and nights the bands of Williamsburg played benefit concerts non-stop to defeat this evil, but this was an old god and his powers were strong. They say such was Víðarr's irony that his armies rode into battle on bicycles with no gears at all and clad in concert t-shirts of gigs yet played. They were ruthless in their gentrification, intent on turning all of Brooklyn into a "small Ohio suburb." Wave after wave of hipster returned to live with their parents, Víðarr's carnage seemed complete and his twisted victory nearly accomplished when on the 120th day a hero emerged: Sufjan Stevens. He realized that they could never destroy Víðarr, but there was a possibility, a slim one, that they could create an art project so perfect, so ironic, they could trap Víðarr for eternity. No one knows what the final art project looked like as Sufjan perished in his attempt, but the armies retreated and Víðarr's presence was never seen again, gone as quickly as it arrived. The remains, or shards, of the art project are rumored to be spread throughout the world but none up until now have been found. If all parts are found and put together, the power would be enormous ... it would be comparable to getting a 10 on a Pitchfork review, no one wielding such power would be stoppable.
posted by geoff. at 9:44 AM on November 24, 2009 [68 favorites]

I must be a tasteless relic, judging from the comments on this thread, but I liked these tracks. Would love to play them on a drive through the desert on a dark (maybe moonlit) night.
posted by bearwife at 9:48 AM on November 24, 2009

This is totally the musical equivalent of porn in the woods: unexpected, inexplicable and some parts just skeeve you right out, but on the whole it's rather fascinating.

Plus you won't get into trouble if you take the CD home with you.
posted by Spatch at 9:49 AM on November 24, 2009 [4 favorites]

If you're going to make up a story involving a 5-1/4 inch floppy disk, you've got to at least make the fake email address [e-mail], or something similarly dated. That it's a gmail address makes it unbelievable from the get-go.
posted by mudpuppie at 10:04 AM on November 24, 2009

Am I missing something, or would a cd encased in a black plastic disk enclosure and a baggie, in the joshua tree desert at any hikeworthy time of year, be plastic soup?
posted by condour75 at 10:04 AM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

This looks like a left-behind clue for a Caltech Ditch Day puzzle. The history is a bit much to explain, but suffice it to say that the seniors build these insanely elaborate puzzles for the underclassmen to solve. Making someone drive out to Joshua Tree to collect a cryptic treasure map wouldn't be out of the question.

Ditch day is tomorrow, frosh!
posted by xil at 10:23 AM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

I'm with xil. I don't know about CDD, but it seems like part of a scavenger hunt/riddle game, though damn that seems like a hard clue to find/decipher.

The music is OK. The songs are showing up on Last.fm's ??? page. It doesn't sound much like punk/jazz fusion though I could be wrong ...
posted by mrgrimm at 10:28 AM on November 24, 2009

"When you have lost yourself in the wasteland of unending nothingness, the Night Things will come."
posted by mrgrimm at 10:35 AM on November 24, 2009

If you're going to make up a story involving a 5-1/4 inch floppy disk, you've got to at least make the fake email address [e-mail], or something similarly dated.

holy sheet Aol. is SO BACK!
posted by humannaire at 10:39 AM on November 24, 2009

I was hoping it was The Shaggs.
posted by chocolatetiara at 11:37 AM on November 24, 2009

So, if we find the treasure, DARPA sends us a $1 million check?
posted by mccarty.tim at 11:37 AM on November 24, 2009

It might be Shlohmo. I listened to the Shloh-Fi EP afterward, and it's awfully similar...
posted by mrgrimm at 11:42 AM on November 24, 2009

Am I missing something, or would a cd encased in a black plastic disk enclosure and a baggie, in the joshua tree desert at any hikeworthy time of year, be plastic soup?

Joshua Tree is only mid-100s with a record of 118F in the summertime: cooler than your average car interior at 80F. Its the desert, man, not the sun.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:42 AM on November 24, 2009

Am I missing something, or would a cd encased in a black plastic disk enclosure and a baggie, in the joshua tree desert at any hikeworthy time of year, be plastic soup?

Well, the rock formations most people visit Joshua Tree for are mostly stacked boulders, with lots of cool, shady nooks and crannies. You can usually find some shade even in the hottest days of the year as long as your near them. I can imagine places where a CD would survive intact.

I hope this doesn't lead to other artists littering in our national parks to further their ambitions, though.
posted by Thoughtcrime at 11:58 AM on November 24, 2009

The insanity of the recording -- with one or two kind of pretty moments -- mirrored the obsessively constructed feel of the package. I didn't know if I was listening to the work of a mad genius or a deranged psychopath. The sounds are a combination of heavily processed human voices and schizophrenic space music.

