‘6 Victims Of 5 Ecstatic Appliances’ is a bonus track that has never been released before, and it pre-dates most of the non-sampler-derived sources that were culled to assemble the first trio of albums (probably having been recorded in early 1993 – my memory isn’t solid on this point). Unlikely as it may seem, creating ‘Victims’ was important for me since it was my first venture using the approach that led to some of the most successful material on both this album and ‘Their Little Bones’. I’d wanted to find a way to free myself from the hassle of trying to schedule enough time in the De Anza studio, as well as escaping the stylistic limitations inherent in the sampler set-up, and that meant finding ways to make better use of the cassette 4-track. Instead of trying to inflict my unrealistic pre-conceived ideas onto rudimentary equipment, on this occasion I was finding what worked best within the limitations of that equipment – which meant not trying to squeeze a 20-track concept onto a 4-track machine, not grafting so many elements from other (generally poor-quality) cassette sources, and not trying to apply the microphones I was using to things they couldn’t really handle. This piece was built in a fairly simple and organic way, gathering sounds from objects around the apartment that a standard dynamic microphone was able to capture properly (the exception to this being my strange notion to use the purely-electric Chapman Stick as an acoustic instrument: a runner-up for “most non-musical application of a Chapman Stick in a studio setting”) and recording them without any bouncing or layering to each virgin track of the master cassette. This was the easiest track for me to reconstruct, simply because it didn’t contain multiple generations of tape hiss that needed to be scoured away. I remember being especially pleased with the results when I was finished: it didn’t make much sense stylistically, but that was exciting. I also remember playing it to someone else for the first time, a friend who was the drummer for Vacuum Tree Head back in those days. I was a little taken aback when he responded with distaste and disapproval. He genuinely seemed to feel I was pulling some kind of dumb prank, trying to trick people into regarding a bunch of meaningless sounds as actual music.

As much as I liked the track, I never used it on a release. I have an old cassette labelled as ‘1st album mock up’, which was my first crack at assembling some material into a coherent plan: while most of the tracks on it are ones that actually ended up on the ‘An Uncertain Animal’ album, ‘Victims’ and ‘Cognitive Disorder #6’ are also in the mix – a fact I’d entirely forgotten until I examined the tape again recently. I think one of the reasons ‘Victims’ was ultimately left out was that I felt it was a bit too sparse: I get uneasy when simple things go on for too long without changing much. Another reason was that the beginning seemed too obvious of a… let’s not call it a ‘rip off’, let’s call it an ‘homage’ to ‘I Cannot Feel You As The Dogs Are Laughing And I Am Blind’, the opening track on Nurse With Wound’s ‘Homotopy To Marie’. Anyhow, it’s nice to finally include it here where it seems to belong.