Infernal Machines

Our debut album on New Amsterdam Records will be entitled Infernal Machines.

You may thank John Philip Sousa for the reference:

These talking machines will ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left in America! The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came down from the ape.

If you do not make the people executants, you make them depend on the machines.

PS Remember, if you have a favorite Secret Society piece you'd like us to record, now is the time to lobby for it in comments.

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We are fundraising! Please help Secret Society record our debut album by making a tax-deductible contribution.

Comments

[Daniel Wolf]

1.

Although I had posted the same Sousa quote some time ago on my blog, when I read your album title I immediately thought first of Cocteau's (brilliant) Oedipus play, La Machine Infernale and then of the original Machine Infernale, the plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise against Napoleon. Any of the three references would be excellent material for music, methinks.

[Matthew]

2.

Not to mention:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099088/quotes

Seriously, I can't wait for this thing to hit. How about a hidden-track Sousa cover?

[Seth Gordon]

3.

I'm most shocked by the fact that Sousa unabashedly embraced Darwin. Nearly twenty years before Scopes, no less. Pretty forward-thinking for his time...

[DJA]

4.

I'm most shocked by the fact that Sousa unabashedly embraced Darwin.

I know -- I love the way he just casually tosses the Darwin reference in there.