Gather Your Junk Together $1.82

About Gather Your Junk Together

The second full-length Rubber Band Banjo (RBB) album 'Gather Your Junk Together' (GYJT) was an attempt to expand the bloop-bleepy Perrey and Kingsley meets Mr. Bungle Nintendo-esque sound of the first full-length RBB album 'Hybrid Musical Organisms' (available only on www.rubberbandbanjo.com). GYJT is an integration of several different genres from the electronic musical junkyard, originally self-released in December 2002.

This album turned out to be mostly multi-genre tracks composed of manipulated sounds and homemade melodies. The tracks vary from the video game soundtrack - Middle Eastern - trip hop - banjo - beat box musical collage of 'Arcade Trip Bop and Roll' to the two-step rhythmic record scratching freak out of 'Evidence That DNA Can Act As A Wire' to the trash can fusion in 'Reconstruction Of A Metabolic Pathway'.

Neither of the aforementioned albums were released on a label, but some individual tracks appeared on audiogalaxy and the former mp3.com site. Many songs on the GYJT album originally had samples from various movies, radio, and TV shows; thus requiring copyright permissions to officially release. After an extended break from music making, RBB decided to remove the samples from GYJT so that it could be released here.

A third full-length album 'Hypermutator' is available now on MEME Records (www.memerecords.net) and being sold on CD Baby. Loosely inspired by the mechanisms of evolutionary change in bacteria with high mutation rates, this album was constructed using heavy tweaking of electronic sounds, guitar percussion, shortwave radio, and natural recordings. Hypermutator purposely fuses and jumps between IDM, krautrock, jazz, video game music, cut-ups, drums 'n' bass, dub, sci-fi soundscapes, and no-wave.

In August 2005, the Repeating Elements EP was released as a FREE mp3 download on www.rubberbandbanjo.com. This EP was constructed using an electronic drum set, lap steel percussion, and homemade instruments. This is a 19+ minute collage piece of interacting repeating elements where the tracks flow freely into one another. In the future, Rubber Band Banjo hopes to construct an album using sounds entirely from homemade instruments and other musical oddities.

Review of the track 'Arcade Trip Bop and Roll' from garageband.com:

Great track.
1. Arrangement sounded pretty crazy, in a very interesting way. Lots of things going on keep the track rolling right along.

2. Rhythm was awesome, I loved the ethnic tribal/middle eastern rhythms. The breakbeat was pretty phat, and the track had a solid groove.

3. Sound was pretty original. Clean and well produced with some really interesting changes in both tempo and melodic structure.

Overall a really cool experimental-ish track. Excellent programming and ideas.

Extra Credit: Sequencer/Effects Programming, Production, Beat, Originality.

- Asymmetry
Seattle, Washington
May 13th, 2004

Some of Rubber Band Banjo's influences include Amon Tobin, Squarepusher, Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, Mike Patton, Estradasphere, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Jason Forrest (aka Donna Summer), End., Messer Chups, Perrey and Kingsley, Vicious Hairy Mary, Keuhkot, Alamaailman Vasarat, Steroid Maximus, Cardiacs, Bogus Blimp, Ulver, Arcturus, Solefald, Single Unit, Xploding PlastiX, and Kaada.