garote | Meat Beats The Devil '96 Mix

This is a showcase for Meat Beat Manifesto's crunchy industrial energy in 1996. It's also full of the st00pid kid energy my friends and I had in high school a few years before, because tape recordings we made at the time are scattered all over it: Sketches, commentary, fart noises... You get the idea.

The result is not dour and spooky like most industrial mixes (well okay, there are a few places that get spooky because I couldn't help it) it's more like a party that starts out fun, grows out of control, then somehow continues even while everyone is crawling around on the ground in the public park or lying on the beach trying to sober up and find their missing clothing.

The story behind it:

This mix was put together the same way I did "numbah crunch": Windows box, two CD players, and a tape deck. Then the tape got thrown around in a Mercury Tracer hatchback, accumulating hamburger crumbs and dirt, and roasting in parking lots.

Four years later I was driving a Honda Accord with no tape deck, so I re-digitized the cassette into a couple of MP3s and used those as reference to painstakingly rebuild the mix from lossless CD tracks. In the intervening time I'd lost some of the Monty Python dialogue, tape recordings, and random sound effects I'd scattered across the cassette, so in parts of the new mix I just crossfaded from pristine digital goodness back to tape-derived sludge, so those samples could stay where they were. Not for whole songs, but for, like, one-second chunks of songs. Aggressive filtering on the tape source disguised only some of it.

This thoroughly proves how stupidly obsessive I can be: Back in 1996 when I hit "play" and "stop" on a sample of John Cleese trying to buy a pack of cigarettes using a prank language translation book, cutting the conversation up into pieces so it played out across a creepy ambient thing from the Quake soundtrack, I didn't plan on re-splicing the whole sample back on top of the original source track, dragging every bit into place like I was reconstructing a long-lost scroll from the Library Of Alexandria. I mean, okay, it only took a few hours, but was it worth even that? All I can say is, I thought so at the time...

Anyway, I burned the reconstruction onto two CDs, and those lived in a 200-CD jukebox for, I don't know, another eight years maybe? Then those got ripped again. They hopped across an unknown series of hard drives and operating systems for fifteen more years, and now (in 2026) I'm putting them on the internet. What a strange ride, for a strange mix.