Bite the Wax Tadpole

Formed by Mark Dery and Darren Smith in 1985, Bite the Wax Tadpole sprang from the homebrew cassette revolution and New York City's downtown music scene. Although BTWT played East Village art-club gigs (with Sophie B. Hawkins on drums), the group mostly toured Smith's Jersey City bedroom, recording songs on a four-track tape deck. According to the group's website, "Smith, a virtuoso who had studied South Indian vocal music, Balinese gamelan, and electric banjo (with Peter Tork of The Monkees), proved an ideal foil for Dery, whose spoken-word performances were somewhere between William S.

According to the group's website, "Smith, a virtuoso who had studied South Indian vocal music, Balinese gamelan, and electric banjo (with Peter Tork of The Monkees), proved an ideal foil for Dery, [a freelance writer, cultural critic, and sometime poet] whose spoken-word performances were somewhere between William S. Burroughs's deadpan monologues and Jack Nicholson's scenery-chewing rants in The Shining."

On a CDBaby webpage devoted to the group, Smith cites such disparate musical influences as Meredith Monk, South Indian vocal music, Carlos Santana, Indonesian gamelan, Steve Reich, Middle Eastern flute music, Miles Davis, Byzantine Chant, Led Zeppelin's ?In the Light," African drumming, Debussy, and the Dust Brothers." On the BTWT website, Dery's literary influences are listed: "the Killer B's: [William S.] Burroughs, [Paul] Bowles, and [J.G.] Ballard."

The title of Bite the Wax Tadpole's CD, TURN ME ON, DEAD MAN, is taken, according to the group's website, from the backwards phrase in The Beatles' ?Revolution 9.? The CD is a Best Of compilation of the band's early years, from 1985-1992. Recorded by hip-hop/new music engineer Yoram Vazan and post-produced by downtown NYC composer/guitarist Elliott Sharp, the 17-song CD features cameos by new music/alt.rock scenemakers such as Samm Bennett (CHUNK, SKIST) and Yuval Gabay (SOUL COUGHING).

In its description of the songs on TURN ME ON, DEAD MAN, the BTWT website includes mentions of "a full-tilt rocker about a tyrannical boss who thunders, 'You're gonna be a dissected crayfish, and I'm gonna be the man in surgeon's greens wiping your entrails across my lapels'? A bizarre monologue by a worker on some David Lynchian assembly line (or is it a slaughterhouse?) that churns out an unspeakable product involving creatures with 'sucking discs on the tops of their heads'? A musical suicide note, narrated by the Nazi nudnik Rudolph Hess? A techno elegy about the sinking of the Titanic, set to a sampled loop and sung by the ship itself ('A prunefaced corpse, his features blurring, sits crosslegged on the ceiling of my ballroom, warming his hands by the chandelier')."

Since releasing TURN ME ON, DEAD MAN, Smith has pursued "a career in composing for the stage and screen," the group's website notes. "Repo! The Genetic Opera!, a Blade Runner-meets-Rocky Horror rock musical directed by Darren Lynn Bousman and based on a play written and composed by Smith and Terrance Zdunich, was released in 2008." Dery is best-known as a book author, freelance journalist, and university professor, writing and lecturing about "media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture."