Helios Creed Activated Condition Label: Man’s Ruin Records Released: 1998
Frustration Blood Mantra Exodus The Railing “Nugg” The Transport Pure LSD Getting Dark Isolation Tank Pissing On The Produce Oh Shit What Did We Do? SpaceFireWater
Activated Condition is an
awesome record. Again, a number of players credited on this one. Some great
hard driving, rocking acid punk tunes on here. Blood Mantra drives with some
really great Helios lead guitar runs between verses. Nugg The Transport is a
funny song, pretty easy to guess what it's about, it's funny and a really
tripped out song at the same time. Yes you don't really know what you're
getting these days. Pure LSD has some really nice guitar work from Helios on
it, all melting and running together into a nice lysergic output of lovely
psyched out delight. Pissing on The Produce is sort of a speed acid metal type
song. Really awesome album beginning to end!
Helios Creed - guitar, vocals, bass, synths, samples
Paul Della Pelle - drums
Z Sylver - synths, samples, vocals
Frank Gary Martin - drums
Chris McKay - bass
Jeff Pinkus - bass
Krystal – vocals
Click the above pic for a promo flyer that was sent with promo copies of Activated Condition
Comments From Jeff Pinkus About Recording Activated Condition (djstrangeblood.com): DJ Strangeblood:
Honky had a song called “Smokin Weed with Helios Creed” and I was
wondering if you could talk a little bit about you time playing in his
band? Did you travel to the West Coast for that?
JD Pinkus: No,
He’s also been in Kansas is where his family is from. Manhattan, Kansas
where there was that church that got burned down with a bunch of people
in it a long time ago. Its close to that little college town of
Lawrence, Kansas.
So,
he’s lived there a couple of times, he went back there when he had some
bad health, but other than that he’s been on the West Coast for a long
time. And when I went to record with him for Activated Condition was
the name of that record. We’d talked about it and he’d sold the record
to Tom Hazelmeyer, so it was going to be an Am Rep record and then he
sold it to Kozik for the same amount of money. I think he was selling
records but he was just a little behind on projects and product so he
was selling an album that was not made yet and he was getting ahead of
himself. But at that time Hazelmeyer was like “you know, I don’t care,
I’ll let Kozik put it out” so it came out on Kozik’s record label. We
had the drummer Frank Gary Martin, he’s now playing the band We are the
Asteroid from Austin. I brought him up there. He’s got a really tribal
drumming sound, he’s even got a tribal tattoo. He played in Daddy
Longhead at the end of Daddy Longhead. We worked out about 11 songs
before we went up there. We had two weeks to go up there. Helios was
like, “hey, lets jam” and so we played this song and he was like
”that’s cool” and we played this other song and he was like “that’s
great” and we were like “What do you got man? I mean lay something down
for us” and he was like “oh, I don’t have any songs”. So we did all 11
of our songs, but he did have one that was my favorite on the record
and I believe it’s the last song on there but it’s an old one called
Spacefirewater, it’s an old one from the Chrome era and it came off
really fucking cool, but the other stuff, he sent it to me and I
mastered it in Austin and I wanted it to be like a Chrome record where
there were no gaps in between the songs and I had fun doing the
mastering on that because I was a hug fan of Half Machine Lip Moves. It
was a ground breaking record for me as far as opening up my head so I
kind of went with that vibe with it. So, it was an interesting
experience and he used some of those songs on different albums. And I
played on another one that he did where he recorded in Austin. I played
on a couple of tracks on (Deep Blue)Love Vacuum or something like that
and then he used some for “NUGG” the transport but it was an
interesting experience, it was fun to work with him, looking back at
it, that I got a chance to do that stuff. But, everybody’s got their
own style. It was fun to hear those tones and to see how he works. You
get better and you just feel better the more people you work with and
just jam with musically. Some people are jamming and some people are
just writing songs or you seeing how you play on someone else’s songs,
so I think it’s real satisfying rather than just playing with the same
people.
