Made in the fall/winter of 2009/2010, this album is the oldest thing on this site, which is not to say it’s my oldest music - rather it’s the oldest music that I both own the publishing rights to, and that I’m also willing to share with the world at large.
I think House Of Ash might have taken, for better or worse, the longest amount of time it’s ever taken for me to finish a solo album from initial conception to mastering. I began this in mid-October of 2009, and finished it sometime in the spring of 2010, finally being mastered that June. I was exiting, for the first time, the phase of my interest in “beats”, and trying to play guitar more after a hiatus of a couple years. I was also listening to a lot of metal at the time, and re-reading House Of Leaves (hence the album title, along with most of the track names). It might seem a bit funny that this is the album I’ve so far spent the most time working on - it’s not very obviously complex, and seems kind of amateurish in places, but for whatever reason, I felt it needed to be tweaked quite a bit before calling it done. I still like it, despite its flaws, and am finding myself these days (early 2020) in a vaguely similar headspace to this...so the time felt right to add it here.
I recorded all of this myself, in the garage where I was living at the time - I bought a Sunn amp specifically for the project, and really do regret selling it afterwards. The Sunn was complemented by the Marshall I already had, and if my memory serves, I only used my matte black Gibson Les Paul for the guitar parts (none of my other guitars would have been metal enough). Effects-wise, it’s all Boss, baby - RV-5, MT-2, DD-3, maybe some DS-1? There’s a little Juno-6 here and there, which I’d been lent by the generous Tim Clark, but other than that I made a point to source everything from a guitar or my voice. The exceptions to that would be the bass synth on The Mother Of All Strays, which is just a sine wave from a Reaktor patch, along with the piano on that same track, which was played by Ethan Braun on his baby grand. Oh, and some of the noises on A Scream, A Howl, A Roar are a goat, but most of it’s me.
It would have all been recorded with inexpensive Røde and Shure mics, into a MOTU interface. It was eventually mastered by Daniel Blum in San Francisco, California. The cover art is a photo by Michael Keusch, in Bucharest, Romania, with text laid out by Annelise Baer.
I think House Of Ash might have taken, for better or worse, the longest amount of time it’s ever taken for me to finish a solo album from initial conception to mastering. I began this in mid-October of 2009, and finished it sometime in the spring of 2010, finally being mastered that June. I was exiting, for the first time, the phase of my interest in “beats”, and trying to play guitar more after a hiatus of a couple years. I was also listening to a lot of metal at the time, and re-reading House Of Leaves (hence the album title, along with most of the track names). It might seem a bit funny that this is the album I’ve so far spent the most time working on - it’s not very obviously complex, and seems kind of amateurish in places, but for whatever reason, I felt it needed to be tweaked quite a bit before calling it done. I still like it, despite its flaws, and am finding myself these days (early 2020) in a vaguely similar headspace to this...so the time felt right to add it here.
I recorded all of this myself, in the garage where I was living at the time - I bought a Sunn amp specifically for the project, and really do regret selling it afterwards. The Sunn was complemented by the Marshall I already had, and if my memory serves, I only used my matte black Gibson Les Paul for the guitar parts (none of my other guitars would have been metal enough). Effects-wise, it’s all Boss, baby - RV-5, MT-2, DD-3, maybe some DS-1? There’s a little Juno-6 here and there, which I’d been lent by the generous Tim Clark, but other than that I made a point to source everything from a guitar or my voice. The exceptions to that would be the bass synth on The Mother Of All Strays, which is just a sine wave from a Reaktor patch, along with the piano on that same track, which was played by Ethan Braun on his baby grand. Oh, and some of the noises on A Scream, A Howl, A Roar are a goat, but most of it’s me.
It would have all been recorded with inexpensive Røde and Shure mics, into a MOTU interface. It was eventually mastered by Daniel Blum in San Francisco, California. The cover art is a photo by Michael Keusch, in Bucharest, Romania, with text laid out by Annelise Baer.