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BTM=OBE=KOF
Maybe you've seen those images. The cartoon Martian embracing the TV set. The Marshall stack with the perky little crown on top. They've appeared as sleeve art on obscure 45s, stickers on the walls of clubs, and other subliminal situations. They vaguely recall obsolete advertising art of the '50s, but they project a sarcasm that throws a monkey wrench into the cycle of frustration and consumption that advertising depends on. They always seem to elicit the same question: What the FUCK?

Well, of course, it's a band. Actually, there's a handful of bands, all under the aegis of Bill T. Miller, proprietor of Headroom Studio and freelance knob twiddler. "Originally it was a chance for me as an engineer/producer to be an artist, a quote musician," explains Miller. "So it was going to be the In/Out Band, the In Band being pop and a song-like structure, and the Out band being an exploration of the outer dimensions of sound and madness."

Guess which sounded like more fun. So he did that one first. "I pulled together my favorite rhythm section, Andy Deckard on drums and Jeff Cohen on stick and bass, and I made guitar noise and samples, and we became Out Band, which later-- from an out of body experience-- came up with the concept of Out of Band Experience (OBE). When a guest player performs in OBE, he projects an out of band experience, that is, out of his band into my OBE. As I got distracted on this path of outness, I never really got back to the In band.

"And then we created the Kings of Feedback as the altar (sic) ego. OBE is a studio exploration, with lots of guests and phone-in messages, whereas KOF was designed so I could play more, because with all these superstar guests, I was having a hard time justifying playing my own bass, guitars, etc. And also I found that OBE was wacked out beyond the intellectual tastes of the masses. So after recording some hardcore bands, I thought KOF would be some heavy industrial blues, slack, sludge, noise rock, a stripped down version of OBE. Another, very important consideration was that KOF could actually play out live."

And there's more, although some of these bands exist only on reels of tape. "My love of drums and percussion created the Drum Army, by analogy to Jimmy Page's notion of the Guitar Army. I'm currently working on an album, I cut the rhythm tracks with some of Boston's best drummers and percussionists. The concept is a trip around the world, from the jungles of Africa to South American rain forests, to the Native Americans on the plains, to the Tibetan monks in the mountains. Then it goes to modern era, big beat 4/4 Anglo-American rock & roll, a ripoff of John Bonham, to a mutation of the urban melting-pot Santana street jam, to the European industrial Kraftwerk sound-- each one is a song-- and then winding up with the Drum Army March with a ragtag parade of drummers. I have to microdeck it up and mix it, and hopefully it'll be out early next year, and hopefully do a one-off show to coincide with the release.

"Then there's two other inactive dimensions: Floaters, which is acoustic trance noise, and then the Wall of Noise, which is high density noise."

All these bands and projects could be considered a single hydra-headed monster media tweak. Everything oozes out of Miller's studio (and his fevered imagination), and has a pretty consistent sonic vcabulary: a murky, bottom-heavy 4/4 thickly overlaid with peculiar drop-ins from various sources, captured on his trusty microcassette recorder (more about that later). Also, he bootstraps each new manifestation. Kings of Feedback first appeared as a track on the OBE debut album, and now that KOF has a distinct identity, they do a thing called "Wall-O-Noise," presaging the band to come.

But OBE was the root of the whole thing, emerging gradually as a series of odd singles, flexi-disks and cassettes, until ultimately the LP Call Now! 1-800-OUT-BAND was unleashed, 46 minutes of sound art collage and overdubbage. Miller and his brainchild got written up in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal-- mainly because the WATS line number really worked, and he got a lot of wacked-out audience participation on his answering machine, which he in turn used as source material for the recordings. He convinced the Journal the album was "a tale of an insane genius whose obsessions with food, TV, sleep, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, fame and fortune turn out to be a strange path into enlightenment."

For Boston Rock, he amplified: "So OBE became a mirror of my own day-to-day adventures-- a tantric thing, with microdeck and magick amulet in hand. And visits from the various guides, shamen, aliens, gurus, sub-genius deities, samurai, Wiccans, and everybody else in the cosmology. None of those things are blatantly obvious in the record, it's more my mutations of their philosophies. And on our way to get some munchies at the convenience store, we get abducted by alien nymphos." By the way, don't call that number any more-- he changed it to the local number (617) LICK-OBE--(now a dead number) but he's still explicitly interested in the interactive feedback he gets by phone. He reports, "John Peel played 'Warning: Danger!' and actually called LICK-OBE and said, 'That's enough of that!'"

