On april fools day 2001, me and carly ptak bought a building in West Baltimore and moved in from Chicago. We had been running an antique/junk store in the wicker park neighborhood and lived cramped in the back working really hard to save as much money as we could. Our plan was to save a ton of cash and buy a building so we could focus on our other interest; music, art, experimental/garbage architecture and hosting touring experimental music acts. So we did that, it was a great moment in our life we were now living in a dream. And the the future was wide open. The top two floors of the building had been abandoned since the 1970's, and were condemned, abandoned by the previous owners. So when we bought the building it was just for the 1600sq foot bottom floor which had previously been a doctors office. The first thing we did was bust down a wall to get up to the stair case that lead to 2 other floors. While we were technically squatters for those upper 2 floors, we never tried to make a big deal out of it, you know loose lips sink ships. And why not, we were making good use of a neglected resource and putting it to work for the culture of humanity.
So we jumped power from the first floor circuit breaker to the second floor and started getting to work. Besides not having heat and living in a perpetual rehab it was our own paradise. Bathing in a hand washing sink, cooking off hotplates. We started hosting shows on the 3rd floor, set up screen printing, built a recording studio, started a record label, had tons of room (5,000+ sq ft!) to do what we wanted. Being on a commercial street, we had no neighbors and could be as loud as we wanted. We set out to become a cultural hub, and things eventually solidified. Amazing people from across America would come and live with us for a few months then some would eventually stay around in the hood. Peter Blasser, Caleb Johnston came and bought buildings a few blocks away, collecting even more people and a vibrant interesting community was birthed in the half abandoned west side.
Then things started to change for me at the end of 2004, and here is where it gets complicated. Many years before me and Carly moved to Chicago, I had my first experience into the mechanics of time travel. It was my first 'breakthrough' to the other side, having consciousness beyond space and time and upon returning into my human organism, I witnessed many futures. And this was the best one I saw. So this vision fueled me to focus sharply and make the dream into a solid reality. It was hard work, but it all worked out, here I was living it, yet at this point I was somehow completely unconscious to this fact. I got a slight peek at this when I looked at a calendar and I had been on tour longer than I had been at home for a couple years. Then the next tour was the same as the last, they started to superimpose on each other. I started to get a little more freaked out. On the last tour, I started having very intense unexpected moments of transpersonal awareness; I once took a step away from my body and stood 3 feet behind it, watching it carry on with a conversation and pack up gear, when I would walk back into my body I would become confused and disoriented, until I stepped back out............everything splits back into two bodies and a calmness would wash over. At times I would look at pictures and they would fall off the wall. At the end of that Nautical Almanac tour I was pretty gone, I was alternating between being super stuck in my body then having these uncontrolled glimpses into higher worlds.
A few days when I got home, I was up on the third floor recording music. I wired a AM radio to a tape player, set the tape player on record and pushed down the pause button. I got in a heavy trance and started flipping to random channels occasionally lifting up the pause button. When the tape ended, I played it back and it was pure divination, a bizarre fractured language scrambled me even more out. It was voices from the other side telling me of death and rebirth. As I was listening to this going even deeper into a trance staring at this hole in the floor. I had been living with this somewhat large hole for years and now I see a small petrified face staring at me! I flip out grab a lighter and crawl on the floor to the hole. Flicking it I see what looks like a dead cat. What the hell is that!? I go and grab a hammer and start ripping up the floorboards. I uncover a mummified cat with a bunch of smaller dead babies, they look they have been there for years but no one noticed them all this time? Is this one of our cats? I dont know. I get a feeling of intense de ja vu, something about this is very important and it seems as if I should know the answer but it is beyond my grasp. That night during my sleep I have a nightmare of a firestorm that swallows me up and burns me to a crisp. The next night I wake up mid sleep terrified and unable to move, there is a phantom floating above me.
Up to this point (12 years) carly and I maintained a non-monagamus relationship, while no ones relationships is perfect, this was becoming too much of a strain on ours. carly was also seeing max who was also playing in our band and who had recently moved to baltimore. Our life felt closed off repeating in an endless loop heading in a downward descent, but I still refused to see it. So I started to unconsciously behave in self destructive ways.
A door opened at the end of that year, wolf eyes were going on tour with sonic youth and I was going. I great chance to tour and NOT have to play music.Plus wolf eyes and sonic are some of the funnest inspiring people to be around. I would just work hard on tour and get away from it all. It was a banananas of a time. Epic times. So during the tour a joking plan was hatched, to hang with michigan humor, you think of the utter most boneheaded thing you can think of and then pushing it like it was gold. In seattle, we stop for their (first) meeting w sub-pop and sit in a conference room with them and the air of "are these guys fucking with us?" was shared between two groupings.
So folks an anti-noise music parents group would be formed and protest the rise of of this under appreciated music form, blacklight bait and switch. What would be the dumbest name? Mothers Against Noise. or M.A.N. for short. john olson mentioned it in an interview in the detroit free press, and then we all forgot about the dumb joke. Little did I know it sat for a year waiting to lurch and sink its claws into my brain.
When I got home, I got the post-tour depression rough. It happens everyone gets it, its ok. But then all of a sudden I am getting these same very intense dreams of the firestorm and now its grown to the cosmos exploding, worlds burning, flaming cubes and the chain of life and death.
