The Official Main Street Electrical Fire Blog

The Loose Tracks is Here; MSEF is Dead

2010-05-12T21:12:00.000-07:00

The final MSEF release, the rarities compilation The Loose Tracks - discussed in further depth somewhere else on this blog is up on Megaupload.

We've had to pair down the tracklist due to...erm....problems:
1. Psychomania, The World Is Under Attack
2. Money For Nothing (Great Blues Slowdown)
3. This Can Only End In Distaster (Single Mix)
4. Twistylittlepassages (Remix)
5. Ends in Disaster (The New Stuff Ala Carte)
6. Anothertwistylittlepassage (Extended Dance Mix)
7. Children Ride Bicycles (Single Mix)
8. Friends Don't Let Friends Spontaneously Combust
9. Legends of the Fall
10. Billie Jean Slowdown (Smooth As Fuck R&B Mix)
11. Long Live the King of Pop And The Billie Jean Slowerdown (Drum Machine Hits You Like A Punch To Your Ribcage Remix)
12. Billie Jean Speedup (Laughing Gas)
13. Billie Jean (As Fast As Possible Mix)

Download or go to our last.fm page. Either way.

And that's it for MSEF, we're done. If we decide to release Water Park, then you'll hear from us again, and then never again. So bye...for now.

Here's "Tape of the Brand New Surrealism"

2009-12-12T17:30:00.001-08:00

Amazing, we've actually released something on schedule. So here it is - finally - our new EP, Tape of the Brand New Surrealism.

TRACKLIST
1. Children Ride Bicycles (2:14)
2. Time Park (2:38)
3. Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators (1:37)
4. Figures (6:08)
5. Pointless Pilot (1:58)
6. The Surrealist (2:37)

FREE DOWNLOAD

Download the Children Ride Bicycles single now!

2009-11-28T08:37:00.001-08:00

Download includes:
1. Children Ride Bicycles (Single Mix) - 2:14
2. Friends Don't Let Friends Spontaneously Combust - 4:00
3. Legends of the Fall - 4:48

Download Link

A special Halloween treat from Main Street Electrical Fire

2009-10-31T10:08:00.001-07:00

As a special treat for Halloween, you will be able to stream the single mix of "Children Ride Bicycles" our new two-minute ambient single, from this blog, via Soundcloud. Enjoy.

Children Ride Bicycles (Single Mix) by mainstreetelectricalfire

The Loose Tracks + Water Park tracklisting

2009-10-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

We plan in 2010 to release a compilation entitled The Loose Tracks which will contain the non-album track "Psychomania, The World Is Under Attack!", the complete tracklists of the "This Can Only End In Disaster" and "Children Ride Bicycles" singles and a handful of songs that wound up being unused. such as "Psychomania II" and "Caught in a Fish Eye Lens". It will also include a slowdown of Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing", similar to "All The World's A Stage" that wound up going unused and the unreleased The King of Pop Is Dead EP, which features four remixes of "Billie Jean". This is the only release we have planned for 2010. The compilation will be out in either January or February 2010. We don't have a static release date yet.

The tracklisting for this compilation is:
1. Psychomania, The World Is Under Attack
2. This Can Only End In Distaster (Single Mix)
3. Twistylittlepassages (Remix)
4. Ends in Disaster (The New Stuff Ala Carte)
5. Anothertwistylittlepassage (Extended Dance Mix)
6. Children Ride Bicycles (Single Mix)
7. Friends Don't Let Friends Spontaneously Combust
8. Legends of the Fall
9. Psychomania II
10. Caught in a Fish Eye Lens (All The World's A Stage slow mix)
11. Money for Nothing (Great Blues Slowdown Remix)
12. Songworks (Original Hit Parade Workprint for Legends of the Fall)
13. Billie Jean Slowdown (Smooth As Fuck R&B Mix)
14. Billie Jean Slowerdown
15. Billie Jean Speedup
16. Billie Jean (As Fast As Possible Mix)

As for Water Park - our third album - It will be released sometime, at random in 2010. Even we don't know when. But upon that release, MSEF will be no more. The day we release Water Park, the project will be over. We will have nothing more to say and MSEF will be just a forgotten memory.

We've finally decided on a tracklisting for the album, although we haven't come close to creating these musicks:

Water Park tracklisting
1. Mandarin Nights
2. Hip to Moderation
3. Skill At Crystal Sound
4. You're All Vultures You Are
5. One In A Million Girl
6. The Love and Oblivion Complex
7. Television News Helicopter
8. Minidisco
9. Haettenschweiler
10. International Orange
11. The Eleven Channels of Superzero
12. Thoroughly Modern Mayhem
13. A Day At The Water Park

Announcing Tape of the Brand New Surrealism EP

2009-10-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a few months since we've said anything, but we've been "hard" "at" "work" at another "instant" release.

