Album Notes

From Sir Millard Mulch / Carl King:

It was 1991. We were three sheltered kids in our late teens in Venice, Florida. (Actually we were in a smaller town just to the north of Venice, called Nokomis. And we were in a portion of Nokomis called Bay Point, which ran along Dona Bay.) Rich kids whose dads were doctors, lawyers, newspaper owners, and dentists ran all along the water, with the rest of the population in the center and towards US-41 mostly being terrifying white trash. I grew up on the white trash side of the neighborhood. Darby lived over by the rich kids, and we practiced at his mom's house.

Voice of Nothing was my first band, along with these Eugene and Darby, two weird kids from my high school. I played guitar and sort of sang. It was more like a mixture between rapping and mumbling, really.

F. Darby had a massive collection of SST Cassettes and cymbals. He was a monster drummer, unaware of what he was even playing. 100% talent. He could probably play every George Hurley and Neil Peart drum part by the time he was 18, but didn't even know what a quarter note was.

Eugene walked around in pajamas and had a dog named Ted. He played bass and was a massive fan of Dead Kennedys and 60's activists, so he tried to steer us in a political direction. He was a big influence on me, and we were really tough on each other but still somehow best friends for a while.

Voice of Nothing tried to pick up tricks from bands like Victims Family and Primus. Anything with tricky drums, we'd listen to and try to figure out. We knew it was cool to stop and start and change into different parts, but how to actually do that was beyond us. I knew a few things about music theory, so I could get around the guitar analytically and write basic songs. It mostly just annoyed the other guys, because they didn't want to be told what notes were right and wrong.

The three of us had strong and distinct personalities -- we were all weird in different ways, so it's not surprising that this music is pretty eccentric, too. What were we thinking? I have no idea.

We listened to bands like fIREHOSE, Minutemen, and Nomeansno, which were the only 3 bands we could all agree on listening to. After band practice we ate at Taco Bell. We'd often get in some kind of fight and not talk to each other for 3 or 4 months, and then get back together and try to write a new song.

Back then I hadn't figured out how to play with distortion yet, as evidenced by the direct, clean Fender Strat on the first eight songs -- and the Boss Metal Zone plugged directly into the mixing board on the final two. We knew nothing about style or genre, and we always wondered why we didn't sound like a "real band."

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc was our second recording, the first we could afford that was beyond 4-track cassette technology. Because of this tape, we ended up getting a production offer from a guy named Kramer, who owned Shimmy Disc in New York. He also played bass in Ween and Butthole Surfers and produced a couple of bands called King Missile and White Zombie. We were so scared and intimidated that we turned it down. We had no idea where New York even was, or how we would get there. The idea of going somewhere seemed so far-fetched.

We probably played less than ten shows. Our final gig was opening for Victims Family in the summer of 1994. After that, we broke up for good. (And by good, I mean, it was a good idea!)

What is important and special to me about this recording is that it captures the creativity of some confused kids in a small town, making it all up as they go along. We had no understanding of business or how to communicate an idea to an audience. We had no idea what style of music we were. No one else did, either. We didn't know anything about touring or merch, there was no internet, nowhere to play, no scene to fit into, and we just did what we could with what we had, pretending to be a band.