The Shanghai Project,..

One of my links brings you to a page entitled "Going Back In Time" and it's basically stuff I found in an old box of cassette tapes. And while digging around in the box I came across some interesting tapes that I had completely forgotten about. Back in the 80's I was one of three core musicians collectively known as The Shanghai Project. What we did was provide a "band" for the students of a recording institute to learn their craft on. In exchange, we got a cassette of the session. What made this interesting for us is that we were not given any constraints on what type of music we had to show up with. So we made it interesting for those students by showing up with music I'm sure none of them had ever heard before. We had them micing up old brake drums, folding chairs, African slit tongue log drums, and none of them had ever seen a Chapman Stick before. They never knew what to expect when we came through the door, and we quickly became their favorite band because of it.

The Shanghai Project consisted of myself on guitars, keyboards, percussion & effects. I also did most of the melodic writing and arranging. Next up is Craig Zammiello on the Chapman Stick. He would typically provide the bass riffs that the songs would develop off of. He is also famous in the arts. Just google his name and you'll see why. And the originator of the whole project and drummer extraordinaire is Bill Donnelly.

As for the music, all except one of these songs are about as far away as you can get from anything that was being done in the 80's. We had a great time playing with the latest toys, stretching out in new musical directions, and actually creating some music that I think was ahead of it's time. Remember, what you're hearing comes off of 35+ year old cassettes, recorded and mixed by students. I did a little EQ work on them and mastered them as best as possible, but they are still pretty raw.

There came a time when the engineer teaching the class asked if we could do something a little more conventional with vocals. Up to that point I had typically only sung harmony and high falsetto back up vocals in the numerous copy bands I had played in. So Craig knocked out a riff on the Stick, we arranged a song, and I wrote up some lyrics for it. It was actually a pretty good song for the time. Our next visit was just Bill and I, with a synth, strange stringed instruments and percussion, and an idea we put together an hour earlier. The students found it interesting lol.

As it turns out, I remember that I asked the engineer, who we knew, to snip off the original tapes after each session and save them. I went in later and remixed them and the half track pancake is in possession of one Bill Donnelly, who also now happens to be my brother in law. I want to get them converted to digital so that I can master them and maybe release them.

Octavian

The Bone

Morse Code

Scree

Into The Sea