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Tracks was the first album that we did that I really felt was really cohesive and solid from beginning to end. Done during the period of time while Cory Goodwin was still playing with us regularly, you can really hear a lot of Cory’s amazing and crazy sonic experiments. I also heavily used an awesome effects pedal on my voice and played around with odd ways to warp the sound of my voice. I often remember times where Cory, Neil and Jeremy would somehow find just the perfect mixture of sound textures in a way where I’d just have to stop and listen.

As to lyrics during this period, many of the songs didn’t have them. I’d just make something up off the top of my head and go with it. At first, I was just jamming out vocalizations, making crazy sounds and things. Just using vocals for additional instrumentation and having fun with it. Sometimes, I’d get ideas going in my head and maybe come up with a story or a scene and just describe it as it ran through my head at the time.

This way of singing led to Track 5, which was the first semi-solid song we really did. It was initially dubbed, “The Song”, because it was the only thing we felt we could come even relatively close to repeating more than once.

We were also playing out occasionally during this period, sometimes utilizing motives and ideas from these songs. We’ve never really done a song the same way twice, but often during this time, we figured out how to start off a song with a certain progression and then take the journey from there.
Usually this would lead us to very different places by the end of the songs.

I still remember the first show we tried, we actually played Track 5 (“The Song”) several times because so few people were there during the first performance that we felt we should play it again after people actually showed up.
I love Track 3 from this album as well, which we often referred to as the “Snow Ballad”. It’s a very sweet ballad with a slow pace. Something born in Neil’s attic on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Tracks Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

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Explore the album, Space Explorer, for free this week.

Space Explorer was the album that Ryan, Jeremy and Neil put together right before I joined the project so I have very little to say as to the album’s creative process. However, I do remember the day Jeremy came to the session with the CDs to hand out to everyone. I was very new to the project and was still trying to figure out exactly how I fit in. I think I was bringing in a different instrument to try just about every week at the time.

During this period of time, every session was essentially a set of very, very long jams that would meander from one style of music to another. I know Neil’s mentioned that it wouldn’t be unheard of that they would jam constantly for 45 minutes or more at a time! Often the sessions were just explorations in sound. We were just coming up with some of the craziest sounds we could make with the instruments we had. Thankfully, we had quite a few neat toys to alter sound in a ton of strange and interesting ways. Most notable on this recording in particular was Ryan’s bass and the giant effects processor that he was using at the time to come up with different ways of altering bass guitar sounds. I really love a lot of the crazy slides he coaxes out his bass on this recording.

Fun times with exploration.
Check it out.

To download the album:
1 Go to the Space Explorer Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

(more…)