Penal Colony

Last night was the 30th anniversary of Penal Colony’s first show. Good thing Chris Lyons capped it!
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Penal Colony’s first show. Spanky’s Cafe in the I.E., 1992. Just got this from Jason today. Many thanks to Chris Lyons for hanging on to the tape and sharing!

Penal Colony 10 31 1992 Penal Colony October 31, 1992. Spanky's Cafe.

Longtime Penal Colony cohort Michael Hateley and myself (Dee) have started a podcast! "Music, Mindfulness, and Madness"! And that's what it's all about! Music, Music Production, Music Tech, Surviving as a Creative, the creative process and hacks to help with it, the madness that comes with all of it, and using mindfulness and meditation to navigate all of it and, well, life in general. Our first episode is up! Listen! Subscribe! We're making this a weekly shindig so more to come!

‎Music, Mindfulness, & Madness on Apple Podcasts ‎Music · 2021

This guy sitting next to Jason is our buddy Ian McLendon. Ian fronted a really great band from the I.E. back in the day called Fun Truckin’ With Jesus. We played many shows with them, and they were among the bands in that scene I always looked forward to playing with. He’s been tight with Jason Chris and Andy going back to Texas Vamps days. Jason has remained friendly with him and his wife, Sophia.

Ian got into a terrible accident with Sophia on the 91 freeway in LA a few weeks ago. Sophia lost her life, and it left Ian in a coma up until a few days ago.

In addition to the hospital bills, he’s going to find himself in a very tenuous and complicated family situation when he leaves the hospital, and he’s going to need help he can get.

His family setup a gofundme to help him. Me and the guys in PC have decided to pledge 100% of all our Bandcamp profits from “Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994” to Ian’s gofundme, from now until he can get back on his feet.

If you’d like to help our Brother, buy the album on Bandcamp, or donate directly to his gofundme below.

Thanks all.
Dee, Jason, Chris & Andy

https://www.gofundme.com/f/26mlehn500

In contrast to the "Anaheim Trailerpark" recordings, the "Brea Rehearsal Space" demos from "Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994" was the first time we attempted to print anything we had going on to tape - VHS tape, to be specific - in a formal manner. More on the VHS tape part later.

We had our first show at Spanky's in Riverside on Halloween in 1991, which will be 29 years ago this Saturday, I'm just now realizing. By early '92, we were creeping out of our Inland Empire shell, expanding to book shows in Hollywood and were getting asked by bookers for things like demos and press kits. It was time to do some recording.

Being almost 30 years ago, the sequence of events are fuzzy. But somewhere around this time, I got to talking to our old friend Michael Hateley about how to set about recording a demo. I have long abhorred doing anything in a proper studio, even those days. Then and now, I have only been in a proper one to record anything twice in my entire life. Never been comfortable working in them, I avoid them like the plague. So I was trying to figure out with Michael how we could do it without having to go into a studio.

We took inventory of what we had. Andy, Chris and Jason already had this awesome rehearsal space from Vamps days, in a sleepy little business park, nested in the equally sleepy town of Brea in Orange County, which we continued to use as PC. Hateley figured we could do basic tracking there.

The next problem was equipment. We knew we wanted to track it as live as possible, and keep overdubs to a minimum, which meant we were going to need a 16 track, mayyybe get by with a 8 track recorder to make it work, plus mics, cables... Tape... Ampex 1 or 2 inch tape alone was/is super expensive... and everything else. We were still living in the days of analog multitracks, and no one was going to rent us an 8 or 16 track Otari long enough to record what we needed to record to 4 kids with no money.

