Buzz Cats--Raw & Dirty 1996 The little Schizoid Zither factory, an adjunct to the Schizoid Furniture concern, saw several production runs of creature shaped perverted zither in that year. The saws were always running. Trips to Faust Saw Mill in Helena, Ark. were a pretty regular thing. Mr Faust would let me climb through the huge stacks of hardwood and search for boards that were wide and thick enough to make zither blanks. Hardwoods ran the gamut of what was available along the Mississippi River: elm, ash, oak. hickory, walnut, locust, etc. The creature zithers were a popular item. Demon headed zithers with long horns. Bird headed zithers with beaks and coxcombs and M'bira built into their tail feathers. This was well before i settled into certain patterns that felt too right, (long wide instruments with treble cleft geometry on each end). Then there was the Buzz Cat, huge runs of cat headed instruments, complete with long tails. Buzz Cat's .....Raw & Dirty was recorded around this time. Like all, they were real instruments, with piano wire and harpsichord pins, moveable bridges, a soundboard, a tail, a head, and whiskers. Some cats were bigger than others, just like in the real world. The recording studio setup was quite minimal. An ancient well used Peavey recorder and mixer, (the MCR4 & AMR64). A couple of Shure microphones (57 & 58). Field recordings were captured and transferred into the 4 track by a Tascam DAP-1. Way better than the boom box of previous times. Improvisations were also recorded in the field by DAT and transferred to the analog 4 track. A funky come down resolution wise but it was what i could afford at the time. Buzz Cats.....R&D does make use of some digital instruments. The Roland RD-500 digital acoustic piano and the Roland D-50 Synth were used sparsely on perhaps 4 tracks at most. But mainly it's a Schizoid Zither thing. As stated, field recordings play a certain role in the compositions, whether in spots or as a background canvas. I particularly like the long Katydid clicking through "Two views of Uranus" and the fish flop at the end. The rain at the end of "On Grackle Pie Road". Of course "Little Buzz Box Boy" is a perverted Christmas tune. In '96 i was continuing the experimentation that was begun two years before with the Boing Box Table. But that's another album waiting it's turn. I have composed three other Albums, some containing Schizoid Zither compositions. They can be found at: CDbaby.com/dmm David M Moore POB 875 Rosedale,MS 38769 waytchowhound8@gmail.com 662-759-6353