"So, you're an artist now, eh?"

Click to go to my page on Society 6

Some art prints, plus stray t-shirts, iPhone skins, throw pillows, et al.

New Releases and Editions by Me

The Rest of Steve Fitch

"If I were right for you, you'd be perfect for me:"

It's been quite some time since I'd noticed the glitches in some of the tracks on my Rest of Steve Fitch compilation (comprising some juvenilia by me from 1984-1994) and pulled the album from availability, but I have finally made good on my promise to restore, re-master and re-release it – HERE.


Click on the "read more" link to read about the other three.

A Season or So Off?

Toward the end of 2012, I had "vowed" not to release any new music until the end of 2013, the reason being that it consumes too much of my time to "administrate" the releases. That is, it's such a devoration of my free time, much to the detriment of and distraction from other activities and pursuits. However, once I had completed the first couple of sets of music of 2013, it became clear to me that to perform all the tasks associated with making public the music I might create this year would require too large a block of time in December for me to plan for or rely upon, and that doing it as I go is much-more time-effiicient.

Even so, I have again assessed the economics of my time, and confirmed anew that revenues from the sale of my music by me fail to compensate me for the time I have spent in service of releasing and publicizing it. For example, My Music by Me Music (my erstwhile employer) owes me in excess of $100,000 in back wages for grapbic design, audio post-production editing and processing, video creation (which I ceased after realizing how time-crunched and under-funded I am to do the video work I'd prefer), legal consultation, book publication, website and content maintenance (across multifarious internetric concerns), music-publishing and copyright registration, correspondence with music vendors to contend with their incompetence or worse, and hours on end passed in figurin'-out how all this dang stuff works or just wha'the heck'm I s'posed t'do.

My 7-Inch Punk-Rock Record by Me (As It Were)

Blurbiage on the Bandcamp page for this one:

I had envisioned this as a three-track punk-rock seven-inch vinyl record, but since I am neither affluent nor cool enough to pull it off, I'm leaving it up to you. Just buy this download (lossless files only, naturally); then print and press the three-song vinyl seven-inch disc with your own money, using the supplied artwork and audio files; just pay me $3 per copy manufactured (including "promo" copies). Everything should be so simple!

For Peter

I can't relate to why someone would write to a stranger expressly to say bad things to and about him –
but I might be a gentleman.

Kleinabermein, Nein

Yes, yet a nother album attributed to Kleinabermein: Nein – its title owing in part to that it is Kleinabermein's album ordinal number nine.

The CD-package art (downloadable along with the audio, via Bandcamp), features meticulous yet economical typographic design by Walter Krankheit.

Nein by Kleinabermein is now available for download (FLAC, MP3@320, et al.) on Bandcanp; also on Amazon (MP3@VBR256).

UPDATE, 3 MAY: Schreiben Sie mir in Deutsch und fordern Sie einen kostenlosen Download von einem Album von Kleinabermein.

Five-Song EP by Japanese Mother/Son Movie

With that beaming glow of pride with which Mom puts your drawing up on the 'fridge, I present to you a five-song EP, by the band Japanese Mother/Son Movie, produced by  me.

Clocking-in at 21:30, this EP is a fine introduction to the avant-tard genre, with a nod to the electrocreep pioneered by Kleinabermein, with whom JM/SM share an emphasis on mangled wordless voices.

Listen to all five tracks on Soundcloud. Buy it on Amazon MP3. Listen to and buy (FLAC, MP3, whatever) this cute li'l sucker on Bandcamp.

Brown Town Album Now Available

Yep – a nother album by me. Brown Town consists of 10 songs, half of which are raw guitar-based punk-pop, one of which sounds like a '60s Polish jazz film theme, one is an electro-groove thingy, another is a folky-dokey British-sounding whatzit, along with the electrocreepish drone track . . .

Ten songs @ 36 minutes: a concisely intense package of humor, vitriol, impishness, hatred and redemption. Nothing says, "F*ck you," like saying, "F*ck you."

Brown Town is now available for download on Bandcamp (including CD-package artwork files). A ten-track download will be available soon on Amazon MP3.

