or
Donated to the Mallet Assembly
by
Jeff "the Axe Murderer" Robertson
This is it! This CD contains all the Flvxxvm Florvm songs you'll ever need. And probably quite a few that you don't need, but which I've decided to throw on here anyway. 94 tracks await your perusal!
I will assume that you know what Flvxxvm Florvm is, or you wouldn't be reading this. In case you don't, Flvxxvm Florvm is the name under which I recorded a lot of silly lo-fi music while I was at Mallet. I am assuming you live in Mallet Assembly.
If you just want the music, or the lyrics, quit reading this file now and browse on into the subdirectories. That's where all the real shit is. If you want to know about the origins and history of Flvxxvm Florvm, read on!
My advice to you is to copy these files to as many computers around Mallet as possible. So that when you lose this CD (and you will lose it), the songs won't be lost with it.
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The name Flvxxvm Florvm came from a comic strip I used to draw when I was in high school. The name of the strip was Junker's Rebellion, which is in turn derived from a war that happened in 19th century Germany. The strip was about a geeky American teenager named Junker. Occasionally Otto Von Bismark would show up and shoot Junker's dog with a cannon. Keep in mind that I mostly came up with this while sitting through a European History class.
Anyway, Junker's favorite band was an outfit called Fluxum Florum. I based the name on the 60's art movement called "Fluxus", which I had read about once in a magazine (I think it was one of my dad's Dartmouth alumni association mags..) but had never actually seen. One of the leaders of the Fluxus movement was quoted as saying that the real meaning of it all was "shit". Young and dumb as I was, I assumed that the word "fluxus" literally meant "shit", presumably in Latin. The spelling FLVXXVM FLORVM came later, after I had learned enough about Latin to know that everything was written with V's instead of U's.
The "band" originally appeared in the comic strip via the video for Knock Me Flat, which was a montage of images like the Space Shuttle blowing up, sea animals dying because of pollution, and jars of human fetuses being smashed on the ground. Flvxxvm Florvm was supposed to be a band so hideously bad that they had to rely on such cheap visual shocks to get an audience. They were the epitome of crap, so giving them a name which I thought was Latin for "shit" seemed like a really good idea.
Meanwhile, I had written a bunch of goofy songs like Rock and Roll Aliens, and had no idea what I was ever going to do with the stuff. At some point during my freashman year at Alabama, it occurred to me that Flvxxvm Florvm could be the outlet for my stupidest creative energies. A way to write and record songs so dumb that I would have to do it alone, since none of my musician friends would want to be a part of it.
I had no illusions that this was quality music. Flvxxvm Florvm was to be an experiment in deliberate incompetence and disorder. An excuse for me to let it all hang out, with toungue firmly planted in cheek. It was all a grand joke, a parody of the unbearable dumbness that I saw in the world around me.
In 1993, I was pretty convinced that popular music was in a sorry and degraded state, where people were worshipping gun-toting rappers and suicidal drug addict rockers, while everything good and truly revolutionary could only be heard on Dr. Demento. Flvxxvm Florvm was my "up yours" gesture to this world, a way of saying:
"Hey everybody! What I'm doing is a joke! I'm playing stuff that sucks, on purpose, and I know it sucks! I fooled you all! I'm soooo smart! Ha ha ha ha!".
The first, self-titled Flvxxvm Florvm casette was "released" in 1993. I put that in quotes because, like all the others to follow, this album was "released" by virtue of being hand-duplicated and distributed around Mallet.
Soon thereafter, came a tape called T.O.E., which stands for "theory of everything". The name was partially a reference to physicists' quest for a sigle theory to explain everything in the universe, and partially a hint at toe-sucking erotica.
Both of these first two albums were made up entirely of songs that I had already recorded before I decided to "become" Flvxxvm Florvm. The song Can't Beleive somehow wound up on there, even though it wasn't a novelty song. This was just the beginning of me screwing up the Flvxxvm Florvm formula.
