Here's more about the Zidsick Icon Festival: Icon meaning - Independent Cassette Only Networkers according to Mr. Zan. The month of June was chosen because it coincided with Zan's birthday on the 16th of June 1991. The fisrt visitors were Adam Bohman (Finchley - London U.K.) and Mike Honeycutt - Mystery Hearsay (Memphis,TN USA).
The main idea is to make the whole month a celebration of Zan's birthday by inviting people he networks/trades music and/or collaborates with to come to Louisville. That way they can see where he lives, creates and records, etc. And to of course Party with the Zanny guy himself as well as the other half of Grandbrother. Grandbrother is Beau and Zan as a performing duo. And speaking of performing... The last night I was there, it was arranged for us all to play live at a bar called "The club with no name". The nucleus was Zan & Beau (Grandbrother), Adam Bohman and myself. As the night wore on, audience participation grew. Locals like Charley and Kathy Newman, Shelby McDowell, Joey Conroy and David of "Ut Gret", Barb Hall and other unknown members of the audience as well as the owner/manager who supplied bubbles a la Lawrence Welk. Instrumentation included: Adam Bohman's prepared violin with utensils for playing, brass sculpture, viola, guitar adn various percussive things. Joey brought his Chapman Stick and David his alto sax. Thus we created what can only be called the "sound with no name". Other live performances took place later that week with Adam Bohman doing a solo set and more Grandbrother mayhem.
More info on the house of Grandbrother and Zidsick - (culled from a recent phone conversation with MR. Zan.
MH: Tell me more about the colorful wall in the Grandbrother studio?
ZH:Oh yes.. The collaborative wall. Anybody who comes over to party or record in the studio has full rights to do chalk art on the wall. I buy these 25 cent boxes of colored chalk at BIGGS for people to ravage the wall in any way they see fit.
MH: What about the piano harp/soundboard?
ZH: We found it in the alley next door. It had no keys and we ripped the front off it and we prepare it ala ADAM BOHMAN and manipulate it because playing the inside of a piano is much more exciting than playing it from the outside.
MH: What equipment does Grandbrother use?
ZH: We have a ARP Axxe, Seqeuntial Circuits PRO one, a Zippy Zither which "you can play instantly" of course one of the key selling points, Viola, snow shovel, indian sugar can, bongos, assorted percussion....
MH: Of course Grandbrother guitars?
ZH: Grandbrother has about a dozen guitars, the F flat horn, the stylephone and various recording decks, mixer, quadraverb. The Harry Bertoia like sculpture.
MH:The goose sculpture?
ZH:The goose sculpture eggzactly. MH:The recently aquired thrift store brass thing that has rods emanating from it's ringed center and garnished with goose replicas.
ZH:Umhuh... MH: But most importantly... always remember to "Prevent Recordables".
ZH: Oh yeah... I forgot about that. And the law of the Grandbrother studio is that "We do not sell Milk"!
MH: Let's get into the tape label - How many cassette releases are on the Zidsick label?
ZH: Let's say after I got over 300 I stopped counting.
MH: So you have more than 300?
ZH: Right. The logic is after you have more than 300 you just don't want to count. You just have a lot, ya know...
MH: And these releases are mainly mixes of sound sources that you have received from contacts around the world?
ZH: They are all multi-collaborative international sound compositions.
MH: With exception of the Grandbrother material?
ZH: Yeah, with the exception of say 40 tapes which would be my solo noise projects and the Grandbrother tapes that also include collaborations.
MH: Any future projects you want to mention?
ZH: Oh yeah, I'm doing a collaboration with Louis Mesa, it's dual collaboration, he's taking all the tapes I've sent them and remixes them to his own composition and that's called "Zanmerz". My part is to take all the tapes he has sent me and mix them which will be called "Merzan". And then I'm also doing a collaboration with Francisco Lopez from Madrid, Spain.
MH: The insect guy?