Despite all of this, somehow, our timing couldn't have been better. Our saving multitrack angel came in the form of a company called Alesis, who, up to then, was known for making inexpensive effects processors and mixers, not much else. Literally months before we started thinking about recording a demo, they did something that completely transformed the recording industry at the time. They introduced an 8 track recorder, enclosed in a 4 space rack case, that recorded 8 tracks of 16 bit, 48k digital audio to VHS tape. They called it the ADAT. Not only could this thing record 8 tracks of digital audio, you could link up to something like 3 or 4 together, giving everyone access to something only very expensive studios could provide - 24 tracks of digital audio recording. And it was cheap. Much cheaper than any equivalent analog 8 track, and the only digital multitracks produced at that point were these 24 and 48 track beasts Sony made, which cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The next bit of great fortune came with OUR angel in black clothing and tats, Michael Hateley. At the time, Hateley was working for a company in Hollywood that rented out high end recording equipment to all of the big studios in town. Turns out even big studios need to rent additional equipment for recording projects now and then, and when they did, they'd go to this company Hateley worked for to get it. As luck would have it, his company had_just gotten some ADATs in, and he could set us up with one or two in order to record. Renting 2 of them was still too prohibitively expensive for the aforementioned 4 kids with no money, so we had to settle for renting a single ADAT, plus all of the gear to run it, from Brother Mike. We rented it for 2 or 3 days, and Hateley would run the session.

Now, we had the gear, we had access to the gear for several days, so why bother recording 4 songs for a demo, when we could record our entire set? And if we could record our entire set, maybe we could just put out our own album? The last part still felt pretty lofty, because, you know, we were poor, but the recording of the entire set felt attainable.

Without boring you with all of the gory details, we technically only had 7 of the 8 tracks to record to, because we needed to dedicate one of them to a SMPTE track. To facilitate recording live drums/bass/guitar on 7 tracks, we came up with some clever techniques to augment our number of tracks through recording the overflow as live MIDI data into my Atari 1040st computer. It all worked beautifully.

Once we had everything tracked, the next problem was mixing. We didn't have the gear necessary to give this material we just tracked the love it deserved. Enter guardian angel Hateley once again. Turned out, this place he worked at, that rented out the fancy recording gear, also had an equally fancy demo room, with a really nice mixing console and tons of outboard effects. Mike arranged for us to use it after hours, over a couple weekends. After 2 long weekends, it was all done. Fast forward several months, we got it into the hands of several labels, Cleopatra got a copy, and the rest, as they say...

This here is a track from those sessions that none of us had listened to since it was recorded, completely forgot it was even a song we wrote or played in our set. None of us remember exactly why it fell out of the set and the PYHD recording sessions later on, but it did. We all loved hearing it again, and we were all happy to be able to share it with all of you.

It's the one called "Serpentine":

https://penalcolony.bandcamp.com/track/serpentine-brea-rehearsal-space-demo

My old pal Heresy with Adz on MMH - The Home Of Rock Radio gave the sons of the P to the C some love on his show Saturday night. You can find it as a podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite Android podcast app!

Heresy with Adz 24.10.2020 Goth Industrial Post Punk Listen to the pdocast of the latest Heresy on MMH The Home Of Rock Radio. Goth Industrial Post Punk Alternative

The "Anaheim Trailerpark" demos on our new collection, "Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994", were the last batch of recordings we did together. As Jason said in an earlier post, we knocked these out very quickly at his mobile home crib, situated in a trailerpark in Anaheim, hence the "Anaheim Trailerpark" name.

All of these were tracked on my trusty Tascam 4 track, which is the beige-ish object with the open door at the top of that stack of gear between the monitors in this pic. This was taken during those sessions by Jason's Dad, Taz.

4 tracks weren't exactly enough to capture everything we needed to capture. By this time, Jason and I had 3 samplers with enough memory between them to augment tracking by sampling entire sections of guitar and bass, then sequencing those samples. We had to use both my computer and Jason's to make it all work, since I had done some non-beat sequencing on my Atari 1040st, and Jason had done all of his beats programming on his Mac SE.

In order to mix everything down, we had to lock the two computers to one another via MIDI, and then, to lock both computers to the 4 track, we had to "stripe" one of the tracks on the 4 track with SMPTE timecode, and then we'd "slave" the computers to the 4 track using a SMPTE sync box. Once all of that was setup, we'd press play on the 4 track, and cross our fingers.

