Song Of The Day 11/11/2014: Hearn Gadbois - "GAHT MAYH MOH8JOH3 WOYKIHN"

Quarterly Covers Report: Back in September when I became enraptured by the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine series, to the point where I did three separate mixtapes based on its contents, the recording that might have stuck with me the most was Hearn Gadbois' of Willie Dixon's "Got My Mojo Workin'." I'm a blues semi-purist, though not a killjoy about it, but there was something about Gadbois' remake that I adored. A lot of things, really. First the insistent rhythm bed, held together by hand shakers and (I think it's a) marimba, then the remarkably well-nuanced Macintosh voice "singing" the lyrics in ways that are alternately hilarious and not unaligned with the original spirit of the piece. Even my wife liked this one. Or at least she liked the marimbas.

Thankfully Gadbois, based in Prague, is still around and has a SoundCloud page featuring this song. He's also got a Bandcamp site which has the deepest bio I could find on him: "He started playing congas in funk bands at an early age and his sensibilities evolved through a mess of different hand drums and 1983 saw him living in New York and co-founding the psychedelic band SAQQARA DOGS. He has worked with many notable artists including Yoko Ono, Patti Smith & c & c." Don't know who "c & c" are but I highly doubt they're the ones who had the Music Factory.

Further digging on Gadbois' quite comprehensive SoundCloud page elicits slightly more info about this piece (formatting not edited): "a bit of my recording pre-history ca '83. a friend loaned me a macintosh computer with an interesting speech program for a weekend, and covering the willie dixon song "i've got my mojo working" seemed the next logical step." You read that correctly: This was Mac art from 1983, a full year before mainstream America had any idea who or what Apple Computers were. And Vocoders didn't yet come standard with refrigerators. Gosh, but I like this.