Sometime in December, we'll be releasing our last release of the year and probably ever.

The EP is called Tape of the Brand New Surrealism.
This is the cover:

This is the tracklisting:
1. Children Ride Bicycles
2. Time Park
3. Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators
4. Figures
5. Pointless Pilot
6. The Surrealist

Children Ride Bicycles will be the only single and will be issued two weeks before the EP's release. This is that single's cover:

And that single's tracklist
1. Children Ride Bicycles (Single Mix)
2. Friends Don't Let Friends Spontaneously Combust
3. Legends of the Fall

"Friends Don't Let Friends Spontaneously Combust" was formerly known as "The Obligatory Techno Banger".

The "single mix" of "Children Ride Bicycles" - a track which samples the intro to "A Forest" by The Cure - is louder and more echo-y than the original more quiet version which appears on the EP

It will be our first single to include b-side equivalent songs exclusive to the single, although both tracks will be added to the tracklist of The Tape of the Brand New Surrealism for the first 24 hours after its release as early bird bonus tracks.

These two releases will be our among our last. In 2010, MSEF will begin a long hiatus. The tentative release day of Children Ride Bicycles is November 28. The tentative release date of Tape of the Brand New Surrealism is December 12. Dates are subject to change, but these seem to be reasonable.

If You Wear Your Sombrero Like A Helmet, You're Going To Get Yourself Killed

2009-08-01T12:51:00.001-07:00

Finally after months of delays, we finally have it, the new EP from MSEF. The theme of the album, ironically enough, is "delay". All the songs feature the Audacity "Delay" feature in some capacity.

Tracklisting:
1. Trauma Des Moines (1:42)
2. Objection Fantastique (3:01)
3. You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue (2:18)
4. Panic from the Height (6:38)
5. Pain Train (1:18)
6. Fast Weight for Girl Talk (3:23)
7. Fast Weight for Girl Talk (Cannonball Trance Remix) (3:27) First 100 Downloads Only!

Here, take!

Here It Is! Pain Train!

2009-07-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

And here it is, the aforementioned new preview track for Sombrero, "Pain Train"! Enjoy!

Download courtesy of last.fm

Finally, Something from Sombrero

2009-07-19T15:56:00.001-07:00

We are proud to announce that later tonight, the first track from or ridiculously long awaited and long overdue EP If You Wear Your Sombrero Like A Helmet You're Going to Get Yourself Killed will be released

However, It won't be a track we've announced as apart of the lineup. Instead, it is a song called "Pain Train", a song we made to replace "Little Johnny Heart Attack" which we are removing from the track list so people who downloaded Two Songs don't have to download the same song twice. "Pain Train" will premiere a bit later on today on our last.fm page. Three other songs, "The Obligatory Techno Banger", "Psychomania II" and "Caught in a Fish Eye Lens" were also casualties of the delay. They will be released at a later date

Another new song is "Fast Weight (For Girl Talk)", which features The Band song "The Weight" sped up from 33 1/3 to 45 as heard on the track "Still Here" from Girl Talk's 2008 album Feed the Animals.

This is the new and final tracklist for Sombrero when it is released in August

1. Trauma Des Moines
2. Objection Fantastique
3. You are Likely to Be Eaten By a Grue
4. Panic from the Height
5. Pain Train
6. Fast Weight (For Girl Talk)
7. Fast Weight For Girl Talk (Special Cannonball Trance Edition) Limited Edition Remix

The MSEF Discography

2009-06-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

ALBUMS
47 Minutes of White Noise (Febuary 14, 2009)
Caterpillar Minutes (April 4, 2009)
Water Park (TBA 2010)

MINI ALBUMS ("too long to be an EP, too short to be an album")
If You Wear Your Sombrero Like A Helmet, You're Going to Get Yourself Killed (August 1, 2009)

COMPILATIONS
The Loose Tracks (May 12, 2010)

EPs
This is Your Problem Now (January 15, 2009)
Two Songs (June 27, 2009)
Tape of the Brand New Surrealism (December 12, 2009)
I Tried Dancing. It Didn't Work. (TBA 2010, will accompany Water Park)

