BAND OF FIRE, Then And Now

BAND OF FIRE: 

A special edition CD, from conception to release

by Mike Metlay of Atomic City (atomic-city@netcom.com)

---

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this post is to explain, in gory detail, the process of
making Atomic City's latest release, BAND OF FIRE, from its beginnings
in 1990 to its final form today. It is hoped that others will benefit
from my experiences when they attempt to put out their own music, if
only to avoid the mistakes I made. In Part 1, I'll talk about how the
piece was originally created and why, and in Part 2, I'll cover its
rerelease this year on Atomic City.

---

PART 1: 1990-1991

MOTIVATIONS

This story begins in early 1990. I had been friends with Chuck Van Zyl
for several years at that point, having hooked up with him through my
publication of the Xpander Users' Group newsletter. Chuck, for those
of you who don't know, is a Philadelphia-based space musician of
exceptional calibre; soft-spoken and shy, he has produced nearly a
dozen albums of eerie, startling solo work, and a good deal more as a
member of the group Xisle. Most of his stuff is on cassette, but he
does have two CDs out that you can find at places like Wayside Music;
one, _Celestial Mechanics_, is a remastered CD of two of his solo
albums combined on one disc, and the other, _Regeneration Mode_, is a
lovely duo effort with Peter Gulch of Xisle (and the Nightcrawlers, a
legendary band in their own right).  Chuck had waited patiently for
over three years for a solo album of mine that never came; my
scientific research during that time had essentially ended my music
career for a while, and my marriage didn't help matters. I agonized
over the time and opportunities I was losing, but the prospect of
getting a whole album out daunted me.

LESSON 1: Take your recorded output one step at a time. If you set out
to take on a project that seems too big or difficult for you, you'll
find a way not to do it, or not to succeed at it. If you can do things
one step at a time, you'll find yourself taking larger steps later.

The opportunity to let me attack a manageable chunk of music came in
1990, when Chuck wrote to tell me that he was assembling a sampler
tape for Synkronos Records, his indie label. The tape, _Facets_, would
feature ninety minutes of music by six musicians; could I provide him
with a 15-minute track for it? Of course, I responded immediately; I'd
get to work on it as soon as I returned home from my current research
trip. And I found that the idea of taking part in a larger project, 
holding my end up for others, made a huge difference in my attitude;
after three years of broken promises, I actually did find myself in
the studio, hard at work, soon after my return home from Atomic City,
Tennessee.

STRUCTURE

"Band of Fire" was the second-longest piece of music I had attempted at
that time; at fifteen minutes, it was much longer than the shortish
pieces I was used to scripting out. (Two to six minutes seems more my
speed, even today.) I wanted it to establish a very definite mood, dark
and brooding with an undercurrent of urgency and motion; the Synkronos
label was pure space-music, not dancetrance or twinkly New Age, and I
needed something hypnotic, compelling, and above all, well-paced. I had
to avoid the tendency to shovel everything into the first thirty seconds
and then flounder; the piece needed to have a definite shape, and it
needed to take its time without boring or hurrying the listener. I
elected to give the song an approximately symmetric tonal envelope in
terms of timbre; it would start with a certain feel, evolve to a second
transitory phase, on to a third, then a fourth, then back to a
recapitulation of the third, through the second, to the first again:

OPEN -- TRANSIT -- DEVELOP BED -- MELODY -- RELAX BED -- TRANSIT -- CLOSE

With this essential structure in mind, I spent several weeks
auditioning and developing sounds that would do the job for the piece,
arranging them appropriately, working out effects, and so on. I had
recently acquired a used Amiga, but I elected not to use a computer
sequencer for this track, preferring the tried-and-true methods I'd
been using for years: live melodies, arpeggiator patterns, and onboard
loop sequencers, all synched to a simple beat clock and recorded live
to two-track. This means of working, with a few details changing here
and there, had been my trademark for years already, and it continued
strong in my repertoire right up until 1995. There would be no
prerecorded tracks, no tapes; all would be done direct to digital,
including starting and stopping sequences and getting them synched to
the beat properly, without the use of Song Position Pointer or other
absolute time reference. Once the instruments and treatments were in
place, getting the piece to work became an intricate ballet from mixer
to keyboard to front panel and back, combining mixing, playing and
programming into one smooth motion, fifteen-plus minutes without a
hitch.  There's no way around this but to rehearse over and over again
until you're satisfied, and to start rolling tape as soon as you're
anywhere near what you're looking for.

