This is cool. Mark Gunderson, founder of the Evolution Control Committee has a blog. Before you all freak out at the name, I should point out that the ECC isn’t some kind of eugenics program or a cloning lab. It’s a band. Sorta.
I first heard this guy back in college. I think it was the Whipped Cream Mixes, where he took the lyrics from a Public Enemy CD and mixed it with music from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He doesn’t exactly fit into a singe genre… There’s a whole stack of free music available from the evolution-control website if you’re interested.
A couple of years ago I was in Columbus Ohio for a gaming convention. I do surprisingly little actual gaming at these things. Mostly I check out the dealer room for rarities or things that pique my interest. I’ll play a few demos, maybe spend an afternoon in the open gaming corridor with a few boardgames that I don’t get a chance to play much. This particular year I decided to wander around the neighborhood and check out the local music stores. I knew that ECC was based in Columbus, so I made it my goal to try to find a place that had some of his records and I hoofed off in the general direction of Ohio State’s campus.
A couple of blocks later on, I found a kind of creepy little used record shop. There were little posters about how “CD’s Don’t Last Forever!” and other signs that the owner had some kind of grudge against compact discs. The whole place smelled of old cardboard and cigar smoke. I poked around for a bit and found a couple of albums by the Residents and some similar esoterica, but no ECC. There was a good chance that I was looking in the wrong place though, so I decided to ask the gnome-like guy behind the counter if there was a section for local music.
“Do you have anything by Evolution Control Comittee? It’s a local band.”
“Never heard of em.”
“Oh. Thanks anyway.”
As I was turning to leave he suddenly piped up, “Hey wait, that’s Mark Gunderson isn’t it? I’m sold out right now, but I can give him a call.”
This kind of boggled me for a minute, but I said OK. He fished around under the counter and dragged out a ragged looking rolodex and started phoning. He couldn’t get ahold of anyone right then, but he promised to keep triyng. I left the number of the hotel where I was staying and bought a Residents LP that I’d been looking for. By the time I got back to the hotel, there was a message from the record store. He’d managed to get in touch with Mark and he was going to be at the store around three in the afternoon the next day, in case we wanted to meet him.
Badmovie was at the convention with me, and he’d introduced me to ECC’s music in the first place, so we both showed up to meet the man and buy the music. Mark had a powder-blue cardboard suitcase full of tapes, records, stickers and CDs with him. The strangest thing was that it looked almost exactly like the luggage that my grandmother used to have when I was small. The two of us bought up about half his stock of stuff, and we wound up talking for a while. We invited him to the Smithee Awards, but he was going to be at “Red, White and F*ck You!” the local alternative/punk 4th of July concert.