H.P. Lovecraft called, he wants his prose stylings back.
posted by gimonca at 12:09 PM on November 24, 2009 [3 favorites]

That last song would fit right in the batch my friend and I recorded on my parent's front porch back in the day. Cool.
posted by mannequito at 12:13 PM on November 24, 2009

I wanna leave huge slightly unsettling scupltures in obscure places in national parks. Just strange enough to make you pause, with all kinds of obscure references and symbols. I would do this and then tell no one about it. I call it Project Fuck With Future Archeologists.
posted by The Whelk at 12:13 PM on November 24, 2009

The music is reasonably interesting. I mean, I managed to listen to all the tracks, which is a hell of a lot more than I usually do with free music. Regardless, it seems to be a major coup for the anonymous artist to have been found and posted on Beware Of The Blog. Anonymity is what has propelled the music into international exposure. If the disc had been well annotated with contact info pointing to some guy's bedroom studio in Kearny Mesa, would anybody have even bothered to give it a listen? Well played, mystery musician.
posted by 2N2222 at 1:30 PM on November 24, 2009

Great, now people know about my favorite album that was so obscure that only one copy was ever made and hidden in the desert. There goes my street cred, thanks a lot Metafilter.
posted by jefeweiss at 1:34 PM on November 24, 2009 [14 favorites]

I lost interest when I figured out there is no Gram Parsons tie-in.
posted by Danf at 1:45 PM on November 24, 2009

Since noone has mentioned this yet, just the most superficial examination reveals the following:

1) The tracks have number and "of" tags, suggesting twelve tracks with #9 missing (the ninth track on the site, "Gloomsday", identifies itself as track #10).

2) The 12th track (11th as listed) identifies the band as "Musky Taint" and the album as "Tres Mellow", from 2006. It also identifies the artists as "Evan: tremelo, Ilya: Delay, Dan: bass, Ken: Drums". A quick Google search for various combinations of those turns up nothing very promising.

3) Several of the tracks have iTunes gain info, and the 11th track (10th as listed) mentions the encoding software as iTunes v7.3.2.

TFA doesn't mention whether the original disc contained CD audio or MP3s, so points #2 and #3 could just reflect the ripping software used (he mentions using iTunes to try to id the disc). However, iTunes tends to somewhat aggressively insist that you update it, with v7 dating from 2007, so most likely TFA's author did not recently encode this on his own machine (though certainly not impossible).

Overall, for those of you mocking this... Hey, just a good mystery, nothing wrong with that. Don't like it? Don't play along. If nothing else, as egypturnash mentioned, track #8 "The Seventh (Clubbed) Seal" doesn't suck.
posted by pla at 1:47 PM on November 24, 2009 [6 favorites]

He realized that they could never destroy Víðarr, but there was a possibility, a slim one, that they could create an art project so perfect, so ironic, they could trap Víðarr for eternity.

It really is Ghostbusters 2 this time, isn't it.
posted by kid ichorous at 2:04 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

@pla

"Musky Taint" and the album as "Tres Mellow"

This came up
posted by yoyo_nyc at 2:06 PM on November 24, 2009

yoyo_nyc: "@pla

"Musky Taint" and the album as "Tres Mellow"

This came up"

See the name at the top of that page? Swan Fungus. Where have I seen that before, that's an odd name. Oh yeah ... This cd was mysteriously discovered and posted by one swan fungus to WFMU.
posted by jefeweiss at 2:11 PM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

Well, some viral marketing.

The other songs sound the same:
http://www.swanfungus.com/2006/06/sniff-this-musky-taint-for-free-mp3s.html

Here I can somehow not download the mp3 but it works here:

http://www.searchsounds.net/modules/GeneratePlayList?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.swanfungus.com%2Fmusky%2Fmp3s%2F5ttsw.mp3
posted by yoyo_nyc at 2:18 PM on November 24, 2009

yoyo_nyc : This came up

Ah, good catch! So, "Swan Fungus" posted that to the FMU blog, and Swan Fungus' personal website has a relevant post from December of 2006 (how auspicious).

I think you've solved the mystery here.

Unfortunately, the track mentioned on that page, "Qygmalion", has a broken link. Pity, because I expect it would either prove identical to one of the listed ones, or fit in as the missing 9th track.
posted by pla at 2:18 PM on November 24, 2009

yoyo_nyc : Here I can somehow not download the mp3 but it works here

Ah, thanks... Tweaking the URL contained therein, I managed to get Qygmalian to download (20MB).

And... also known as Matthew 24:14. Dingdingding, we have a winner.
posted by pla at 2:30 PM on November 24, 2009

I kinda like the tracks. Interesting...
posted by Hairy Lobster at 2:51 PM on November 24, 2009

Well done, kids. Somehow my 12 track wasn't labeled with "Musky Taint" or "Tres Mellow" but the answer certainly makes sense...
posted by mrgrimm at 2:58 PM on November 24, 2009

self-link. Can we have him banned?
posted by philip-random at 3:49 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Self-link is a serious charge to be leveled at the accused. While the "found" CD is most definitely a creation of Swan Fungus and the entire thing is a hoax, it is not clear that gcbv is Swan Fungus. WMFU is a good station regardless.
posted by geoff. at 4:17 PM on November 24, 2009

I am not Swan Fungus, at all.
posted by gcbv at 6:05 PM on November 24, 2009

self-link. Can we have him banned?