LESSON 2: There's a time for learning new techniques, be they sound
programming, the ins and outs of a new piece of gear, or how to use a
new program effectively. I feel that such times should be set aside
for their own sake, not as part of actual playing or serious
composing.  You can't easily learn which menus to access to tweeze
certain parameters and devote your full attention to writing all at
the same time and not have one or the other suffer a bit for it.

Over the course of about three weeks, I rehearsed and tightened the
song into its final form, assembling the parts and honing them to mesh
properly. Ideas were tried and discarded until I had everything I wanted
and nothing I didn't want.

METHODS

Over the years, I had relied very heavily on CV and Gate technology to
do most of my sequencing and arpeggiator control; MIDI was relatively
new to me, and I made a conscious decision to use as much of it as I
could without compromising my music. To do this, I set up the loops
and arpeggiator patterns that would form the structure of the piece
via MIDI rather than CVs, using the resources available within the
MIDI modules themselves.

For "Band of Fire," my studio consisted of two keyboards, two sound
modules, a drum machine, four effects boxes, a MIDI controller
keyboard, and a simple MIDI switcher. I had a CV sequencer as well,
but it was out of commission and I elected not to try to use it.

The only sequencer I used was aboard my Prophet T8, a powerful analog
synthesizer with a 76-note wooden keyboard with poly aftertouch and
attack and release velocity. The T8's sequencer was the cream of 1984
digital technology; it had a knob that let you speed up and slow down
the sequences you recorded in real time (no step editing here), and
enough memory for some three hundred notes in eight locations total.
Since it was a true MIDI sequencer, it could remember patch changes,
too. I loaded the T8's memory with two simple loops, one with a deep,
bass-heavy booming sound that opened and closed the piece, and the
other with an ominous brass-pad. The T8 sequencer would sync to beat
clocks, if a certain arcane set of start and stop signals were sent
both on the T8 itself and on the master clock source; even then,
getting a note-on to fall perfectly on the right clock was almost
impossible, so the sounds had to be tweaked until their attacks masked
any unevenness.

The Prophet VS was a digital-analog hybrid synthesizer using the
relatively new concept of vector synthesis, now made famous by the
Wavestation and Yamaha SY22 and SY35; it created wonderfully gritty
timbres, full of motion and fire. It also had a marvelous onboard
arpeggiator with a memory-latch capability and fairly tight footswitch
control. Loaded ahead of time with a chord in the proper mode and
inversion, it would randomly fire notes from this chordal structure
over a four-octave range in time with beat clocks. A special auto-pan
function was built into the sounds used, since I would be too busy to
do any fancy panning tricks while playing.

The Oberheim Xpander, my favorite synth, had two roles: an endlessly
droning resonant pad chord spread over the stereo spectrum, and the
leadline in the middle portion of the piece. The Korg EX-8000, an
inexpensive but surprisingly powerful digital-analog synth rack, was
set up to provide a wide range of sound effects and odd noises, some
original and others tweaked from the rather 'bent' set of alternate
factory patches provided with some EXes. The two modules were
controlled from an Oberheim Xk MIDI control keyboard, although the
EX-8000 has a front panel button that will fire single notes (A4) when
pressed, that saw a lot of use as well.

The drum machine and master beat clock for the piece was my trusty old
Roland TR-707. The 707 is a very recognizable beast, as it is the only
drum machine Roland ever sold that has absolutely no control over its
internal sounds: no tuning, no decay, nothing at all. In order to disguise
this, it ws fed through an original 12-bit Alesis MIDIverb, set to a 
brutally overloaded gate reverb program. To this day, I still have not
heard a better gate anywhere. The other effects boxes were routed as
needed during the song: a Korg SDD-2000 for MIDI-synched delays, a 
Yamaha SPX90II for pingponged multitap delay and cathedral reverb,
and a Lexicon LXP-5 for regenerating pitch-shift effects. A Yamaha MJC8
routed the MIDI clocks, and a Roland M-240 mixer (the same one used for 
mixing _Bandwidth_) ran the mix to a Sony PCM-501ES digital audio encoder.
The music was digitally striped, 16-bit at 44.1kHz, onto a VCR tape.

