Originally released on Khalija Records in December 2009, this album marks the proper beginning of my ongoing collaborative relationship with Sam Jones, which is certainly the single most fruitful musical partnership I’ve enjoyed so far. Although we’d played together in a few different situations for a few years before this, in the summer of 2009 we finally decided to do some recording, just the two of us.
For the period of about a month, we met up most nights and jammed, first at Sam’s house, then at various other spaces, some of them proper venues, some of them...not. I had been feeling completely fed up with the computer as an instrument, and hadn’t yet gone down the modular synth slip n slide, so I rigged up a feedback mixer situation and used that as my instrument for these jams. I used a Behringer Eurorack mixer that had been sitting in my closet gathering dust; it had individual outputs for each channel and a master effects bus with a collection of just awful built-in effects, but what could be more perfect for making horrible noises? I also had some contact mics and a set of walkie-talkies that I would use to make feedback while walking around the space. I didn’t use any effects other than a dead-simple reverb. Sam played 6 and 12 string electric guitar & bass, with his pedalboard, which was much smaller than it is now, though still mighty.
At the end of our jamming month, we’d ended up with an archive of recordings from all the sessions, which Sam had recorded as professionally as we were capable of managing back then. We edited them for length, and ended up with the album here, six improvisations, as well as the following album, live at calarts. We felt the CalArts session was concise enough that it should be left as its own thing, while the tracks collected here come from a variety of different spaces. If memory serves, they were:
-Sam’s bathroom (I set my mixer and amp up in the shower)
-Pehrspace
-The orchestra room at Cal State Northridge
-One other place? I guess memory doesn’t serve so well.
The track titles are the dates when the jams were recorded. We did one other session at Dublab, recorded live on air as a part of Khalija’s Decay Fest series of drone concerts. Unfortunately Dublab lost the recordings of that whole session, so we were unable to include anything from that performance.
The cover photo was taken by Chas Crandon, who was present at several of the recording sessions.
For the period of about a month, we met up most nights and jammed, first at Sam’s house, then at various other spaces, some of them proper venues, some of them...not. I had been feeling completely fed up with the computer as an instrument, and hadn’t yet gone down the modular synth slip n slide, so I rigged up a feedback mixer situation and used that as my instrument for these jams. I used a Behringer Eurorack mixer that had been sitting in my closet gathering dust; it had individual outputs for each channel and a master effects bus with a collection of just awful built-in effects, but what could be more perfect for making horrible noises? I also had some contact mics and a set of walkie-talkies that I would use to make feedback while walking around the space. I didn’t use any effects other than a dead-simple reverb. Sam played 6 and 12 string electric guitar & bass, with his pedalboard, which was much smaller than it is now, though still mighty.
At the end of our jamming month, we’d ended up with an archive of recordings from all the sessions, which Sam had recorded as professionally as we were capable of managing back then. We edited them for length, and ended up with the album here, six improvisations, as well as the following album, live at calarts. We felt the CalArts session was concise enough that it should be left as its own thing, while the tracks collected here come from a variety of different spaces. If memory serves, they were:
-Sam’s bathroom (I set my mixer and amp up in the shower)
-Pehrspace
-The orchestra room at Cal State Northridge
-One other place? I guess memory doesn’t serve so well.
The track titles are the dates when the jams were recorded. We did one other session at Dublab, recorded live on air as a part of Khalija’s Decay Fest series of drone concerts. Unfortunately Dublab lost the recordings of that whole session, so we were unable to include anything from that performance.
The cover photo was taken by Chas Crandon, who was present at several of the recording sessions.