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.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Tracks by chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

It’s been tough getting the 3 of us together lately. Work, family and other obligations have come up recently in a way that makes it difficult to get together on a consistent basis to play music.
This isn’t new, it happens regularly that we have to do other extracurricular work in order to make sure we hit the weekly releases we post to the site. Regardless of all the things that need to be done, we still strive to make sure we are regularly releasing material to keep the site updated with new and relative content for all of you to enjoy.

However, a couple of weeks ago, we managed to get together for a great jam session in Neil’s attic for the first time in weeks. We didn’t have time to fully set up all the recording equipment as we normally try to do, however, we set up a single microphone in a sort of “Return of the Lonely Microphone” session. Funk E Jazz was one of the pieces that came from this session.

If I remember correctly, Jeremy came up with the motive here and we just kind of went with it. I really dig the very Medeski, Martin and Wood kind of sound that came from this jam. It really felt good to jam together in a full room jam again.

Hope you all enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed playing it!

Funk E Jazz by chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Working on some of the ideas for our most recent project has required a lot of focus on very dark progressions a lot of really heavy sounds. So, just as a light diversion, I wanted to write something a brighter and more lighthearted.

To be honest, I didn’t really start with any idea in particular. I’ve been listening to a lot of Faunt’s work lately and am enamored with their “video game”-style production sounds. I love how lighthearted everything sounds, even though their lyrical content may be focusing on some intense subject matter. It makes listening to a sad song a happy experience.

So basically, that’s where I started and I just played around the most lighthearted sounds I could find in my collection and just assembled them together in a fun way.

Primarily utilizing bouncy electro sounds, it has a lot of 8-bit video game type sounds in there and kept the heavy beats far away this time to just keep the whole thing lighthearted as a whole.

Promise by chilljam.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.