Album Notes

OKS Recordings of North America is pleased to announce the release of "Tesla At Coney Island", our eighth major release. This CD will available through cdbaby.com as well as Amazon.com, Los Angeles’ Amoeba Records, Austin’s End of An Ear, and Waterloo, New York’s Other Music and Kim’s Underground. It will be available for digital download at iTunes, Napster, Yahoo Music, and many other digital download services.

"Tesla At Coney Island" is a unique sonic collaboration between one of the great forefathers of modern experimental, noise, and avant-garde music, David Lee Myers and a guitar hero from the land of tomorrow, composer, Marco Oppedisano. Myers brings his signature feedback sources and found sounds, and Oppedisano drives his intense guitar tonalities straight at them for a head-on collision. With this release the two obviously throw caution to the wind and set out to explore whatever audio frontiers please them, genres be damned.

We are invited into a bad horror movie with the opening track, "Hyperpituitary Giant", as appropriated sound predominates and a full orchestra slides across the deck of the Titanic on its way down. Sonar makes an attempt to track it to no avail, and apparently a seance is held in the effort, but the melancholy final notes indicate that the string section sleeps with the fishes. "Pheromones" begins with the promise of something a bit more conventional, but as cascading guitar notes become cascading water drops and untuned bells, Oppedisano's screaming guitar scratches fitfully at the walls, creating an atmosphere of unease. "Roog" fittingly borrows its title from a Philip K. Dick story, and a sci-fi feel is evoked as if by Morton Subotnick's bastard son. Events progress, and we are perhaps relieved when the UFO vanishes into a cloud bank. On "Fling Away The Shell", Myers lays down a dreamy fog of ambient sound, but as if in disagreement Oppedisano's guitars storm in and trash the place. Kind of ECM in hell, but in a pleasant way, if that's possible. With the next track, suddenly the duo's real intention begins to dawn on us—"Throttle Body Lifter" wrenches us off the rails into heavy metal not-so-intelligent dance music (HMNSIDM), and we realize that we have been purposefully cast adrift off Coney Island with a lightning rod in our hands.

Washes of feedback and crazed electric tones waft in and out, interwoven with tasty guitar wails as we await the next bend in this ever-so-interesting crooked road. Throughout the thirteen tracks, we are treated to (threatened by?) alternating rhythmic patterns, noise barrages, looping Chinese finger-puzzles and...what? A lovely acoustic guitar piece? Well, with grating feedback accompaniment, of course! Finally, Myers and Oppedisano leave us with "Love's Diet", scattering a boxful of Scrabble pieces at our feet (and perhaps making a mockery of John Donne), posing the question, what is to be made of all this? It's worth asking, and in the case of "Tesla At Coney Island", it's a journey worth taking.

This is Marco Oppedisano’s second release with OKSRNA, following his acclaimed solo collection 2007’s "Electroacoustic Compositions 1999-2005". Oppedisano’s second solo release, "The Ominous Corner" and the debut of his electro-acoustic improvising trio BIOS (with Bill Byrne of The Painful Leg Injuries and John Ibarra of El Plan De Aguavodka) are both awaiting release on OKSRNA later this year. This is David Lee Myers’ first release with OKSRNA, but his groundbreaking, often gorgeous and challenging work has been circulating for over twenty years. This CD release marks the latest major release from OKS Recordings of North America a label run by Bill Byrne and his longtime collaborator, Jonah Goldstein.