While digging through my desk I bumped into a tape I’d been looking for for ages. This tape was recorded in Blackey, KY (there’s a Wiki) in 1979 and features my great uncle, Clyde Caudill. By far my favorite of the songs is “Hitler Called the Devil on the Telephone.” All titles are mine, by the way. The tape represents an interesting bit of ephemera, and features two songs written about Blackey, Kentucky itself, one telling the story of how Blackey got burnt down by fire, unincorporated and then reincorporated when someone discovered that the corporation records were stored in Frankfurt Kentucky. I consider the tape to be a really rare find so far as Appalachian history goes. I hope that somebody else with heritage in Blackey gets to hear the tape.
Disco gets dismissed wholesale way too often by American musicians. There were a lot of really interesting disco records made, and they deserve to be revisited.
One such artist is Cerrone. I’m about to contradict myself here and call the records a little campy- but there’s still something really original about a lot of the material. Giorgio Moroder wasn’t the only person making disco records…
Cerrone’s a relative unknown to American audiences, but he sold something like 30 million records a 5-10 year period after 1977. So this post might be laughable to a European audience. Disco was a passing fad to the American audience- quickly eclipsed by what we now call “classic rock,” probably for reasons relating to Cold War paranoia, homophobia, and ethnocentrism.
I released this record in 2007, having taken my time on it. The record was made over the course of a year or two, a particularly difficult period of my life economically. I had a lot of interesting experiences during the making of the record- living in shady apartments and working low paying jobs in the Southeast I got a lot of exposure to redneck culture. Working at a fireworks store on I-24 was particularly interesting. During the majority of the time I worked on this record I was partially deaf in my right ear. During the rest of the time, I was totally deaf in that ear.
My style has changed a lot since then, but I think it’s still a really fun record.
It was never popular, selling 13 copies and getting some radio play here and there on college stations. After it had been a year since I sold a copy, I released the record for free as a download.
All works are copyright 2007, David K Caudill/deltasleep. You may play this music anytime and anywhere for non-commercial purposes. I only ask that if you enjoy it, or receive any feedback about it, pass it on to me.
This is the record in its entirety as a .zip file along with the graphics I was printing and attaching to the CDRs I was selling.
So I’ve decided that it’s time for a big change for me artistically, and I think that a new page might be a great thing to do. I hope you don’t mind the minimal theme- I really want the focus of my time and the site to be the content in it, not the the presentation.
Music has been a pretty absent part of my life for the last year or two, and I’m working on ways to bring it back. One of those ways is going to be podcasting. To that effect, I have created this blog with the intent of providing a nice and tidy way to archive and display podcasts. I’ll be getting things up to date as I find them, and adding them to this blog.
Feels good sometimes to cut baggage loose. At a certain point as an artist, having a history is a lot like having baggage or expectations placed on the work I do. Like I do any work…
I’ll be making a catalog here for easy access to all the media I create. Posts will be categorized, you can select the category to the left.
