Well, since a copy of this recently sold for a huge wad of cash, I figured I’d share some information as well as songs by this band. I’ve been able to find a couple members of this band, which has been pretty hard to do since only the first names of each member appear on the credits. Here is what Greg, the songwriter/singer, had to say:
“We never again pressed anything else under the moniker Short-Wave Mystery but there are more songs that I have on tape, from that era.
Most of the tracks on that record were written and recorded by myself when I was attending Santa Barbara City College down in Isla Vista, CA around the 1985-1986 time frame. They were recorded in a bedroom using a 4 track Tascam 38 and some small Electro-Harmonix 2 second samplers and a Memorymoog Plus running a sequencer driving a Moog Source. I took some of the tracks into a bigger facility for mastering before releasing the record.
All of the memebers were essentially friends. Two of the members were brothers who I grew up with in Modesto, CA (Tom and Jason) while the tall, blonde fellow, Dave, was a roomate of ours from college in Santa Barbara, who played sax. The other guys in the band played instruments, but none actually played anything on the record, save for Jason, who laid a few percussive licks down. It was all written and sequenced by me. When we played live, I essentially hit the tape play button ala Depeche Mode and let it roll. Not much going on save for a lot of posing and gesturing..
We pressed about 1000 copies of the record and never and never went into repressing. I think we had a hard time getting the record to sell at all, and took a loss. None of us had much marketing or business savvy when it came to getting our product peddled. We just could not create a demand and spent most of our cash just trying to get the record made. I believe it was available through Rough Trade Distribtuion in SF when it was down on 6th street. After that, we grew up and went our separate ways. Tom still lives in the Bay area, Dave I haven’t heard from in years, and Jason sells his art in Michigan…
...Anyway, I have all those tracks and many many more from that era still on 2” and 4” real to real tapes. I am going to take them into the studio and remaster them then post them and perhaps re-release them as an album if anyone might be interested. This will occur in the first quarter of 2009.
Jason and I did some stuff after that under the moniker Chapel Bell Chimes, which perhaps I should release as well. More digital sounding of course since I was using a lot of antiqated samplers at that particular time.”
Red a bit more here (as well as download the entire EP!):
http://goutroy.blogspot.com/2008/08/short-wave-mystery-pilots-12.html
