‘Cognitive Disorder #5’ is the one that disturbed Norbert Schilling so much; even setting aside the possibility that he had some kind of phobia about yodeling, it is certainly (and deliberately) an abrasive and relentless piece. For a brief moment in 1993 or 1994 I had a duo project with Vacuum Tree Head guitarist Mike De La Cuesta which he named ‘Stutzbearscats’, and using Richard F’s (hi Richard) now-legendary cassette 4-track we created a very primitive but also unique-sounding EP of material together. There was never any plan of releasing it, so eventually I scavenged some of the raw material for my own projects. Two of those sources were used on this track: the chance-encountered-and-manipulated-on-the-fly yodeling broadcast extracted from a portable radio through effects pedals, and my double-tracked Chapman Stick bumblement recorded to accompany it (certainly a candidate for “most non-musical application of a Chapman Stick in a studio setting”). I left this track for last when tackling the reconstruction of this album. What can be done with it? It’s an ugly mess, so I just let it be a slightly better EQ’d ugly mess. Some high spirits grabbed from Werner Herzog’s ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ peek through here and there.

The second bonus track I’ve included on this collection is a full-length isolation of the aforementioned Stick bumbling rescued from under the piles of radio interference. Why?