There was once a computer game in the late 80’s, called Dung Beetles, which was a poor-resolution, almost impossibly hard Pac-Man ripoff where the mazes were mostly all dead ends and you rarely even made it to the second level. The music was an occasional rendition of La Cucuracha, plus dancing beetles proclaimed “We Gotcha!” when you died, which was often: it was an insane, claustrophobic and paranoid and generally addictive game. Since Dave introduced me to this game, I asked him to write a riff that reflected its mood, the better to pay musical tribute to it.
He came up with this appropriately absurd, labyrinthine, many-legged-marching-type riff in 19, which I further fucked with by making it into a 4 part round. Notice how, key when a new voice is added to the round, all the voices change key no matter where they are in the 19 progression. Also note how the drums use a different cymbal to accent the downbeat of each voice. I didn’t have to do that, but I did. Eventually the first voice reasserts certain notes and all the other voices only play when the First-Voice-Accents occur, resulting in the other voices playing non-accented notes that harmonize weirdly with the First-Voice Accents.
Then it starts getting interesting: A new, 3 part round occurs, with each voice in a different key this time. They each start out playing only one note of the 19-note progression, and every bar they add a few notes, until it’s a full-on 3 part round at which point everyone plays in unison for the first time in the song and does the 19 super-heavy. Then it slips sideways into some other silly riffs, culminating in the dreaded announcement of “We Gotcha!” and thence decays into backwards squat-singing. Out of this unstructured jazz interlude, a new voice is subliminally introduced, the “Dung!!” chant, which eventually takes over. Eventually, the chant itself becomes a 2 part round, before going to a thrash, death metal version of La Cucaracha which, right when you think it’s stopped, goes into a Black Metal rendition of La Cucaracha which ends the song. Metal humor.
lyrics
We Gotcha!! Dung, dung dung, dddddddddduuuuuuuuuung!
One-man-band! Home recordings! Small town alienation! Absurd humor and musical complexity! Various levels of quality! Songs (as opposed to albums) free DL.
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