SINGLES
"You Won't Have Don Quixote to Kick Around Anymore" b/w "The Alleged Sunrise" (December 23, 2008)
"Psychomania, The World Is Under Attack!" b/w "4 Minutes of White Noise" (February 5, 2009)
"All The World's A Stage And We Are Merely Players" b/w "The Last Caterpillar Minute" (March 15, 2009)
This Can Only End in Disaster and More 4-track single release ("This Can Only End In Disaster (Single Edit)" b/w "Twistylittlepassages (remix), "Ends in Disaster (The New Stuff A la Carte)" and "Anothertwistylittlepassage (extended dance remix)") (April 23, 2009)
"Pain Train" (July 19, 2009)
"Children Ride Bicycles (Alternate Mix)" b/w "Friends Don't Let Friends Spontaneously Combust" and "Legends of the Fall" (November 28, 2009)

DEMOS
Jackalope (2003, not released to public)
The Lime Green Tape (2003, not released to public)
Acid Flower Stopwatch (2005, not released to public)
World Class And Flamethrower (2005, not released to public)
Alleged Music from Main Street (2008, 3-track EP - "The Alleged Sunrise" (demo), "This Can Only End in Disaster" (demo) and "Psychomania" (demo), not released to public)

Push Backs + Very Major Announcements

2009-06-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

With the release of Two Songs comes some bad news as well.

So the release of the long awaited If You Wear Your Sombrero Like A Helmet, You're Going to Get Yourself Killed won't conflict with promotion for Two Songs, we're delaying its release (again) to August 1, 2009. Because of this, no singles will be released from Sombrero (and like we said before Two Songs is not any sort of single for Sombrero even though it includes a track featuring on it).

Also it saddens us to announce that Water Park will be moved back to January 11, 2010, about a year after the release of This Is Your Problem Now. There will only be one single from this release.

And of course, there's this decision we have come to:
After the release of Water Park, the Main Street Electrical Fire will no longer be an active band with scheduled releases. We might release some spur-of-the-moment releases here and there, but by the end of March of 2010, we will no longer be an active unit. We foresaw this day coming when we reactivated this group back in late 2007. The members of MSEF want to move to more serious projects instead of simply deconstructing pop tunes into experimental noise tracks. Also, there's been a clear lack of interest in the band since we reformed, just like last time. If barely anyone (or probably no one) is listening why bother to keep releasing music?

A New Release from the Main Street Electrical Fire: Two Songs

2009-06-27T13:04:00.001-07:00

While making our upcoming EP "If You Wear Your Sombero Like A Helmet, You're Going to Get Yourself Killed", we created a monster out of one of the tracks, "Little Johnny Heart Attack/The Breakfast Sausage Funeral March". We had to split them up and because of "Sausage"'s runtime, it won't be on "Sombrero". So we're releasing both on this EP. Don't worry, "Little Johnny" will still be on "Sombrero", it just won't be with Sausage. This isn't the "Little Johnny Heart Attack" single, either. "tbsfm" is simply too long and involved to be a b-side. It is track two on an EP which has a track one which appears on another release.

Both songs are based off of Arctic Monkeys' instrumental track "Death Ramps".

Little Johnny features the song sped up x8 (or so) and repeats four times: two times plain sped up, once sped and reverse and once sped with effects.

"Breakfast Sausage" features the song repeated twice. The first time features the song slowed down as if a 78RPM record is played on a 33 1/3 turntable (thanks Audacity) and the next features THAT slowed down as if THAT is played on a 33 1/3. It is an expansive, doomy and introspective 25 and a half minutes which sound nothing like the original composition and would be unrecognizable to its creators.

1. Little Johnny Heart Attack (2:25)
2. The Breakfast Sausage Funeral March (25:39)

Here is the cover to the EP:

I know that it's not much of a cover, but it shall do.

And now the all important link to download our new EP:
Download our new EP free from Zshare

Like most of our work, you can download it from our Last.fm page.

Update: The .rar file in the link now is the second edition, which fixes various problems with the audio, an accidental inclusion of 10 seconds of silence which seems to split "TBSFM" in half and fixes panning problems on the last 3 minutes of that track. We've also added the album cover, too.

Epic Sombero Failure

2009-05-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lapse in posting, but we've been hard at work on our upcoming EP If You Wear Your Sombrero Like A Helmet, You're Going to Get Yourself Killed.

At least we were.

We've had several problems with the computers programs that we use to create our music. Because of the setback, we are delaying the EP until mid-July. This has been the third or fourth pushback of the EP, but it will be worth it, I promise.

Also, the upcoming Water Park release will be moved from September to either mid-November or early December to keep it from interfering with the promotion of Sombrero.

A New Single from the Main Street Electrical Fire: Introducing "This Can Only End In Disaster"

2009-04-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry we're a few days late, but here it is, the brand new single from the Main Street Electrical Fire.

