D.F.S.celebrates 30th anniversary (1989-2019)

I decided I would revisit and re-release for the first time on CDr since the original cassette-only release in 1989, D.F.S.' first official album - "Dialectically Impotent Thanks To Dogged For Sympathy", as well as offering a "commentary track" (in written format for this post" to commemorate 30 official years of D.F.S., my first solo musical venture after a couple of years fo playing around with bands.


THE EARLY YEARS (pre-D.F.S.)


In 1987 I was one of the three founding members of a high school band which we called Voice In The Attic, for Chris' drum set and Martin's bass were located in the attic of Martin's parents' home on the South shore of Montréal.


We all came from different backgrounds and all had different musical tastes but wanted to play in a band so we decided "what the heck" and just had fun. I think our set was 6 to 8 songs which included a cover of Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead", the only song in which Martin would sing lead and I would do nothing at all. The line-up for 1987-1988 was as follows:
Christoph Evalek (Christian Robitaille): drums and lead vocals
Martin Belzile: bass, background vocals, lead vocals on "Bela Lugosi's Dead"
Alex Wheill: synthesizer


We did a gig at a youth center for mainly Young hardcore punks, so after our set we just improvised thrash stuff real fast to allow them to thrash amongst themselves.


Sometime in 1988 Chris recruted a real female singer who was new to our high school that year, and she took over lead vocals for a few practices and one mini-concert at our high school.


After that Chris and I went our seperate ways; he sold his drums and bought a synthesizer, as did I, and we started doing synth-pop flavored songs as we tried to get into the Skinny Puppy-Front 242-Frontline Assembly sound. Our first tape, the 90-minute long "Do You Love?" served as a double album which included all sorts of tracks both from our Voice In The Attic days, to slow ballads (sic), to complete ridiculous nonesensical jokes ("We Are The Popcorn" was a particular standout).


It was on our second "album" that we started having a "crunchier" sound, closer to what I wanted with the project, and what I also thought was Chris' prefered direction at the time... or so I thought. I forget the name of that tape, but it was also at the time we attempted to record a proper demo tape on a four-track using Chris's friends' equipment and studio, which led to a horrible sounding demo where some of our tracks lost their unique flavor. He would sometimes leave his bulky synth at my place back then as well as our "Sequential Drumstracks" drum-machine which tended to overheat during prolonged power up. It was during this time that I started doodling and noodling around as a "solo" project whenever I had time and Chris was busy doing stuff elsewhere.


I started working on the first D.F.S. pièces during mid-late 1988 simultaneously as we were working on another "album" on tape which was to be called "God's Dilemna". Chris became less available, perhaps more interesting in spending time with his lady friends in intimate scenarios, and his interest in our "aggro-dust-industrial" sound was being replaced with that of 70s-80s prog-rock. We did do a few house basement shows and at least one high-school mini show as "Tome IV" (the band name we had agreed upon when leaving "Voice In The Attic"), and I did find a copy of an old 1/4inch tape of one of those shows somewhere in my huge cassette stash. I would like to digitalize it because it is the only real Tome IV recording I actually have: Chris kept all our Tome IV original tapes.


D.F.S. : The beginnings


I will need to get back to Chris for around 1990 or so he conned me into playing a concert meant to promote him, using money he owed me as hostage. He'd take both new songs, covers, and even Tome IV tracks he would translate into french lyrics, because singing in french was becoming a big thing back then, apparently. Anyway, it was a horrible experience. So back to D.F.S.


I started working on what would be D.F.S. in 1988, first by trying out an improvised industrial-flavored song which would turn into "Dementia (Glass Shadows)" later on. I know there are a few takes including the intrumental version somewhere, but again I need to sit through a ton of old tapes.


"Messe Noire", "Cipher", "Calm On Valium"
The first three track from what would later become the "Dialectically Impotent Thanks To Dogged For Symptahy" were used using Chris's "Juno-something" synthesizer with it's onboard 16-step sequencer, the over-heating "Sequential Circuits" drum machine, a small Casio sampler (the one everyone had in the 80s and early 90s), and a tape machine. All three tracks were essentially recorded live direct to the cassette master, except for background tapes which would play underneath as I would play the songs. All three pièces were essentially improvised on the spot, usually just practiced one or two times before hitting the record button. They weren't supposed to be any "good" as these were essentially primitive ideas never meant to overshadow the Tome IV material which was still, at the time, the main project.