The third album, Florgasm, was released very soon after the death of Frank Zappa, and was dedicated to him. The comic-strip bandmembers of Flvxxvm Florvm swore that as a tribute to Zappa, they would tastefully refrain from ever butchering any of his songs on their albums. Years later I transgressed against this promise by attempting to perform My guitar wants to kill your mama in public, and was rightfully struck down by poetic justice.
Florgasm was the first album of music to be written as Flvxxvm Florvm. It was also the purest, the truest to form, the shittiest. Listen to the title track (in the Early and Rare directory) if you don't beleive me.
Later, during my sophmore year, I collected songs from these first three albums into a tape called The Flvxxvm Florvm Sampler. This was supposedly a collection of the best songs. The songs that didn't make the cut (instrumentals, mostly) were buried for years, but are now included in the Early and Rare directory on this CD.
Meanwhile, under the influence of Malleteers less snobbish than myself, I actually started to like "indie rock", and I wanted to do it for real, not as a joke. I started working on a project called Down the Line, which was to be made up of "real" songs. The title comes from the fact that at the time I had some kind of a fascination with power lines. I had maps in my room of the power grid for the whole state of Alabama. I had already imagined that the video for the song "String" would involve a chick rollerblading on top of high-tension power lines. Unfortunatelty, my singing voice was suitable only for novelty songs, so these attempts at sincerity came across as unintentionally funny.
Sometime during all this, I had stopped using the Flvxxvm Florvm name exclusively for the jokey songs, and just used it as a generic label for everything I was writing. This has the effect of diluting the original mission statement to the point where I wasn't sure what I was really doing, or why. Actually, I no longer cared.
Anyhow, some of the more presentable numbers from this period ended up on a tape called Flvxxvm Florvm Sampler 2, which came out when I was a junior, and which also contained more material in a traditional FF novelty vein. The rest of Down the Line is presented on this disc in its own directory.
The two volumes of the Sampler were usually distributed as the two sides of a single tape, which was sometimes labelled Flvxxvm Florvm Complete. A small 10-song core sample was packaged as Flvxxvm Florvm for Dummies, and was actually available at Vinyl Solution in 1996.
The relative popularity of Complete around Mallet spurred me back into creating new Flvxxvm Florvm music. By this time, I was drinking hard liqour and smoking pot on a regular basis. Also, my junior year at Alabama had been marked by frustrations and failures both romantic and academic. The result was Flvxxvm Florvm Ate My Balls. Only "The Grooviest Girl in the U.S.A." is what you might call positive, but it was one of the last songs written, after I had met the woman who is now my wife. Most of the others date to the dark days before.
For much of 1997, I rested on the momentum of Balls. It was generally well received, and actually earned a few fans outside of Mallet. A couple of songs were played on college radio stations, late at night when they would play anything.
As it became apparent that I really was going to graduate at the end of 1997, I decided to crank out one more tape while I was still in school. The first 10 songs of Flvxxvm Florvm is rhe Devil (inspired by Shane Scott singing "i'm the devil, i'm the devil! your soul, if you please!"), were written, recorded, and mixed in a hurry. Everything except the guitar was done with Finale on the Mallet computers. Because it was mixed without much care, it ended up sounding something like AM radio. By this point I was no longer bothering to make a distinction between Flvxxvm Florvm music and honest Jeff Robertson music...the albums had always contained both kinds of songs, but on this one its hard to tell which songs are which.
The tape was rounded out with some tracks that had been recorded over the years of me jamming with other Malleteers. I didn't bother to get any of these people's permission until after the tape was already "out".
Flvxxvm Florvm is Dead was actually recorded after I left Mallet. The title signifies that it will probably be the last thing I ever do as Flvxxvm Florvm. Once again Finale was used heavily. Also has the now-obligatory "serious" tracks. No shortage of foolishness, however, and it includes some songs that I had stored in up in me for about 10 years, and just now recorded.
Also included on that tape are some more nuggets from my vault of stuff recorded in the Mallet drawing room.
© 2000 Evil Grinn Music