LESSON 3: Certain purists like PCM/VCR setups for their exceptionally
clean sound, even today, but a good DAT is just as clean and much,
much easier to operate, so unless you know exactly why you need a PCM
box, don't invest in one. They're a false economy in 1995.

The set of reflexes one develops when recording with a PCM encoder are
very weird; like a DAT, it is utterly unforgiving of overloads, but
unlike a DAT, the transport is extremely sloppy and in fact has no
reliable time readout. Add to this the tendency for there to be loud
pops and clicks when the VCR is turned on, and you end up with perfect
digital recording on a budget, with 30-second prerolls before you play
a note and NO punching or tight edits at all. And by tight edits, I
mean within ten seconds. :-P However, this was a while before DATs
would become common tools, so the PCM was the best a home recordist
could hope to do, unless he had a 15 ips two-track reel to reel with
Dolby SR.

PERFORMANCE AND RECORDING/RELEASE

I worked out a studio log book as I worked on the piece, in which I
wrote down the choreography of the piece; start this sequencer, stop
that one, pot down this channel, reset effects send, bring it back up
again, stop sequence, fade in chord pad, and so on. The piece works on
two levels from a timeflow standpoint: in terms of microstructure, it
is very exacting and precise, with interlocking sequences and
melodies, but in macrostructure it is very relaxed. Each section of
the piece can exist on its own, and the boundaries are deliberately
somewhat blurry. As it moves along, the player senses that the next
transition should come NOW, as opposed to three seconds ago or three
seconds from now, and careful listening allows the audience to track
the breath and motion of the synthesist.

The structure breaks down as follows:

OPEN: T8 bass gong and resonant howl, EX evolving notes into
TRANSIT: Xpander chord pad drone (under which all synths reconfigured) into
DEVELOP BED: drums and VS arpeggio develop, then T8 brass loop
MELODY: improvised modal solo over simple pedal tones (Emerson I ain't ;)
RELAX BED: strong emphasis on VS arpeggio, indicate space with echoes, pan
TRANSIT: Korg effects add dimension and uniqueness to Xpander drone, into
CLOSE: long Korg howl, then T8 bass gong loop concludes as it began.

The piece is designed to be about 15 minutes long, but the length can
vary drastically depending on how quickly the changes are made and how
long each section is played. The various takes ranged from 13 to 20
minutes.

Once the pieces were in place, it remained only to perform the piece,
which I did in a series of takes over two days. I relistened to them
all, threw away ones with obvious errors, and narrowed the field down
to two good ones, of which I picked one and sent it to Chuck. I then
tore down my rig and moved it to the studio where _Bandwidth_ was
about to be recorded, and put "Band of Fire" out of my mind. I had a
copy of the song on another VCR tape, made by the encoder's digital
copy feature. That was for backup in case Chuck had trouble getting
his Toshiba PCM box to read my tape.

LESSON 4: Make backups of your digital data, just like you'd back up
your hard drive, and save your out-takes if you can, if only for
future reference. Paranoia is beneficial where your music's concerned.

Six months later, _Facets_ came out to uniformly good reviews, and
sold out almost immediately. "Band of Fire" held up well against the
other tracks, and was a startling contrast to the largely relaxed and
spacy pieces on the tape. The next time I talked to Chuck, he told me
that he was no longer going to be releasing cassettes, and was
concentrating his resources on CD releases, so my solo album wasn't
going to happen; I'd missed my window of opportunity. Since I had
_Bandwidth_ ready to release, I told him I wasn't interested in a CD
on his label, and we parted comapny amicably. I was very grateful for
the exposure I'd gotten on the tape, and it was mentioned at
infrequent intervals in the years that followed. However, with Team
Metlay absorbing my time, I largely forgot about it.

In Part 2 of this post, we'll fast-forward to 1994, and how "Band of
Fire," the song, became _Band of Fire_, Atomic City's latest CD.

mike


BAND OF FIRE: 

A special edition CD, from conception to release

by Mike Metlay of Atomic City (atomic-city@netcom.com)

---

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this post is to explain, in gory detail, the process of
making Atomic City's latest release, BAND OF FIRE, from its beginnings
in 1990 to its final form today. It is hoped that others will benefit
from my experiences when they attempt to put out their own music, if
only to avoid the mistakes I made. In Part 1, I talked about how the
piece was originally created and why, and in Part 2, I'll cover its
rerelease this year on Atomic City.