"Messe Noire" was sung in french, as I had written some lyrics which I felt weren't relevant to the Tome IV material but also were maybe too "personnal to be sung by someone else. It was originally meant to be "re-recorded" with a secondary track, a technique Chris and I were using extensively on the Tome IV material, which basically consisted of recording the track on a cassette, then taking that cassette and playing it back on another tape player which was plugged in our mixer which our gear and microphone, and recorded onto another cassette while we would play and sing along with the pre-recorded tape, hence the two-track technique. This was also why I used to call the pre-Wreck Age label "Half-Trak" because we couldn't even afford a 4-track recorder. I remember experimenting above the two-tracks, but any additional tracking meant the sound quality would become unbearable to listen to.


"Cipher" was a product of attempting to re-create the result of "Messe Noire" but with a different song "texture" of sorts. It was recorded in exactly the same manner and also on the same day, also using background tapes which were put together in quite a haste, to be honest. The lyrics are both in french and English, which felt normal to me at the time since I was quite fluent in both and I had just been exposed to The Young Gods, so maybe that could have been an inspiration. the out-of tuned chord "hits" were made on purpose as I wanted these to be "noisy" and not melodic at all, but I had some limitations in terms of useable sounds, and like "Messe Noire", "Cipher" was supposed to have the second track treatment.


"Calm On Valium" was a little melodic instrumental which may have been inspired by the softer stuff I was into at the time, like the Legendary Pink Dots or something. I don't recall exactly why I did this piece - maybe I wanted something softer to follow up the two previous "crunchier" tracks. The main melody was played on that Casio mini sampler which was not quite tuned to the keyboard, as is an actual sample of my voice if memory serves me right. It always was a little out of place when looking back upon it, but this was also done during the Tome IV days where were would sometimes do these "softer" almost ballad-like pièces to balance out the rest of the tracks. Ah those glorious days of feeling tht we had to adhere to a specific format!


I recall that after "Calm On Valium" I had recorded more material on that tape, including stuff with my long time friend Dave (who was never a musician in any capacity) but I had deemed those pièces way too horrid to remain, so I proceeded to record over the rest of the tape (!!!) with the remaining D.F.S. material which would round up the first album.


D.F.S. : It's on now!

"Apollonius" was recorded in 1989 using the two-track method, and was one of the very first official D.F.S. pièces "officially" crafted under the name D.F.S., as by this time I knew I was on this project in an official capacity, the strained relationship with Chris becoming worse with every meeting )meaning of course that Tome IV was on the verge of being no more, or was very freshly broken-up).


"Premium Fighter" starts off with some kind of fade-in like effect which was provided by the original tape being damaged and phasing into itself before settling at the proper volume. This was the first time I used the "26" sound on my Akai synth, and far from the last. Two sounds on my Akai synth are my "go to" sounds whenever I work on a bass line and a pad melody/accompaniement: "75" for the bass as it is this side's near perfect sequenced electronic bass sound (not used on this track) and "26" for those ethereal pad-like dreamy chords. Like "Apollonius", the sequenced bass was played using the live arpegiator function on the Akai synth. "Premium Fighter" was meant to compliment and continue where "Apollonius" left off, which was more song-oriented structure rather than pure aggro-dust-industrial.


"Dementia (Glass Shadows)" was the first real D.F.S. track ever, recorded before "Messe Noise" and "Cipher", but using that two-track method, recorded in 1988. This was the best cut/version of the piece and served principally as a grounded root of what D.F.S. was supposed to be, originally. I always was my favorite of this first album and always was what I was trying to copy or improve upon with the rest of the tracks, without attempting to over-carbon-copy it. It was recorded using Chris's synthesizer and 8-step sequencer, as well as that infernal over-heating drum machine.