Iggy Pop's Album The Idiot by Me (Update)

Yep, I done gone 'n' upped my re-make of Iggy Pop's 1977 album The Idiot to Bandcamp. Just buy it – it's good. I had a lottta fun making it.

The price of this download $6 (unless you would like to pay more for it) because although the cost of the mechanical royalities for all eight songs, per copy, is 76 cents, the additional licensing fees ($114, charged by the Hairy Fox Agency) bring the total licensing cost per copy to $5.32. In addition to that are the 3% fee charged to receive your payment by PayPal and the 10% that Bandcamp retains from sales. In brief: At $6 a download, after licensing fees and mechanical royalties, then after PayPal and Bandcamp have taken their cuts, I stand to lose 10 cents per download from releasing these eight songs.

Buy Iggy's original version of the album – it's way better than my re-make.

Das achte Album von Kleinamermein

O Feinde, nicht diese Töne is now available on Bandcamp.

The eighth Kleinabermein album consists of six selections. The first is 15 minutes in duration; the last 30 minutes of required endurance. Both of them are insidiously-engaging drone pieces that "work" as either passive or active listening. The other selections on the album straddle tohe arbitrary partition between humor and horror – with the customary mangled voices and manipulated sounds.

Listen to a sampler medley on the Bnadcamp page and in the Kleinabermein section of this site.

Mike Sweet Is Dead

– but he lives, in my head:

Follow the links in the player, or download it from its Bandcamp page. Download it for free or pay whateveryawant – I don't care. Mike's dead.

My "Old Painted NYC Signs" Flickr Page Is Now Public

- after my not having realized, all this time, that the perferences of the page had been set to be viewable only by people signed-in to Flickr.

I realize that one so tech-savvy and internetrical as I is supposed to be aware of such things, but nevertheless, I can't help but feel that someone shoulda told me.

See the  photo set here, then. Sorry'bout that.

See the original blog post here.

The Other CD Bonus Tracks Now Available

This album is QR-friendly.

In doing some housekeeping in regard to my cessation of CD production, I decided to make available a collection of eight formerly-CD-only "bonus" tracks from 2011–2013.

The Other CD Bonus Tracks is now available for download on Bandcamp, and also on Amazon MP3. The download from Bandcamp includes 150dpi CD artwork, and some other pertinent graphics and info.

Among the material is only one song, with the rest being instrumentals or instrumental mixes or versions of songs. Four are from A Curse in Reverse; the rest from An Hour off Your Life,  Repeat & Fade, Fucksgiving, and I Can't Love You.

The reason why this collection is designated as being of the "other" bonus tracks is that previously, four medium- to excessive-duration abstract or instrumental bonus tracks had been anthologized on Masturpieces.

Das siebte Album von Kleinabermein

Für die dummen normalen weissen Menschen, the seventh (minus Missing Boy) Kleinabermein album, is now available for download (FLAC, MP3, OGG, w/e) on Bandkamp.

I am at a loss as to how to describe this album. Listen to the sampler medley on the Kleinabermein page. The album is "only" 32 minutes in duration (the final track being over 17 minutes in required endurance), but how much of this stuff can you immoderately take?

My First Album by Me of 2013

Despite my swearing that I'd not release any new music until the end of this year, it looks like that New Year's resolution – as are they all – was made to be broken. My first album of 2013, Fucksgiving, has 13 tracks totaling 41 minutes in duration. Songs and other stuff. Yum.

Although I am the king of the modern-day concept album, I'd not had an unifying theme in mind for this one, but upon completion, I realized that the material might warrant the subtitle The Obscenity of Everyday Life. Most of the material "deals with the issue of" how some form of b/s or another insiduously seeps into one's life – via the computer, the telephone, the media, one's personal life, one's domestic situation (i.e., unruly neighbors), and/or one's own scummy id.

Fucksgiving is now available in the Listen & Buy section.

You can listen to a sampler medley of it on the album's Bandcamp page and in the Listen & Buy section. View the album's tracklisting and other info here.