This was in the days prior to computer DAWs, and the timecode-to-tape method for locking recorded audio to MIDI equipment was the defacto way to mixdown, all the way up to the big studios.

Like Jason said, it was a brutal marathon recording session. We worked our collective hind quarter off for 2 or 3 days straight to get it done.

Through the miracle of modern technology, we were able to clean these up using tools that didn't exist as until as recently as a couple years ago. Longtime partner in crime Michael Hateley and his Lotus Mastering applied the mastering glue to make these recordings and the rest of the collection work as a whole.

This one here in the link below is my favorite of the Anaheim Trailerpark saga - "When The Veins On The Back Of My Legs Hurt, It's Time To Stop"

https://youtu.be/w1b89qutBfU

After decades of promises, it's finally here. "Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994" is available NOW on Bandcamp and all of your favorite steaming outlets! Recordings by the original lineup, made available for the first time.

"Anaheim Trailerpark" demos - These are the last recordings we did as a group. Recorded on a 4 track at Jason's mobile home in a trailerpark in Anaheim

"S. P. D. T. T. S. F. W. R." - A one-off we did for a Reconstriction comp recorded on a 4 track in my bedroom in Garden Grove

"Brea Rehearsal Space" demos - Early recordings done in our practice space in Brea, done with Michael Hateley on a single ADAT 8 track

"Laurel Canyon" demos - Early 5 Man Job recordings done at my sister's house in Laurel Canyon, on a single Tascam DA-88 8 track.

The "Instrumental" tracks are basically the Jason and Justin show. The first group is everything Jason would perform from his DrumKat live. At some point, Jason recorded what he did to DAT as a backup, so what you hear in these is everything he would play from samplers via his DrumKat. The "5MJ Live" instrumentals are slightly different. These are playback arrangements used by Justin Bennett (he of Skinny Puppy fame) when we did the 5 Man Job tour. 10 tracks of fun artifacts for the DJs and remixers/producers.

More details about these recordings to come in later posts!

https://penalcolony.bandcamp.com/releases

https://open.spotify.com/album/7xAFQDkyYHosiZL2esVQpS?si=wzPAV6XBS4WRtocRNiPWVA

https://music.apple.com/us/album/exhibitions-in-survival-demos-1992-1994/1536037747

Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994, by Penal Colony 30 track album

Just tripped over this whilst perusing - Penal Colony was added to the "Industrial Deep Cuts" playlist was added to Apple Music! An oldie of ours "Combine" is in there alongside many of the usual suspects. Check it out:

Industrial Deep Cuts Playlist · 97 Songs

My livestream chat with Ivan Hart was captured for posterity and it’s up on his YouTube channel. We talked a whole bunch about the old days of PC and his band Usherhouse. Had a blast doing it!

Dee Madden Interview Interview with Dee Madden, former Cleopatra Records recording artist and singer song writer for Penal Colony.

Bands Of Brethren #8 - Dr Dre - Like a few of the other entries thus far, I had to think long and hard how much ground to cover on the hip-hop front, and how important certain members of the hip-hop community were to the development of Penal Colony. Like many things in life, all of this can and might change, but for the time being, I’m going to focus on hip-hop Producers that I know I can offer props to, for myself and on behalf of the other 3/4’s of the original lineup, who’s work, inspiration and influence on the band is incalculable.

Thinking back on that core period of the early 90’s that we were at the peak of our output, I’d have to say the biggest influence of all hip-hop artists and Producers was almost entirely work that Dr. Dre was either directly or indirectly involved in.

It’s hard to remember a world before Dre’s “The Chronic”, but when that album was released, it completely changed the west coast hip-hop game, arguably hip-hop as a genre, period. Hip-Hop production sensibilities were dramatically different from what he did. Tempos were faster. Filthy dirty samples and sample loops were the preference at the time, the dirtier the better. Dr. Dre changed all that. He slowed tempos down. He changed the way the low end was shaped. He introduced live instrumentation. He applied a clean, sleek, pop-like sheen to his productions. As a result, there were many nay-sayers to the approach, because it ran so dead against everything that was happening at the time.

