It's been more than three years since I posted here. I was on a quest to keep available pieces I had posted on my CompuServe page many many moons ago. I never finished that task. Let's see if I can complete a different one.
I have moved recordings of my music (see "Scaputones Music Launch") to a SoundCloud account. It should be easier to use for anyone who wants to listen. I haven't posted anything in a while there, but I'm hoping to rev up those engines in 2020.
The stuff that's up there includes my senior recital at Livingston College, Piscataway, N.J., in 1975. The recital included three "covers" -- "Please, Please Me," "Shelter from the Storm" and "Bima Kurda" -- and the rest of it is stuff I wrote. When SoundCloud's setup page asked what style of music this was, I answered classical rock. But the music includes a traditional Gamelan piece from Indonesia, a reading from Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" backed by a soundscape of overdubbed sine waves. We had only one microphone recording this, so when the electric guitars start going, they drowned out the horn section pretty much, but you get the intensity of the evening if you listen.
Besides the senior recital, I've got a"Winter Wonderland" that I recorded in my apartment on Fairmount Avenue, shortly after moving to Phoenix, probably the winter of 1981. I played my 1958-vintage Gibson electric as an "acoustic" guitar on one track and then dubbed the lead part with a microphone in front of my old Santo amp. The vocals followed, then keyboard bass, and finally a plastic Amway box served as the percussion.
There's a track of my father singing "Surdate," which is Neapolitan dialect for soldier, in Italian it's soldato. I'm prejudiced, of course, but I think my father had a beautiful voice and this Neapolitan song that he sang, probably on Christmas 1968, shows it off well. The song is about a soldier far from home. His lieutenant asks him why he's playing a guitar and singing, and he tells the lieutenant that he's Neapolitan and if he doesn't sing, he dies. The lieutenant confesses that he, too, is from Napoli, and the recruit asks the lieutenant to sing along. The story loses a little in translation, but it's emotional for those two characters.
The other stuff includes an interview on KUPD in Phoenix from 1983 and features two originals, "Twist of the Arm" and "The Tighter - The Looser." These were put together in the same way as the "Winter Wonderland" track, in my apartment with lots of overdubs on Fostex eight-track reel-to-reel recorder.
I'm hoping I can put up new stuff soon, but time rushes by and the laundry has to get done, so so-called nonessential things get put off. I have no one to blame but myself.
Copyright 2019 Salvatore Caputo