The Singing Housemate Does Bono Stipe

Recorded on a minicassette recorder outside the bedroom door
of a progressively-drunker housemate as he imagined himself
first Michael Stipe and then Bono, wailing along with R.E.M.
(two songs) and U2 (nine songs). Some “performances” have
been edited for the sake of brevity. No attempt has been made
to mitigate tape hiss nor other noise. The identity of The Singing
Housemate is intended to remain unknown; these recordings
have been made available in order to entertain you, not to
embarrass him. Even so, this is what happens when you wake
your housemates with your drunken howling on a regular basis.

Available as a free download on Bandcamp.

The Man in the Little Yellow Box

Renaissance Music: Collected Works 2009-2012 (Box Set)

This collection has been produced in order to celebrate the musical "renaissance" I've experienced after not having made any music at all in the 15 years prior to Spring, 2009:

Three data-DVD discs containing FLAC versions of all the music I have released from 2009 through 2012, categorized by the titles of the CDs on which the recordings had originally appeared, plus a 44-page color-printed discographic booklet ("disorientation and untraining manual") – all in a hand-fabricated slipcase.

Read all about it here.

Précis Review of Sixty-Nine by Me

(via e-mal)

I'm listening to 69.  Lovely stuff.  Too much there to critique in any coherent fashion, at least on first listen.  If you ever need an elevator pitch: "Instead of leaving Roxy Music, Eno leashes and gags Ferry, and drags him through a brothel that's a scale model of each Beatnik apartment ever depicted in mass media."

dominique e.p. available

My five-track, 17-minute EP of instrumental music, entitled dominique,* is now available in the Listen & Buy section.

This music is really thrilling for me to have created, especially since I hadn't had to listen to the sound of my own voice during its production. The opening track accidentally comes as close to wubstep as I wanna get; the rest of the tracks range in styles from Krautrock to Europop to Latin Jazz – insofar as I might be generically fluent or pertinent.

Discographic blabla for dominique is here.
The CD artwork of dominique and my other fecalets is displayed at Flickr.

(*) The title has nothing to do with that old song by the Singing Nun. If you're not old enough to remember that one, you should be.

Ich glaube nicht . . . Available Again

Ich glaube nicht dass ich ficke, the sixth Kleinabermein album, is again available, thanks to a correction of a typographic error of one of the titles in the package art, thanks to German's not being my native language and my not having a helpmate to proof my work. (Just one of the reasons why I need a German girlfriend.)

During and after my working on this album, I didn't much like the material, but now we go everywhere together.

You can listen to sampler medleys of all the Kleinebermein albums, plus select selected selections selected from them, and be seduced into buying them, in the Kleinabermein ghetto of this site.

Legitimate Bastard Now Available

Sorry to make you feel inadequate, but my album Legitimate Bastard is now available in the Listen & Buy section.

Tracklisting 'n' such is at my Discography site.

View the CD artwork (and that of my other CDs) at Flickr.

Photos: Old Painted Signs, NYC, 1997

E. 13th St. & Second Ave.

During the warmer half of 1997, I photographed old signs painted on the sides of buildings in New York City. Not only did the history that they implied and evoked fascinate me, I also sensed that many of them, despite their having remained untouched for decades, wouldn't be around for much longer. There was, in the air, at that time, a sense that the city was changing – being changed – in some revisionist makeover. Already, I was seeing these old signs being replaced with stories-tall printed-vinyl underwear ads and other egregious ephemeral eyesores. Times Square had been shuttered and boarded-up, its vacant storefronts painted alternating cartoon colors, in preliminary Disneyfication. Clinton St., where I had lived in the '80s, had young white trendy-yuppie couples replacing the Hispanic heroin and crack dealers – and, as a metaphor of the change, its one-way traffic running toward Delancey Street, not up from it. And so on, here and there, in various parts of the city. Disappearing, in an accelerating manner, was an aspect of NYC which had made it interesting to me: the symbiosis of its past and its present, the persistent reminders of how things had been generations ago, the sense of one's presence there participating in and contributing to the city's rich and prominent historic legacy.

Merry Pissmas EPP Available

My Merry Pissmas EPP* is now available in the Listen & Buy section.

Listen to a sampler medley of Merry Pissmas (and buy it) in the Listen & Buy section and on its Bandcamp page.

