Huge Voodoo

Huge Voodoo is the creation of D. Bruce Grant (often spelled dB Grant). A longtime resident of Madison, New Jersey, where he attended Fairleigh Dickinson University in the early 1970’s, “Mister Bruce”, as he was usually known to his friends, passed away in January, 2009. Bruce was an innovator of live music creation via his “AutoDope” system , a collection of monaural tape decks that simultaneously played cassette loop tapes (the kind once featured in many telephone answering machines in the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s) prerecorded with an amazing variety of sounds: drum beats , bass lines, machine noise, guitar riffs, and vocal samples from a wide range of sources, including television shows, documentaries, propaganda films, and movies. Tapes were played simultaneously through a small mixing board and switched “on the fly” during live performances to sculpt and shape various elements of the combined resulting soundscape. Bruce was influenced by early American music and black blues and jazz artists; the sermons of the Reverend Gates as well as the fusion sounds of Weather Report were equally important in Bruce’s development. In the late ‘70’s Bruce helped produce several New Jersey bands, including WKGB, whose co-leader Dennis Kelley partnered with Mister Bruce in the 1980’s to create some amazing tracks as “Deekay Jones”. (Some of their music can be found in the “Church of the Subgenius” subculture, popular as it was with several Church leaders.)