The Pixie Kitchen

The Pixie Kitchen was the name I took for my early solo work in music. The name itself came from a restaurant/theme park on the Oregon coast. It was a magical place, the magic in part due to its being already in a state of decay in the late 1960s. I used to love to eat their sweetened butter they served with pancakes. 

Anyway...

My brother had moved to San Francisco and we sort of got to know each other for the first time. He had been playing music for a number of years, and had recently made friends with a lot of Mills College graduates. Mills has one of America's best music programs, and many of the students who go there are open to many interpretations of what "music" can be.

I had a friend who left The City in a hurry. He told me to go into his cellar and take whatever I wanted. I left his cellar with an electric guitar, a mixing board, and an 8-track cassette recorder.

I had not played music before, but was the sort of fan that did my research. If I liked a band I would read tons of interviews, which would inevitably turn me on to any number of things. In fact, most of my taste and knowledge of all art comes originally from delving into this mire. Politics too, came from this source. In the early/mid 1980s there was a viable and thriving underground scene, and this underground did NOT see itself as divorced from the rest of 20th century underground movements in music, politics and art.

So I was well prepared...

I was welcomed by my brother and his friends into their various configurations of playing music. For some time I was quite adamant about being a non musician, an identity I can no longer lay claim to. But at the time this was political for me, taken from one of my favorites, Genesis P Orridge in Throbbing Gristle. I was also very influenced by Derek Jarman, whose collaborative way of making films combined the Non and the Professional.

Eventually I needed to begin making music my own way, and with my own ends in mind. This was spurred in part by an interview with Jack Smith, where he stated that the "title was half the work", referring to the political, and also from an interview with Otomo Yoshide where he said something like, "In times of bad economy, or political instability many musicians make Noise, in the good times they make Art" To me these quotes pointed to a type of political expression in art that I was very interested in.

So...

The Pixie Kitchen began making Noise; aggressive, difficult, despairing, sometimes funny works that had this political expression in mind. The PK also was a means to test out what I learned by playing with other musicians and composers. In the beginning I also had this utopian notion that The Pixie Kitchen could be a band, one with no identities, just anonymous players, that it could be a concept that others could use. This did not happen. Very quickly I could not stop recording. Mostly these CDs had me as the only player, but on some of them other players are featured as well. Cheryl Leonard, under whose wing I learned micro listening, John Blue plays guitar and bass on some tracks, also my brother Jerry plays guitar on one CD. Friend Mark Gergis, whose own body of very political work is on another. I am certain to be missing a name or two. Oh yeah, dearest friend Heidi Follin too...

Anyway two...

I put all PK CDs for free download on the website LastFM

The pictures of the album covers and a link to the CDs is in the post below

Annette Frick took the above picture of me