His release (1994) - entitled Open Your Ears (ExtraTerrestrial), is a split CD, half OBE, half Kings of Feedback. "I abandoned the so-called concept album and just had a collection of songs and experiences. It has some of the same themes, sex and food-- and it's still pretty wacked out. Although semi-enlightened, and semi-in control of my obsessions, I still have many pleasant flashbacks to the alien nympho abduction. 'Alien Android Succubus' has Elaine Walker, from Zia and DDT, singing from the alien nympho's perspective. She restricted herself to conventional vocals, telling me I already had enough moans and stuff. On an OBE record, when you hear moans, bong bubbles, power munching, phone sex, pizza delivery guys, and so forth, these are the real things, journalistically faithful, no simulations." The pizza delivery guy appears on a perky funk jam called "Za," and other inadvertent stars include Kurt Loder explaining sampling (duh!) on the whimsical rave "Sample This," Lurch from the Addams Family on the ponderously metallic "You Rang," and this author on "Gimmick," complaining that "They broke rock 'n' roll!"

Then there's the Kings of Feedback set, which is considerably more focused than OBE, with nervy stop-time riffs, more real time performances, and fewer microdeck extracts. (The whole shebang is 78 minutes long, which means each "band" gets the equivalent of an album.) Where OBE is the audio equivalent of channel-surfing and the Weekly World News, KOF unabashedly salutes the guitar frenzies of Spinal Tap and their real world brethren. It's also got something of a political program, or at least a set of furious but not unreasonable arguments about artistic freedom. In concert, I was reminded of early sci-fi rabble rousers Hawkwind and the MC5.

"The core of KOF is basically me and Vernon Tart, a total anti-musician, my tripping and record collecting buddy from my teen years, who spews and rants and raves an odd collection of words and attitudes. He's never been in a band, he's sort of a Jello Biafra meets Jed Clampett. I got the title 'Community Standards' off a sample-- 'The word obscenity is defined as it relates to community standards'-- and I wound him up and let him run with it. 'Fuck Amerika' is Vernon unleashed, realizing all the ranting won't really change anything, but it makes him feel better. He says he's his own best therapist.

"We did several 7-inches as a studio band with several drummers. Then we created the live band: me on bass, guitars, microdeck samples and vocals, Vernon on ranting and noise guitar, Jeff Cohen (OBE) under the alias Doktor Skill doing the live samples and guitar, {update - MAY '95 Andrew Wilson is doing the live samples and GTR} Sean O'Brien of Curious Ritual on guitars and bass, and the current drummer is Jason King from Mother of God pounding the skins. Peter Schwartz played the first three KOF live shows."

"In the live show we balance parody with current issues, politics, religion, serial murder, hearing damage, and a wacked-out, I don't give a fuck attitude. In the middle of the set we pay tribute to the legendary SubGenius savior deity J.R. "Bob" Dobbs." This tribute involves playing the tape of Sinead O'Connor's "Fight the real enemy!" outburst, while Miller holds up a picture of "Bob" and tears it asunder.

Moreover, the last time they played out at the Middle East, Roger Miller (no relation, although he does play guitar on the CD) warned the audience about the excessive volume levels of Kings of Feedback, and handed out earplugs. Since he'd damaged his ears when he played in Mission of Burma, it was a particularly poignant statement.

OBE and KOF appear on America the Beautiful, the brilliant 10th anniversary compilation CD of RRRecords, and, with Wall of Noise, are also featured on RRR-100, the single with a hundred lock grooves. The Open your Ears CD ends with the sound of yet another lock groove, from a different record-- a single erotic moan. And, more down to earth, Miller has put together a cassette compilation (now on CD) called Heavy Hardcore Headroom, featuring a dozen-odd of the groups Miller's produced and recorded.

Miller also likes to tweak the gearheads who assume he's doing it all with high-tech samplers, so he concluded with a few words about the microcassette machines that he actually uses. "I borrowed one from a friend, and once I had it in my hands, I discovered in play mode I could fast-forward and rewind in a turntable- like scratching style, creating sample loops. I wore out several microdecks, abusing them with this technique. Much to my chagrin, shopping for new microdecks, I found that the newer models didn't scratch as well-- the tape lifted off the heads and it was harder to control. My favorite model is a vintage silver Panasonic, circa late '70s.

"I use it for everything, I stick it in front of the TV, I dub off the answering machine, I take it out on the street, I interviewed Mr. Butch with it, to collect wacko samples. After using the microdeck for five years, I just as of yesterday got a sampler-- but the first thing I'm doing with it is, I'm loading it up with microdeck samples!"

1989-94 was a fun era.

-UPDATE 2006- SIXTEEN CDs have been released from BTM's various personas (OBE - KINGS OF FEEDBACK - KING OF SLACK - DRUM ARMY - ORGY OF NOISE) and they are all available as FREE MP3 COMPLETE RELEASES with ARTWORK at: MP3ORGY.com

UPDATE 2007 - retreated even further into self-exiled semi-hibernation that started around 1998. holed-up in headroom cave working on editing dvd of the last 50 years of btm thrills and wondering where the time went.

UPDATE 2008 - kicked into high gear overload with more BTM DVD EDITING and several ORGY OF NOISE GIGS... plus tons of remixes, videos, photos, and assorted thrills... all being broadcasted live from the studio via webcam on BTMTELEVISION.com