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Mark Scudder: Felix Culpa

In 1998, I suffered the failure of my first long-term relationship. We were both to blame; I was young and from a conservative, socially-awkward family, she was trying to experience both the fairy-tale traditional marriage while immersing herself in misandric 90's pop feminism, acting as if she'd been abused after the slightest disagreement. It was doomed to fail, but it still hurt like nothing I'd ever known before.

While she fell right into the waiting arms of someone who told her what she wanted to hear ("No one should ever abuse you like that") and married him, essentially spitting in the face of the feminist revival, I ended up with someone whose intentions weren't so expertly hidden, and was not a help for long. So I turned to the studio. A kind an eccentric soul at WHRW named Paul Goldschmidt was in the process of training me in the station's production studio, Control Room 2, when I suddenly had a desperate need for it.

The first night I dragged my rig down there and dropped a tape into the studio's Tascam DA-88, I recorded the second half of "Between the Shot and the Fall" in the time it took to play four stream-of-consciousness overdubs. Comprised of only first takes, it became a stark but accurate picture of where I was at the time.

The album only took a few months to complete. The raw tracks were recorded on the DA-88, and were recorded into a 486 computer with a Sound Blaster card, a stereo pair at a time, then rsynced for mixing at home in Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition).

The signature space sound I had developed on Mother of Invention with the Korg AX30G was expanded here with the use of distortion and lead tones. All the electric guitar tracks on the album, with the exception of the lead on 'Everything is Perfect," were recorded through the AX30G, and recorded direct in.

The album is deliberately sequenced like a story, or a movie. The necessary but sliightly-manufactured track "Everything is Perfect" sets up the backstory - a naïve protagonist who believes that he can give his heart completely to another. "Between the Shot and the Fall," a 17-minute soundscape, sets the violent picture of the moment it was finally over, and the uncontrollable pain that overwhelms, and eventually recedes to a dark numbness, when the one who calls herself victim creates a victim. "August 24, 1996" recalls a painful but manageable moment from the past, with a traditional arragement. "The Expected Season" is a dark, longing piece that sets up the album closer: a realization, however forced, however unfair, that happiness can be found elsewhere: "Summer Came Without Her."

Not having a outlet to release or even perform Felix Culpa in the Binghamton area, and having no interest in the sort of business the traditional music industry does, I sort of bet the farm on an internet startup called MP3.com, whose president Michael Robertson promised me that he would bring digital music from the indepedents to the masses. After Felix Culpa was delivered, his focus shifted within weeks to mainstream, pre-established artists who were jumping on the internet bandwagon, offering essentially pre-released music ripped to MP3 to capitalize on the craze.

Not having any other marketable venue, Felix Culpa languished until 2007, when I was finally able to deliver product to iTunes and other major online retailers. At that point, the album was almost ten years old, and I was hesistant to release it in its original form to a worldwide audience. Instead, after some rewarding work dipping back into the archives, I produced the Re-Mastered Special Edition, with which I was much more satisfied.

The curse of creating art from your pain is that it sometimes creates an unwanted psychological situation. I hope I never again do something so careless as to write an entire album about someone who hurt me - the message that she took from it was, "awesome! Somebody wrote an album about me!" That certainly wasn't the intended message. The straight white men who succeed these days are those who appear to be completely unaffected by hatred or pain immediately after it is inflicted. That Felix Culpa was received by its muse with this sort of reaction was an obstacle. But it also illustrates the need for albums like it - because we are almost always alone in our suffering, and honesty is still very much a lonely policy.