of J. Cullup/BUG/Mr. FLARF/Dingus The Sock Puppet
Hailing from northwest Washington state, Jason Cullup has spent the last several years cultivating one hell of a noise catalog. Whether it's manipulated field recordings, harsh noise madness, or psychedelic audiobooks, Cullup knows how to keep things fresh in a genre that can easily grow stale. Lately, Jason has started creating his own instruments such as the Rain Bass and the Noise Contraption Of Doom, turning a passion into a true labor of love. The man known as MR. FLARF took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few of my questions.
Stuburban: You call yourself the Rand Peltzer of Homemade Instruments. If you had to pick only one, would you pick Gremlins or Gremlins II?
J. Cullup: The first Gremlins for sure! That one is a classic. Rand’s inventions in the first one are awesome!
S: Yeah, now that you mention it, he doesn't really make as much stuff in the second one. How would you say your inventions compare to his? Ironically enough, I'd say yours are more practical!
JC: I have had quite a few inventions that didn’t quite work. I usually end up taking them apart and using the parts in something else. I also have quite a few that work way different than I imagined! Haha. Actually some of the sounds in Return of the Noise Contraption of DOOM are a Behringer Ultra Metal pedal I tried to circuit bend. It didn’t goes as planned. So now it’s just a weird sounding noise pedal! But I guess it was a success! Haha
S: Which recording of yours exceeded your expectations, and which one were you maybe a little disappointed with the result?
JC: That one is tricky. I actually have dozens - maybe even dozens of dozens - of songs that didn’t work out. So I only share the ones that I feel good or proud about. I have a lot of weather related stuff that just doesn’t turn out good. I would love to perfect some weather instrument. The Return of the Noise Contraption of DOOM! is actually one of my favorites! I also am very proud of the Dingus Sock Puppet stuff! when I first did the Dingus [recordings] my co workers were listening to the Butt Mushrooms one at work and cracking up! My kids like that one also! They quote some lines from it. I also have an album that I have never put on Bandcamp. I recorded it back in 2020 it was called The Dollar Store EP. That one was structured goofy songs. I really liked how that one turned out!
S: I really love those two Dingus albums and wanted to talk a bit about them so I'm glad you brought them up. Seeing as it's your first release listed on your Bandcamp, did you ever think of doing more audiobooks? Or did it end up just being a one and done situation? Unless you count Food Reviews as an audiobook.
JC: I would love to do more Dingus audiobook stories. I would love to do other types of audio books also. I have a few audio book ideas in my brain. I would love to do one and use sound effects from field recordings I do. Hopefully someday! I really like the Dingus doing food reviews! It’s fun to do. I just need to balance the layered chaos with some funny actual items. I keep on looking at this box of “logs” at the local grocery store. Taco Logs! In the frozen food isle. I am also really excited about dollar store food items. There is actually a song about dollar store fish sandwiches on The Dollar Store EP. I will have to get you a copy of that EP or just finally put it on Bandcamp. Fun fact. One year I cooked my wife and I a dinner on NYE with all dollar store items. Dollar store steaks were the main coarse!
S: Which dollar store sells steaks? You've piqued my interest.
JC: It was Dollar Tree. It was before they switched to $1.25 store. Now they even have prices above $1.25 on some things. But those steaks might be in there somewhere! I love the dollar store. They have some delicious noodles bowls. I get my hot sauce their. Lately I have been buying these $1.25 cans of mackerel, then I smash it all up. Smash up some saltine crackers and add some seasoning. Press them into patties and fry them in a pan. Good stuff! Haha.
S: I'm a big fan of Dollar Tree as well, and we'll circle back to that a little later because I want to talk about your project BUG. Before we do that, I'd like to know: what got you into noise? Did you play with any non-noise bands prior to these projects?
JC: BUG is just one of my techniques and/or personalities. But it seams over time they are all blending together. I wanted BUG to be the more chaotic stuff. But it is definitely all evolving into just a mashup of all my stuff I like to do. I was in a couple punk type bands in the nineties when I was a teenager. Then I evolved into metal. I was in a pretty fun metal band in the 2005 timeframe. We played quite a few shows. Made a demo cd. I played a baritone 6-string guitar and had a full stack haha. It was loud and heavy. Then I joined a band in 2014. It was like a southern hard rock band, even though we live in the northwest! But we had a lot of fun in that band. As for the beginning of noise. It was just homemade instruments in the beginning. Cigar box guitars and Diddley bows. I think it was [like] Split Lip Rayfield in the beginning. I loved the stitch giver gas tank bass. That evolved into [something like] That 1 Guy in his homemade set up.
JC Continued: I even was fortunate enough to see That 1 Guy and Split Lip together during a music fest in Arkansas! From there I was super into Quintron [ and then] I started collecting his albums; his first couple albums are very experimental and noisy. He also fell into the invention category. That then inspired my recording weather obsession. Quintron was playing a tape by METRULIATED QUAIPE during a video he recorded at one point. So the Metruliated Quaipe tape was my first experimental music artist. My renewed love of cassette tapes opened up every thing else. I think my second tape was Petr Valek. So basically the influence of these artists influenced my switch from cigar boxes and Diddley bows to electronic experiments and noisy recordings.
