Funki Porcini’s hed phone sex

When I set out to write about August’s selection, I had an entirely different album in mind. However, after spending a couple of days writing down various thoughts about that album and how it influenced me, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to complete that essay any time soon. Arguably, the album I originally considered is, perhaps, more of a personal soundtrack for a specific time of my life than an influence. Regardless, I had to put the effort aside as it is too overwhelming to consider at this moment.

Instead, I am choosing Funki Porcini’s hed phone sex as it is from the same time frame and is something that I can grapple with it at this moment while retaining an argument in favor of its influence on my life.

I first came across hed phone sex during a really dark period of my life. In the mid 1990’s I had a couple of degrees but nothing to show from those experiences that would permit me in any way to be financially solvent in any reliable manner. I was barely employed and inhabiting a small city town that I did not desire, initially with my parents, living paycheck to paycheck, unable to consistently make ends meet. Over time, I eventually progressed enough that I wound up doing white collar work in a corporation. I loathed every aspect of the experience even though it inevitably permitted me to crawl, ever so slowly, out of this dark period of my life and become financially reliable.

Hed phone sex is James Bradell’s debut effort under his Funki Porcini stage name and it was a welcome and needed escape for me those times. Thank goodness for this album. I felt a bit trapped in the city town I was living in during this time. The town was somewhat run by an ancient potato farmer who had a house on a hill that seemed landscaped entirely in lawn and it overlooked the town as though it were his personal fiefdom. In my opinion the area was a bit stuck in time despite a heavy investment in memory chips. Many people love this city town and that is great, but I had left a much smaller version of that type of town and didn’t really want to live in one again even if this one was larger. But I also couldn’t afford to leave. I was stuck there for a while and had to retire my expectations and life.

Absent some wonderful outdoors experiences in the form of hiking and backpacking, music was the only other consistent escape that I could afford. Mostly this meant listening to whatever I had already in my collection, which due to various thefts along the way was a very meager collection at the time. I believe I picked up hed phone sex as a used cd that someone felt was unnecessary for their collection. I am thankful for whomever gave it up so I could better afford it.

The city town in which I lived was the type of town where young families thrived. It was also a land of in between. The town was too small to be quaint, but too large to have the allure of a proper city. People who thrived there tended to have a stereo typical nuclear family set up and jobs that paid for that lifestyle.

I found it a bit of a hellish experience. I was single and in no person’s land with very limited means. I couldn’t afford the family activities available to the citizenry. I didn’t have kids or a spouse to occupy my free time. I was living someplace too remote to see much music as it wasn’t convenient for many acts to make the trip to this area. I did get to experience a drunk Ryan Adams having a complete meltdown as he fronted Whiskeytown when several of the ten people in attendance refused to stop chatting whilst he attempted a low volume acoustical number. My memory escapes me if it was “Houses on the Hill” or “Dancing with the Women on the Bar”, but Caitlin Cary had to mamma bear him into not berating the few people in attendance and to return to a more angry and louder number so as to drown out the chatting lest he go off on the audience again. This was pre internet and I cannot locate the date of the show. ‘97? ’98? I am guessing this must have been an impromptu show of sorts as they travelled across the country to the Pacific Northwest to do larger shows in Portland and Seattle. I just happened to come across the band’s first record a couple of months earlier and was surprised when I happened to discover they were coming into town for a midweek show. There was so little live music at times people would often sell out the smallest of acts. Given the super low attendance I don’t think many people were aware of the show. I actually enjoyed the show despite the occasional fit and predictably late start.

That type of excitement was pretty rare for me in this city town and contrasted heavily with the television show “Friends” that was a huge hit during these years. “Friends” consisted of young vibrant people my age who were thriving in one of the most expensive cities on the planet whilst they lived the lifestyle of their dreams doing whatever work they desired. It was an entirely fictional show that falsely suggested one could struggle as a barista and still live in a huge loft in a great location and do so with relative comfort. The dramas that affected their lives were silly and resolvable and their struggles were fairly silly.

I loathed this show as I felt it did not reflect my very real life. I felt it did nothing but mock my life.

My experience during this time was the exact opposite of that depicted in Friends. I rented a cheap house that was built in the late 19th century. It lacked insulation. It had a single space heater that could only partially heat the same room in which it was located. In the winter I would sometimes wake up to and see the vapors of exhalations from my own breath dance out into the room. To warm up I would take frequent baths in an ancient clawfoot tub as the rental lacked a proper shower. The water originated from hot springs and smelled of sulphur but provided an endless supply of extraordinarily hot water. I was grateful for that hot water.

I could barely afford this place as I had to cover student loan debts and a small but forever amount of credit card debt I had acquired trying to make ends meet along the way. Each month I would pay the minimum payments for these debts which would never make a dent in the principal of the debt. I would hope no emergencies would occur that would force me to choose between that emergency or paying the exorbitant late fees that preyed on those of us who struggled to simply pay rent. Once in a while I would get ill and not go to the doctor for medications as I could not afford to do so lest I bounce checks and go further into debt.