"Faces In The Water" was another one of those LPD (Legendary Pink Dots) inspired "slow" pièces, originally meant to give the listener a "break" of sorts after the rather exhaustive beat sequences of the previous three songs. Chris and I had done a few similarly themed pièces as Tome IV ("Blue Water" was one piece I had written in 1988 for Tome IV) and I thought I could pull it off myself as well. It has it's naive charm in a way, sort of like trying out a different speed on your new bike. D.F.S. was still a new baby project back then so I allowed myself a few stylistic experiments with a varying degree of results. In the end it is far from a stand-out piece from the album, but serves it's purpouse nonetheless. It was recorded in 1989.


"The Multi-Station" was originally meant to wake the listener up from the coma induced by the previous piece, and again it is a hit or miss scenario of a piece, which I recall was put together quite quickly without much thought put into it. It was meant principally to re-shift the album back into a proper rhythm, but it was not done so without a clear idea which lead to this being a rather forgettable track. "The Multi-Station" was an excuse to use both my newly bought Akai AX-60 synthesizer as well as a beat pattern I had been toying on for a while. I also wanted to do a double-vocal thing which did not turn out as well as would have thought, but at least it was done and recorded in all it's embarassing glory! The use of a flute (recorder) doing a cacaphonous non-melody which bringes the main singing verses into the drum pattern changes was a conscious decision to not actually play the flute(recorder) in any real musical capacity, something I remember having seen done live and wanted to try out for myself, since I was so limited in my musical instruments.  Interesting to note however that a few albums later (1991's "Mind Altering Substance") some elements of this track would seep into that of the piece "Station 108", and I can see it now with 30 years of being removed from these recordings, but I had never seen the link before. This song also was recorded in 1989


There was not a whole lot of tape left on the cassette and so it came time to finish it off. I had heard a few beat-less more ambient-like experiments on albums by Frontline Assembly (pre-Delirium) and Skinny Puppy, and so decided that that was the way to go to finish off my album. "Forecast 1" was originally meant to be the first in what I thought would be all ending pièces to my subsequent albums (so for my second album it would finish with "Forecast 2", "Forecast 3" for the third, etc.), but as fate would chance it, it would remain, to this day, the only "forecast" in the Wreck Age catalogue! It was also my first accidental brush with minimalism but I felt it could work (I did always had the option to come up with something else and record over it if I did not like it) - using background tapes obviously culled from a VHS of John Carpenter's "Prince Of Darness", which I felt had a lot of potential as background narrative and spoken word, not to mention that awesome "dream from the future" series of sequences. I would then play very minimal chords on my Akai just to augment and compliments the background tapes, and the whole piece was essentially recorded live as a semi-improvided bit. Perhaps it would have fit better with the then yet unexistant ARCHangel project, and was the last piece recorded in 1989 before the purchase on my Mirage sampler and Korg SQD-1 sequencer later that year.

"Dialectically Impotent Thanks To Dogged For Sympathy" is not a great album and for a while I was ashamed of it. It did not have a decent sampler, and was more "tape"-based than sample-triggered. There was severe limitations with effects as I did not have any pedal effects, nor did I have a proper sequencer which meant the pieced were basically held up by the drum machine patterns and the chords played on the arpegiator off the Akai meanst to emulate that sequenced bass all aggro-dust stuff at the time was "supposed" to have. I remember once summer/autumn going to my dead end student job back in those days which I was recording this album at home that I was basically doing it to make music for myself, to make music that I wanted to listen to, as too much music back then (long before the days of networking and the internet) was just very dissapointing to me: industrial aggro was becoming fluffier and underground music as it stood was becoming more commercial, less aggressive.


