(Home | Order Bananafish | Midheaven Mailorder | Revolver USA | Bananafish #14)

Excerpted from Bananafish #15

KRISTA NICOLS: Damian, what the fuck are you wearing?

DAMIAN BISCIGLIA: Secondhand clothing that I either find in thrift shops or that is given to me by friends, 'cept my underwear, of course, which my mother buys new at the local department store. When my beard and hair were longer and I hiked in the local mountains, she used to worry that people might mistake me for Bigfoot. Occasionally I'm harassed by police due to shabby appearance. No arrests were ever made.

DYLAN NYOUKIS: If I were a local law enforcement officer, I would shove you in a meat wagon and drive you to the outskirts of town, where you would be dumped like a bag of rags.

KRISTA: Anyway, this might sound titillating but it is valuable for the listener to have a mental image of a home-taper's surroundings. Is your studio neat or thrashed?

DYLAN: What do you think?

DAMIAN: My studio, bed, desk and recording collection are all crammed into one tiny room. Always in disarray. Plastic arms and legs are piled like corpses on my desk, along with seashells, rocks and weird melted plastic stuff. The floor is littered with musical instruments in various states of decay, mixed with springs, parts of automobiles and scrap metal, along with a lot of other junk. The whole mess smells slightly of seaweed. Ex-girlfriend found it claustrophobic. Need a sympathetic maid.

DYLAN: And a visit from Rent-a-Kill.

KRISTA: Some of your cassette covers are insane! I'm thinking in particular of the doll's head construction piece in Mr. Zan's collection. How does the cover art relate to the recording within?

DAMIAN: There is no conceptual relationship between my recordings and the cover art that accompanies them. However, one of my friends has commented that there seems to be a “textural grittiness” that seems to run through both my sonic and visual work.

KRISTA: If the cassette is separated from the cover, does it lose something for the first-time listener?

DAMIAN: Over the past fifteen years or so Agog has released over a dozen cassettes and I was only really happy with four of them. Those tapes took anywhere from ten months to several years to complete and as far as I'm concerned could have been mailed off in a bare white envelope without losing any impact on a potential listener. But there's no reason not to make interesting covers, so that's what I try I do. The insane-looking, one-of-a-kind covers — um, I guess I call them “Encrustaceans” —the ones with all the arms and legs, debris from fire-consumed automobiles and other crap dredged up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that's pasted directly into the cassette shells, stand up pretty much on their own and don't even need tapes in them or anything. People aren't even aware they've got cassettes in 'em unless I tell them or they're lucky enough to receive one.