And while I had friends, we all seemed to share very similar struggles as we tried to navigate out of our college years and into a barely form of adulthood. Though most everyone I knew had college degrees, I knew very few people who were directly employed using those degrees. In many ways the people surrounding me were an assortment of misfit toys stuck in somewhat similar purgatorial existences as the one I experienced. Almost everyone I encountered was doing “whatever” they could to not be homeless people. I knew zero people who had answers. Most of us worked for the same computer manufacturer despite our lack of degrees in business or technology. Yet there we were going to work each day in a warehouse that was located a further ten miles down the interstate in an even more rural community. We were often greeted each day with the smell of burning sugar beets as we attempted to figure out life best we could.

Romantic relationships? Forget about it. We could barely take care of ourselves. While I knew a few people with positive relationships, most of us seemed to understand we had to first figure out how to care for ourselves before we burdened someone else with our nonsense. I was a mess and had no business infecting others with the mess that was my life back then.

All this to say that hed phone sex was a needed respite for those times. It provided me a journey elsewhere. I didn’t care where elsewhere really was, I just needed it to be anywhere else. Hed phone sex felt more authentic to the times in which I as living than the fictional television show pedaling entire fictions about young adult life in the mid 90s. Life was not ebullient and neither was hed phone sex. The album had a certain degree of darkness about it that was accessible for my experience and it transcended geography. It was cinematic. It had nooks and crannies that you could disappear into through repeated listening. It travelled to different destinations. It had surprises. You adapted to them and carried onwards.

I welcomed its acknowledgement of jazz as it was the antithesis of the ruination of what had become of indie and so called alternative music of those years. Funki Porcini provided a contrasting laid back ambience that encouraged reflection over indulgence. I enjoyed that this ambience could suddenly be abruptly disrupted not with a barrage of guitar, but rather with occasional and unpredictable disturbing sounds, such as a baby fussing loudly in the background.

I would listen to this album whenever I needed a mental vacation as I could not afford to take physical vacations. I would play it whenever it rained or during winter when climate inversions shrouded the valley under a singular cloud that blighted out the sun for days on end. I would play it at night when I could not afford to do any other activity.

And while I eventually crawled my way out of this city town and out of poverty, I have found I still carry a lot of affection for the works created under the Funki Porcini moniker. I eventually moved to the Pacific Northwest where I happily lived a much more economically stable life for twenty very happy years. I continued to listen to his subsequent works under low hanging pillowy clouds and lots of rainy winter days. Despite becoming familiar with it during hard times, I now associate it with survival. I associate it with the need to carry on and step one foot in front of the other even when things are rough; even it the path forward is iced over snow.

At the moment I write this I live in the American Midwest and invest my free time into more artistic pursuits and those pursuits include audio creations. I find that I still pull up various tracks from Funki Porcini when I catch myself trying to steam roll way too much audio through limited bandwidth. I use it to slow my frenetic brain down when necessary. Funki Porcini provides me a counter example where it is ok to slowly evolve over time, where less is more and patience is often more effective than drenching oneself exclusively in a firehose of sound.

Bradell’s Funki Porcini is a more mature, restrained, approach than what I tend to produce. While I often fail to follow his lead, I do not disregard it. And I do borrow from his ideas abstractly. Much of what I create with audio also leverages the attempt to create soundscapes that take one on a journey elsewhere. I tend to want to meander across a soundscape rather than adhere to any specific structure. I do this to underscore how little control we have over basically anything. I enjoy the challenge of attempting to create something that breathes in unpredictable manners. I enjoy riding a dragon that is barely and rarely controllable. I enjoy that one can develop an abstract track that behaves in an emotional manner. I also enjoy tossing in abrupt unexpected changes in direction or sound.

That isn’t to say that I attempt to create or replicate elements of the Funki Porcini catalogue. I can’t. I don’t want to really. Bradell has his own idiosyncratic sound signature and style. I would never do these justice. I have other influences and sounds that shape me. My brain operates differently. If I wish to experience it I need only pull up one of Bradell‘s Funki Porcini tracks.

Hed phone sex also led me into the various rabbit holes of many other artists I had not yet encountered. These ranged from Tricky’s Maxinquaye, Portishead’s Dummy, Kruger and Dorfmeister’s K&D Sessions, and several other adjacent acts from this time and space. Musically, the city town I lived in during the years in which I first encountered hed phon sex seemed stuck in a perpetual 1993 state of Grunge, a genre I once enjoyed immensely but I found was no longer enjoyable as many of the artists that drove it started disappearing on us. I was grateful for an antidote to the young angst that was grunge, an angst that did not age well with adulthood. Hed phone sex introduced me to audio aesthetics that helped me mature and endure the reckoning that was to be had as I was forced to grow up, and deal with the struggles of day to day life without permitting myself to forever wallow in some negative stasis that would inhibit me from moving onwards.

While I certainly cannot say Funki Porcini saved my life, I do think it was an appropriate neutral companion that asked little, provided a lot and was appropriate company for the times I was facing when I first encountered hed phone sex. And like a good friend Funki Porcini remained around for the good times as well.