(Members of the various line-ups) are: Billy Sides - percussion, recorder, voice Joe Shrapnel - synthesizer, tapes, electronics, percussion, guitar, voice Tar Pet - alto saxophone, voice Weasel Walter - tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, 12-string guitar Nic Clark - tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, clarinet Slava Balasanov - alto saxophone, guitar Kathy Baird - bass guitar, voice Crazy Andy - bass guitar, synthesizer EXZOSKELETON was formed as kind of a "free jazz" offshoot of my prog-punk band ABORT PROTOCOL, which Joe Majalca, AKA: Joe Shrapnel, played synthesizer in for a while. About two months after Joe and I met, we started playing music together. I was starting ABORT PROTOCOL over for the 3rd time (AP is now on version 5!) with Mendi Robeson, an old friend from high school, on drums. We'd both lost our jobs at about the same time so we made a pact for him to quit his terribly corny bar-band THE ESTRUS and for us to reform AP and make it the ultimate shit, and then rock the world and all that. Joe lived in the basement of an apartment building that his mom owns and everybody who lived in the apartments worked at the Botanical Gardens in Highland Park during the day so no one was in the building until about 4 PM. Mendi moved his drumset in and I brought over my bass and my Yamaha 40M analog noise synthesizer, which my parents found in the trash. It wasn't the original intention, but Mendi and I ended up asking Joe to play the keyboard, kind of as the guitar player, in AP. I found that he was doing stuff on my synth, with a cache of pedals he had, that I'd never thought of and he was really exploring the dynamics and possibilities of it quite effortlessly ("I play it like I used to sleep around on my pregnant girlfriend."- Joe). When Mendi wasn't around, I played his drumset as much as I could. On days when he couldn't or didn't want to practice, I'd go over to Joe's, which was amazingly 4 blocks away from my house; I'd wake him up at about noon, sometimes sitting on the couch watching TV while he laid around in bed for 45 minutes, and then we'd take rum-and-coke shots, get high, and then ravage for about an hour or so. This was the typical day for a few months. Tara Peterson moved to Chicago from Decatur to play drums in Steve Krakow from UTOPIA CAR CRASH's new band THE UNSHOWN. I met Tara at a METALUX show a few months after she moved here. She mentioned she also played alto saxophone, as well as bass and cello, and we exchanged numbers. In early May of '99 we three played at Joe's and I think that already I had the name EXZOSKELETON in mind. Tara could actually read music (something which, admittedly, Joe and I cannot do) and she picked up the sax in high school band, but she had a very strange style of playing. She'd twist and butter-slice notes on this really dinged-up alto which leaves a lasting impression that she perpetually has a cold. Billy Sides, Tar Pet, Joe Shrapnel I felt that, at best, we were taking a chance on asking Weasel Walter to play with us but actually was genuinely interested and I got Crazy Andy to drive across town to pick him up and bring him back to Joe's. Weasel, Joe, and I played and when Joe got tired, Crazy Andy jumped in. The last track on the Exploring Biology CD is from that first "practice" with Weasel. EXZOSKELETON proper played a week later, not for long, but it was again great and a lot of fun. We recorded most practices and lots of random stuff on Joe's cheap Panasonic boom box; as well, the first four-member rehearsal was also documented and one of the couple improvisations we did that day is also on the first CD. The "studio" tracks for Exploring Biology were recorded two weeks later, in the beginning of June, and nowhere better than in Joe's basement. Roy Silverstein from Joe's other band ROYAL.SPACE.FORCE recorded us with a digital 8-Track and five mics. Then Roy, Joe, Weasel, and I mixed and mastered the material and laid out the artwork at Roy's house in Evanston over 3 days. Weasel made guesstimations with a computer program that he wasn't really familiar with. He quickly got the hang of it though. I already had the artwork ready, selected mostly from old science textbooks. I did the tray card for the CD as a take-off of the FMP-style tray cards, like a punk rock band ripping off an old 70's rock record. The whole album was produced for about 100 dollars. 25 burned CDs were made just in time for our first gig, fittingly at the "closing party" for the No Exit cafe, a 40+ year-old coffee house owned by my own mum and dad for over 20 years. This was on June 25th. We scored our second gig two days later for the coming Thursday, July 1st at the Fireside Bowl. Old friends of mine from the Bartlett/Streamwood area PLAGUE OF YETI hooked us up; we played with them and these 15 and 16-year-old kids (at the time) from Mobile, AL called XBXRX, who absolutely ruled the show with their all-out big-band punk assault. I played on Jason from PLAGUE's drumset, which was a pile of junk, and completely sucked, even though everybody seemed to enjoy it. The third performance, July 16th, is probably to this day the most brutal performance by the band. Augmented by guitarist Slava Balasanov from JAVELYN (who played the show with us), we did an 8 minute "cover" of TLC's 'No Scrubs.' Joe played synth and ran 4-track tapes through an additional amp. I unloaded onto Mendi's cymbals. Slava jumped in, wailing away on unmeditated jazz/psyche/metal harshnesses, quite easily too. The Nervous Center had no PA system, so with no mics, Weasel and Tara mercilessly advanced on the audience. We created a solid wall of noise which, coupled with the fact that it was very hot that night, brought the spectators from about 25 down to 4 by the time we jumped into Kid Rock's 'I'm Trippin.' On July 30th we did kind of a low-key opening performance at what was supposed to be like a 12-band party held at Carbon from METALUX's loft for Japanese psyche legends, the HIGH RISE/MUSICA TRANSONIC/RUINS collective. Weasel was at Metalfest in Milwaukee, so Slava played alto sax in his place. What a guy! We basically just fucked around for 10 minutes. I played a crappy house set which fell apart while we were playing. It was embarassing. I got to play with Sasaki from RUINS for a little while though. Unbeknownst to any of us, our next gig, which was on Tuesday, August 17th at the Fireside, was Weasel's last performance with the band. Ironically, it was also the first time that I really felt a palpable connection between the four of us; solid interactions and steady movement together, not as four people just playing their instruments. I didn't have this kind of feeling about EXZOSKELETON until a year later, in St. Louis with Nic Clark. Billy Sides, 1/24/01