TRUE Force

Here’s what I remember. Scribble Jam 1998. I HAD to go but I was broke. The job I had back then didn’t pay enough to cover rent so I was always hustling and scheming make up the difference and to feed myself. In order to pay for gas for the 2500 km trip and for food, I made a bunch of tapes to sell. I remember that I had four or five different titles - a handful of copies of each. Can’t quite remember what they all were but I know for sure that there was the Achilles album that I posted on Bandcamp recently. I think I had copies of Vertex. And there was the Henry Krinkle thing. Lately, I have been on a mission to find the Henry Krinkle master tapes but so far, no luck.

A little background…

For a year - maybe two - I lived in a house in the north end of Halifax and my roommate was my friend Graeme. Graeme had some gear and from time to time, we would knock some ideas around. This was somewhere between ’96 and ’98, as I recall. Graeme had a sampler with considerably more sample time than my SP-1200 (I can picture his rig but I couldn’t tell you what it was). Graeme was also a pretty nice scratch DJ. We’d make beats to scratch to and once in a while, I’d lay down a verse or two. Voila: Henry Krinkle.

It’s weird how my memory is super-strong and clear for some things and fuzzy for others. Before a few weeks ago, I would have sworn that all the stuff Graeme and I recorded together as Henry Krinkle was on that tape that sold at Scribble Jam. So when I was digging through some boxes a few weeks ago and I came across two cassettes labelled ‘Henry Krinkle’, I figured it had to be the 4-track tapes for that album I sold at Scribble. When I popped them into my recently acquired 4-track machine, I was shocked to discover it was something else… mostly.

In all, the tapes contain a little over an hour’s worth of material. The bulk of it is virtually unlistenable. Punishing to the ear. Boring. But there’s some good stuff too.

What confuses me is that two or three parts on these tapes ARE actually on the Krinkle Scribble tape. Why did I not use this other material? The good parts, that is.

Over the last few weeks, piecing together the story of this material has been a bit of an obsession. I did some detective work and here’s what I pieced together…

Going through the contents of a box labelled ‘rhyme books’, I found the notebook containing the rhymes that I recorded for the Krinkle stuff. The same notebook had the rhymes for the first Sebutones album in it (so, pre-Language Arts). That made sense and helped bring the timeline into focus.

I’ve always had a policy to never use a sample twice. If I release a song that features a certain drum break, that break is now off the table, never to be used again. This recently unearthed Krinkle stuff features all kinds of samples that were subsequently used for other songs. There are drums that I used on Language Arts. A song/part I’m calling “Hit ‘Em Where They Ain’t” has the same drums I used for the waitress song on Vertex. Another beat has the same main sample that was used for the song “Ice” (the song about my mom) on Man Overboard. So I’m thinking that these cassettes are likely what I used to refer to as ‘ideas tapes’. I would document ideas on these tapes - quick and dirty - for future consideration. So maybe the answer to the question - ‘why wasn’t more of this stuff on the Henry Krinkle Scribble album?’ is that it was never intended to be shared with the public. I suppose it’s also possible that I later got excited about newer material and moved on past this older stuff.

It makes me feel a little weird or even guilty to go back on an old rule and share stuff that was never meant to see the light of day and that was later picked apart for future projects, but I also feel that the stuff is too interesting (if I may) not to share.

Now, I should temper that last notion a little. There’s not much to this stuff. In many cases, it’s a drum loop (sometimes chopped in interesting ways) with a drone-y experimental record being transform-cut over it. In other cases, it might be a couple of samples put together and looping for two or three minutes with no structure. A couple things are slightly more fleshed out. It’s far from a masterpiece but interesting (at least to me) for the reasons I already mentioned and because it’s further documentation of an important part of my timeline. This is what led up to what I’ve called the ‘Language Arts trilogy’: Language Arts, Vertex and Man Overboard (sometimes I think of Square as part of the series too, but I digress).

Another reason why I want to share this stuff now is because I think it marks a very clear turning point in my evolution as an “artist” (barf). The stuff that came before this is embarrassingly bad (with maybe the odd bright spot). The stuff that comes after is where I found my voice, I guess you could say. This Krinkle stuff straddles the line. Some of it makes me cringe. Some of it sounds like me.

I should also mention that the sound quality is quite bad. I did my best to clean it up. I’ve tried to understand why the Krinkle Scribble tape sounds so horrendous. The beats sound half-ways decent. But the vocals are a muddy mess. I have surmised that this stuff was recorded before I owned a proper microphone and I was using headphones, à la KRS One on the cover of the Return Of The Boom Bap album. I also remember that when I finally did get my first mic, I would often wrap a t-shirt around the crown when I was recording. I was more concerned with popping my Ps than I was with muffling my voice, I guess. Idiot.

So that’s what I know. The plan is still to post this stuff (the best bits) and the Vertex instrumental on Bandcamp for the next Bandcamp Friday, which is May 1st. I may not be able to hold off that long because my bills are starting to pile up but I’m going to try. You’ll hear it soon. Hope you enjoy. Like the Achilles thing, it may be strictly for the die-hards.

In the meantime, the search for those ‘official’ Henry Krinkle 4-track tapes continues.