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Order Canceled

by klaaah*

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about

An intentionally opaque, obtuse, noise opera.

(Wherein I discuss the horrible mess that is my trying to finish out the 2022 anniversary albums project through the completion of a single release of the two remaining recording sessions, attempting to get by on a technicality.)

In late December of 2002, according to the information still available to me, members of Halaka convened in a garage in Finksburg, Maryland, to record something. What came out the other side were an hour of crap called Festival and another hour of crap called The Carapace of Orange Taco. While, in the 20 intervening years between then and now, a few hastily mixed songs have been heard by, well, possibly someone, the bulk of the material has simply languished, copied and moved from one hard drive to another, occasionally listened to in its raw form by members (mostly me,) considered, stared at, documented (barely,) and, for the most part, ignored. And now, at long last, the time has come to pay the piper, or whoever might serve as one. The plan, hatched in early 2022, to release every recording session in some way or another by the anniversary of its recording, required that I find, somehow, some way for those things to be turned into something someone else might, theoretically, hear. And since this is the final such release, in order to commemorate, as well as to fulfil my contractual obligation, I am stepping for a moment out from behind the curtain to talk about the project.

Because I have some distaste, the exact reason for which I am unclear, for these recordings, I decided at the beginning of this last stretch of the project to pull stems from the master recording from each of the projects, along with stems from other Halaka projects, and combine them into something not necessarily bearing much of a resemblance to the source material. While this approach is similar to other collisions over mismatched material I've constructed in the past, such as Resurrect Concentration on Tuneless History, I had something just a tad more listenable in mind here. Of course, "listenable" is a subjective term. In any case, what I've achieved is listenable by my definition (I might even enjoy listening to it,) and given that I'm the one writing it off, that works for me.

In addition to those two sessions from 2002, additional stems were pulled from Dot Rab (July 2005), Steet Chebley (July 2005), Tech Support for G-Strings (May 2004), The Four Inch Cockroach (May 2003), Steet Chebley (July 2005), Uncredulousness (July 2005), and Under a Grain of Sand Cookie (May 2004.) The projects and stems were chosen essentially at random. Finally, additional material was recorded during the construction of this album.

In the early 2000s I was interested in experimenting with ways that recordings made with the band, in live, improvised sessions, could be made to be something entirely separate from what was actually played and recorded. I've maintained that interest, and feel that I've spent far less time experimenting in that arena than I'd like. This certainly doesn't mean I've never done this - there are very few of our releases that don't include at least some such tinkering. that said, this album is one of my attempts at attacking that experiment on a larger scale.

While on some levels I could call most of what's up there an excuse, and say that I've simply attempted to find a loophole so that I could finish off this anniversary year without missing a deadline, that's really not the case. The only real rules stated in my Anniversary project were that, by the 20th anniversary of their recording, all of the recording sessions from 2002 that hadn't already been released would be used in albums. This particular material, while it's possible that someone else might release it later in something closer to its original form (though it's unclear who would do this, or when,) served this experimental project well because I just haven't felt connected to the source as much as I'd like, and as much as I have with other 20th anniversary releases this year. Mixing and mastering music recorded by a rock band has not, thus far, been a strength (or really an interest) of mind, and the material here falls squarely into that category. The Carapace of Orange Taco was recorded with electric guitar and drums (along with things like a record player, alcohol, and various effects pedals,) and, aside from therefore falling outside my comfort levels, was performed by Halaka members in various levels of non-sobriety, leading to some less-than favorable outcomes. Also there was an incessant fucking cell phone sound interfering with the microphones (although, at some point, Sacky claimed that that was not the root of the problem.) Cell phone interference and badly used microphones and arguments, to me, serve that original purpose of mine, to create something at odds with the intentions exhibited in the actual performances, better than they serve the release of a more-or-less straight-ahead experimental rock record. The Festival recording session was similarly styled.

Stepping back for a moment to avoid poisoning the well (as if that hasn’t already been done long, long ago,) I'll point out that there are many worthwhile songs in the morass of those two albums from December 2002. Some of them are audible here in various states of undress, but a lot of it will remain locked on these hard drives until, most likely, I'm dead, after which point it will be willed to the state.

I imagine that someone who's read this far might wonder why this is being released by a band called klaaah*, instead of under the Halaka name. Instead of answering, however, I'm going to have to step back behind the curtain of anonymity.


- KS, accepting all of the blame, December, 2022

credits

released December 28, 2022

Fanch Taylor - acoustic guitar, vocals
Kingo Sleemer - vocals, record scratches, tapes, noises, modular synth, broken classical guitar, acoustic guitar
Sacky Jamboree - vocals, drums, electric guitar
Madhog - acoustic, electric, and possiby nylon stringed guitars, drums, vocals

Lyrics by Halaka

Produced by Kingo Sleemer
Engineered by Halaka and Kingo Sleemer
Constructed, mixed, "mastered" by Kingo Sleemer
Cover art by Kingo Sleemer
Liner Notes by Kingo Sleemer

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Pile Records Maryland

not a dentist. a pile of releases from a pile of goons. still not a dentist. free.

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