Dinosaurs with Horns

Jul.02, 2013

“Since 1983′s self-titled cassette release on The Solid Eye label, Rick Potts and Joseph Hammer have delicately dispensed laughing-gas-balloon-animals-go-pop-music as Dinosaurs With Horns. The cryptic LAFMS-related group occurred during and in between periods of playing with Points of Friction, Steaming Coils and Solid Eye. Spencer Savage and/or Tom Recchion jammed with them in the mid ’80s and continued intermittently since. While a smattering of material has appeared on various compilations and very limited cassette and CDR releases, Return of the Disco-Aristo-Sarcophagus is the first full-length CD release. It was recorded November 2000 on KXLU radio and January 2007 at the LACE Gallery in Hollywood, CA. Joseph Hammer cites AM radio station mixing (receiving more than one station at the same time) and an episode of the ’70s TV show Land of the Giants, where astronauts used tape loops to thwart alien tyrants as a couple of his musical influences. He has developed his own way of making music utilizing consumer audio technology, tape loops, samplers and analog synthesizers to create compelling and varied musical expressions. Since 1980, he has performed with Solid Eye, Points of Friction, Blue Daisies, Steaming Coils, Debt of Nature (which became Medicine), Vector 3 Niner, Paramecial Wedding, Kitten Sparkles and others. Rick Potts has been making unusual music for the last thirty years, starting with the forming of Le Forte Four and founding of the L.A. Free Music Society in 1973. Playing the electric guitar with electric toothbrush, street sweeper bristles, electric cocktail stirrer and other objects, and using musical saw and analog synthesizers, he has a talent for making familiar instruments and other implements produce sounds unique, alarming and enigmatic yet oddly cordial. Tom Recchion has been working with sound and music for over 35 years. Starting off as an accordion player then on to pillow cushions with cardboard sticks that transmogrified into a set of drums. From there on, playing anything he could get his hands on, guitar, pianos in garages, found and invented instruments, tapes, keyboards, paper, fans, synths, radio, records and finally computer. Spencer Savage began playing live music with numerous groups in Los Angeles in 1983, primarily as a percussionist, vocalist, and noisemaker.”