Discography → COQ
Vitals
- Artist: Spacefuzz
- Release: January 11, 2020
- Label: StupideIntelligente Phonographes
- Format: Digital, streaming
- Genre: Musique Concrète / Experimental / Found Sound
- Recorded: The Blue Room, Phoenix, AZ
- Concept: Found sounds, guitar synthesis, and phase loops (including inkjet printers repurposed as drum machines) folded into something like experimental country music
Overture
Musique concrète, found sounds, guitar synthesis, phase loops, inkjet printers as drum machines, and experimental country music. What more could you want?
The Long Version
COQ exists because of a story told secondhand on a drive back to Phoenix from Las Vegas. Charles’ then-wife had heard WTF with Marc Maron, Episode 1036, Sean Lennon, aired July 15, 2019, where Sean talked about the weight of making music in the shadow of his father, John Lennon.
As the story was relayed, Yoko’s advice was simple: stop worrying about the legacy. Go into the studio every day for ten days. Whatever the music is by the end of each day, that’s finished. At the end of ten days, whatever exists is the album.
That simplified framing cut through something decades of bands, collaborations, and compositions never had. Charles had released records under other names, played on countless projects, but never a full, bound release under the Spacefuzz name alone. He borrowed the advice and adapted it: seven days of daily recording, followed by about a month of editing, expanding, and rearranging into something more thoroughly finished than the original ten-day sprint described to him.
The timing matters too. COQ came together not long after the Karlsruhe trip documented on Live at the Electric Eel, and the record is full of sounds carried back from that visit: church bells, airport noise, snatches of voices caught in passing. Found sound and musique concrète weren’t just an aesthetic choice here; the source material was quite literally sourced from the road.
The whole thing was recorded solo at The Blue Room in Phoenix, AZ, no collaborators involved. That’s part of what makes the record’s palette so unusual: field recordings from a trip to Germany, phase loops, guitar synthesis, and an inkjet printer repurposed as a drum machine, all filtered through one person working alone against a self-imposed clock.
Musique concrète as a technique has always been about treating everyday sound as raw material rather than incidental noise; COQ leans into that fully, letting airport announcements and church bells sit right alongside guitar and drum machine as equally valid instruments.
There’s a strong later-era Pink Floyd thread running through the record too, specifically the post-Roger Waters, Gilmour-led sound: The Endless River, On an Island, and Rattle That Lock. It’s the same spacious, guitar-and-atmosphere sensibility, filtered through found sound instead of a full band.
Track Notes
Sudstadt is named for the Karlsruhe neighborhood where the Electric Eel sits, built from found sounds of church bells and children playing.
Dialog 9 sweeps synthesized guitar runs through a Meris ENZO and an Ottobit pedal, laid over a sparse boogie groove, Wurlitzer electric piano, and a run of ripping guitar solos.
Dog On A Chair rides backwards synth-guitar loops and ethereal EBow, with lyrics about a dog sleeping on a chair. It’s also the first appearance anywhere in the catalog of the “hull breaking” sound that resurfaces years later on Crush Depth. Everything is connected.
Canonical Phase approximates process music: repeating phrases and shifting tempo in the Reichian tradition. It carries found sounds recorded on the flight home from Germany, and marks the first appearance of the slide guitar and EBow “faux theremin” technique that recurs throughout the catalog.
Aero is flurries of chords and synth-guitar tones, closing on a heartfelt, radiant guitar solo. Charles’ own description: “Steve Vai, minus the amazing technique.”
4-D Print puts inkjet and laser printers to work as rhythmic accompaniment, their carriage returns panned in stereo. Acoustic arpeggios sit in the background alongside Rick Wright-inspired electric piano pads and guitar-synth atmospheres, until a sub-sonic thump pulls everything into a glistening, heavily dubbed landscape of abstracted circuit boards. Then, just as suddenly, it’s gone; the mystery evaporates the moment it arrives.
Kosmische Honkytonk is a faux pedal-steel echoscape drifting over sparse motorik drum machines, jet-engine noise, and twinkling white noise, all radiating from a honkytonk on the far side of the universe.
The dusty doors open onto a slowly gathering acoustic ensemble, guitars, bottleneck, dobros, mandolins, pickers and strummers, like a relaxed late-night porch jam on Mars. Charles Ives’ influence is audible in the way whole musics fade in and out of the mix, with conversations murmuring somewhere in the distance. Possibly human.
Monster closes the record and predates everything else on it by nearly two decades, written in 2001. It’s a retelling of Frankenstein from the monster’s point of view: a mismatched, cobbled-together creature (a square head, green skin, one giant foot and one small one) who just wants to be left alone to play. He finds a friend in a young girl who isn’t scared of him.
But the peace doesn’t last: a torch-lit mob shows up at the gates, and the story ends the way the original always does. The refrain says it plainly: “I don’t feel like the monster.” It’s the same question asked three different ways across the song: why is he the one being hunted, when all he ever wanted was to be let be.
Elsewhere
The seed of this record: WTF with Marc Maron, Episode 1036, Sean Lennon (July 15, 2019).
Many of the found sounds on this record were carried home from the same Karlsruhe trip documented on Live at the Electric Eel.
Track List
- Sudstadt — 2:00
- Dialog 9 — 5:52
- Dog On A Chair — 7:33
- Canonical Phase — 6:16
- Aero — 3:29
- 4-D Print — 4:49
- Kosmische Honkytonk — 7:59
- Monster — 5:24
Total runtime: approximately 43 minutes.