---

PART 2: 1994-1995


ENTER MATT HOWARTH

I made a lot of new friends with _Bandwidth;_ it attracted the attention of
a lot of worthwhile people in and out of the industry.  Probably the most
directly important to me were the new Team members that joined on after
1991 (Joe, William, Eirikur, Steve, DAC, John 0, and David), but there was
one other friendship that was to have a far-reaching effect on me, and that
was with Matt Howarth. Matt, for those of you who have never heard of him,
is an underground comic artist of considerable talent and imagination with
a small but loyal following and an eclectic taste for emusic of all kinds.
He is best known to the comics world for his groundbreaking graphic novel
CHANGES and the violent, sickly humorous world of Ron and Russell Post in
the ongoing THOSE ANNOYING POST BROS. comics.

But to emusicians, even those who don't normally read comic books, he has a
more immediately accessible hero; Henry Savaj, the lovable, fearsomely
talented (and slightly addled) guitarist who fronts the Bulldaggers,
comicdom's most dangerous musical group. The SAVAGE HENRY comic book
details the adventures of Henry, Caroline the clone, Monsieur Boche the
drunken, gun-toting Samoan synthesist (imagine a cross between Michael
Hoenig and Mike Doonesbury's Uncle Duke and you'll be close), and the many
musicians with whom they play on countless worlds and planes of alternate
reality. SAVAGE HENRY is a worthwhile comic book for electronic musicians
because Matt adds in a lot of real musicians to the mix; the fictional
characters rub shoulders with Conrad Schnitzler, Steve Roach, David Borden,
Richard Pinhas, the Residents, Chuck Van Zyl, Peter Gulch, Nash the Slash,
and Moby, to name but a few. Klaus Schulze appeared in a recent issue that
drew a lot of publicity for the use of its illos in a Schulze interview for
KEYBOARD. His comics often feature small four-panel cartoon reviews of
rare emusic releases, and become a resource for comic and music fans alike.

Matt has an ongoing correspondence with many of the musicians about whom he
writes; normally a very private person, he reaches out to contact a few
musicians at a time to glean worthwhile information about the world of
emusic and help research his books. I was surprised and pleased when a copy
of _Bandwidth_ and a letter elicited a phone call, followed by a long
correspondence and a growing friendship. In one of our chats, Matt
expressed interest in doing album art for some of my new releases; he's
done artwork for several other musicians, and a whole series of album cover
art pieces for his fictional groups like the Bulldaggers, the Quiet Space,
and Bobbie Neuwave's Dazzle. I was excited at the prospect, but having no
immediate plans for solo work and no obvious projects coming up, I shelved
the idea until something inspiring came along....

RE-MASTERING AND PSYCHOACOUSTIC PROCESSING

In 1994, I sold my PCM encoder system to a pro studio that needed one,
having gone over to DAT for all of my mastering work over a year earlier.
Before I did so, I made dubs of all of my PCM master tapes onto DAT; these
included the tracks from the Team Metlay _Beta Test_ sessions of early 1992
(by August 1992, when _Saturnalia_ was recorded, we were already using DAT
machines), several outtakes of old projects, and the almost-forgotten
"Band of Fire." As I listened to it, I ws struck by how well it had held
up over the years, and I determined that if an inexpensive means to do so
would ever arise, I would put it out as a re-release. 

Later that year, Team Metlay got together in Tallahassee for a session.
(There. I've said it. Okay?) We actually did a lot more than Team stuff,
though; besides recording and mastering our new double CD set _Ballistic_
(about which more at GREAT length in a future set of posts), we also put out
Joe McMahon's solo record _Shatterday_ (which Joe has written up in a nice
article I'll edit and post soon), proofed Steve Verity's solo record
_Digital Planet_ (as heard on "Music From The Hearts Of Space" this week;
Steve has promised me a writeup on it, but it may be a while), remastered
_Band of Fire_ for release on CD, and premastered three Silent Volumes: my
solo CD _Mystech and Beyond_, Team Metlay's _Beta Test/Saturnalia_, and
TTM's theatrical-work-in-progress _Eight from the Deck_. This five-week
period brought the Atomic City catalog from two recordings to nine, of
which five are now available to the public.

