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Woteva 3:530:00/3:53
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Companero 6:240:00/6:24
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0:00/4:32
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Steam 4:270:00/4:27
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Kaleidascope 6:170:00/6:17
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0:00/4:25
Urban Wenachee
"Electronic Pop for America's Favorite Little Big City"
Urban Wenatchee was in existance from about 1995-1999. After a few years of living in the town of Wenatchee, WA I came to understand it as a place that both embraced and feared growth. The term "Urban Wenatchee" is an oxymoron, as Wenatchee was a rural community, but one that promoted itself as the biggest of the surrounding rural towns and cities.
I routinely performed with two Ensoniq keyboards, now vintage: An ESQ-1 and an SD-1 sampler with 1 full MB of memory, in addition to a Mac Classic that mostly ran sound files. Usually I had a guest performer or two as well. I recorded on my Yamaha four-track cassette recorder in the attic of my house.
Unfortunately, I have NO images at all of my time with UrbWen, so all you get is text.
Urban Wenatchee's old IUMA (Internet Underground Music Archive) profile: Click here
Songs:
Woteva - A commentary about apathetic school kids tuning out a very dynamic teacher.
Companero - My favorite UrbWen song; it's about the Peter Falk character from the movie Wings of Desire. He's an ex-angel talking another angel into trading in a drab immortal life for a colorful but mortal one.
The Doctor's Beautiful Daughter - About a girlfriend who turned to drugs. The title is a homage to William Ackerman's The Miller's Beautiful Daughter.
Steam - About having dreams to change the world, but after getting over that, just "blowing off steam".
Kaleidascope - A tribute to Ray Bradbury, a huge influence on my creative life. Kaliedascope is one of his short stories, about a group of astronauts forced to jettison their spacecraft in an asteriod storm. They are alive and well, but helplessly speeding through space in opposite directions.
2 O'Clock Danny - This is about the character Danny Taylor from John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent.
Welcome to Urban Wenatchee - UrbWen's signature song; it describes the conflict between Wenatchee viewing itself as a small town, suburb, or city.
It Used to Be An Orchard - About the proliferation of convenience stores where there once were orchards (Wenatchee identified itself as the Apple Capital of the World).
Sorget Nicht (Don't Sweat It) - "Sorget Nicht" was the theme of a family patriarch in my wife's family tree. No matter how bad things would seem, this German immigrant would remind people, "Sorget Nicht". We need more people like that in the world, don't we?