K GRAVE

It was sometime in 2002 that I wanted to create not just a musical act, but more of a performance art piece set to sound, and I enlisted my friends Jay to join me in the endeavor. By that time I had known Jay since my wife and I moved to Kent, OH, and met a recently transplanted himself Jay, on his own up the street from us. It made sense that we would gravitate towards each other.

Up to that point I think Jay was one of the craziest sons of bitches I'd ever had the pleasure of meeting, outside of random mental cases met casually, Jay was very polite and quick to laugh but he could turn into a madman at the drop of a hat. He'd seize you by the lapel and chant rabid accusations, some practically in tongues, and he was grand in gesture and reaction, a magician without a top hat. The first time he came to visit us in our new apartment, he had brought over a box of wine and once that was gone we were instant friends. He was a visionary and a mad prophet escaped from the desert, part child evangelist gone wild, he could eat a whole BBQ chicken in one sitting, leaving only the bones, and he was an artist, an artist who made maniacal paintings and seemed almost feverish at times. He was very magnetic, and he introduced us to those others who had been drawn into Jay's sideshow machinations. I always felt Jay lacked the pulpit from which he could spread his message, and to supply him with one would be a magical thing.



I decided to create something kinda ugly but highly spiritual out of sound, and feature Jay to tear through the tomato fields in bare feet and a tattered tuxedo. I wanted to forge something hypnotic, but more importantly I wanted to extend outwards to the realms of public spectacle, where we could catapult this lumpy projectile straight at people. I asked Jay to record himself, talking or chanting or even reading, but to try and capture his inherent intensity. Once he gave me the data disc I went to cutting up and asking what I had, with sine waves and primitive samples of Tibetan prayer bowls and church bells. I put together the demo 'Demostration 2002' and christened the project K GRAVE, named for the ketamine fugue state of nothingness, a mindstate I wanted to force people into and to exploit Jay's atavistic tendencies.

Jay was up for it, he was up for anything. By that time we were living in NJ, in separate residences after having roommates together for a time. I found the email address of a local booking agent for shows in our area, mostly hardcore matinees but I wanted to pitch to this guy, so I sent him the demo and the leaflet/flier that we had made, with our manifesto of sorts on it. To my surprise, the booker was into the cdr, he called it 'a soundtrack to a horror film' but every booking fell through, as he didn't think we'd fit on any of the bills he was promoting. I fantasized about traumatizing little hardcore kids with our sonic gruel, but he never offered anything else to us, and sadly we never got a chance to perform live, thus depriving the world of the fierce spectacle of K GRAVE. After a few years Jay moved back to Ohio, where he's into the local produce scene. I had intentions of creating a soundboard of Jayspeak but I never got around to it. I wonder if he ever thinks about how glorious it would have all been, to terrify into submission a room full of faces and to allow Jay to channel some higher energy and perhaps for everyone to have a wonderful mystical experience.

Here is a link to download 'Demonstration 2002' plus, two other pieces recorded post-demo, utilizing Jay's vocal torments: Mediafire Link



Here is the original manifesto:

A CALL TO WITNESS——Within endless circles there is an understanding of a certain protocol, a prototype to uphold, a patent to honor. There may be laws so cosmic that they are nearly invisible in our heads, as silent as a thought, signaling commands. Reptilian brain schemes must be dealt with upon an individual basis, and this thorough double-gloved deprogramming will be accompanied by the wails of paranoid schizophrenic street preachers, the clanging of detuned churchbells, and a very sorrowful greek chorus who sing only in sine waves. K GRAVE are the conductors of this almost unholy symphony. K GRAVE are two individuals who push at the sturdy walls of endurance to blaze new pathways out of the head, and into the skull. Using sound loops and scrapes both primal sounding and foreign, various antiquated effect setups, and a stream of tortured consciousness that flows from the body of the honorable Rev. Avatar, a new strange understanding seems almost attainable. K GRAVE has been delivered from a thornbed of ideas, crosscutting tent revivalism with power electronics and primal scream therapy and performance art and sufi brain training exercises and alphawave thoughbending and gnostic scripture lessons and backwoods witchcraft legends and rabid mid-western upbringing, a sonic cocktail that takes god out of the classroom and sticks him right in your third eye chakra. Let it in.