S: The recordings of your old bands - are they still available, or have they been lost to the sands of time?
JC: I have a cassette tape of my 1999 Christian punk band. I also have a cd of my band in 2003 and also my metal band in 05. So I have some recordings still around. Fun fact! My first two bands were Christian bands!
S: That's actually pretty incredible, and I'd love to hear those sometime. Your weather albums are some of my favorites. I think Snow Day was when I started really paying attention to what you were doing, and the Rain Bass series may be your magnum opus. With your recordings like Snow Day, do you actively plan to record stuff like that, or is it more spontaneous?
JC: Snow Day was totally spontaneous. The Rain Bass stuff I actually watch the forecast to try and predict the best rain. Unfortunately, Washington state is changing. This is one of the driest winters we have ever had. The summers are also getting really hot and really dry. I have lived in this same area for 45 years now (I’m 45). It used to dump the rain and we would get some heavy snow storms like once a year or once every other year. Hopefully this spring will have some nice rainy days to get the weather instruments going again. I need to get that contraption I recorded Snow Day back up and running. It’s the same thing I recorded the Did you know ants talk? song [with]. I broke one of the leads off [and] I need to re-solder the connections and try and beef it up some!
S: Yeah, I live in northern Illinois and it feels like we're in a perpetual drought. How did you make your Rain Bass and what motivated you to create it? Those recordings are absolutely beautiful. I love how low-key the bass is in the earlier tracks, and then once you hear it you realize it's been there the entire time.
The second installment in the Rain Bass series
JC: I used the 1x2 pieces of wood you can find at Lowes. I cut cross pieces for the important areas like the nut, pickup, [and] bridge. I wanted it to be hollow so rain wouldn’t puddle or pool on it. I use treaded pieces of metal for a nut. The Rain Bass has a single string bass bridge. Originally it had a single enclosed bass pickup. The original was mounted to the roof of my carport. Weather beat that one up pretty bad. So I took it down, replaced the pickup with a jazz bass type pickup, and taped it up to try and protect it better. I mounted it to a rolling cart so I could move it in and out of my car port. I used Flex Seal spray to weather proof it. I actually have a fun story about Flex Seal!
The third installment in the Rain Bass series
JC Continued: I made a few waterproof contact mics, then I went out to the coast [to] record waves and water and even sand noises. I went out to Fort Worden on the beach recording sounds. I was standing probably knee deep in the water with a Flex Sealed liquor bottle full of piezos and a wire running to my recorder. Some person walked up and said “Can I ask what you are doing? “ Haha. Apparently his group was just sitting there trying to guess what was going on. Anyway, I posted some pics on Instagram and tagged Flex Seal in the post. They messaged me and sent me a big Flex Seal merch bag. Haha. Hats, shirts, koozies. A photo of me doing weird music got me some Flex Seal gear!
S: Whoa, really? That's incredible! Did you ever release those recordings?
JC: That was before I did Bandcamp, so I would just make a video. Mainly a still-photo video and post it on Facebook. My kid wears the Flex Seal shirt. I gave the hat to the kids, also. I kept the koozie!
S: I was curious about BUG. Electronic Surgery calls itself "the return of BUG" but I couldn't find any earlier BUG releases on the Bandcamp. That solves that mystery! For Electronic Surgery you circuit bent some dollar store toys. What were some of these toys?
JC: The early BUG stuff was just videos. I actually recorded a full BUG album of noises, but I think it was confusing for people to understand multiple Bandcamp pages. So [I] shut down the BUG page and just went by my name so I could have one page with all my stuff. Simplify. I played one show as Bug. Just an improv noise set with a lot of my inventions. Then I wanted to change the name to Experimental Audio Adventures. Play one noise show under that name. Then I realized I am confusing everyone again. Haha. They were the Halloween motion activated “toys”. The main one was a witch. I dug around that circuit board. I love Halloween and horror so I try to go in that direction. I got an intercom system at a garage sale that is the main part of that song. I wasn’t trying to circuit bend the intercom. I was just trying to record one take of noises digging around in the electronics.
S: Speaking of Halloween, BUG's HALLOWEEN is another one of my favorites of yours. You did a great job paying tribute to the Spooky Sounds cassettes of autumn's past. What inspired you to this, and what did your equipment look like for this recording?
JC: That was a fun one! I love Halloween. My wife and I got married on Halloween 2018. Kinda. Legally we got married on the 28th of October at the old abandoned mental hospital farm about 10 minutes away from us. Everyone was in costume. We dressed as hotdogs. That location is where we went on our first date actually! Then we flew to New Orleans and did our own wedding on Halloween day. Dressed in hotdog costumes in [a] cemetery. We found a black cat in the cemetery to officiate the wedding! So the cover photo is a photo of a cigarette machine I took in New Orleans at Pepper Keenan of Corrosion Of Conformity’s bar!
