What If? by The Undecidable

Tracks 1-8 were recorded on a rented 8-track cassette recorder, in April of 1994. They were written between 1989 and 1994 (see below).

Tracks 9-14 are "bonus tracks" that I recorded on my 4-track cassette recorder between early 1991 and late 1994.

The first 8 tracks were all recorded in April of 1994, on a rented 8-track cassette recorder, with rented microphones, at home in Toronto. They were all written, played, recorded, and mixed by me. Several other songs were recorded as well, but I think these 8 recordings were the best of the bunch. They had the fewest errors. I'm a very error-prone musician. But that doesn't really bother me, because I believe that the evolution of life on earth has been driven by what we humans call "errors', like, for example, genetic mutations. If the creation of our species depended on a long history of mutations, then such "errors" might not really be errors at all. They may be the very heart of life itself: radical imperfection. And thus we, as imperfect forms of life, hope and pray that there is a perfect being out there somewhere, to save us all in the end. Some hope that AI will somehow lead to perfect AI beings, who will do for humans what humans have hoped the gods would do for them for thousands of years: make their lives as wonderful as possible, and grant them some form of immortality as well. We should expect all forms of AI to be as error-prone as we are, and thus, just as creative, in the end, for better and for worse. But I digress ...

PEDAGOGY MAN was written in 1989. WHAT IF?, VELLUM and FEAR were all written in late 1990 or early 1991. I played versions of VELLUM and FEAR in Vine, in 1992. LIPPING THE WAVE was written in 1992, for Vine, but we never played it live. I WILL, CATHARSIS, and NOT HOME were spontaneously written on the spot, in 1994, as I recorded them, for this album.

All of the tracks were remastered in 2025.

The cover photo is of me, on my birthday, in the late 70s. My birthday present was a toy robot, named 2-XL. It played 8-track tapes––in its mouth. My cousin Angela is standing behind me.

This was not the original cover for this album. It was originally released on cassette only. There was no cover for the album, or any text whatsoever. Just an unmarked cassette, inside a clear plastic case. But everybody knew who recorded it. It wasn't a mystery.

For those of you who want more detailed information, read on ...

I went into this recording project intending on recording a bunch of songs that I'd recently written. Vine had broken up over a year earlier, but I still hadn't recorded a full album of my own music. I rented some recording equipment at the beginning of April, and immediately began recording some songs, eager to begin the next phase of my "musical journey". However, after only a few days of recording I was shocked to hear of the death of Kurt Cobain. Every night I would turn on the TV and feel increasingly overwhelmed by all the latest news––including lots of speculation about what exactly happened. I was becoming very distracted from the task at hand. I wasn't in the right mood anymore. Instead of recording my new songs, I suddenly retreated into the past, and began to randomly pick old songs of mine to record, and record them immediately, often without remembering all the lyrics to the songs, and thus making up some of the lyrics on the spot. I had spent several hundred dollars to rent microphones and an 8-track recorder, so I forced myself to keep recording. (I ended up recording some of my newer songs only much later, starting in 1997, which was the next time that I rented an 8-track recorder. I recorded some more songs in 1998. I didn't re-record LIMINAL until 2007 (I had recorded it on 4-track in 1993, but was never very happy with that recording ). I didn't record THE RAIL and SUSPICIOUS until 2015. In fact, I still haven't properly recorded some of my songs from the early 90s.)

WHAT IF? was written in early 1991. I always played it with a heavily distorted guitar. When I recorded it in 1994, for this album, I changed almost all the lyrics on the spot, and re-imagined the song, giving it an entirely different feel, by playing it with a clean guitar, and singing it in a slightly different way. A solo recording of the original version will soon be available on "Late Twentieth Century Magnetic Tape Archives, Volume 2".

VELLUM and FEAR were written in late 1990 or early 1991. I played versions of them live many times, in 1992, with my band Vine. The lyrics for both these versions are different than the Vine versions. The vocal melody in the verses, for Fear, is also very different than the original version––which also, by the way, wasn't titled "Fear". That's one song of mine that seems to just keep changing over the years, so there really isn't one standard version or one standard title for it. Different versions over the years have been called "Decide", "Everything" and "Trailer". I sang the melody in the verses differently for each incarnation of the song. (I've written over a thousand songs in my life, out of which only a few keep changing noticeably over the years. I don't intentionally keep changing my songs, to be "undecidable". Some songs just insist on continually changing, regardless of what my personal intentions might be, or seem to be.)

PEDAGOGY MAN was written in 1989. I played it, and recorded it, during the 1989/90 school year with my band at the time, The Grendels. But that was the second incarnation of The Grendels, with some new members. Unlike the first incarnation of The Grendels, we never played live. But we jammed often, and recorded some songs in a studio. PEDAGOGY MAN was one of those songs that we recorded. Unfortunately the tapes for those recordings might be lost forever, so this is the only recording of the song that I currently have. I couldn't remember many of the lyrics when I sang it in 1994, so I just hummed some the parts instead.

LIPPING THE WAVE was written in 1992, when I was in Vine. Vine never played it live.

I WILL, CATHARSIS, and NOT HOME were all written on the spot, as I recorded them, in 1994.

The photo above is from 1988. I sang in The Grendels (88/89) and Vine (92). In the 80s and 90s I used various names on my solo releases, including Moving Camera, and/or, the nom de plume of Mark De Plume, as well as my birth name: Paul Waliczky (Hungarian dad, Italian mom). I decided to explicitly call "myself" The Undecidable sometime in the early 2000s. I write and play all the songs.

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