With a lot of the records that I’ll be posting, I can remember a time and a place of when I got it. But with Botch’s John Birch Conspiracy Theory 7″, I’ve got no idea at all. There’s a good chance that it was when I ran a record distro with Kerri Dick.

She and I would sell punk records at shows and after a few months, we had amassed quite a collection. Mostly, we were trying to expose kids to new music. That would have been 1997. Most punk kids still had their record players at that point.

I wasn’t yet in a band (that would have been Waterstain Eulogy, which I joined in 1999), but I was putting on shows at the New Berlin Community Center. One of the shows that I remember was with Egress and The Gray AM. Maybe Mid Carson July played too, I can’t remember – we had a ton of shows there.

But it was during that time that I heard Botch. I was into screamy music like I Hate Myself and Lincoln, but Botch took it to a more complicated level.

On this 7″, which I believe was their second, they covered “O Fortuna,” the opening movement in Carl Orf’s opera, Carmina Burana. The rest of the songs are tightly controlled chaos. I loved it then and love it now.

For some reason or another, my copy of this 7″ has always been very crackly. Even when it was new, it was full of tiny pops and clicks. Since these recordings are available on Hydra Head Records (on a CD that compiles some of Botch’s early stuff), I’ve decided to not clean these tracks.

If you want to hear them all cleaned up, go buy the CD (you should). But there’s something about the crackles, especially during “O Fortuna” that takes me back to the late 90s and to the fun idealism that my life was way back then.

For me, this 7″ was all about the vocals. It was probably because of this record that I wanted to sing (well, scream) in a band. And that pretty well changed my life. So as far as pivotal records are concerned, this was a big one for me.

This was a four song 7″, but the first two songs run together. I didn’t want to split them, so I have them as one track.

Side One
1) God vs. Science
2) Third Party Tragedy

Side Two
1) Inch By Inch
2) O Fortuna

Here, you can listen to a couple of tracks.

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God vs. Science > Third Part in a Tragedy

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O Fortuna

And go ahead, get it here. (25 MB)

Technical Information:
Media Used:
Vinyl 7″ from my personal collection.

Artwork Scanned from Original @ 72 dpi with XSane .996
Edited and Restored Using GIMP Image Editor 2.6.6

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