THIS CAN ONLY END IN DISASTER
1. This Can Only End In Disaster (Single Mix) (1:42)
2. Twistylittlepassages (Remix) (3:53)
3. This Can Only End in Disaster (The New Parts A La Carte) (1:42)
4. Anothertwistylittlepassage (Extended Dance Remix) (12:24)

Download it for free

Caterpillar Minutes: It's Here!

2009-04-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

It's Midnight, April 4, and we are proud to finally release, for all who want it, Caterpillar Minutes, our second full length album. It is 40 minutes of experimental noise, and a strange Rush reconstruction ala Negativland's 1990 U2 deconstruction.

Just download it here.

April 23 is launch date for second "Caterpillar Minutes" single

2009-03-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

It was slyfully annouced a few weeks ago on this blog, but yes, there will be one more single from the upcoming Caterpillar Minutes and it is the "preview" track "This Can Only End in Disaster", which will be made digitally available on April 23, 2009, in a rar file.

"This Can Only End in Disaster" is a track which consists solely of a text-to-speech conversion software reciting an abstract poem composed by Oplinkt the Mysterious, 1/2 of MSEF. It is accompanied only by a faint drone of white noise.

The single will feature four songs:
1. This Can Only End In Disaster (Single Edit)
2. Twistylittlepassages (remix)
3. It Ended in Disaster (The New Stuff A la Carte)
4. "Anothertwistylittlepassage (extended dance remix)

The single edit removes the "i am falling" part and turns it into backing vocals (with echo repeat) throughout the song and a new distorted sawtooth tone was added to the backing static. "It Ended in Disaster" is these new features by themselves.

"Twistylittlepassages" and "Anothertwistylittlepassage" are remixes of "You Are in A Maze of Twisty Little Passages All Alike".

Here's the cover to the single:

Announcing Two New Upcoming Releases from the Main Street Electrical Fire

2009-03-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Along with the upcoming release of Caterpillar Minutes (availible for free from a torrent site near you on April 4), We are happy two announce two new additions to the MSEFography:

First Up:
On June 4: If You Wear Your Sombrero Like A Helmet, You're Going to Get Yourself Killed. A new EP which features:

five songs cut from Caterpillar Minutes due to time constraints
a brand spanking new song, "Little Johnny Heart Attack/The Breakfast Sausage Funeral March"
a new extended, remixed version of "Psychomania, The World is Under Attack"
a new mix of "All The World's A Stage And We Are Merely Players".

Here's the track listing:
1. Trauma Des Moines
2. Objection Fantastique
3. You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue (Take 2)
4. Panic from the Height
5. The Obligatory Techno Banger
6. Psychomania II
7. Little Johnny Heart Attack/The Breakfast Sausage Funeral March
8. Caught in a Fish Eye Lens (All The World's A Stage and It's Getting Faster and Faster and Faster Still)

This is the cover art:

And then, on September 27, another new album, one we haven't even started yet (but we have plans on it being far more planned out than anything we've ever done before): Water Park. It will most likely be the album everyone will remember us for. It is our legacy.

Updates: New Sombrero release date - "sometime in July"
New Water Park release date: "hopefully Sept. 27, but its looking like a mid-late November/very early December release maybe anywhere between November 14 and December 2".

So, Just What IS this Main Street Electrical Fire band, anyway?

2009-03-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

This is the fifth post or something like that and I haven't gotten around to a proper introduction of the Main Street Electrical Fire.

OK, We are a "gravity pop" band. Gravity pop is a new genre I created to house the band (mostly because I like the sound of it). Gravity pop is a subgenre of Plunderphonics. MSEF is influenced by Negativland, Girl Talk, Brain Eno, The Avalanches, John Oswald, John Cage, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album, and to a lesser extent, Merzbow. Since their formation, the band members have been Oplinkt Hauser and Doktor Horatio Von Helikoptrix. Helikoptrix is the mouthpiece and primary artist for the group. It is unknown what Oplinkt Hauser does or if he even exists.

The band is based in the wonderful city of Newport, Rhode Island, and actually began in 2003:

The band began in 2003 and focused on experiments with white noise, MIDI music and tone shifts (and later sounds the two members captured by keep a tape recorder on while riding their bikes around downtown Newport) creating a mixture between ambient music and noise rock. The project ended in 2005 after no interest was taken in the project as Newport’s music scene - which mostly (if not entirely) consists of hardcore punk and ska bands - took no interest in the band’s experimental noise rock.

