Sleep on the Floor

You Are Home

Funzzz

SOTF 017

August 17, 2010

Digital

$8.00

$12.00

Stream

Brown & Ground

Smoldering Torso

Funzzz

Track List

1. Introduction

2. Funzzz Variations

3. Pasolini's Dick

4. P9

5. Bore!!!

6. Brown & Ground

7. Smoldering Torso

8. Fist Twister

9. Learning to Funzzz

10. Funzzz

11. Sex Urchin

Album Description

Described as a loose concept album about "having a good time," Funzzz exhibits the avant-garde and underground psychedelic music of the late 60s and 70s. Featuring a large cross-section of prominent Ames musicians with Dake at the helm and providing a unique perspective within the Iowa music scene, Funzzz is a kaleidoscopic tour de force.

Notes

Funzzz was recorded at The Spacement and mixed by Bryon Dudley and Matthew Dake. All songs were written and performed by Matthew Dake with help from Bryon Dudley (guitar, Rhodes piano, hand claps, vocal chant), Jordan Mayland (Nord Lead, hand claps, vocal chant), Aaron Alcott (guitar, vocals), Nate Logsdon (trumpet) and Kate Kennedy (saxophone).

Press

Des Moines Music Coalition

CD Review: You Are Home, "Funzzz"

Written by Aaron Lea

“Funzzz” is the 4^th album from Matthew Dake’s project YOU ARE HOME. Right off the bat the cover makes you think “This is sort of strange… different… I’m not really sure what’s going on here”.

The music that ensues does little to change those thoughts. This album of experimental instrumental psychedelia runs the gamut from far-out jazziness in the vein of Medeski, Martin & Wood to percussion-fueled Ministry style intensity. I think it’s pretty safe to say that this album caters more to a less sober type of audience.

The album was recorded at the Spacement and mixed by Dake and Bryon Dudley. Many prominent Ames musicians were brought in to lend their particular (and often peculiar) talents to various tracks. The YOU ARE HOME team employed drums, bass, guitar, Rhodes piano, Nord, trumpet, saxophone, hand claps, vocal chants and who knows what else through heavy effects and creative production to achieve some very psychedelic results. “Funzzz” seems more designed to be heard as an album than as a collection of songs. Many tracks seem more about feels and textures than riffs. Drums- although used somewhat sparingly on this album- are really creative; appropriately ambient at times and appropriately intense and heavy at other times.

Press play and it’s full-on right from the get-go; the first song would not seem out of place on a Ministry album. Track 2, “Funzzz Variations”, is definitely unique, with trippy broken-up timing that would definitely be intense on a headfull and builds nicely into “Pasolini’s Dick” with its rolling, almost tribal sounding surf style drums, experimental, effects-laden guitars and other ambient strangeness. “P9”, the album’s 4^th track, is very robotic sounding- think R2D2 DJing a rave. Tracks 5 and 6 really start to open things up more- the ironically titled “Bore!!!” slowly builds from ambience to become percussively quite fast and intricate and around 4:20 opens up into a full-on jam with a haunting Pink Floyd-ish piano outro. “Brown & Ground” follows with a very industrial rhythm supporting guitar and keyboard leads that seem somewhere between Pink Floyd and the Dr. Who theme. “Smoldering Torso”, with its sci-fi horror movie sounding intro, could be the most traditional rock song on “Funzzz”; that is if anything on this album could be classified as “traditional”. “Fist Twister” was my personal favorite (and not just because of the romantically poetic title); I suppose it could be classified as psychedelic surf jazz, with its cool jazzy drum beat, horns and claps. The delightfully chaotic outro was reminiscent of MMW’s “Blotter” album, and sounds like a Mardi Gras after party where you might have eaten, drank or smoked one too many. This outro flows right into track 9, “Learning to Funzzz”, which utilizes sounds, effects, and textures that many musicians would not be creative enough (or brave enough) to try. The title track, “Funzzz”, uses Zappa-esque vibraphones and timing to create a fun, happy groove that fades out a little too early for me (1:34). I would have enjoyed hearing them jam this song out longer…. It left me wanting more, and maybe that’s the point. The album’s closer is the epic nineteen and a half minute “Sex Urchin”. This track is really long and really intense; overdriven with a definite Ministry feel. Timothy Leary would be proud. Lots of strange ambient sounds; are those animal noises? (I can only assume that they did not torture monkeys and cats to get backing tracks)

