There are several tracks of hidden, backmasked vocals on the original album version of one of the songs from "Any Raw Flesh?"

This came as a complete surprise to me when I was starting my remixes - I was sorting through the vocal files for one of the songs I'd requested, when I noticed that one of the files was backwards. When I flipped the file forwards and played it back, I was stunned to hear a completely unexpected line of lyrics, that I couldn't place anywhere in the original tune. The part is indeed in there, as a matter of fact, along with several different vocal parts - a few lines of lyrics, some of which are harmonized several times. But they're all very carefully blended into the section of the tune they appear in, and unless you know specifically what you're listening for, you'll probably never notice that they're there in the first place.

Before I heard these hidden vocals, I'd already been thinking about trying to construct a "new" instrumental tune - taking different instrumental parts and editing them in such a way that they still sounded like instrumental performances, but were unrecognizable as anything other than new musical material. When I heard the secret vocal parts, though, I realized I could effectively create a new song, complete with vocals that no Yogi fan had ever properly heard before.

As it stands, there's so much cross-pollination of parts from different songs going on across half-pint demigod that, in many cases, the only thing that really makes a final track a remix "of" any one particular song is the choice of which vocal performance appears in it. I really liked the idea of using the hidden vocal tracks separate from the rest of the song they were recorded for, and since no Yogi fan had ever properly heard those vocals, there was little reason to identify such a track as being a remix of a pre-existing tune.

Hence the two "versions" of "Bucket 'o Damn," a title which became the label for whatever tracks I produced using the hidden vocals as a template. It wasn't just the "new" vocals that set these two tracks apart, either: in a purely musical sense, these two productions are about as far-out as I got in terms of creating tracks that were more or less unrecognizable from the original instrumental performances they were spun from. All of this means that, as an overall listening experience, both versions of "Bucket 'O Damn" come across more like electronic tracks with guest vocals by Shawn "Yogi" Farley, rather than as remixes of Yogi music as such.

"Buckey 'O Damn 1" is, stylistically, probably the closest that "half-pint demigod" gets to straight-up techno. It reminds me a lot of the Chemical Brothers in terms of both the sound and the structure of the track, as well as a number of early-'90s British rave acts and "Madchester" bands. It's a very trippy, psychedelic-sounding track, due in no small part to the inclusion of the hidden vocal parts, which are lyrically VERY abstract in a Roger Dean Gatefold Album Cover/"Easy Rider" kind of way. The fact that those vocal lines were time-stretched and pitch-shifted to fit into the new key/tempo of this remix gives them an even more surreal edge, steering them fairly close to Beatles-esque territory in their tone and vibe.

Drum-wise, this is one of my very favorite tracks on the album; Chris G is such a fantastic player, and his work provided a huge wealth of material throughout the entire project, but "Bucket 'O Damn 1" really covers a wide spectrum of different ways his performances could be used: from the kaleidoscopically-tweaked one that shows up at the beginning of the track, to the almost industrial-sounding stereo pair around the 1:45 mark, to the "main" groove which kicks in at 3:15 (which actually came from three different Chris G performances which accidentally played through the same audio output at the same time, and sounded great to me).

And I agree that when the "main" beat in a song doesn't show up for over three minutes, you're dealing with a pretty extended length of time. "Bucket 'O Damn 1" is probably the track that's most structurally akin to conventional electronic dance music, in that it takes a while to unfold completely, as the myriad different loops and layers occur after and on top of one another in different ways. But I quite like the fact that, within this extended amount of time, there are a number of very distinct different sections, definied by different loops and sounds, which have a chance to establish themselves within the scheme of the overall track. To my ears, there's almost a theme-and-variation approach to this track's structure that suggests classical music at least as much as dancefloor techno.

Between the more or less unrecognizable instrumentation and the "new" vocals from Yogi, I can see where "Bucket 'O Damn" (in both of its versions) has, arguably, the least direct connection with Shawn's own musical identity of any of the tracks on the album. But as a big fan of Shawn as both a singer and a lyricist, I find it really cool to hear what is essentially a fresh vocal contribution from him, with his distinct vocal and lyrical identity, in a musical context that's so utterly different from anything he's done on his own.

Andre LaFosse
5 December 2005