ambient

Third Option’s “Still, Murphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix” is above…

Ok. Lot to explain on this one! First of all, Murphurd. For those of you who know me as Murph, Murph is actually short for Murphurd. I got the name Murphurd freshman year in high school, damn near the first day. I was new to town. I was in science class, I asked this dude Andrew (I think) if he had a pencil. I was mumbling. I mumbling often then. He said “murphurd?”, you know how people do where they repeat the gibberish you sound like you’re saying? You say “are you here for pizza?” and they say “what? hurforpeets?” Well “do you have a pencil?” was somehow “murphurd?”. Like three times in a row. Finally I just gave up and said “yeah, Murphurd”.

From that moment on, partly because the dude didn’t know my name anyway, he just started calling me Murphurd. He never knew I was asking for a pencil. He just thought I was being a weirdo, all the more reason to name me what I was saying. I often WAS being a weirdo like that, (still am), and so it made sense, even though ironically, weirdo I was not being that particular time.

Of course Murphurd quickly shortened to Murphurd, but the honors class kids I went through all of high school with would be just as likely to call me Murphurd. All you cats who came around AFTER high school, when M.C. Murph and then just Murph were my stage names, you wouldn’t call me Murphurd. But cats from high school, they certainly might.

On to the word “slow”. Well, I thought this was so cool. I took I think the whole mix of the original Still track, minus vocals and played it back with this hard drive recorder called the Darwin I was using. The Darwin had a shuttle wheel, where you could hold it and turn it to play or fast forward or rewind. You could hold the wheel in one spot and have your audio play back at 2 times the speed, or 4, or even slow. If you held it right in the right spot, you could play a whole song back at the same screwy speed. Nowadays you can just tell some software to slow down or speed up something, and you could then too, but the software and computers were more expensive, and all I had was this Darwin machine. So I was playing it back with the wheel and did it slow one time, and it sounded neat. So what I did was, I put another Darwin on record (ok ok I had two – and they were like 3 grand a piece I admit) – wait did I have two at that time? I put SOMETHING on record at regular speed, and then I held that shuttle wheel in the exact right spot for like 10 minutes and recorded this mega slow version of the tune. Well it just so happened that the speed was a perfect multiple – I think a quarter – of the original speed. So what I could do was, I could bring in the normal speed song later and have it be perfectly in sync. And I put vocals in different spots, re-recorded the poem with me saying it, etc. We used this mix (minus the vocals, ’cause we were performing them) to start our Third Option show most of the time, actually. I always thought it was a neat mysterious intro. It comes on slow so you could sort of start it early and come to the stage just in time.

Anyway the result is the Murphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix, and that slow down process is why it’s a 10 minute long version. I guess I felt like I should use the whole thing *eyeroll*.

Oh I didn’t explain the unrequited love part. Well, at that time, there was a Third Option act, and we hadn’t done the Cult Of Nice record yet, and we were in Albuquerque and going all around doing our shtick, and the act was a duo, me and Tamara. But at that time me and Tamara weren’t dating. There was this kind of 9 month period between the time me and my girlfriend before had broken up where I was all about the getting with Tamara but she wasn’t all about the getting with me.

I guess sometime during the creation of the Still EP, we finally started moving that direction. I actually remember the date when we first “went beyond friends” (to put it politely), but not exactly where we were in the production process.

The point is, eventually, I named this mix the Unrequited Love Mix – I think because I did the whole thing in a sort of all night binge of disturbed creativity that was disturbed due to the unrequited love situation.

So it was quite a bold thing to say, seeing as how the subject of disturbance was IN THE BAND. Sort of like a Mama’s and Papa’s story I heard once.

Last piece of trivia: If you were to buy the disc, there’s a typo ion the cd packaging. It says “Muphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix” (missing an r in Murphurd).

Love to y’all! Hey, here’s some free Third Option stuff, in case you didn’t get it yet 🙂

– Aaron

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