VAS DEFERENS ORGANIZATION-SWEAT YOUR CHEESES, BUT NOT IN MY SALAD, CD, 1997, USA

Described by Mason Jones of Charnel Music/Subarachnoid Space (who released it) as sounding like a "tribal carnival lounge party", "Sweat Your Cheeses, But Not In My Salad" continues my program of shares of albums from VDO's back catalog, this being one of our more truly fucked and sui generis offerings (along with our most notorious, containing as it does our "reply" to the Nurse With Wound list within the CD's booklet, which WFMU have kindly reprinted Here ), an anomaly in our discography for the novelty of it's central conceit, with all the tracks being built atop/around the tribal poundings of a four-man drum corps; a quartet who occupied the rhythm section of a band that Matt and I were contemporaneously producing at the time, one Primitivecho. Condensing the sorry saga of that aborted project down to a bite sized morsel, we essentially blew a year of our lives helping this local nu-metal by way of Crash Worship outfit completely recontextualize their sound into a face melting avant prog monster in the spirit of stuff like Present (and which would have easily given Yeti a run for their money, had it come out as planned), only to have them take the masters to another studio after it was completed and entirely shitcan our parts, pump up all the guitars and generally demolish the entire album. On the periphery of Primitivecho during that year was one Brian Artwick (on his own, a fabricator of Vidma Obmana cum Robert Rich-like subdued ambient wash), who, by dint of his spiffy new Groove Box toy (employed extensively on the album, albeit in dissected form) and the array of mind altering substances he came equipped with, wound up being the de facto third member of VDO for this one album. All that backstory aside though, the album that resulted from this mid-session VDO offshoot project is the silk purse hewn from this sow’s ear and one which, with eleven years hindsight now sounds to me a bit like dragging Tipsy through a Lard Free time tunnel en route to a Crash Worship gig.

Get Sweat Your Cheeses Here