All apologies to gcbv. No Fungus relation intended.
posted by philip-random at 6:25 PM on November 24, 2009

I wish I had read this whole thread now before posting about this on my blog. @#%@% SELF POSTERS!
posted by Bageena at 7:30 PM on November 24, 2009

Great, now people know about my favorite album that was so obscure that only one copy was ever made and hidden in the desert.

I have the early demos of it. You're way behind.
posted by krinklyfig at 7:57 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Quote: holy sheet Aol. is SO BACK!



That is just wrong, on many levels. It's like bringing back the mullet.


.
posted by ~Sushma~ at 9:29 PM on November 24, 2009

Sometime near 1980 when I was around 17, I was scuba diving in a kelp bed off Santa Catalina Island in Southern California and found an unlabeled white cassette tape in about 40 feet of water. The tape had a little marine growth on it. Maybe it had been in the water a few months.

I took it home, soaked it in fresh water, took the tape of its housing and placed it in the bottom half of a new cassette housing, let it dry for a few days, then attached the top half of the housing.

I wondered what would be on the tape. I hoped it was some nefarious conversation that some boater had tossed overboard to never be found again.

I placed it in the cassette player, hoping to be surprised. The sound was murky, but it was clearly barbershop quartet music. I fast-forwarded through it too see if anything else was on the tape. It was all barbershop quartet music.

I suppose the person who threw it overboard just didn't like barbershop quartet music.
posted by ShooBoo at 9:44 PM on November 24, 2009 [54 favorites]

Somewhere there's a pissed-off octopus looking for his goddamn barbershop mix.
posted by crapmatic at 1:45 AM on November 25, 2009 [37 favorites]

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: You don't know?!
posted by shakespeherian at 7:38 AM on November 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Lightbulbs? We tape fireflies to our PBR hats with duct tape and can see just as well as YOU.
posted by pyramid termite at 8:29 AM on November 25, 2009

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: All of them. One to screw in the lightbulb, while the rest brag to each other about how they were changing lightbulbs before it was cool.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 10:17 AM on November 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

They don't need lights. Macbooks have backlit keyboards.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:44 AM on November 25, 2009 [5 favorites]

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Oh, are those the new light bulbs? I liked the old ones better.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 1:32 PM on November 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

I have the answer on vinyl.
posted by ichthuz at 5:06 PM on November 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: an obscure number you've never heard of.
posted by meadowlark lime at 7:22 PM on November 25, 2009 [7 favorites]

When I was twelve, I found a CD copy of Bad Brains' first album lying in the gutter down the block from my house one day when I was walking home from school. The case was covered with mud, but the cd inside was still untouched.

There are probably about three moments in my childhood that changed my life, moments about which I can honestly say that if you went back in time and removed them, I would be a completely different person today. Of those three moments, finding that Bad Brains CD was probably the only one that was unreservedly positive.
posted by koeselitz at 9:18 PM on November 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

how many hipsters does it take to tell a light bulb joke?

seven so far ...



... or ummm ... eight.
posted by philip-random at 11:27 PM on November 25, 2009

I have an old CD, you see this CD will be in stores. The only way I could get my old CD in stores is if I would take one in there and leave it. They'd say, "Sir, you forgot this." No I did not. That is for sale! Please alphabetize it.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:08 AM on November 26, 2009

My favorite thing about this is that the guy posted it himself to the WFMU blog. I'd like to imagine (though I should probably trust to the laziness of people that it can't be) that the dude actually went to the trouble of wrapping all the stuff up, putting in the map, sticking the CD in the disc case, and sticking it out at Joshua Tree and then left it there for a year, anxiously waiting and googling "Joshua Tree CD" and "A SILVERY FEMALE VOICE" for the moment when somebody would find it and post it to the internet - only to realize that was never gonna happen, and to have to go back out and "discover" it himself.
posted by koeselitz at 12:13 AM on November 26, 2009 [4 favorites]

It's been almost a week since I posted this CDr to the WFMU blog, and since then I have been ransacked by e-mails and comments crying "hoax" or "bubble boy," from everyone from random passers-by to the higher-ups at WFMU. Rather than address all the theories being espoused by readers from around the globe, I simply want to aver that this is indeed a true story, and is in no way meant to be a self-promotion tactic. Any alterations to the WFMU blog entry post-publication -- or my own personal blog -- were done in an attempt to quell the uprising of cynics. Had I known that my actions would only add fuel to the fire, I would have simply let things stand as they were. Clearly I've learned a valuable lesson in controversy control."

That's the best he could come up with?
posted by zamboni at 11:13 AM on December 1, 2009

So "aver" means "deny"? Learn some new every day.
posted by Theta States at 11:29 AM on December 1, 2009