08/08/2025
Early autumn, 2007. For the first time in his adult life, Chris Gooding cut his hair short.
“I was watching a lot of Wildboyz back then,” Chris says. “That show with Chris Pontius and Steve-O. Coincidently, I met Pontius years later – after I’d cut my hair short for the second time in my adult life – and he told me I looked like Crispin Glover: a bit of a wildcard himself.
“Anyway, I’ve always been keen on adventure. Trying new things. Hence, the new haircut and Wildboyz obsession. I’ve tinkered with music my whole life. At the time I was moving from the Hammer Head drum machine to the world of FL Studios. I wanted to be Korn. I wanted to be Mr. Bungle. I wanted to be Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
“I’ve always enjoyed things on the fringe, like diaper keg parties or having artistic folk in my life who I genuinely love and call my friends. The kind of folk who understand ‘we all ain’t right for normal society’ and are navigating through a world full of people who’ve never misjudged a fart while upchucking from a headful of ‘shrooms and booze. If you know what I mean by that, I probably like you already.
“I knew all the ADAL fellas. They’d been making music on the fringe for a couple years and I wanted in on the action. So, I burned a couple instrumentals I’d recorded onto CD and took a walk around Springhill.”
Kody Smith says: “You know Lefty the Salesman? He was that green Muppet on Sesame Street who would try to sell things he had hidden inside his trench coat to Ernie. Well, I was walking around Springhill one day and ran into Chris Gooding. I was Ernie. He was Lefty. I went home with a CD Chris made and was given carte blanche to manipulate those songs however I wanted.
“I finished one tune before I left to work in Alberta for the winter. Upon my return home in the spring of 2008, I ran into Chris a couple more times under similar conditions. Each time he gave me a CD with new instrumentals on them. Each time I’d take the music home and add to it.
“Back then, I was obsessed with the idea of death metal vocals over music normally not suitable for that style, so I modulated the concept into Chris’ tunes. Upon reflection, I may have taken that idea a bit too far. But that’s for the listener to decide. I was also ingesting a lot of Bruce McCulloch’s ‘Shame-Based Man’ album at the time. Its influence can be heard from me on a couple of the tracks Chris and I made.”
“We wound up with six original songs and a cover of The Cure’s ‘Close to Me’”, Chris explains. “Julian Merlin cameos with some vocal work on the latter.”
“We used our old ADAL pseudonyms: Pimp Daddy Hoe Bucket and DJ C. Screwtape Run," Kody says. "Chris created the front and back artwork for our little EP, he named it ‘Straight from the Heptagonal Ring’, we emailed it to friends, and that was that.”
The songs from STRAIGHT FROM THE HEPTAGONAL RING have since been added to the ADAL YouTube and BandLab pages. Here they are today accompanied with photos taken by different ADALians over the years.
Have Chris and Kody recorded anything since 2008? Yes! In 2023, they created a seasonal tune called ‘Halloween in Mortville’, but we’ll share that sometime in October.
Kody and Chris hope you enjoy their seventeen-year-old voyage through the heptagonal ring!
