I started writing lyrics again for the first time in over a decade.  I'm completely shocked.

1)  I am still going through endless stacks of cassettes hoping to find some other lost treasures but it's a slow process and it will be some time before I'll have anything to post.  It's been rather hectic the past couple months and I don't see that settling down anytime soon.

2)  Secondly, I've spent some time over the past month and a half working on these websites:  www.steveewingmusic.com and www.steveewingmusic.com/mobile.  Yes, that Steve Ewing from that band The Urge.

I've had some requests to put the Swim video on YouTube. I have no idea why, but what the hell. you can find it here: www.youtube.com/watch Also, I've thrown some stuff on ReverbNation for those of you who don't want to download the compressed files in the archive.  You can find those here:  www.reverbnation.com/toddunger

Enjoy.

I know it's been a while since I've updated this site. Unfortunately life happens, so I've had to devote time to other things. I still have some things left, mostly the last recordings I did and some other stuff I played around with before I stopped recording. Hopefully I'll have that up soon. Until then, keep enjoying what's posted and spread the word.

Todd

As evident by the Mix Master Matt postings last year, I wasn't the only one recording music way back in the day. Throughout the archiving process I've unearthed a few things here and there like Matt's "Neff" cassette and the "Molly" recordings. However one of the "gems" that I found was a cassette by what I vaguely remember being called Black Cat, which was a group consisting of Ryan, Jessica, Chad and Carissa. From my vague recollection I do remember being part this as well. First, I used my kareoke machine to record these songs in Carissa's backyard. Secondly, I think I wrote the lyrics to "Rocket to the Stars".

I know at one time I had an idea of having everyone contributing to one of the A Night in the Court followups but I don't remember every setting that idea into motion. I'm not entirely sure why this collection exists, but it does and it was a surprising find as well.

I have been making some edits to the liner notes over the past few days and I'm happy to report that all of the links are back up and functional.

Thank you for your patience and enjoy.
Todd U.

I will be doing some minor edits on the liner notes that are included with the downloads. Some files will inaccessible for a short period of time. If something is down, please come back at a later time and try again.

Thanks for your patience,

Todd U.

Happy 2009!

When I started the archive process, over a year ago now, I started with a group of Android songs that I had recorded myself. Well, I managed to track down most of the original recordings from 1988-1989 and they're now ready for your enjoyment.

Matt and Carissa (now Brooke) Holloway decided that they were going to form a band and I somehow got wrangled into it. Unfortunately not much ever materialized from this, which is a shame because initially there seemed to be some potential.

As usual, there were several reasons that this project never got off the ground. First off, I was working and going to school and really didn’t have the time. Secondly, my heart really wasn’t in it because I wanted to break free from writing about the court. Thirdly, I don’t think Matt and Brooke were going to put forth much effort anyways. So we made a few meager attempts at putting something together but in reality it was shelved like so many other ideas.

You would not believe the hassle I had to go through to get this post up.

Here’s a collection of songs that were recorded between the demise of Android and the recording of A Night in the Court. Actually four of the songs here, “Horizon”, “It”, “Brainstorm”, and “Barricades” were recorded for an album called Miracle Crime that for some reason or another never got around to completing. In hindsight, I wish I would have finished it because the last song was “Barricades” and the line about the nightmares would have perfectly segued into another album about nightmares I was toying around with. Then the first track from A Night in the Court would have perfectly capped that. Brilliant, I say, brilliant!

Now that I have the computers back up and running I'll be getting back to posting. Right now I'm sifting through pre-A Night In The Court material, post-Later That Day material, the Era Yes followup and some more videos as well.

The basement is currently under reconstruction at the moment. What was supposed to take 3 days is now on it's 5th week with little to no end in sight. Needless to say that this has put a damper on the archiving which will resume as soon as I get a place to work. Hang tight and sorry for the delay.

Todd

The Junkmobile has been hauled off to the scrap yard.

I found it! The lost performance video that Matt and I put together back in May of 1995. It's about as crappy as can be but what the heck, you only live once right? It was shot in my parent's basement with my dad behind the camera. Matt was off to the side working a strobe light. I'm the dork in the middle with the long since discontinued Kawasaki One Man Jam guitar by Remco. That little thing was actually quite a genius product and I'm hoping that we'll see it's return in lieu of the current boom in the video game market with Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

Anyways, for your viewing enjoyment is a performance of "Swim" by me, looking like a complete idiot and loving it!

Download Todd Unger's "Swim"

I've been debating for a while on what to do and how to present the leftover material that I've been unearthing. I've decided to just release stuff when I come across it because at the very least I'll get everything up that I want to share. I had a couple different compilation ideas but they require more elbow grease than I can provide at the moment. Besides, this gives me a good excuse to keep this site updated regularly.

It’s said that all good things come to an end. After 3 years I realized that I had done, redone and overdone expressing everything that was going on outside my door. It was a great ride. I’m proud of what I had accomplished, even to this day, and probably the rest of my life. So I decided to give the court one last fond farewell and this was the result. This was also the last thing that I released and probably garnered the least amount of response.

It’s really not a bad tape despite a few flaws here and there. It flows together really well and I wish I had compiled A Night in the Court in the same fashion. Part of the charm, if you will, is that I went back to the tapes that started all of this. I put my heart back into this project even though I knew that this was going to quickly fall on deaf ears. Despite the lack of support, Matt commented once that the production was the best I’d ever done.

I would agree, the production was much better this time around and all in all I think I put together a good set that put the finishing touches on that chapter of life.

