"Run here, my towhead grandchillen, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee." - Lester Bangs
Recorded, edited, mixed & mastered on 04 & 05 Jul 2025 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa, USA.
Synths, effects
The first sentence in Lester Bangs' posthumous collection "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" is also the first sentence in the essay with the same title. While ostensibly a record review of the Count Five, it's more accurately a work of fiction. Since the early '90s, I haven't read many complete books beyond instructional ones—instead, I graze for inspiration and create my own works. So I pulled out a Kindle app, scrolled until I found a past favorite and here I am.
What I tried to do is capture all sorts of miscommunication—be it literally Lester imagining himself a grandfather (something I don't believe he ever became), or the way he writes in a slang he probably did not speak, in character. Or my own generation (X) trying to figure out the noise of the generation prior ("who cares about Woodstock when there was Love, garage punks, Pet Sounds and the VU?" was my way of thinking at approximately 20). Or how some of this has not aged well since Lester wrote it, and I know he, being of some conscience and allowing himself revisions and growth might approach it differently now. In the same book, read “The White Noise Supremacists” to experience him struggling with it an emerging skinhead culture. Then, perhaps, how people younger or otherwise different than myself would react to this writer.
The title is an obvious nod at Lester’s character's stolen vernacular and also a reference to an anonymous woman long ago who left a message on an answering machine of my co-improviser where the outgoing message was a snippet of some improv we’d done. She left a message that it was “ugly music.”
The synths I used here are; Cherry Audio's ARP 2600 & Minimoog emulations; Arturia's DX7; Korg's M1; and the Puremagnetik Klome through a Moogerfooger filter and other things for the textural, almost percussive stuff.
Photography/Art - Jim Lemanowicz, 31 Jan 2015, Marjorie Post Park, Massapequa, NY, USA
Music & art © 2015, 2025 Jim Lemanowicz
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This original version of “You Some Ugly Child” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0705: Book Start. The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music.
More on the Disquiet Junto at: disquiet.com/junto/
More on the 705th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Book Start — The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music — at https://disquiet.com/0705/. This week’s project was proposed by Neil Stringfellow.
