Fresh-sounding. Innovative. Eclectic. Melodic. Yes, these are just some of the many adjectives used for independent musicians. As for this one, you’re out of luck.
Ken Eckert (me) has been recording electronic rock music since 1985 with Artless, Heralds of Cheese, Kill the Wabbit, and in solo work. Subscribing to the philosophy “Stop taking everything so damn seriously,” what sets us apart from other indie music is the fact that we admit our music is cheesy. In fact, we embrace our cheesiness.
Chewy Planets is proudly postmodernist plunderphonics, where I used and abused classic rock songs as a platform to construct new songs and mixes. Recorded in Incheon, Korea, the album includes samples and riffs from Willie Nelson, Talking Heads, Elvis Presley, U2, Charlie Pride, Howlin' Wolf, Led Zeppelin, Herbie Hancock, Rammstein, Grease, Bee Gees, Supertramp, Chemical Brothers, Beatles, Black Sabbath, and Megadeth. I am not sure this is all legal, but as usual, totally free.
Kill the Wabbit
You can also see some other videos
on my Coughlan House Site
Yes, I know that actual Vikings probably didn’t wear pointy hats. It’s a bloody music video, not BBC History.
Q&A with Kill the Wabbit
Q: Where is Kill the Wabbit located?
A: We originated in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 1993, but more than half our catalog was recorded while living in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Several tracks do not appear here because they got rained on. I now record from time to time in my home in Korea, and I involve Mark when I can.
Q: How did you come up with the band name Kill the Wabbit?
A: It comes from the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc?, where Elmer is a theatrical Viking singing a song about hunting. The band members decided on Kill the Wabbit after vigorous market research. Actually, I remember coming up with the name suddenly during our first recordings. As police reports say, alcohol was a factor.
So far, fortunately, Warner Brothers doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the name. As all the music and video here is free and non-profit I believe it falls under fair use.
Q: What difference does the name make? How can you be a band when you don’t regularly record together.. and you don’t
actually play live.. and no one would ever pay good money for your music
anyway?
A: Wait a minute! I’m the one writing these questions! They’re supposed
to be fawning and complimentary to the band. Okay, Q & A over!
What does the yell in The Viking Song mean? This is from “The Battle of Maldon,” an Old English
poem about a battle between the English and the Vikings in AD 991.
Hige sceal þe heardra / heorte þe cenre
mod sceal þe mare / þe ure mægen lytlað!
(“Our resolve must be harder, our hearts keener, and our spirits greater, by as much as our strength diminishes!”)
Heralds of Cheese
When I lived in Newfoundland in the nineties, I recorded with
Mike Winsor (guitar) and Scott Batten (bass, rhythm guitar). I played drums and sometimes bass and keyboards. It was
refreshing to do things this way. Heralds of Cheese was a sort of un-band
of Joe Satriani-meets-Jan Hammer. No live performances; no videos; no second takes!
Artless was my first real band (1990-91), formed when we were students at Concordia College in Edmonton. We started out, as most
do, playing cover versions under the slightly cheesy name Visionary but we progressed to writing and recording original songs.
Noel Nibblett (vocals) and Alex Chu (guitar) were better songwriters than
I was, so I stuck to percussion and recording. We also had Jim Mulligan
(rhythm guitar) and Trevor Grinde & Corey Payne (bass).
Ken & the Cowflops
My first recorded work was Ken & the Cowflops, in which
I played every instrument. If you like Yello, Herbie Hancock, or Kraftwerk you will perhaps
like this. There were no Cowflops; it was just the name I chose to use for my solo work. Like most people, I never expected to see the inside of a recording studio
and so I began to build my own.
All of these recordings were made by myself using technology which slowly
improved from two cassette decks mixed together, to a four-track recorder,
to producing almost studio-quality recordings on my computer with MIDI
and digital editing programs, all on a budget of likely less than what U2 spend on coffee. I have had some of this material played on a few
radio stations and have performed live a few times.
CKO Radio
CKO Radio was the name of an imaginary radio station that my friend Paul Horsman invented in 1983 when we were grade 10 students in Edmonton at Concordia High School. Paul and Roland Schwaldt began writing and recording short skits for CKO with a tape deck and a record player. I joined in 1984, and over the next two years an album of comedy shorts took shape. In 1989 we began a second album, now equipped with multi-track tape recorders and sampling keyboards. I eventually become the recording engineer and some of the skits became pretty complex.
Some of these radio spots have been played on campus radio. As some of them use bits of copyright music in the background, I can’t do much with them commercially at present, but you’re welcome to listen to a few clips for fun. There are no obscenities in these recordings, but the subject matter isn’t suitable for children.
Paul Horsman & Roland Schwaldt at the end of CKO I, March 1986.
A recording session in November 1991: Roland, Paul, Ken.
Making a rock video is twenty times as much work
as I expected, and I sympathize with those poor bands who spend weeks on
their video and end up being made fun of on Much-Music’s Video Fromage the next year.
I ended up spending about $170 on my first computer-edited video, the Viking Song. I was able to
do this because I had help from the Education department at MUN, which lent
me a camera, and from the Arts & Culture centre in St. John’s, which
lent me some costumes. I then spent two weeks
on Adobe Premiere editing five gigs of video files (that was a lot in October 2000) and trying to keep my computer
from dying under the load.
My later videos have been somewhat less ambitious than
the Viking video, as I no longer have access to a large cast of friends I can
bribe with cheap beer to put on goofy costumes. I also don’t have the luxury
of spending a month building costumes and assembling harps. Nowadays I tend to just use clip art for props and a lot of After Effects plugins. If you’re going to cut corners, don’t go halfway.
To make a rock video, you need a video camera, a color screen, and a program like Premiere that crashes every five minutes.
You also need some friends to act in your video. The sillier the friends, the better. Music videos are not high art.
Viking babes Danielle, Michelle, and Tammy, with homemade outfits and "improv" dance choreography.
Myself burning my harp, a la Hendrix. The harp wouldn’t burn and so we had to use newspapers and fix it in the mix.
Morphing images together in software is fun, although it will take all day to render on your computer.
And sometimes women might dance in their underwear. Hey, it was artistically meaningful to the song, alright!
Some recordings on this site feature brief excerpts of copyrighted recordings as background samples, or are cover versions of copyrighted music. No money is made from this site, and the performances here are for personal use and may not be sold.
Yes, I know that actual Vikings probably didn’t wear pointy hats. It’s a bloody music video, not BBC History.
