Dirt & Domesticide by AKA Alice

In the early 1990s the 3 founders of Alice had dispersed from their Lexington homes to different parts of the world. John went to Rhode Island, Pete also spent some time in RI before heading off to Arizona while Gregg was in Portland, OR with a brief stint in Japan. The 3 did rendezvous a few times at the Providence loft shared by John and Pete, and dabbled with an early 16-bit DAW run on a 286 computer. These experiments were the raw and unformed beginning of understanding a new musical format away from sticks and strings and analog tape.

By 1995 John had secured a space at RPI in Troy, NY with access to the state-of-the-art 16-bit digital iEar studio. It was here in the middle of a very cold mid winter night, over a few hours of borrowed time that the tracks for Dirt & Domesticide were created. Gregg and Pete have spotty memory of the event- a steel door in the side of a building, a blank empty dingy narrow hall to another heavy door and windowless bunker with racks of boxes with knobs and blinking lights, occasional cords patched here and there, some video screens blipping for ambience. They brought a couple of horns and a bass guitar, there were some mics and some keyboards, it was crammed and tight. John knew which switches to flip, Gregg and Pete were a bit dumbfounded, but dove in with gusto.

Alice was known for recording everything, initially on reel-to-reel tape, then cassettes, and for the previous 6 or 7 years on 4-track tape. Here they made their first DAT recording, 2 track stereo on the fly with a minimum setup and virtually no monitoring during the session. The result was clean but the levels were uneven, sometimes unnerving. Eventually the original DAT got lost and only a couple of cassette tape copies remained, from which this release was re-mastered with the help of newer digital tools to smooth out some of the problems with the original mix… it is not a perfect recording by any means but the result accurately captures the initial raw spirit of it’s creation.

Dirt & Domesticide was the fork in the road for Alice, leaving the pure analogue world of musicianship and entering the modern digital realm of infinite possibilities and an opening for the future of these 3 persons to continue to grow and invent together. This was AKA Alice, not exactly the band they were before and not quite sure where they were going. It is built on their strengths of what they do best; make sense with their own musical language and plunge fearlessly into unknown creative situations for the ultimate challenge to make something new and inspiring… and to perform it live without reservation, if only for an audience of the themselves.

Stick uh Butter is the production library of musicians / artists during the 1980s and 90s. Headed by the core of Baird, Malinoski, Weaver -known then as Alice and currently as Pipestem- here is recorded evidence of those groups of like minds and their experiments, expressions and musical adventures that spread beyond KY from New England to AZ and beyond.