In 2017, it was the 30th anniversary of my very first song, "To Be A Machine", originally recorded with Voice In The Attic in 1987 and then re-used and re-adapted continuously by Tome IV, become a staple of sorts in our sets and whatnot, leading it to not being re-done by myself as a solo artist. I had planned to do a 2017 re-visiting of the piece but every attempt I made made it sound either kitchy, or a cheap re-hashing of something I had already done numerous times in the past, so the idea was scrapped after a few attempts. When 2019 reared it,s ugly head, I recalled two things: this was the year of Blade Runner, and it was 30 years since my first "official" release as both a solo artist, and as D.F.S., a project which would last all those years. including two lost albums ("Phase 2: Recloned" originally meant for a 1999 release but original sound data discs were lost, and "Threat To The Human Race", which suffered a similar fate when band members Simon Sinistar and Atmospheh-rhycxx decided to pursue other ventures), a few shows, some mild soundtrack appearances, and a lot of démos and tests in the piles and piles of audio cassettes in my posession.


30 years later and I am still working on D.F.S. material, although the sound has shifted and mutated quite a bit since it's original incarnation.


Looking for additional material from the era has left me stumped. I wanted to add some more goodies to the digitalization of "Dialectically Impotent Thanks To..." but I seem to be left short in terms of material that old. On the week of January 21st (or so) 2019 I unearthed another box filled with old cassette goodies and I am in the process of goinf through them to find out what little niblets lie within. So far nothing as old as the first D.F.S. release, save for a live set of Töme IV we did in someone's basement one night, and a half erased track from what was to be our third of fourth cassette "album". So far as I continue to dive deeper in the "@nal5" of analogue memories I have yet to unearth anything of the era which would be proper bonus material or such for the re-release.


I did find however a lot of demos and out-takes, trials and unfinished ideas ranging between the "Sick" days ("Sick" and "Sick 2nd Edition" were the second album by D.F.S., both master tapes stolen decades ago making these "lost" albums) up until the "Threat To The Human Race" days (another lost album, this one from 2000-2001-2002 or so). I also found a completelly unmarked tape which sounds both familiar and completelly alien, which be the infamous lost A.K.A.inc. E.P. entitled "The A, B, C's Of Noise" which was out first and only real multi-track studio experiments from early 1993 or so, but since the music/noise sounds unlike anything I can identify, it could also be something else entirely. Anyway do stay tuned!
UPDATE:
Sadly, as I am continuing to unearth and re-listen to old cassettes from the archives, I am still not finding any material dating back from the "Dialectically Impotent Thanks To..." era. The oldest I found so far (as of Febuary 12 2019) was a track called "The Military Complex", which was obviously recorded in and around the 1989 era, but was actually used as a song for the second D.F.S. album "Sick" - this track was probably recorded right after "Dialectically Impotent Thanks To..." just before the aquisition of the Mirage DSK sampler and the Korg SQD-1 sequencer, and was therefore used for "Sick" even though it has all the failings and primitive-ness of the first album.

ReCyClor: The (un)rise and fall of a doomed project

What was ReCyClor? It was a project which was essentially Frank Zen and myself, Lx Wheill, and it was an on-and-off musical venture which began anywhere between 1997 or 1999 and was officially laid to rest by myself in febuary 2017. If you want to know my side of the story, please read on, as for the first time I am going public in "dishing out the dirt" as to what happened, my view/interpretation of what was happening, and why I decided to drop ReCyClor and Frank in the process. Be warned, this is not an easy read and is meant more as a personnal therapy rather than an official account of the facts, as "facts" as we know them are always tainted and interpreted by the one recounting these "facts"


ReCyClor: A brief history lesson (yawn!)


It all started when Frank Zen contacted me in the late 90s via my Wreck Age postal address, asking to purchase the entire catalogu up to that point. Since no one had ever actually purchased that much in one shot, and even less the complete catalogue, I decided to drop them off in person to save on shipping costs and the meet the guy, seeing as how we both lived in the greater 514 metropolitan area.


Back in those days we also decided to start a music review DIY magazine and we would be getting quite a bit of harsh noise material to review, and that quickly became quite redundant. We were both somewhat fond of noise and were very appreciative of the fact that people from around the globe would be sending us these tapes to review, but harsh noise started losing it's interest.


It was also during this time that Frank wanted to try to do some noise and "music", but did not have any experience, instruments, or background in music at all, so I would invite him over to my place to "jam" on my gear. While he would abuse my bass with a crap CD as pick, I would simultaneously process the experience using a few effects pedal into something more or less "dynamic" After a few more turns on my analogue 4-track portastudio, our first piece was hatched, baptized as "Master Bastard", which was to be included on an upcoming noise compilation.

