What’s In A Name

Sometimes people introduce me to other people as a “musician”. It always makes me feel a little weird, considering the paucity of my output and the infrequent rate at which I play shows, which can easily be measured in terms of SPD (shows per decade). I like to say that I’m a theoretical musician… theoretically, I make music.

I (can) do a number of different things, but what I’m best known for (by 5 or 6 people) is playing a Farfisa organ through a laptop. You can listen to some here. One thing I’m trying to figure out is what to call it. Initially I just used my own name, but a couple years ago, a friend arranged for me to play at a noise/experimental series. In an attempt to conform to my perceived norms of said series, I tried to make the music noisier, by use of this thing called a distortion pedal. You can listen to the results here. It doesn’t really sound that radically different from the previous output, but in anticipation of a radical change, I had thought I’d better come up with a noisier name. And so I utilitized a previous idea, the rejected-in-favor-of-”Ultra Hummus” name, “Lordosis”.

But being that it didn’t turn out to be a radical break, I feel like I mislabeled the music and wasted the name. I would hereby like to retain all rights to the Lordosis ™ name in perpetuity, but I want to save it for a noisier future. Meanwhile, this stuff still needs a name. I really wanted to use “Melody Laughter”, after the freeform thing the Velvet Underground sometimes did. Unfortunately, there’s already a Japanese band by that name that no one has probably ever heard of. Okay, hmmm. I was just going to link to the band’s website, which I think was melodylaughter.com, but now it turns up an error. Maybe the name is free for me now! I wonder if there’s any way to find out definitively? At any rate, I had then considered using something like “Melody Laughter UK”, which could cause a certain amount of humorous confusion. More recently, I thought maybe “Conortronics” (inspired by Frippertronics) might be good.

Additionally, I feel like this music might possibly be acceptable in the venues of multiple -brows, which raises the question of whether to use my own name in one situation and an invented name in others, or whether to enforce consistency. Of course, as I mentioned, this is all mostly theoretical, but lemme know if you have any brilliant ideas.