You Mean There's Race in my Movie

You really need a lot of enthusiasm to spend hours on end, evening after evening, year after year, sorting through old piano rolls. Player pianos were all the rage at the beginning of the twentieth century. A pianist – often a composer – had to record his or her work once. The music is stored by perforating paper rolls (like old punch cards) that can be replayed over and over. Thousands of these old rolls were made before they were displaced by the long-playing record.

It takes more than enthusiasm to spend hours every evening spending hours evaluating old piano rolls. Self-playing mechanical pianos became fashionable at the beginning of the 20th century. A pianist - often the composer - once had to play his piece. The music was punched on mechanical rollers (similar to punch cards) and could then be played over and over again. Thousands of these old reels existed until the record pushed them more and more.

The beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in South Central Los Angeles. The violent clash between Hasidim and African-Americans in Crown Heights. The boats of Haitian refugees being turned away from the Land of Opportunity. These are among the many racially-charged images that have burst across our television screens in the last year alone, images that show that for all our complacent beliefs in a melting-pot society, race is as much of a problem as ever in America.

As part of the first generation of indie-rockers Human Switchboard were transplants from Ohio that found their way into the NYC club scene of the early 1980s. Inspired by the writing of the Velvet Underground Bob Pfeifer, Myrna Marcarian and Ron Metz along with an endless slew of bass players worked up a great batch of edgy post punk rockers with battling boy/girl vocals before imploding. This collection documents the Human Switchboards integral contribution to the history of alternative music. "Most music writers seemed incapable of discussing Human Switchboard without mentioning the Velvet Underground, and there's no getting around the fact Rob Pfeifer's melodic style and clipped vocal delivery bears a certain resemblance to what Lou Reed was doing back in his formative days. But there's an emotional tension and sexual paranoia in Pfeifer's work that sets him decidedly apart from the Velvets and their many followers, and songs like "This Town" and "Refrigerator Door" speak of a grim, landlocked existence that would likely not have occurred to anyone outside of the Midwest." –Muze