The track was also treated to a "remix" of sorts by my friend Atmospheh-rhycxx who managed to mangle it some more into a "remix" of sorts, using the original live recording.


The name ReCyClor actually came shortly after our initial recording session, as we found out we were recycling other peoples' sounds and re-processing them and ajusting them in our own repurpousing manner. Seeing as how we were "musically conscious" enough to re-use sounds, we decided the name ReCyClor was very representative of our current motive.


I knew that ReCyClor could become something more than just a one-shot noise ordeal, so I started working on a massive 30 minute piece which would be a series of movements from noise to ambient textures, as well as playing around with recycled loops and sounds. Frank would then layer atop this half hour roller coaster ride monstrosity with some spoken work, as he had been written poems, verses, and other thoughts for many years. The first hickup came when his text for "The Sinking Process" could not be elongated nor recited in a manner which could be spaced out over the 30-minute piece, so elements from other texts were incorporated throughout, and the musical construction of the piece was also slightly modified to reflect this. Added in with some assistance and texturing by Atmospheh-rhycxx, and our very first "masterpiece" (ahem) was hatched. What was left to do was to record other material to fill out an album.

Frank and I jammed a few times recording basic tracks for what was to be re-worked in the future, and I started working on a track during spare time as well, but the process was long and tedious and nowhere near as productive as either of us wanted to. During this time, Frank managed to get some music and sampling programs for his laptop computer and started working on material himself, which would eventually lead to his Flesh For Frank and Minimal Frank projects, as well as the Baseline for other collaborative efforts.


It was also during this time that I have to admit that I had a serious drug and alcohol problem. I started feeling a bit like John Belushi: I would smoke dope to trip out, and that in turn led me to massive memory loss and incredible amounts of procrastinating, as well as great paranoia, and I would calm these sensations down with heavy duty cheap beer. I was somewhat of a wreck, and kept pushing back production on a number of things, so weeks turned to months, and months turn to years.


Finally came a day when I needed to dust off the old equipment to start work on a soundtrack, I discovered that my portastudio 4-track was not in functioning order anymore, and neither was my trusted old Mirage sampler. By this time digital technology had properly settled and there was no way to get the porta 4-track back in working order with a low cost that would not be more expensive than purchasing a new device. Anyway, all the original 4-track tapes were now useless, and therefore all the ReCyClor material recorded was lost.


That is of course until Frank pulled out some various cassettes he himself had been hiding and holding on to, and with these tapes I was able to make a makeshift debut album, about 15 years later. ReCyClor's official CDr debut entitled "The Sinking Process" featured the title piece, two versions of "Master Bastard", an instrumental shorter demo version of "The Sinking Process" which was called "The Dubbing Process" (a live jam Atmospheh-rhycxx and myself did in order to test how some parts of the song would end up sounding like), and a short jam piece with Frank Zen, which he called "Toasterized". Culled from second generation cassettes, this was a far cry from the original intended debut album, but seeing as how we had been sitting on this material since about 1999, I thought it was highly due to be unleashed as is to the general public. Check out the official release page here: https://www.discogs.com/ReCyClor-The-Sinking-Process/release/5827236


ReCyClor: The post-Y2K damnation


Frank was fast becoming a "something" of his own online, churning out quite a hefty amount of solo recordings (Minimal Frank, Flesh For Frank), as well as collaborating with other artists, so his plate was quite full. Around 2012 or 2013 I acquired a cell phone which had musical programs capabilities, and as I was toying around with them, I also saw the possibilities of using these freebie gadgets and applications differently than what they were originally designed for. So I started working on some stuff for myself (a D.F.S. comeback with again a new shift in style, soundtrack work as ARCHangel, etc), as well as some ReCyClor stuff. The idea was that I would record and give to Frank some basic, ray, simple stuff that he would add on to. Three albums were recorded and donated to Frank around 2013 and 2014 or so: One was more "ambient" or "noise" oriented, one was more "dark-dub" oriented, and then third was a mixture of both, incorporating rhythms to the basic raw sound sources.


