“Lingering Household Odours” is a nearly 45-minute tape collage conceived and constructed by Evan. It was a monumental work of mixology at the time. My notes from the mixing indicate just how complex this was. The notes indicate recordings made on a “Sharp” and an “Akai”. The Sharps were a pair of stereo cassette decks that we used for dubbing cassettes, one at a time, in real-time. I recorded some noises (telephone busy signals) directly to the Sharp via a microphone. The “Akai” was a small, portable cassette machine and it had its own small microphone that could be plugged into it. I used it for a number of things, including putting it in my car seat next to me and driving around the block making a recording of that experience. These recordings would then have to be transferred to the reel-to-reel on the 4-track Dokorder. As the piece had to be mixed in real-time, an error would send me right back to the beginning. I had time available to do this work because I had been laid-off from my job at Trust Company Of America and was collecting unemployment. Meanwhile, David, my bandhouse-mate, was still working a night shift job at Hotel Boulderado, so I was under strict notice not to make noise during the day while he slept. He was a light sleeper, so this was a big deal for him. For me, it meant that although I had a lot of time on my hands and a music studio in the living room, my hands were tied in terms of any kind of volume. Playing the electric guitar unamplified was enough to wake up my house-mate. But mixing tapes with head-phones was a silent activity, so I indulged myself. For this piece, I assembled recordings of alarm clocks, a drive around the block with the Akai in the car seat, a stapler, telephone busy signals, radio broadcasts, odd material on records like guy preaching about “nobody, the atom!”, a dishwasher, and machines in Jane Carpenter’s machine shop. All of this was overlaid on one long recording of daily life with a baby in Helen Broderick’s living room, likely made with the Akai, since it was portable. Helen lived in a flat near Boulder High School in a neighborhood that was subsequently completely razed to make a playing-field beside the school in the name of flood-mitigation. In many ways a paean to all the noises and sounds of everyday life, the piece is also a “found sounds” experiment. I was always one to hum along with the rhythm of machine sounds, windshield wiper blades, and the rhythms associated with the elements of everyday life. This piece took those household sounds and put them front and center, elevating the quotidian to the level of art. Everything was on 4 different tracks, which allowed me to fade in and fade out as necessary, adjust tone controls and to pan liberally for stereophonic effects. I didn’t use any splicing of tape, for two reasons. One was that I didn’t really know how to. The other was that I had had bad experiences in the past with recording techs who were enthusiastic about cutting and clipping tape. In 1976, the recording of the one concert that Dreamer Easy played at Old Cabell Hall on University of Virginia campus was ruined by the use of a tape that had been spliced backwards. Dreamer Easy was an all-original King-Crimson-soundalike band that I dropped out of college in which to play bass for a semester. This experience was part of my growing frustration with spacey recording engineers and one of the reasons I had obtained my own 4-track reel machine in the first place. I included musical sections recorded on Rick Corrigan’s Roland (a polyphonic synthesizer) in “Lingering Household Odours” because I wasn’t keen on the 100% abstraction utilized by Architects’ Office’s more random “aleatoric” approach. In March of 1984, this piece was constructed shortly after the Festival of Pain (February 1984) .