In 2008, The project was resurrected, now taking refuge on computers and the free software Audacity. Using this program MSEF creates their trademark “sound disfigurement” in which a piece is run through a gamut of effects (reverse, repeat, wah-wah, change tempo, cutting out of various parts, adding parts of other pieces, etc. etc) until the track is unrecognizable from the original.

The band used to mostly use computer synths and MIDI files, but have since moved on to actual mp3 songs of real music in mid-2008, partially influenced by indie mashup artist Girl Talk, but taking the idea in a different direction. For instance, in the example of “I Am…A Carnival?”, the guitar solo from “Aerodynamic” by Daft Punk, opening bass line from “Psycho Killer” from Talking Heads, opening drum part of “Vienna” by Ultravox, fragments of “Here Come the Warm Jets” by Brian Eno and that “free form” segment of “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin are all played on various degrees of “on top” of each other, saved as one track, and then that new track is run through the sound disfigurement process. Due to that track’s intended purpose to “disorient” the listener. In the original “mash-up” portion of creation, parts of each sample were muted for times, but the only recognizable one is the guitar, which will suddenly change tempo, speed and pitch and even stop suddenly to achieve its goal.

The mash up part of the band is merely one third of their “gravity pop”/plunderphonics sound. The other two thirds a resumption of the band’s original mixture of noise rock and ambient music

You Can Stream "Caterpillar Minutes" on Last.fm Now!

2009-03-16T06:42:00.001-07:00

We just uploaded all of Caterpillar Minutes onto last.fm, but not as free downloads (for that, you wait until April 4) and there was an error adding "4 8 15 16 24 42" (which, yes, is a Lost reference), as last.fm is wonky with songs beginning with and/or consisting entirely of numbers and/or because it runs north of 11 minutes (the name has been changed to "The Numbers Are Bad (4 8 15 16 23 42)", and will be uploaded seperately later).

One track we are especially proud of, "This Can Only End In Disaster" - the reading of an abstract poem I wrote by a text-to-speech synthesizer backed with much more calming white noise than the harsh stuff on 47 Minutes of White Noise - is available as a free download - a "taster" for the album, if you will. You can download it here.

The First Post about Caterpillar Minutes

2009-03-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

As the 12 people who listen to us on last.fm know, we are creating a new record called Caterpillar Minutes.

It has tremendous cover art, too
Fucking A, right? Goes far beyond our usual MS Paint covers, too.

Anyway, there's some good news and bad news involving Caterpillar Minutes.
The good news is that five of the songs have already been made.

One of them "All The World's A Stage and We Are Merely Players", MSEF at it's most Negativland-esque (we slowed down the song "Limelight" by Rush several different times at several different speeds. It sounds like stoner rock now, and Geddy Lee's famous falsetto is now a deep baritone and at this speed it really shows what a fucking tremendous lyricist Neil Peart is), is up now on last.fm.

But sadly, due to time concerns and computer problems, the tracklisting has been scaled back from 14 songs to just 8. It's still going to be a pretty long album. In fact, one of the problem was, with things panning out, the record was going to be two hours long (the five songs we've already recorded are just over half an hour in length when you put them all together), so this brings it down to just barely over 40 minutes, a perfectly acceptable length for an album (we could release it on vinyl if we pleased).

One song, "You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue" was deleted accidentally and I forgot how it went, so I made a new one, with a title that's similarly geeky, "You Are In A Maze of Twisty Little
Passages, All Alike".

Five of the songs - including our best attempt at a reconstruction of "Grue" and we never got around to recording the middle two "Caterpillar Minute" songs - will be released on an EP in June called If Your Wear Your Sombrero Like A Helmet, You're Going to Get Yourself Killed

This back cover shows the final track list of Caterpillar Minutes, our new experimental/noise album, due April 4, 2009:

47 Minutes of White Noise

2009-03-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

This was our first album, released in February.

It's influenced by Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, but is made to be much more unlistenable. You see, Metal Machine Music at least has changes in its barrier of noise, 47 Minutes of White Noise is nothing but 47 minutes of white noise or as the Brits say, "exactly what it says on the tin".

You can use 47 Minutes of White Noise as an alternative to one of those fancy white noise machines or you can sit there with headphones and try to see how much you can take. Not even I got all the way through and I made the album.

The download of the free, continuous mp3 is available here (hosted by last.fm because they're super cool about that).

What's This?

2009-03-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

This is my brand new blog for my music project, the Main Street Electrical Fire.

Now, I will be continuing the daily updates on IPUS, which means that this blog will be infrequently updated. In fact it will only be updated when MSEF have new music out.

So that's the gist of it