(Of note, I had donated to Frank a 78 minute CD featuring 12 interlinked very low-fi dark ambient pièces for his practice; he in turn remangled them into two 56 minute long pièces each: the result was released on Wreck Age Recordings as the "Tectonic Plates" douoble CD album, Under the project name of Tectonic Plates. A little more détails can be found here: https://www.discogs.com/artist/3620794-Tectonic-Plates-2


I also began working on another album which would be much more quiet and very "spacey", to see if we could go into dark ambient territory. Simultaneously I had begun working on even more ReCyClor material in the form of short 1-2 minute pièces, for in those days, Frank was privy to numerous compilations out there in internet land which I wanted to get into. I thought it would be a great way to get the ReCyClor name across if we had a one-minute piece on as many 1-minute compilations out there as we could. So I basically recorded about 30 little 1-minute pièces using the same formulae as I had begun: doing a basic underlying track and then giving them to Frank for his finishing touches and laptop magic.


It was 2015 that the proverbial sh1t began to hit the fan. The company which produced the programs I was using on my cell phone to craft all the ReCyClor material decided to shut down without warning, essentially taking their "cloud" storage along with their sinking ship. To put it bluntly, all that ReCyClor stuff was now gone. I still had all the patterns and sequences stored in my phone, but all the sounds were no longer available; apparently the company thought that having their sounds only available through their cloud was a "good" idea. At this point I had only been able to transfer  / download the equivalent of the first two prototype albums for Frank to work on, but everything else was never layed down, and so were lost forever. The sounds themselves used in these ReCyClor tracks were the key to the whole process, and without the sounds and only the basic structures (which were done based on the sounds themselves), it was useless if not an impossible task to even attempt at recreating these pièces.


Depressed and frustrated, I started realizing that maybe our ReCyClor project was doomed from the start; from the troubles surrounding the first album, to these hickups and sabotage due to modern technology, I feared that ReCyClor was more of an unabtainable dream rather than a feasible reality.


ReCyClor: This Is The End (2017)


In early 2017 I decided to shut down the project. I recall weighing the factors of my decision back in the days was very difficult but seemed necessary. I apologize in advance in this will anger, frustrate, agitate or in any other way negatively impact anyone, but as I mentioned earlier on in this post, I decided to "dish out the dirt" in order to try to explain my decision.


Frank and myself were buddies, but as with all relationships, it had it's fair share of ups and downs. I would regularly visit him every friday evening for drinks and music appreciation, but over the years, things happened which would tarnish and taint our Relationship. First, I will admit I was a horrible friend to Frank. I would constantly try to push him out of his comfort zone through many means, at times very unethical and quite selfish on my part. I believed at the time that the only to get Frank into trying new things and approaching things Under a different light was to try to get him out of what he was well versed in, and what he was comfortable with. You see I had begun to think that he had reached a plateau with his music, and most of his "recent" musical offerings sounded very redundant to me, as though it was basically re-hashing the same stuff using the same methods. His pièces started to all sound the same to me, and I actually thought that I wanted him to "evolve" musically, or at least get out of the rut I thought he was in. I admit it was pretty selfish and sh1tty of me to both think so and act upon my thoughts, but I did.


Added to this was Frank's "obsessions". Basically he would go on at lengths about his celibacy and how it felt like a curse to him. Many of his rantings and "deeper" conversation points started and ended with this concept. This went on for a long time, a few years at least, until he discovered the joys of "Skyping", or how to get it virtually if you don't get it physically. His mood changed and he was envigorated (invigorated?) with a new energy, and how his discourse became that of having these new and unique expériences, as though his "curse" had been lifted. As much as his previous rantings on the subject were fruitless and quite repetitive, his new fascination with the now "curse lifted" aspect changed the shift of his rantings, but they also became almost his only subjects of discourse. Long gone were our discussions of music, both listened to, appreciated, and plans for our own. Now it was all abouot how he was finally catching up to the world and enjoying his numerous polyamorous online adventures thanks to a webcam and a microphone.


