Artist description The sound of dorks screwing around. A melting pot of regurgitated pop culture about to tip over in an out-of-control bandwagon. An audio thrift store filled to the creaky rafters with rebelliously conventional commercial daredevilism.

Music Style Buttrock-influenced math-pop and indie-prog, not-so-subtle pop-era homage/ripoffs, and other odds and ends

Musical Influences Guided by Voices, R. Stevie Moore, Talking Heads, Jazz Butcher, Beatles, Dead Kennedys, Specials, Dukes of Stratosphear, Pink Floyd, Violent Femmes, AC/DC, alternate-universe college radio, Bathrobe-era Beach Boys, 70's AM Radio, Jesus Christ Superstar.

Similar Artists See above

Artist History Over the years, Timber Trout Studios has hosted many fun-filled recording sessions with clowns from all over the world. They take their cassette or CD-R copies and leave, rarely to be seen nor heard from again (until they come back for more fun, of course). This leaves the hapless studio operator with a huge collection of master tapes, outtakes and studio pranks. This is where they end up. Preoccupied Pipers was started as a cassette-only magazine-style publication orbiting the galaxy of the late, great Northern Californian Lounge-Pop-Punksters LAWSUIT. Band members and associated pals recorded a zillion hours worth of stuff over the years. Some of the things went on to be new LAWSUIT hits, other things were left by the wayside. We open that treasure chest for you here. A brief discography: "Summer 1995" (1995) and Ubiquitous Lamp Twin Pack (1996) encompass the LAWSUIT-era Piper recordings; 2002 saw the release of "The Crispy Taste of Hell", and 2003 will see the release of "Jokes About the Medical Profession" which reportedly will sound like a cross between "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables", and "Free to Be You and Me".

Group Members KC Bowman, Paul Sykes, Ned Sykes, Jeri Sykes, Marta Wilson Sykes, Stephen Erickson, David J. Anderson, Anthony Costello, Joel Lee, Mike Ishizue, and Joe Hayes were all members of LAWSUIT and all have been featured in Preoccupied Pipers. Other luminaries include: Barbara West, Steve Schalchlin, Andy Siff, Gerry Grosz, Brad Zell, Jeff Storey, David Sykes, Mike Hayes, Bill Fairfield, and many, many others.

Instruments Everything

Albums Summer 1995, Ubiquitous Lamp Twin Pack, The Crispy Taste of Hell

Press Reviews Here is an article about "Preoccupied Pipers: The Crispy Taste of Hell" that appeared in the May/June 2002 issue of Amplifier Magazine -------- "Fringe pop album of the month I: MP3.com is a great idea and all, but spending much time on the website only proves that as many stupid decisions as the major labels make, and as many terrific artists there are in the world with little chance for the attention they deserve, there are about ten times more who aren't ever going to amount to anything for the very good reason that they make Vanilla Ice look like a visionary talent. Then there's the Preoccupied Pipers, who deserve kudos for their brilliant name alone. Best known for being the original springboard for that gifted eccentric K.C. Bowman, the Pipers are a loose-knit collective of buddies who record in ever-changing combinations. Their anarchic records range from brilliant little pop nuggets (XTC are an obvious influence, along with fellow Bay Area obscurities Game Theory and New Jersey's kindred spirit R. Stevie Moore) to some of the most freaky-ass weirdness you're ever gonna hear. The group themselves sum it up best: "The sound of dorks screwing around." The Pipers released two albums in the mid-'90s, the double-disc Ubiquitous Lamp Twin-Pack and A Cooperative Audio Magazine, Volume 3 No. 1 Summer 1995, which are just as quirky as their titles suggest. Their new album, The Crispy Taste of Hell (available only through mp3.com, for a mere $9.99), is comparatively normal, though the klezmer-inflected "Cream In My Coffee" and the just plain bizarre "Mr. Yambags" are vintage Pipers oddities. Other songs, however, have the sort of deceptively catchy choruses and knack for unexpected hooks that characterize Bowman's solo work: for all the quirkiness of songs like "White Socks Turn Blue" and the Guided By Voices-like "Slathered In Flags," there are some genuinely gifted songwriters and musicians here. (The near-total lack of specific credits makes it difficult to get much more specific than that.) Bowman's website, www.timbertrout.com, has ordering information for this and the earlier Preoccupied Pipers albums." http://amplifiermagazine.com/30_TOC.shtml ----------------- Now let's talk about that lovely portrait of the Psycho Lady up in the left-hand corner. What's the relevance? Well, I'm a big fan of "Thrift Store Art". Do an Internet search on that phrase. You'll find a vast array of "bad" paintings. Many of them merely display a lack of basic "painting skills". Some of those reflect the fact that the artist is aware of his/her lack of "skill" but is undaunted by it (like Howard Finster, maybe). Some seem like pure contrivances ("Hey, I suck at painting. I'm gonna make some realllly bad, disturbing art, hahaha!). But occasionally you'll find one where a) the artist has clearly invested time in developing his/her "painting skill" and b) doesn't seem to be conspiring to make something self-consciously "bad". That's the category that the Psycho Lady painting falls into. (As for why/how it was created, I imagine this possible scenario: Susan has an Aunt named Peggy. Susan knows a guy in town who paints portaits for a living named Alfred. For Aunt Peggy's 70th Birthday, Susan decides to give her a gift: a beautiful portait of her beloved Aunt as painted by Alfred the locally famous artist! Excited about this, Peggy gets all prettied up - maybe overdoes it a little bit on her normal makeup job - and heads over to Alfred's painting studio wearing her best outfit and biggest, warmest smile. Alfred does his best, but the reality he skillfully captures becomes the strangeness you see in the final outcome. I mean, THAT'S WHAT SHE LOOKED LIKE and SHE JUST SMILES LIKE THAT! would be Alfred's excuses. "Didn't you notice the deft execution capturing the soft light and texture of her hair?" he'd say. Not that Aunt Peggy is entirely to blame. She might not have the most natural smile when posing for a picture and she might wear 5% too much eyebrow pencil, but I'd bet that in real life she is not remotely as freaky as Alfred's rendering. And although his painting is a 95% technically accurate representation of what she looks like, It's WAY off somehow. Can this "error" be "quantified"? This is the mysterious part, and the crux of the matter. If, for instance, he re-did the teeth and eyebrows would it make it un-psycho? Where did it go wrong?!?)...SO ANYWAY, I look at the Psycho Lady and see not a hint of irony. It was not conceived as inept art. It was just a well-meaning and respectably skilled artistic effort that resulted in something seriously weird, and which seems to have involved no self-conscious abstraction. NOW THEN, WHAT IS THE RELEVANCE? The intent of Preoccupied Pipers, in part, is to provide the audio equivalent of the Psycho Lady. Well-meaning and respectably skilled musical efforts that might result in something weird or inept - yet don't appear to be conceived as such. Yes, of course, it's sort of oxymoronic to set out to do something unselfconscious. Maybe this sums it up better: The concept of the Psycho Lady painting is something utterly normal and it shows effort and skill. However, the end result is both laughable and disturbing. Similarly, we will present recordings here that were conceived honestly and were executed using all the skill and effort we possess -- but if the end result sounds like something went horribly wrong, so be it. Can't blame Alfred for giving it his best shot.

Location Oakland, CA - USA

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