Whereas for some of the records there was a great deal of retracking and
remixing, to say nothing of actually recording material from scratch, for _B
of F_ the operation was fairly straightforward: the DAT master was played
back on a Fostex D-10 DAT machine, reprocessed, and recorded to the hard
disk with Sound Tools 2.0. As it turned out, the digital noise reduction and
hum removal on the track were minimal, as the original recording had been
quite cleanly done. The place where it got interesting, though, was when we
elected to add the Hughes Sound Retrieval System to the mix.

The Hughes SRS is an arcane little box that has been sold as part of stereo
and emusic equipment catalogs for some time, at a relatively handy price;
it's designed after a system used by Hughes Aerospace for flight simulators,
to give a better illusion of a three-dimensional soundfield. The scary thing
about it is: it works. Very, very well, actually far better than some of the
more expensive systems out there like Roland's RSS. It takes a signal and
does some sort of phase decorrelation of the left and right channels, adding
spaciousness and depth. Sounds actually seem to come from beyond the
speakers, the middle of the room, even behind the listener, and over
headphones the effect is even more startling. We spent a lot of time just
playing with the Hughes, seeing how outrageously we could project the sound
outward from the monitor system; at one point, the Hughes was pushing the
signal so hard that a listener in the sweet spot could literally feel the
arpeggiator lines march across his scalp from front to back.

However, as we did more work with the Hughes, we discovered that as much
fun as it was, it was a very deceptive machine. It simultaneously altered
gain structure, equalization, perceived balance, and loudness.  Mixes that
sounded great without the Hughes suddenly were altered almost beyond
recognition, as some tracks literally vanished while others suddenly became
scorchingly loud. Because the differences in dynamics and EQ were based on
phase information that was not easily predictable, the Hughes became a
dangerous loose cannon in the studio; it either worked exceptionally well,
as it did for "Band of Fire," or it ruined otherwise excellent tracks, as
for almost all of _Ballistic_. (More on that in a later article.)

LESSON 5: If you have a couple hundred bucks to play with, a Hughes box can
be a lot of fun. Use it with caution, though. Get the model with the front
panel display (the model AK-200, I think as opposed to the AK-500); you can
actually see when it's overprocessing the audio, when the left and right
LEDs peg out at the ends of their travel.

Even "Band of Fire" wasn't immune to problems; the Hughes has a very hard
time dealing with phase-decorrelated bass frequencies that carry a lot of
dB's, and that aptly describes the opening Prophet-T8 and EX-8000 timbres of
the song. The Hughes, when asked to process this sort of information, can
overload, causing loud pops and ratcheting very similar to digital noise;
for this reason, the front panel includes a preset filter for rolling off
the subsonics and avoiding the problem. We ended up mixing _B of F_ twice,
once with the filter out and once with it in. While the filter out mix was
much more sonically involving, it was corrupted by pops and clicks in
several places, and we regretfully had to forego using it. The mix with the
filter in place was a bit tamer in terms of wild special effects, but
handled itself much more cleanly and evenly on a variety of playback media.

LESSON 6: Cute tricks should never be allowed to supplant quality of music
and production. What seems fun and neat now may not wear well, and you need
to at least try to treat your music as if it will be listened to carefully
in 50 or 100 years.

MAKING THE CD

When I got the idea of rereleasing the track, I had Matt listen to the
original release on tape; he liked it, and painted a gorgeous picture of
odd, almost organic rock formations, for the front cover.  He also did a
portrait of me that is almost embarrassingly accurate, working from a
source I'm not at liberty to disclose. The artwork, along with some nice
printing and incidental pieces, was mailed out to me, and I handed it over
to Jonathan Lyons of Lyons Digital Media for high-resolution scanning and
layout. Jon is a loud, brash Southern gentleman who runs one of the finest
small digital-graphics studios in the southeastern USA. He loves doing
album artwork, whether laying out existing art or creating his own, and he
was rubbing his hands in glee at the huge pile of projects I was bringing
him.

The pressing plant was Cyberdisk, a marvelous firm that works with
Europadisk in New York City for small disk runs. They agreed to press a
limited edition of 500 copies, if we restricted ourselves to one color
separation on the CDs themselves and supplied the art ourselves.  On the
face of it, this looked like a very good deal; as it turned out, it was
very nearly a disaster. Peter Baldes of Cyberdisk did his best to 
warn me, and I chose not to listen....