This album is definitely a product of outside-the-box thinking. Dake’s crew must have had fun making this album; they disregarded all the by-the-book rules of traditional music and allowed themselves to express and create, even if some of it does come out “It puts the lotion in the basket” creepy. This is definitely not an album for the timid (or, one could argue, the sober). Good production quality adds to the heavy psychedelic feel, making the strangeness and intensity more immersive. The background sounds often leave you wondering “What was that?” due to creative use of effects and different vocal and instrumental combinations on different songs. Anyone in Hollywood making sci-fi horror films would do good to look to this album for soundtrack material. Anyone looking for hooky, 4/4 time, sing along pop songs should look elsewhere. Maybe Britney has something new….

Cityview

You Are Home

“Funzzz”

Sleep On the Floor

Recording studios can be a trap for some musicians, but not You Are Home’s Matthew Dake, whose manic creativity continues to impress as he uses the studio more like an instrument than an evil necessary on his third and strongest album in as many years, “Funzzz.” The album’s 11 instrumental tracks range from metal (“Funzzz Variations,” “Pasolini’s Dick”), to percussive (“P9,” “Brown & Ground”), to space oddities (“Smoldering Torso”), to psychedelic (“Learning to Funzzz,” “Funzzz”), to creepy distortion (“Introduction,” “Sex Urchin”) — sometimes all in one — with a sense of wild experimentation that is missing from most music today. To help create his loose concept album about “having a good time,” Dake recruited fellow Ames musicians like Bryon Dudley, Jordan Mayland, Aaron Alcott, Nate Logsdon and Kate Kennedy. The result is a composite of unique musical perspectives without boundaries. CV
(Visit http://sleeponthefloor.com for more information about You Are Home.)

Impose Magazine

By Anthony Mark Happel » The bent and sometimes broken musings of Ames, Iowa’s Matthew Dake (You Are Home) can pass for a few different things. Is it psycho-experimental indie rock, or noisy progressive post-art rock? (Why must we resort to so many labels?) There are flashes of various bands and suggestions of certain songs from across the broader post-post-punk-cum-noise spectrum (more labels). Sometimes they just flit around the underground rock library and point out different amusements, sometimes they go hang out under the bridge that Glenn Branca built while blasting Big Black at passersby on a shitty old cassette recorder, wishing it was an 8-track.

Dake is joined by several friends on guitar, Rhodes piano, trumpet, sax and vocals as they skirt the bounds of good taste and discernment and mostly wank off. “Pasolini’s Dick” sort of delivers on the intro to Branca portion of the show with diffuse washes of noise, but they never really get out of their own way. “Bore!!!,” oddly enough, is just that, a slow, kind of dry bore, an essentially empty vessel waiting to be filled with a glory that never really arrives as it should.

There’s plenty to unearth from within the dense mass, moments of transcendence, but they are fleeting and too few in number to keep some of this from being flat despite the racket. I never heard the deeply moving creative force that was promised. The three longer tracks lose themselves and the seven shorter blasts don’t have enough substance contained in them to do anything but fill space on the disc. The last song, “Sex Urchin,” sums things up well enough. 19+ minutes of wobbly, grumbling dirge-like waves that might be the Melvins goofing off in the studio. Is that really all you’ve got for us in a 19-minute long song? Sorry. I’m just sayin…

babysue

True underground music with little or no regard for any kind of commercial acceptance or success. You Are Home is the project created by Matthew Dake...a fellow compelled by the power to create. Instead of aping the latest cool band or trying to recreate sounds from the past, Dake seems driven by the simple desire to be creative and let his music go wherever it wants to go. Funzzz is a peculiar album full of fuzzy guitars and plenty of cool spontaneity. In a world of carbon copy bands it is refreshing to hear an album like this that really doesn't fit in any one category and is chock full of peculiar sounds and styles. Eleven smart classy cuts here including "Funzzz Variations," "Brown & Ground" (great song title, that one...), and "Sex Urchin." Wildly provocative stuff.