The next night I go out to a show in town, I am drinking I and smoking and I am a wreck. Chiara shows up from philadelphia and tells me I look awful and that she had an intense dream that I was swallowed up by a flaming storm. This just rocks me and I fall into a trance, she goes and asks me if I am happy with my life and my outer shell cracks. I try to say I am, but it doesn't work. I realize that even though I am living my life on what I thought was my own terms, it was a lie. I am shattered. The only way out of this is to cut it all out. The next day I tell carly I am not in love with her anymore, the love is gone.
A week later I awaken paralyzed and Steev Mike is standing over me, one hand is black one is white, offering me a puzzle. A labyrinth and joke.
This puzzle is my mind, the wager: my sanity.
I question it for days.
I am in the shower and I look down at this skin rash that I have had for years that would not go away, I am at the end of my rope.
I asked god to heal me.
It disappeared overnight.
I was ready. I accepted earthly the challenge.
I gain clarity and knowing I was living in time tape loop, and I had seen my future and lived it. Mission accomplished. Now I must set out to deconstructing my mind until I attained a new vision. I now knew that all is perfection in the eyes of god.
" I was a mess, I knew I was blind, but could not see "
Paranoia, obsession, self doubt, not sleeping, all came over me and swooped me away. Months upon months went by, it was rough, then I found the key that would finally come in and take me away. Mothers.Against.Noise. The perfect weapon against everything I had and did,
And so it goes like this:
Its a hoax called Mothers Against Noise. This was a media experiment to push noise music more to the front of underground culture, I was creating an opposing force to something that had fringe cultural appeal. I dug up a bunch of 80's christian anti rock books and modeled a new version with outrageous claims that noise music was an upcoming illuminati plot to steal peoples souls, of course. Then I put radiohead on the list next to a bunch of noise bands and noise rock bands, different genres for the record snobs. Full of misspelled words, fractured grammar a real american point of view.
When I first made the website it was on a free geocities account and a group. Aaron dilloway posted it on a noise message board and it took off like wild fire. I invented a group of european NOIZE people, who would say they saw it and thought it was real and bought the domain main. Eventually contacting me pretending to be concerned mothers. A double double ruse! So "they" mirrored the original site. They were planning on using the web site to promote, a cdr comp with a bunch of bands that did not exist.
Now its swallowing my life up. I was getting 100's of emails a day people yelling at this organization. found here http://mothersagainstnoise.blogspot.com/. Double tricks of mirrored sites both claiming that the other is an imposter and tricking people as an ongoing plan of a secret cabal of mind control artists who are using magic to hypnotize people. Some of this groundwork had been worked out by the Louise Harland Corporation, and the Steev Mike concept. I fed the Spin magazine guy that information and they ran a blip as Andrew WK was the responsible party.
At this point I asked a handful of writers to help with it Adam Boysen wrote most of the funniest descriptions of bands, the john cage really got a lot of academic types panties in a knot. There was alot of funny things happening when people really tried to figure out if M.A.N. was a legit group or not: We registered the domain with the address of Universal Music. So those who real snoopy would do a who is search and then type the address into google and think it was a viral marketing from them. So at one point the TV show Wife Swap tried to get the supposed M.A.N.organization to be on the show, tons of people calling for radio interviews. More hate mail.
Ok next level.
I sent out an update on the M.A.N. website saying that they were going to protest the No Fun Fest in NYC. I was playing solo this year, and everything wad working out smoothly, it was going to be the deciding factor to the groups legit status. If I can pull this off I know I win, this is the point of transformation. I start to hire actors for the protest, then it started falling apart, bad. I slowly realized that this was not the way to go. So Carly records a hypnotic statement fror M.A.N. and we send it to the festival. Thats the best we got.
We arrive unload and start hanging out, some one hands me a cell phone,
"Twig this is Caleb, Tarantula Hill is on fire"
"Ha ha funny."
"No I am serious"
"Ok you got me, ha ha if this is joke........."
"Tarantula Hill is on fire"
My heart stopped and here is my dream. Its also a nightmare, but I have been set free.
When I played my set that night the cd carly recorded was played before my set the words disappeared and reassembled and spoke of what had just happened. The energy of the sold out fest is charged beyond belief. When I started to play I struggled and the music was caught in it self, halfway into it I lifted back and opened up, I shot out of my body and disappeared into the void, re-entering a completely new at the end of the set.
So we get home a day later and look at what went down. How should we, should we rebuild? is it even possible? we had no insurance? are best friends the cats are all dead? and of course the one question, that was standing up screaming yet invisible in the past.
WHO DID IT?
A curious cat and a light fixture?
"sounds simple enough when people ask."
Federal Agents / The Secret Government ?
"That morning when Caleb went into Tarantula Hill to use the computer he noticed that every single light was on in the building, and every door was open"
"What? really? That is completely strange"
"Yes"
Universal Records?
" Dont mess with these big record companies, they play dirty tricks"
A psychotic Andrew WK fans?
" I figured out Steev Mike, its a joke played by Twig Harper that fucker"
Mothers Against Noise ?
"If it was M.A.N. that means Twig probally set a timer trigger device next to a bunch of burnable stuff, turned on all the lights, just to further a conspiracy that he putting him self into"
"Well if he did that then is reading this like some kinda magic or somthing? Because thats what happening again. When I read this"
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