Loaf of Wonder and Simpletone Electronics
Hahn Rowe, Jake Dillon and I, after doing some radio shows together, began playing music as Loaf of Wonder. The rules of the group were you had to play a homemade guitar, usually made out of a piece of wood and a pick-up, and you had to wear a bad Hawai'ian shirt. We jammed several times in Curtis Hall, did some guerrilla performances at the Tufts Student Union, and then 2 performances, one outside as part of the concert series Apple Jams which was a mess, and another at the Alumni Lounge, which was an inspired afternoon of loose improvised tinkering. I think Jake has recordings.
After Hahn moved to New York, Jake and I continued to do radio together and re-organised our group as a duo called Simpletone Electronics. We edited a rough cassette of radio pieces; some were guitar pieces and others were tape loop manifestos. I was known to do a spiel about Le Cranberry, in a French accent with McCoy Tyner vamping to My Favorite Things in the background and had another one called The Snooze. On another, Jake and I warned against Quantum Duck attacks. And Jake did some nice soundscape Frippertronics, one called The Loud Family, about his neighbors. Jake and I had studied animation with Flip Johnson; a lot of our sound work had soundtrack aspects to it. We did a session at the Museum School Electronic Music studio with Andrea Parkins, who now works with Ellery Eskelin trio (on Hat Art), and a performance at the Museum School with Andrea and Pierre Archambault used a photo darkroom timer to limit the length of each piece we spontaneously improvised.
Jake began making music exclusively with an Electric Football Game, using the sheet of tin with a contact mic to create feedback soundscapes. We did some other performances around Boston, at Mobius and other places, where Jake played EFG and I screened 8mm films. Jake suggested we regularly work that way, but I was too interested in sound to just project film. For a while Jake was doing regular EFG performances at the Somerville Theater, when Len DiFranza set up an Extended Theater salon on Saturday mornings.
Jake and I also drove cross-sountry in his dad's '67 VW bug in the Summer of 1984; destination: Olympia, Washington's OP magazine conference. But that's another story.