Ames Tribune

‘Funzzz’: Bass player Matthew Dake releases experimental solo album

By Nate Logsdon
Special to The Tribune

Published: Saturday, September 4, 2010 11:52 PM CDT

Matthew Dake is making a musical career for himself in much the same way he makes his records: by laying down a foundation, adding more and more layers and, most importantly, improvising.
Dake, an Ames native, is an accomplished bass player and drummer who has played in many local bands over the years including 11010011010011 (also referred to as Binary or One One), MRPF3 and Steps.
Dake’s most recent release is a full-length album from his solo project You Are Home called “Funzzz,” released by the Des Moines-based label Sleep On the Floor Records. The album is, in some ways, a departure from his previous recordings. “It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever done before, and that was intentional,” he said.
He wanted to make a record that would seem to come from out of “left field,” an unpredictable and experimental release.
“I was inspired by popular bands that make these almost career-killing records,” he said. “I thought it’d be funny to make an album like that without having much of an audience to begin with.”
In the process of making and promoting the album, people from around the country began to contact him online to express interest in his new work. “I was like, ‘Oh crap, I actually do have an audience! Am I gonna kill what little of a career I have?’”
In some ways, “Funzzz” resembles Dake’s past work. It is built from complex drum beats and thick layers of bass tracks. And like much of Dake’s music, the record combines a hard-driving and aggressive sound with hypnotic and ambient tones.

What distinguishes “Funzzz” from any of his previous releases is the methodology he used to create the record.
“I didn’t have set structures, it was more of an idea of how the song would flow,” he said. “I knew kind of how it would sound from beginning to end. It was more of a concept than a finished song.”
Each song was built from scratch in the studio, created by mixing the huge number of dense and rhythmic tracks that Dake accumulated in the course of the recording. “A great deal of the album was fully improvised,” he said.
The album was recorded, mixed and mastered at the Spacement Studio in Ames. The studio is owned and operated by Bryon and Rachel Dudley, who run it out of the basement of their home. Dake is also involved in the operation now, having become very familiar with the studio’s equipment in the process of making “Funzzz.”
Bryon Dudley knows Dake through many years of mutual involvement in the Ames music scene. Dudley first became involved with recording You Are Home when Dake was finishing up his previous album, “Phony Home.” Dake was under a 2-day deadline to finish “Phony Home” and enlisted Dudley to help him finishing tracking and mixing.
The making of “Funzzz” stands out from the other albums Dudley has recorded in his studio.
“It was a lot of fun because it was different,” he said. “Matt would come in and play drums, and all I’d hear was drums, and I was like ‘Hmm, that’s an interesting beat.’ I had no idea what the song would sound like at any point. Watching it develop was just fun.”
“Funzzz” is an experiment in improvisational composition in a studio setting. In a live setting, however, Dake is no stranger to improvisation. He has played in numerous bands over the years, including the locally famous drum-and-bass duo MRPF3. MRPF3 was a collaboration with the musician Aaron Alcott. The band released many recordings over the years, including a number of albums that were comprised of selections of the band’s live improvisations.
Like You Are Home, MRPF3 was a beat-oriented band that accentuated the bass guitar. Their powerful sound could create a ruckus at live shows. At one infamous house concert that the band played in an attic in Ames, the packed crowd was jumping up and down so furiously that people on the level below the attic could see the ceiling caving in. The band almost rocked right through the floor. At another show at The Practice Space, an unzoned music venue that operated in Ames from 2002 to 2008, MRPF3’s music inspired the entire audience to writhe around on the floor. Both performances were captured on film and distributed as a DVD.
Dake and Dudley also play together in a new Ames band called The Jerkles. The band builds organized instrumental improvisations around a set structure. They are currently planning on recording an album at the Spacement Studio and it will involve improvisation.
“We are just talking about how to do a Jerkles album before you got here,” Dudley said.
Dake is also beginning to conceive his next You Are Home record, and he plans to incorporate some of the in-studio improv he used in the making of “Funzzz.”
Though the record was released just a few days ago, he is not going to spend time lingering on it.
“Honestly, I’m just glad it’s done,” he said. “I’m ready to start working on new stuff.”