What do you get when you cross Andy Cowitt's love of melody and harmony with the rhythmic dynamism and timbral experimentation of Michael Wertz? Why, you get A.M., a side dish with the depth and richness of an entree. AAT Records signed the band after hearing their debut recording, ICS January 2004. So far, all the recordings of A.M. have been available as MP3's on Brother Cow's page on the Wiglodge site.

Arguably the most famous band on our little label, The Pinecones are the only Argyll Adventure Tree group to have made a project in an edition larger than 50. And because The Pinecones actually offered their CD's for purchase, they are the best-selling artist on our roster.

The roots of the band first sprouted in the fertile soil of UC Santa Cruz in the late 80's, a time when "college rock" really meant something.

Unabashedly pop-ulist and fired with the ambition that makes heroes of mere mortals, the band spared neither time, nor effort, nor expense to bring their debut CD, Shirley Kramer, to the world.

Side projects were never envisioned when the Pinecones first sallied forth into their living room to record the tracks that would come to make up their original K7. As more friends and associates heard those legendary early 'Cones recordings, requests to work with the band piled up like so many sides of beef. Eventually, one such request became irresistible.

Gia Amella was an old friend of the Pinecones, another UCSC alumna living in San Francisco and soaking up the non-conformist culture there while establishing a successful career in documentary filmmaking. One fateful day while chatting with the boys at Chez Pinecone, Gia mentioned that it might be fun to cover T. Rex's "The Slider."

Andy pulled out the trusty Tascam cassette 4-track and off they went. Their lives would never be the same.

The most enigmatic aggregation to grace the roster of Argyll Adventure Tree Records would have to be this loose collective of musical anarchists, who claim to be from Oshkosh, Wisconsin but whose "official" band biography has always been shrouded in secrecy.

Very little can be confirmed about the band, but what we do know is this: some group of people calling themselves "Crimson Crunch" assaulted the airwaves of Santa Cruz, California with their amateurish performance art on March 1, 1988. From what we can tell, the band included percussionists, a guitarist, a flautist, a synthesizer player, and someone with a primitive sampling keyboard. Floating in and around the musical mayhem were seemingly improvised spoken word performances of various lengths.

Few who heard the broadcast can talk about it, even now, some 14 years later. We did find one woman who agreed to go on the record with her reminiscence of that unbelievable night in broadcast history. Her name is Ann Onymous, and here is what she had to say:

It was like the Mercury Radio Theater's "War of the Worlds." That's the only thing I could compare it to. People were running around in a panic, screaming, hysterical, ripping off their clothes like they were at Clive Barker's last orgy. Grown women were reduced to babbling incoherently, frothing at the mouth and buying Quarter Pounders with Cheese. The men were even worse, flagellating themselves with whatever tree branches were at hand, singing the choruses to Journey songs over and over again, and printing up large quantities of "Bush in '92" bumper stickers.

Their only legacy is that much-bootlegged radio performance, which Argyll Adventure Tree Records chose to make available to a few collectors some 8 years after the incident.