(*) The extra "P" is for extra pee

This Made My Month

Today I received an e-mail from someone to whom I had sent a CD of my album Lost in Austin:

Yo Steve - thanks SO much for sending me LOST IN AUSTIN!  It's a fuckin' masterpiece.  I think I've listened to "My Velvet Rut" 15 times - it should be the official anthem for over-40 (or is that 45-50?) Austin.  Funny, real, and thus a little scary.  Pleasure Dome------Nursing Home.  Congrats - it's inspiring.

G'head – go for it.

A few days ago, I decided to resort to a lame, desperate marketing ploy: offer an album of recordings with "blind" titles of instrumental pieces. That is, one doesn't know what the names of the pieces are, just that they are instrumentals of some sort or another.

So, on my page on Bandcamp, one can purchase the download of this 37-minute album – Instrumental Surprise Pack – in FLAC, MP3@320, OGG, or whicheverelse – for a risk-worthy $5, with CD-package artwork (150dpi) included, so that the industrious, bored or frugal might be able to fabricate their own full-quality-audio CDs from, say, the lossless FLAC files – and the enterprising might be enabled to arrogate bootlegging it to random suckers. You may also pay more, if you like, in order to reward me for a job well done or to compensate me for my time.

Lost in Austin Album Now Available

The most "conceptual" of my "concept" albums yet, Lost in Austin, is available in the Listen & Buy section.

You can view the artwork for this CD and my others here.

This album has nothing to do with the 1979 album of the same title by Marc Benno. Or maybe it does — as the other bookend to an era, of sorts.

The Octomom of Pop Compilation – on Bandcamp

The Octomom of Pop, my compilation of 22 of my "pop" songs, from 15 CD releases from 2009 until the present, is now available for download on Bandcamp.

Along with the download of FLAC, MP3, OGG, or whatever you prefer, comes 150dpi artwork for a CD package, for those of you who burn lossless FLAC to CDs. (I include such artwork for all of my download releases on Bandcamp.)

You can listen to (and buy) The Octomom of Pop here. The lyrics of the songs are published there, for you to better sing-along or take offense at what they're saying. (If you're feeling cozy on this page, there's a player-widget embedded in the sidebar.)

My Second Soundtrack Album by Me

My second "soundtrack" album, With the Moon behind Me, is now available in the Listen & Buy section.

This 10-track, 40-minute album is entirely instrumental. The artwork was stunningly executed by photographer Colin Ambulance.

Hecknology Now Available

My album Hecknology is now available on CD, here. "Only" 33 minutes in duration, but dense and intense with five distinct and succinct songs, a short instrumental, and a 15-minute montagesque title track. The CD has the lyrics thoughtfully printed in the booklet, better for you to sing-along.

This album is available for download as FLAC, MP3@320, OGG, or whateverelse ya want, via Bandcamp.

View the CD artwork here.

"Old Lolita" (Third Chimpunk E.P.) Available

As though to complete a "trilogy" thereof, I've now a third Chimpunk E.P. to my name. This one, Old Lolita, is seven songs at a duress – excuse me, duration – of just under 17 minutes.

Do it to it in the Listen & Buy section.

I gottatellya, after this set and a pair of Kleinabermein albums (all three in a month-and-a-half), the "noise" for the sake thereof is probably out of my system for a while, though such lizard-brained cacophony has been all I've been able to muster while it's been too hot for higher, mammalian cortical activity. The Chimpunk projects serve as creative laxative. Now it's time for me to get off the pot and do that chimphonic tone-poem with Russian male chorus.

Fourth Kleinabermein Album

The fourth album by Kleinabermein,  Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population, is now on available.

This album, composed entirely of manipulated sounds of human voices and electric violoncello, is dedicated to the rightful oppressors of the World.

All Kleinabermeinstuff is here.

A Song for Old Acquaintances

"Myself in Your Eyes," from my album Sixty-Nine

I fail to recognize myself in your eyes: however I look, older, is in the eye of the beholder. Life went by so fast; memories were made to last, but a lot has happened since I'd made indelible prints. You're angry, now, because I'm no longer what I was, so neither is your sense of the worth of your experience. I'd rather be discovered than remembered; ignored than mistaken; written-off than vilified; forgotten than forsaken.

