The UFOverdriver Story
In January of 2010 I got inspired to work on an idea that had been running around my head for years. I’ve always been a collage artist, having created hundreds of paper collages over the years, along with numerous word collages. In the 1990s I had the idea to create collages out of sound and did a few experiments to try out the idea.
My first experiment involved a variety of sound sources – a radio, cassette player, TV, record player and an electric guitar… I set everything up so I could play the various sound sources as I recorded. The result was called Still Life with Satellites – a nearly sixteen minute journey in sound.
The First Collage – Area 5150
My first sound collage in the project that became UFOverdriver was a UFO conspiracy piece called Area 5150 – The UFO Take Over Mix. I had no midi keyboard, so I made up some music using audio loops and a drum machine on my computer and layered on top a number of audio clips from videos I got off of YouTube. I really liked the results and proceeded to put together a video for the “song” by stitching together a bunch of the videos I had used along with some simple animation.
When I posted the video on Facebook on January 19th, the response was very positive. I got started on a second sound collage. Again I created a simple little piece of music on my computer and layered in a bunch of audio clips about UFOs, The Integratron, and George Van Tassle. I called the piece “Integratronic” and got ready to release it.
Realizing that I was on the verge of launching into a new project I became obsessed for several days trying to come up with a name for the project. Here’s a page from my sketch book when I came up with the name UFOverdriver.
UFOverdriver is an odd name, for sure. But this project is thirteen years old now, so I’m a little reluctant to change the name at this point. The name is pronounced “U – F – Overdriver” and the U.F. is initials for Ultra Frequency, as in Ultra Frequency Overdriver.
At the time I started UFOverdriver I had an ongoing long-term art project that was an exploration in consciousness. I called the project onehumanbeing.com and went by the name of Jon, onehumanbeing. I was looking for ways to turn consciousness into art. My plan was to run the onehumanbeing.com project from 2008 through 2015 – seven years, with the special year of 2012 right in the middle.
It was with this project in mind that I started UFOverdriver.
In my imagination, UFOverdriver would fly into the night like a Vimana, hovering over the populace at 72,000 feet, picking up subconscious signals and beaming them back in the form of sound collages. We lived in Long Beach, California at the time, in a four-plex on a major street. You could almost feel the psychic energy of all the people around us. I’ve always been a “sensitive” type, and I opened my mind up to pick up on all that energy.
The Brothership Has Landed
In March I started working on the next sound collage. Obama’s election was still fresh in my mind as I started work on the collage. At first the collage was about Obama’s victory but quickly changed as I worked on it. I picked up on the zeitgeist and rode it for several weeks creating the first UFOverdriver album – The Brothership Has Landed.
Here’s the blurb for the album:
What happens when you cut-up and re-mix Pink Floyd’s classic 1977 album Animals with Bob Marley, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, David Byrne and Brian Eno, DJ John Digweed and other musical slices along with a number of sound clips from the mass media and popular culture?
You get a snap shot of current events in the form of an epic sound collage by UFOverdriver called The Brothership Has Landed…
This sound collage was constructed in 3 Acts between March 5th and March 17th, 2010 – and the completed piece contains 12 individual tracks, with a total length of nearly 44 minutes long.
While this album is a copyright nightmare, it is one of the best sound collage pieces that I created during the last thirteen years. Again, I had no keyboard, so instead of creating music I sampled songs and used complete songs layered with audio clips. My thinking at the time was: These are songs I’ve lived with so long they are embedded in the fabric of my thinking, my being. Using the songs was a way of drawing upon that same embedded feeling in the listener. The songs are loaded with psychic energy from years of existence and millions of plays – UFOverdriver deliberately tapped into that.
Just the same way that you would tear up a magazine to create a paper collage without concern for copyright issues, I approached using published music the same way. As an artist, using “appropriation” was a common tool in my artist’s toolbox, one I had used for years to make paintings and other visual arts. During the creation of The Brothership Has Landed I gave no thought to the legalities of the project. My naivety allowed me a freedom that I didn’t have with other sound collages that came after it.
A New American Prayer
Really thrilled with the way that The Brothership Has Landed turned out I launched into more sound collage creation. I created an album for 4/20 that didn’t turn out the way I hoped. Undeterred I spent May working on a collection of sound collages that became A New American Prayer. In retrospect I think I rushed this album a bit. Some of the cuts are really good, but the end of the album left me unhappy.
The album contains a number of personal references to myself, beginning with calling the album the “Gospel According to Jon” and doing a song about riding the “bipolarcoaster”. I sampled The Doors, The Clash, John Lennon and The Beatles, Daniel Lanois, Bob Dylan, Gary Wright, Pink Floyd, Delirious?, and more… in an album of mash-ups and mixes combining songs with numerous audio clips.
One of the early mixes called The Dream Leaver mashed up Gary Wright’s Dream Weaver with the song God by John Lennon. I made a short video for the song and uploaded it to YouTube. I immediately ran into copyright issues and the song was taken down. I fought the ruling and won. But suddenly I became aware of the copyright issues involved with my work. I believe it affected all my sound collages after this…
In June I got a keyboard and decided to head down the road to creating my own songs rather than making collages from already published songs by other artists. It would be several years before I completed that step but this was the first step away from the original ideas that hatched this project, and the first mutation in a project that became ever-mutating.
During the Fall I was caught up in the Occupy movement and the big Wikileaks Cable Dump, following and cheering on the movement from my chair in front of my computer and creating a bunch of sound collages using popular media sources, documenting the moment. It seemed that the world was coming apart, and I wanted UFOverdriver to capture the sound of it as it imploded.
Through 2012 I kept following the similar format, completing numerous singles, EPs and albums that mostly followed along conspiracy theory directions. I was a reader of conspiracy websites during the time, finding them highly entertaining. I called it “real-life fiction” because, while I didn’t buy into the theories, some people really did and wrote with such passion about their obsessive viewpoints. Back then conspiracy theory hadn’t reach the levels it has now and was enough underground to be entertaining rather than unappetizing, as I find it now.
I’m really glad UFOverdriver started this way because it was a road I wouldn’t go down today, but at the time I created an amazing series of sound collages between 2010 and the end of 2012.
The End Of The World
I paid a lot of attention to the conspiracy theories about December 21, 2012. This was the “end” of the Mayan calendar and was supposed to be the end of the world and the return of Kukulcan. This, of course, didn’t happen. Despite this, my sound collages turned towards an “end of an age” and the last of my first season of sound collages and my last album of sound collages was called “New Souvenirs From The End Of The Age”.
The most notable album from that period was called “Grand Deception Star” and was created when I had steeped in conspiracy theory for several years.
I even started a conspiracy website of my own that ran for a short time called Eyebama.com, based on an art piece I had made combining the official portrait of Obama with the eye from the back of the one dollar bill.
Grand Deception Star was sort of a “best of” album from the previous few years, along with an extra track called “Make Today The Day” that pointed out that politics was sick and that the truth didn’t matter anymore. True words. Here’s the video I made for the song.
The end of the age was the end of version one of UFOverdriver and I grounded the project for a few years.