About Kable...

 

Hi,

Kay Bonya here, from Kable. I've been making music since I was about four years old, stretching rubberbands across my dresser drawers and plucking them. (You can hear more about that in the the song, "The Old Band" on the 4th Kable cd, "Boar of the Forest") I've been recording as Kable since 1994. It started as somewhat of a surprise to me. My partner Redo Makeshift and I owned and operated a little recording studio on Montrose Blvd. in Houston, Texas called Deep Dot. Originally we recorded only on analog tape but being the early 90's, digital was the new horizon of recording. We had purchased a Tascam DA88 digital multitrack recorder and it was working well for the studio. We decided to purchase another one to expand to 16 tracks of digital but the second unit we bought was used. I took the used unit home to verify that each track and all functions were working properly before we were to use it at Deep Dot. 

 

In our garage apartment living room, I looked around for sound-makers to record to each of the 8 tracks. I grabbed a cheap little Tascam M-06 mixer and an autoharp that had most of its strings and strummed a few chords. Good, track one seemed to work. Track by track, I added instruments and checked out the new machinery. Seven tracks later,  Redo Makeshift came by to check the progress. "works great-one track left for you!" Redo added some organ and the first Kable song, "Hazy" was born. You might be thinking, "Why not just use the recording studio down the street?" But Deep Dot was having a busy year in '94, so off to Deep Dot went the DA-88, and back to the apartment came a Tascam reel to reel analog TSR8 recorder that wasn't being used at the studio anymore. 

 

Now that I had experienced the joy of recording, I had recording-fever so I set up in the living room and started recording the first Kable cd, "Chlorophyll". My technique on this cd was crude. The goal was to start and finish each piece in one day, very limited overdubs, focus on creating sounds more than songs, just spit it out and run. A technique you can only get away with in the beginning, and so for the first cd, I did. After that I learned how to take more time making songs, enjoying the freedom to overdub and try different sounds. Then as I transitioned from 8 track to computer recording, a whole new world of mixing and production techniques opened up which I really enjoy as part of the process.

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All of this resulted in five Kable cds and songs on several compilations. The first four cds were on Fleece Records, a short history on that below:

 

In December of 94, the folks at Lazy Squid Records put out a compilation of Houston bands, "Risk is Just a Part of The Game", as a follow-up to Deep Dot's 1992 compilation, "The Great Big Pile." The Kable cut caught the ear of Kurt Brennan, founder of Fleece Records. Finding out that Kable was the work of Kay Bonya, he realized this was the same Kay who used to work at his music store, Record Exchange (now Sound Exchange soundexchangehouston.com) several years back. He invited her to release "Chlorophyll" on Fleece, which turned into a long term partnership with the release of the subsequent discs, "Tardy all the Time," "Kable 3," and "Boar of the Forest".

Fleece Records: kurt@soundexchangehouston.com

More on Fleece Records here:   https://www.discogs.com/label/47646-Fleece-Records

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It was a great experience being part of Fleece Records! "Chlorophyll" was one of the first Fleece releases and "Boar of the Forest" was one of the last. When Kurt decided the label had run its course and stopped doing releases the last Kable cd, "The Hand" was self-released on Deep Dot Records.

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