I absolutely and completely enjoyed growing up in the neighborhood that I did. So much so that I was compelled to give something back to it because it meant so much to me. This pretty much sums up why I recorded all of these tapes. At school, I was an awkward social reject that everyone ignored. On my street I had friends and neighbors with similar backgrounds and interests. Sure we were all different and personalities clashed but everyone could at least shelve their differences for a couple of hours each night so we could get in several games of flashlight tag. Or just sit around and talk about stupid crap.

Then go inside and spend hours messing around in my makeshift studio pretending that I was a musician, banging out my opuses on all matters of life. There are brief moments now where I would almost kill to go back to that time and place. Sure, I could get back into music right now if I wanted to. At that heart of it all though, it would really only be to recreate a moment in my life that sadly, no longer exists.

This is not to say that I'd never get back into music. It would have to be for different reasons altogether for me to justify my return.

Taken from a line in Living Colour’s “Wall”, “The walls between us, all must fall”, I was attempting, and failing miserably I might add, to break through the clicks that were starting to form around the court. Essentially these kids stopped playing with these kids and these kids weren’t talking to these kids and no one was really getting along.

By this time however, I was out of high school and expanding my horizons so to be quite honest, my heart just wasn’t in this. I put this collection together because I was still being asked about new material and I still enjoyed writing and recording so I figured, why not? Creatively, I was tapped out, I poured a part of myself into Normal and really didn’t know where to go from there.

Much of what’s presented here could’ve very easily fit onto A Night in the Court, The Morning After or culminated itself onto the follow up Later That Day. So what could’ve probably been a decent effort rapidly dwindled down to another misstep along the lines of Channel 7. It wasn’t a total loss I suppose, there are a few things that I am proud of but overall it never set well with me. First of all, most of the songs were pretty weak and I’ll point those out as we go along. Secondly the unnecessarily loud production made this thing almost unlistenable at times.

I did, however, find a couple of leftovers that weren’t included on the original release and are presented here for the first time ever.

Normal, for all intents and purposes, is possibly the most autobiographical I ever was and probably will be. The bulk of Normal surrounds mere snippets of my senior year in high school and what I found interesting at the time. Being 17 I couldn’t help but think about girls. Way too much sometimes but that’s forgivable. In fact a quarter of Normal is in regards to one crush I had in particular. I make no secret that I have a thing for long haired brunettes. Care to guess why I like Saved by the Bell so much? Well it isn’t Zach Morris I can assure you. Heck, I even went as far as to marry one! I’ll speak more of the crush in a bit.

Normal is not a counterpart to Strange regardless of the play on words and the tape covers. When I was assembling Strange it seemed blue to me and Normal was red. Whatever that’s supposed to mean, it made sense at the time; still does to some effect. Strange and Normal are unique because they more self centric and deal less about what was happening outside my front door like their predecessors. What really sets Normal apart from everything (hey look I just said “everything”) else is that the subject matter is personal. It deals with stuff I was feeling and thinking, stuff that’s usually reserved for a personal journal that you keep under the pillow or in the nightstand.

In retrospect I should have just named this tape “Everything” as that word appears almost everywhere on this album. I’ll do my best to point this out whenever possible.

Relive the pleasure and relive the pain, relive the summer that went down the drain.

For reasons unbeknownst to me I was compelled to re-release "A Night in the Court" a full six months ahead of it's anniversary date. My best guess is that I was trying to recapture some of the fun I had creating the first one. So anyways, here it is, in all its glory with a nice little bonus at the end.

I think there is a law somewhere that states that at sometime during your elementary school years, you have to write one of those ridiculous reports about what you did over your summer vacation. For anyone of the kids that were living in the court in the summer of 1992, A Night in the Court could’ve easily been submitted as that report. Of course, it would have been quickly followed by an immediate expulsion due to the outrageous things that unearthed themselves over the recording sessions.

I’m still not sure what possessed me to do this, but for some odd reason I had the notion of taking a tape recorder outside to just record stuff. Nothing in particular, just stuff, but mostly the voices of the kids playing outside. What I ended up with was over 2 hours of incredibly perverse material, a bizarre idea for a concept album, and an outlet for my music to expand outside of the confines of my parent’s basement. It also eventually gave me the ability to write and record whatever I wanted without worrying about it being “good” or “perfect”.

What began as an experiment ended up becoming a snapshot of how life was at Spencer Path Court during the August of 1992. A dozen kids 12 and under on summer vacation, waiting out their time before school starting up again. Sleepovers, pool parties, impromptu games of baseball, basketball and flashlight tag. Sometimes on quiet summer nights I reminisce about the “good old days”. Days before debt and responsibilities when all that I had to do is stay out of trouble and keep my room clean. But I digress…

I must say A Night in the Court never would have materialized had it not been for Brian Beemer and Matt Unger. They somehow managed to hear “Nightmare” and “Headache”, liked it, and wanted a copy. From there news got around to the other kids and they wanted copies as well. All in all I made 10 copies of this tape and it was well enjoyed by just about every kid in the court. For months after I would hear it just about every time I stepped outside.

All in all it was so “successful” that I recorded it again as an “Anniversary Edition”. With the “Anniversary Edition” I took the liberty of tweaking a few things here and there. The keyboard parts were all replaced using a newer keyboard that I received for Christmas. Some parts were expanded and one song was almost completely rewritten. I will issue that at another time.

On the surface, it would seem that Strange, and its successor Normal, are part of some elaborate concept album with an equally elaborate story behind them. Unfortunately there isn’t, and Strange (as well as Normal) are essentially a collection of songs with relatively no connecting thread what so ever. Essentially it’s whatever I felt like recording, which yielded some of my best (and worst) material to date.