Beckman Sonata

Stale Urine released the Beckman Sonata in January, 1996 in a limited edition of 13. Some speculate that the band wanted to flush the avant-garde urge from their systems before finishing their forthcoming Embodiments of Craving and Aversion; others speculate that they simply wanted to pad out their list of ``recordings'' with another shameless ride on John Cage's coattails. Each copy of the Beckman Sonata, before it reappeared, dressed up in a typically slick SU tape cover (a snide imitation of the CBS ``Great Performances'' line), had lived out its useful life as a commercial cassette recording by some other artist, was abandoned, thrown away, or stolen, and was then partially erased by a strong magnetic field in a Caltech physics lab. The resulting product, while not unlistenable (and occasionally more musical than before its magnetic baptism), is unlike anything else in SU's output, and has at best dubious artistic value.

As bassist Heidi Hofer said, ``I had nothing to do with it.''

Here are the liner notes by Michael Parker.

Credits

Mastered January 3, 1996.
Produced by Michael Parker for DEI Recordings.
Photo of Arnold Beckman used with permission of the California Institute of Technology Archives.

BECKMAN SONATA copyright © 1996 by Stale Urine.