We loved it. We loved Dre productions. We loved G Funk. We’d play it before practice. If you were like us in 1992, and you were dirt poor, constantly begging from Peter to pay Paul, you had a be**er pickup truck because you had to have a pickup truck to haul gear from OC to Hollywood or from home to the practice space with a busted cassette player and a barely functioning radio, you listened to the radio. Fortunately in LA at the time, if you were spending hours sitting in traffic every day on the 5 or the 405 like we were, there was the terrestrial radio blessing that came in the form of KDAY (if you could get it in) and Power 106. These stations played the holy hell out of all things Dre, Ruthless, Death Row, Ice Cube. They were our own. They belonged to us. We were all stoked that they were all enjoying national recognition, and what they were doing_sounded like LA. These guys were doing things with their music and production that could have only happened in LA.

Growing up in LA / The IE / OC, myself and the guys all grew up steeped deeply in African and Latin American Culture. Lowriders and lowrider culture and car shows were everywhere. My old man had friends that owned and built lowriders. At the big events and in the magazines, people sold Lowrider compilations and mixtapes. These were typically populated with 50’s / 60’s oldies, Soul and R&B. Doo-wop. The Stylistics. The Friends Of Distinction. War. The O’Jays. The first time I heard “Nuthin’ But A G Thang”, the thing that immediately jumped out at me about that track was the flood of memories it triggered for me and my childhood. Not only was it innovative, but it vibed like the product of an individual who grew up on a steady diet of Lowrider mixtapes. Oldies station K-EARTH. Backyard BBQ’s during the Raiders game. All things I grew up with. It was comfort food for my soul. While there wasn’t anything specific about that track I could pin this too, it was there. I could feel it.

So I became obsessed with Dr. Dre productions, and by proxy, so did the rest of the band. The more I listened to his work on my crappy radio, sitting on the freeway, there were little things I began to pickup that Dre was doing with his production that I would make mental notes of and share with Jason. “Extremist” is a good example of his influence, “When The Veins On The Back Of My Legs Hurt, It’s Time To Stop” is another one, OUR version of Freemasons, not the remixes, “M.P.D.TT.S.F.W.R” is another one, “Halidified” if you peel away the My Bloody Valentine noise veneer. They all kinda chug along at that Dr. Dre tempo, they all have that Dre-shaped low end, all things we learned listening to Dr. Dre Productions.

The one thing we did that always sticks in my mind is something we did to the outro of “Extremist”. I can’t place the exact track - it was probably a Snoop Dogg track - but I heard this really cool thing he was doing with an 808 kick drum. He was scratching it in time on this track, basically taking a spot of a record where the kick was by itself and he was doing this 8th note shuffle thing, but he was doing it scratching, so the kick would play forward-backward-forward. It was really really cool. Neither Jason or I could scratch to save our lives, but I got to thinking, we could achieve something similar by taking the kick we were using in that track, sample it, reverse it, then alternate between the reversed version and the version we had. I went to Jason with it, we tried it. Instant Dr. Dre nirvana. If you’ve heard the original version of “Extremist” and you’re paying attention, you can here it in there.

Thank you Dr. Dre.

Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Dogg - Still D.R.E. (Official Video) Get COMPTON the NEW ALBUM from Dr. Dre on Apple Music: http://smarturl.it/Compton Music video by Dr. Dre performing Still D.R.E.. (C) 1999 Aftermath Entertai...

I'll be getting interviewed on RadioKAJW today & talking PC days, among other things! Check it!
- Dee

RadioKAJW - Free Internet Radio - Live365 When was the last time you made a mixed tape? Held your breath while you shared a romantic song with a new crush? Discovered new insights in the lyrics of a favorite rock and roll record? Sometimes the best way to tell someone how you feel is with a song. RadioKAJW, defying all genre boxes. Everythi...