In the Key of K

The new album, Out of Time Out of Tune, is streaming everywhere! You can buy physical copies here.

This is yet another song from my second cassette release from 1998, Out of Time Out of Tune (re-released in 2026). This is a filler song to me. Utter shite. I was pumping out songs super fast at the time and had an inspiration to use these guitar slides with twelfth position or higher doodles and I wrote the song around that. The bass line is uninspiring to me–I used similar ideas elsewhere to better affect. There is a flipped beat in the drums too, I was too lazy to redo the drum track. You can also hear me drop a drum stick at the end. That was not how it was originally supposed to end. 🤗 The tempo is all over the place which I usually like in my playing but it irks me a little bit here. 🤷‍♂️ The song is a mess! It only made it on the album because there was room and it was the closest to being completed when I started mixing. This is one of several songs from this era that I put on tape and never ever played again. This is probably my least favorite song on the first two albums. With that being said, I still love it. 🤪

//
The Worthless Magistrate

Systems float through time and space.
We don’t know what’s in their minds.
Expand, contract, and then blow up.
They don’t know what they think they know.
Make them bend so then they feel.
What they don’t trust they cannot fear.
Carve a hole inside their heads.
They don’t know when they feel dead.
They feel dead

There’s a stone that I can feel.
It’s jagged and heavy that’s just fine.
What is thought, what’s in your mind?
Without thought we don’t exist.
Random flailings, writhing worms.
Death comes whether or not you use life.
Blessing or curse whatever you think’s right.
Death will be always naturally.

flipped beat

Systems float through time and space.
We don’t know what’s in their minds.
Expand, contract, and then blow up.
They don’t know what they think they know.
There’s a stone that I can feel.
It’s jagged and heavy that’s just fine.
What is thought, what’s in your mind?
Without thought we don’t exist.
Dying to live as we live to die.
Accomplishment just gets swallowed inside.
We’re renting our lives so we can hide.
Get off your ass and try!
(drops drumstick…)
//

Want to play it? This transcription will not be very accurate. I wrote most of the guitar part in an afternoon, recorded the bass and guitar, and then never played any of it again until 2025 when I was thinking of relearning the piece for this blogpost. It’s mostly in some kind of A.

The very first bit starts on an A5 chord and then does some fast strumming on the upper stings. I will try to re-learn more of it later.

The next part goes like this–I think it’s right but I could be wrong:
A5***|A5**C#5 C5|

During the verses the guitar just does nonsense fills or downward slides all starting at the 12th fret and higher. They are all improvised. The bass improvises around an A chord.

There was originally a solo in the middle part but it was awful and I cut most of it out on the first mix in 1998. In 2025, when revisiting the original tapes, I removed all of it when I mixed it into Ableton–that little bit sounds better as just bass and drums anyway.

This piece is a train wreck of shit from start to finish! I probably won’t ever play it again! 💥🚂💥But it still deserves some love!