LESSON 7: If a pressing plant wants you to provide artwork for a CD, 
get EXACT specs for cut sizes, perfs, and very importantly, weight of
the paper. It can be very easy to provide a perfectly sized inlay card
that the machines won't load because the paper's too stiff. Try to hire
a printer who has done CD materials before, and proof existing work
before you give these people your money. To this day, _Bandwidth_
hasn't broken even despite excellent sales because the print broker
took us to the cleaners.

Not only did we have paper problems, but one set of printings was done
upside down and another had ink bleedthrough, so it took three tries for the
art to be done right by the printers. The inlay cards were run through a
numbering stamper, 550 of them to allow for a possible overrun (CD places
will give you plus or minus 10% from what you order; you don't get charged
for underruns, but you have to pay for extras). Since the insertion machine
at Cyberdisk found the paper too stiff, several of the numbers were mangled,
including 001, 002, and 003. What we got back was a set of 509 CDs, numbered
from 004 to 550 with 41 numbers in the series missing.

LESSON 8: If numbering by hand is good enough for Chris Franke and
Klaus Schulze, it's good enough for you. Save yourself the hassle.

So what I did was to take numbers 510 through 550 and hand-renumber them to 
fill in the holes, by replacing the tray cards with ones from the previous 
print run, the ones with the back cover art upside down. So if you get one 
of those, it's a real rarity! Of the 9 extras, two were sent to the Library 
of Congress forcopyright registration and one to ASCAP for royalties; the 
other six were set aside for special uses.

LESSON 9: It is not unusual for a few CDs in any given shipment to arrive
with cracked jewelcases or trays; you needn't regard these as losses, since
you can use up to four of them for royalty and copyright registration and
your royalty company and the L of C don't care if they're cracked. You
DO register your work, don't you? And remember to check with anyone
who's released your work before (remember the _Facets_ tape?) to clear
the re-registration of your work.

I'm making a big stink of this last stage, when it really wasn't all that
much hassle, but considering that my choice to make my own materials and
machine-stamp them rather than letting the in-house printer do the work and
hand-number afterwards cost me a lot of time and headache, I wanted to pass
it along to anyone else who thinks that numbered editions are cool, as a
warning. :)

--

So now, I have a pile of CD singles, numbered and some of them signed, with
copies already going out to ASCAP, the Register of Copyrights, and the
people involved in the making of the project, then and now. The remaining
490ish units are now up for sale, if anyone wants them. I am very pleased
with how they have turned out, as the artwork provided by Matt and Jon works
very well with the custom jewelcase design and layout I asked for.  The
sound quality is exquisite, and will rattle your foundations at nice
volumes; what few tiny artifacts are there are products of the digital
recording process clashing with the analog synths way back when, and if you
weren't there at the sessions you'd never notice them (I tend to be a
harsher critic of my music than anyone else is, by and large). The music
itself is dark, brooding, and evolves from atmospheric to almost tranceable
and back, and true to the original idea of the piece, it sounds great on
infinite repeat as it loops back on itself. (I even built in a pause to give
your CD player time to reset. ;)

I don't think that many catalogs will have _Band of Fire_ in stock, as
stocking an 18-minute CD single isn't very cost-effective, even from a
proven artist, so I'll be selling them on the Web (I'll announce the opening
of the Atomic City Web page, http://pd.net/atomic-city, as soon as it's open
for business) and via email/mail-order sales. Initial reactions to the
singles have been very good, and while I don't think I'm going to be doing a
limited-edition collectible again very soon, I am very proud of how this
piece of my history has come out.

If you're interested in this single, you can email me to order it at
atomic-city@netcom.com. I hope to be posting information on the other
releases coming out of these sessions, or to browbeat the artists involved
into doing so, very soon. _Digital Planet_ is now available for sale, as is
_Shatterday_, and if _Ballistic_ isn't back from the pressing plant in early
April it will mean a major disaster (not that that's impossible, but I can't
live in fear forever) has occurred. If you want to patronize a mail-order
dealer, whether on the Net or elsewhere, you may have to wait until they
show up in catalogs; I've had good luck in the past with EAR/Rational,
Ranjit the CD Pusher, Wayside Music, Eurock, and Of Sound Mind, and I hope
to add a few more soon, but I can't promise when they'll be made available
for sale. If you're in a hurry, write me...and thanks for following along
with me on this long, strange trip. :)

mike