© 2012 Steve Fitch • My Music by Me Music (BMI)

One New Album Available; Another Available Anew

It was May of last year when I realized the album  I Can't Love You, and by coincidence, a year later, in reviewing instrumental mixes that I had made of its three main pieces, I found that they stand very well on their own. Since they had been made prior to the session in which I recorded all the vocals on the album, they aren't just mixes-minus-the-vocals.

Therefore, I thought to myself, "Why not just make these available, as well?"

I Can't Love You (Instrumental Mixes) is now available in the Listen & Buy section.

Enfantesque, the third album by Kleinabermein is once again available.

Imbecilic chatter never sounded so good/bad.

Sixty-Nine Album Now Available

My new album by me, Sixty-Nine, a collection of 69 songs, instrumentals and whatzits each of one-minute duration, is finally available.

The MP3 version of this album can be downloaded from Amazon, as halves 1 and 2.

Download it in one piece, FLAC, MP3, et al., via Bandcamp.

Read the track listing here.

View artwork for this CD (on Flickr) here.

A Curse in Reverse Finally Available

My new album, A Curse in Reverse, is now available in the Listen & Buy section..

I am really happy with this album. Some of the music is a lot more upbeat and optimistic-sounding than what I've done previously, and as usual, the selections are all over the stylistic map. There are even songs in French, German and Italian, in addition to the language of our colonialist oppressors.

The MP3 version has 12 selections; the CD version has four alternate mixes added, in order to enable one to appreciate the full-quality audio while singing-along with the lyrics printed in the booklet.

Track listing and such for this album is at my Discography sub-site, here.

Thanks, again to the Elephant-Man.

Repeat & Fade E.P. Now Available

Sorry, but I've released another E.P. of so-called music in the "chimpunk" vein (the previous such recordings being the NOw E.P.). This one is entitled Repeat & Fade, consisting of six tracks, plus an uncredited track, totaling 20 minutes in duration.

As with the NOw E.P., the instrumentation of each song is restricted to four elements – guitar (or thereabouts), bass, drums and vocals – but the Chimpunk Rules of Execution have been relaxed, in that effects have been permitted, as long as they be over-used; the title track does fade-out (repetitiously, of course).

Hit it in the Listen & Buy section.

Listen to and purchase the new Kleinabermein album.

I am pleased to announce the second release by Kleinabermein, my fake-German-art-band project. The title of this album is Entschärften Intellektuelle.

These new recordings are not as "extreme" as the previous, but are just as intense and engaging (or alienating), overall. The pieces are entitled "Eins (Schlafen)" and "Zwei (Tanzen)," either 30 minutes in duration. There is, additionally a 10-minute "bonus" track.

Find it the Kleinabermein page above.

NOw, 5-Song E.P., Available NOw

My new CD E.P., entitled NOw, is available NOw. Five songs @ 15 minutes, in accordance with the Chimpunk Rules of Execution:

01: Instrumentation limited to exactly four elements, (i.e.,drums/bass/guitar/vocals).
02: Drum part forms basis of composition and form of each song.
03: Instrumental performances extemporaneous and in real-time; first complete takes; no combining takes.
04: Instrumental performances proceed from emotional impulse, not from thinking of what to play next.
05: Audio effects are limited to those absolutely necessary.
06: Feedback permitted; preferably not mitigated.
07: Recordings presented at full duration, with no fade at beginning nor at end.
08: Recordings presented in order in which they had been created originally.
09: No per-track panning nor volume-level adjustment applied in final mixes; EQ only when absolutely necessary.
10: CD artwork created while listening to the recordings.

The results might be said to be in the "No-Wave" vein, but are not with the genre in mind. These are, instead, the first/original "Chimpunk" recordings.

Find NOw in the Listen & Buy section.

An Hour off Your Life Album Now Available

My new album, appropriately entitled An Hour off Your Life, is now available. I've had the privilege of being the first person to buy a copy (the proof copy). This one really kicks ass, and I hope that you will let it kick yours. Find it in the Listen & Buy section.