Intertwined in these were his lack of reaching out. He'd never actually call me to see if we would meet up, nor to confirm if all was OK with our weekly get-together. If I did not call him, he certainly would not, and we could go weeks, if not months without any news if I decided not to call him. This also began to smell like a one-way street, made more apparent when he would not keep in touch if anything would happen to him, such as his failing health for example. On more than one occasion (OK so I recall only two, but my memory is shot to hell, remember?), I would call him up after weeks of not getting any news from him, and find out he had had a medical condition that required hospitalization or such. He wouldn't keep me in the loop if serious life events happened and I had to find ouot about them by calling him up after weeks of him not giving any news at all.


The final straw, or at least the event which woke me up to Frank's real self and priorities was when he scored a girlfriend and she went through his stuff and found a stash of, ahem... "questionable" items in a bag. Most of these were mine and I had asked Frank to hold onto them as he had the space to store these and I was either just finishing a moving or just planning another one (there was an eviction situation somewhere in there), but some stuff was his. Essentially his girlfriend through a fit at Frank and demanded he get rid of them post-haste, and I had the choice of picking them up a day or two (or three) later, or it would all be going to the trash. Granted most of that stuff ended up in the trash when I went through it but the main point is that it not only showed the relationship of power within his relationship with his girlfriend (a subject I elaborated upon at great lengths on another blog elsewhere) but also how things would be from that point forth.


The main point of course was how this event showed Frank's real intentions and priorities, and I admit I feel quite the fool for not having seen it sooner. He never really cared about the music; it was most probably a diversion to keep him from being reminded of his then "curse". His priorities laid towards having an intimate Relationship with someone. His discourse was that of not having a Relationship, then shifted to that of newfound expériences, but it really never was about the music, for if it ever was, maybe he would have shown some form of interest throughout the years instead of me being the principal instigator of ReCyClor's output, something which was also reflected in our own "friendship", I guess.


In late 2016 and early 2017 I found an old recording from Simon Sinistar which he had worked on, intended as a ReCyClor piece. I decided to finish the piece following the original design laid by Simon, as well as recorded two brand new pièces (as assembled a ghost track as well) as ReCyClor, and bookended these recordings with two remixes Frank had done of our old Master Bastard piece from all those years ago.

This became the second, and final ReCyCLor album, aptly entitled "Aborted Before Baptism", named so after the fact that the ReCyClor project never really became what it could or should have been, and always was more a gleam in my eyes than an actual project. I do blame myself since in the earlier days of the project, I went into alcohol and drugs instead of even trying to get this off the ground. Who knows what would have happened if we would have taken this a bit more seriously, and if we did put more effort into it earlier on before everything changed and music started feeling "old" a month after it's release, thanks to modern day planned obsolecence?


You can check out the official release page over here: https://www.discogs.com/ReCyClor-Aborted-Before-Baptism/release/9611425


I toyed for a minute about the idea of continuing ReCyClor as another "solo" projects. Frank himself had done something similar with projects he was involved with such as Leper Collective, where the project itself was almost much more Frank-based than Main Patterson, to the point of having that project's last (known) two albums essentially being solo Frank outings, purging his laptop of unused sound sources provided by Maim years earlier, and essentially Frank laying to rest the project and turning a new leaf.


My problem with the idea of continuing ReCyClor by myself was that I was trying to avoid and steer clear of multiple project name syndrome. There was a time during the tape underground noise culture in the 90s where artists would release a bunch of stuff Under different band names, for the sheer kick of it all, but at this point in my life I am trying to streamline and simplify the various projects, attempting instead to reduce the amount of project names. Plus the idea of releasing stuff under the name ReCyClor would always be reminding me of what could have been but never was, and there would always be an underlying sensation of unsatisfaction and guilt with every step taken in that direction.


So there you have it: a one-sided history of ReCyClor along with my egoistical musings and selfish excuses as to why I thought this was to be stopped before it even had a chance to get anywhere. At the very least, there are two albums out there which give a hint as to what might have been, as well as quite a few live improvisations on the Wreck Age YooToob channel to give an idea of the ideas which were behind the band..