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Live Oak
Filter Kings
Poetry Attack
Our Camp
Didactyl Brothers
Roundhouse |
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Genre
New Wave
History
Menlo Park, California 1979
After grad school, Max spent a year living in a group house on Live Oak Street in Menlo Park and working in a nearby music shop, apprenticed to Bruce Kaphan, a luthier and an experienced session player with his own studio.
New Wave music, ranging from DEVO to Elvis Costello, was taking over the radio waves, inspiring Max to write his first adult rock songs, several of which Bruce recorded in his home studio. These were Max's first professional recordings. |
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Personnel
Tim Ludington (Max Carmichael): lead vocals, electric guitar
Bruce Kaphan: drums, audio engineering
Various session players
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Genre
New Wave / Punk
History
CalArts, Valencia, California 1979
Mark invited Max to CalArts in fall 1979, to join his band Filter Kings. In keeping with the name, they scrounged the famous thrift shops of Reseda for outdated duds in "cool menthol" colors.
Mark wrote most of the songs, with Max contributing his first "punk" tunes, including the notorious "Time To Get Even". In December, they recorded an album's worth of material on a Nagra reel-to-reel deck manned by a friend in the film school. |
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Personnel
Mark Norris: vocals, electric guitar
Max Klein (Carmichael): vocals, electric guitar
Glenn Grossman: electric bass
James Fell: drums
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Photos
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Graphics
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Genre
New Wave / Power Pop
History
San Francisco, California 1980
Max had moved to San Francisco in early 1980, setting up a studio in the basement of his rental house, and Mark joined him for the summer, between semesters at CalArts. The music and art scene was exploding in San Francisco, and their idea was to continue the songwriting partnership they'd had in Mark's CalArts project, Filter Kings, and turn it into a San Francisco band.
Working feverishly in between nights spent at nightclubs catching new bands, they wrote and recorded dozens of songs and auditioned dozens of drummers and bass players...and then the summer was over, Mark went back to school, and Max switched to post-punk experimentation. |
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Personnel
Max Klein (Carmichael): vocals, electric guitar
Mark Norris: vocals, electric guitar
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Photos
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Graphics
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Genre
Post-punk
History
CalArts, Valencia, California 1981-1982
Our Camp was a late night, substance-fueled, Burundi-beat-inflected, drone-heavy art student project that resulted in numerous recordings and cross-fertilized with Max's San Francisco band, Terra Incognita. |
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Personnel
Mark Norris: electric guitar, vocals
Max Klein (Carmichael): electric guitar, percussion, vocals
Claire Dishman: keyboards, vocals
Various other CalArts students
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Photos
Max, Gary Bachmann (RIP 2012), Mark Norris
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Genre
Drunken / Infantile / Noise
History
Los Angeles & Mojave Desert, 1982-?
The Didactyl Brothers were (are?) a scandalous, provocative art team who recorded stupid, obnoxious music, noise, rants and comedy routines sporadically for two decades.
The Dides became Max's outlet for extreme free-form self-expression that didn't have a place in his public projects. |
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Personnel
Daryl Didactyl (Mark Norris): vocals, electric guitar, electric bass, keyboards, drums
Dartaigne Didactyl (Max Carmichael): vocals, electric guitar, electric bass, keyboards, drums
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Genre
Minimalist folk
History
Los Angeles, California 1984
When Katie and Max met in 1984, they began writing songs together and recording them on Max's new Fostex 4-track. They were inspired by the minimalist folk music of Young Marble Giants, but the content of their songs came from their own childhood memories as well as the world around them, near and far.
Since they were both visual artists, they also focused on graphics, creating a logo with pictograms signifying their band name based on hobo signs.
In addition to the minimalist songs featuring their original lyrics, they built up a number of dense, haunting instrumental tracks. Some of their Roundhouse repertoire found its way into Terra Incognita when they both moved to San Francisco in 1985. |
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Personnel
Max Klein (Carmichael): vocals, electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard
Katie Rauh: vocals, electric bass
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Videos
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Graphics
Roundhouse demo cover
Roundhouse Songbook cover
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