Back to the album: I used two different keyboards, both I got at the thrift store. Used a couple of my altered guitars. I also manually made noises with contact mics. Then, one of my favorite things is samples. So I made some samples out and about and sampled a few from movies. Then I loop them either on tape or I have a sampling app on my phone.
JC Continued: I used to use actual samplers in the earlier years, but know it seems like they are way more expensive. [With] the sampling app on my phone you can record, add effects, loop. Just like a sampler, just a cheaper option. Someday maybe I will find a used sampler at the thrift shop!
S: Those sound like two beautiful ceremonies. You seem to know how to utilize a contact mic. Did you know ants talk?, Snow Day, and Wire all seem to feature a contact mic being used in a novel way. Speaking of Did you know ants talk?, the squeaking heard on that record, is that coming from the ants themselves?
JC: Yes! The ants were squeaking into the contact mic! It was wild. That was the same contact mic set up as Snow Day. I wired the piezo to an amplifier circuit board, then the output to a recorder so it was super sensitive. I love making contact mics. I have a bunch I use in different configurations. I gave myself a piezo tattoo the other day to show my love for the piezo!
S: That is truly amazing. I won't lie. When I first listened to Ants I didn't expect much, but I almost spit my water out when I heard the chirping. This wouldn't be your first rodeo with recording insects as you released YellowJackets the year prior. What type of trap did you use? The ones I'm partial to catches them and drowns them. Were there as many yellowjackets in the trap as the recording suggests, or did you layer the audio later and manipulate it to sound like there was an entire colony?
JC: I was blown away with the ant recording! I was like whoa! They are talking! We had a huge yellowjacket swarm under our shed. I tried spraying under [it], but I couldn’t get them. So I found this big green trap, and it had a big fly-paper piece in the middle. I sat it in front of the opening and they all started flying into it and sticking. The center was hollow, so I put a mic inside when I realized how many jackets were sticking to it. [A] mic to a little amplifier box and straight into the recorder. After that I did run it through a Monotron Delay to make it a little more interesting, so that might have added a few jackets to the sound of the recording, but there were A LOT of yellowjackets.
S: That's my worst nightmare. We get them every year but thankfully not that bad. Wire is another one of your contact mic adventures, it's almost like a proto-Rain Bass minus the rain. What is this wire that runs through your backyard?
JC: We get a lot of yellowjackets! I knock down the nests every year, but they just come back. [They'll] make a new nest in the seat of the lawnmower or the lid on the propane tank. Darn things. I took the wire down for now. It was very hard to see in certain light, but I am thinking up ways to do it in a safer way. It ran from my carport to a tree in my back yard. I would clip a contact mic on[to] various locations to record the vibration sounds. I think I might run it down a fence line when I bring it back. It was pretty high, but I still was afraid if someone didn’t know it was there [it] could pose a problem.
S: Yeah, that's understandable. Made for a very cool album, though. Wire was the one album of yours that made me begin to realize that there's a really saccharine, childlike innocence to your recordings. I mean this in the best way possible. You take these curiosities and you make them into a reality. Do you have plans for any future recordings at this time?
JC: As always, I have a list of things I would like to do and that is not counting the list of things in my brain. Haha. I would love to do an album with my wife. She writes really amazing poetry and she is very good at speaking her own poetry. I would love to do a sound effect album with her reading over the top of it. A Dingus audiobook cookbook is on the list. I have been playing around with a metal slinky. I have also been trying to add a few other rain instruments to the Rain Bass. See where that can go.
S: Sounds like you've got an awesome year ahead of you. You decided to start going by the name MR. FLARF. Are you going to [continue on solely] under this pseudonym or will you bounce between your other alter egos?
JC: I am going to bounce around between alter egos. I would like the MR. FLARF to be a goofy song project. Think a Seasonal Men's Wear meets Cannibal Corpse type sound. Haha. We will see how that turns out. I want to do it one-man-band style. I pretty much go by Flarf in real life. That’s even what my wife calls me. That, or Fluf. But Mr. Fluf seemed to be too easy to switch how it’s said [to a] certain job position in the porn industry! Haha. So MR. FLARF it is!
S: Ha, wow, I did not expect to get an SMW reference here. Well I very much look forward to all of that!
JC: Yeah! It’s too bad Washington isn’t next door to Illinois! I want to head down to the Grill and Chill fest or something! I appreciate and keep track of the fun things y’all have going on over there. Seems like you have a good group of fun folks over there!
S: Whenever you want to play Grill and Chill you are more than welcome! The invitation is always open and we'd love to have you. You'd fit right in. Alright Jason, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Do you have anything coming up that you'd like to promote?
JC: Nice! That would be awesome! Hopefully someday I will make it out there!! Thank you very much for your time. This was fun! For wacky stuff to listen to JasonCullup.Bandcamp.com and to look at wacky stuff on Instagram: @mrflarf I think haha. I'm sure that will get you there ! Thanks again!
And that wraps up my quality time with Jason Cullup. Please do me a favor and go listen to and/or pick up everything you can from his Bandcamp. Please remember to share his noises with your friends.
Got any questions or thoughts for MR. FLARF? Leave em in the comments section and we'll be sure to get em to him!
Comments