ZH: Yeah, right. And he's doing a couple of cityscapes in Spain. That's where he goes around recording four to eight hours of sound sources which in his mind or ear defines what the city sounds like. He asked me to do the same in Louisville. He will then mix my Louisville cityscapes and do a portrait of the city by listening to the recordings I made. For instance, Adam and I went to the ZOO yesterday and got wicked sounds of the Lion roaring. I never actually heard one in real life usually they're just sleeping ya know. You go, "Lions and there they are, OH BOY look at them sleep!" but this one just came out and AAAAOOORRRRGGGGRRRRRRrrrr it was great. Those are two new projects I'm working on. And oh yes, the new "Zoot Suit Beatnik" project with Charlie Newman. He use to be in a Nashville group called "MinimaLogic". We're doing a musical equivilent of the William Burroughs technique of cut-ups with cover songs. It's neat, it's really cool. He takes bars from famous pieces of music and collages together in specific ways. You know certain notes have to carry over from one bar to the next and then he cuts-up lyrics from other parts of music. Oh and the lyrics are hilarious, the lyrics are a stitch.
ZH: And I recently counted my cassette collection. As of now I'm about a dozen tapes short of 2400 cassettes. Which to put it into reference: If you got one cassette a day for seven years = that's how many you would have. And I've been doing this for about seven years, so that's kindof funny. Really there's four catagories: one is my masters - one is my sources - one is stuff I've gotten in the mail - one is recordings of records or CD's. The majority of my collection is tapes in trade from people like you and Adam Bohman.
MH: We help make your cassette wall what it is..?!?
ZH: Actually you make my cassette wall the envy of every hairdresser!
MH: Are there any philosophies etc. you would like to declare?
ZH: YES I would like to say ther are too many old timers in the network who complain of the lack of quality. And they do not ever approach the obvious solution (and it annoyz me) and that is to stop writing the fuckers you hate to get tapes from. MH: anything else?
ZH: I think people should buy every Adam Bohman tape ever created. Just kidding. No ah, Lawrence Salvitore was the second coming of Christ, but nobody noticed. No I'm kidding... AAAAaaaaauh!
MH: It's getting to deep. What's the deal on him?
ZH: The guy is a child piano prodigy. He was teaching piano at age six. MH: You're kidding of cource?
ZH: NO! I'm SERIOUS the guy is amazing and he's so camp it's great. I think it was Don Campau who campared him to "Barry Manilow on EXTACY". His music is the best in the world because it's so liberated and so free. There's no one telling him what he can and can't record. There's things like "Love is the pursuit of the whole" which is an absolute, glorious blowout that no one else would do because they're too self conscious and have that much fun and blast it out his third hole. He's beautifull with his double awe tondres. He really has got the lyrical stuff out the wazoo.
MH: Is'nt he the one you told me was the feminist?
ZH: YEA, yea he's a self proclaimed male feminist, so he writes songs like "All men are pigs"and things like that. And every man woman and child in the universe should own a copy of "The humanist newgentic decentigration a psychedelic pop orchestra" it's sorta like if Dali did the Beatles White Album it would end up being this. He mainly uses piano, percussion, keyboards, voice and a little guitar. He can really write a song. And that is why Grandbrother covers so many of his songs, because he is the most amazing person in the universe. I mean who else could write a song like "Two balls have I" and get away with it? "It's not obscene it's in my jeans, it's squeaky clean." Got love lyrics like that. One of my favorite lines from "Barely man enough", "She calls me little Lawrence and I call her Pussykins, gender bending christmas gifts that are'nt too masculine." And we do "I can crack nuts with my thighs", people know Grandbrother by that tune, it's always a crowd pleaser. The audiance will yell out "I can crack nuts with my thighs"! and I always have the perfect comeback - "Come on let's see it, come on up here!"
MH: This seems like a good place to leave them hanging... oooooo ouch.
YOU, YES YOU MAY CONTACT ZAN at:
ZIDSICK, P.O. Box 4730, Louisville,KY 40204 USA