Although it's usual for my albums to be stylistically and generically diverse, this one touches on grunge-pop, techno-pop, hardcore punk, electro-creep, avant-garde, blues, and sentimental soft-rock. There is also my tribute to Neu! and Glenn Branca, entitled "Neubranca." My re-acquaintance with the guitar really affected the composition and production; I appreciated the opportunity to loosen-up and get sloppy at times.

An Hour off Your Life also contains "Shutupand," my most lyrically-offensive song, ever. I'm sorry, but it's not the biggest thing that I'll go to Hell for. However, one guy for whom I played it remarked, "Our society isn't ready for this song!" That may be one of the finest compliments that any of my songs has received. This also means that I am now accepting death threats in advance.

Masturpieces Available; Rest of Album Deleted Indefinitely

Masturpieces, a collection of "bonus" tracks from four of my previous albums, is now available in the Listen & Buy section.

The tracks, totaling 66 minutes in duration, have been previously released as "bonus" tracks on previous CDs, and are:

"Breakfast of Creepazoids" (from Breakfast of Creepazoids)
"Funfzig" (from Existential Bukkake)
"Masturpiece" (from Coffee for Regret)
"Basement" (from I Can't Love You)

Most of these pieces consist of elements from the songs on the respective albums; all are abstract, pointless, disturbing . . .

The CD-package artwork of Masturpieces can be viewed here.

One of my first CD/MP3 releases, The Rest of Steve Fitch, has been deleted from online availability, with intention of eventually re-instating it after I have raised the funds for the equipment necessary to refer to the original master tapes for clean, uncorrupted renderings of those songs and instrumentals. My old analog master recordings need transfer to the digital realm, anyway, but the question of a spare several hundred dollars intervenes between intention and realization. However, I maintain my promise to offer a FLAC download of the re-mastered album to whomever had purchased the original version.

Just a Thought

Wouldn't it have been so much better if we'd just loved each other?

Coffee for Regret Now Available:

My album Coffee for Regret is finally available.

Coffee for Regret features eight songs in a variety of styles – avant-garde Lieder, musique concrète, chimprock, electro-symphonica, motorock, and jazz – but all free of conventional tonality. I find trying to "describe" my music by me a bit like tying to explain a life-changing mystical experience to a drunk college girl dancing in place to keep from peeing in her jeans while waiting to use the rest room.

The material on Coffee for Regret appears in primordial, precursory instrumental form on Telecommunist Anthems (making the latter a "premix" album).


Find both in the Listen & Buy section.

I Can't Love You Now Available

I Can't Love You is now commercially available. It's aural cinema. Title track is 31 minutes in duration.

In the Listen & Buy section.
The artwork for this CD (and all my others) can be viewed here.

By Disappointment Only: Available in Two Editions

By Disappointment Only. Poems-over-weirdness. Vocal and instruments-only editons. In the Listen & Buy section.

Music for Student Films

With elation and glee – okay, merely with self-satisfaction and smugness – I announce the availability of my album Music for Student Films, in the Listen & Buy section.

As the pertinent blurbiage goes:

Music created, and originally released as most of the album Wish They'd Had This When I Was a Kid, in 2009. 15 mainly-instrumental selections. No license, permission, nor royalties necessary when used as part of student films, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, and you 'remember' me when you do something with a budget.

Judiciously shaved-down to an exact hour's duration, this is really cool to listen to straight-through. The CD package artwork is nice, too.

Existential Bukkake Now Available

With pleasure and pride, I announce the commercial availability of my new album, Existential Bukkake.

Available in the Listen & Buy section.

The tracklisting is found on my Discogrqaphy site here.

Ministry of Love Album

Finally – my album Ministry of Love "soundtrack" album is available in the Listen & Buy section.

I like this one a lot, myself.

I even listen to it now and then.

I even own a copy.

Come Breakfast!

Finally: Breakfast of Creepazoids is commercially available.

See the the Listen & Buy section.

Bon appétit.

Kleinabermein Album Now Available

The album Zsborgqbew by Kleinabermein is now available.

Personally, I recommend the CD's audio quality over that of the MP3 version, due to the appreciably greater "presence" of the sound, overall. While reviewing the proof copy of the CD today, I noticed this when it came to track no. 3, during which I sensed strange things living down in the lower frequencies, and the part in the middle, where the girl says, "Je veux un crême glacé au chocolat," she seemed more present than when I listened to this album – as I have many times – in MP3 format. Uncompressed audio does make for a better listening experience, especially in cases such as this album, whose most significant qualities are compromised otherwise.

For more info and to listen and buy, go to the Kleinabermein page (above).

So, Someone listened to My Son, the Loser.

(. . .)  This is really a great piece of work from start to finish. This cd left me searching for nothing. It's amazing all the different styles you have going on here but make them work together so flawlessly. I really love the distorted, feedback thing you have going on at the beginning and end, the quality of sounds that's going on, just within that, is amazing. I also really dig the vocals on "Nazi Doktor" what ever the effects are in combination with your voice is haunting. There are some parts on this disc that seem like their from such a deep place in you I'm almost surprised you did it. While I was listening to this, the words that came to my mind were' "there's true beauty in madness".

(. . .) Your writing is really great Steve. I felt like I was watching a play while listening to this, and had the thought that, it's a damn shame people will never get to experience this in a live setting. I had the vision of you on stage behind a computer doing your spoken word parts while the strings and other parts were being played live, and you would do the other stuff with the mac. I also seen a projection screen rolling with video you'd pieced together to reflect the songs. I could totally see people wanting to perform your work live, hell, I'd do it in a heart beat.

(. . .) Honestly, I think a lot of people would be floored by this cd. I guess for lack of a better term there is more "Industrial" in this cd than in most industrial music. Then on top of it, you blend all this other stuff into to make it totally unique entity. I don't think any fan of a particular style of music would be let down by what they hear in this. I guess when I use the word "industrial", to me it means, experimental, with a combination of a lot of different sounds you wouldn't think would go together. So, I don't mean to be stereotypical or put you in a category with the word or anything.

Another thing that I should mention that really stands out to me, especially in this day in age that we're in is, you have achieved something totally new and unique with your music. Being a lover of music I listen to a lot of shit, past, present and even my own (trying to find my sound) stuff. Your work is the only music out of all of it, that really gives me what it is I've looked so long for in recent years, satisfaction in what I'm hearing, but it goes beyond that into the world of the pleasantly unexpected.

Great work man.

Yes, I was that guy . . .

Last week, I got yet another e-mail inquiring if I were the Steve Fitch who had a song on the compilation entitled A Texas Trip, produced and released by the Butthole Surfers on Caroline Records in 1987. The gentleman also inquired as to which of my albums might contain that song, or which might have "a similar vibe/feel." I replied to him that he could assess this by listening to the sampler medleys and the 50-song player widget on my site (through which he had contacted me, presumably), but also that a lot has happened and changed in 23 years, and that I am not inclined to make the same sort of music I had back then. I then sent him an MP3 of the song in question ("In the Neighborhood"), "for your nostalgic pleasure."

Another thing I said to the man was that I do not tend to associate myself with that album, although I hardly regret having had a song on it. It's just that my sensibilities have changed as much as the times. I should hope that anyone who has memories going back that far might be at least prepared to revise their frame of historical reference. Unfortunately, this is not usually the case. People tend to content themselves with what they remember, rather than to go through the pain of revising their memories. The more of an history one has, the more demanding it is to update it, especially to modify its contextual containment. I liken this to how a person who lives in a house full of stacks of old newspapers would rather walk across the room and grab an old paper and re-read it, comforted by the familiarity with how the stories go, rather than to put on his or her shoes, go out to the corner store, pay for today's issue, and read and assimilate all the new information. Newspapers from 23 years ago describe a strikingly different world from that in which we live now.

This sort of subject (the past vs. the present) I have addressed elsewhere in this blog, but I shan't cite those posts, as this instance wants to speak for itself. To be blunt: I am surprised that people remember that compilation album, I was honored to be invited to appear on it, and I am somewhat astonished that I had made some minor contribution to pop-cultural history – especially since at the time of the album's release, I was culturally disconnected from whatever ripples it might have been registering. However, I really do not have time for nostalgia, nor for being "remembered," and if people are disinterested in what I have to offer in the present, I should wish them contentment among their stacks of old fanzines and indie vinyl of yore.