recorded between 2010-11, originally slated for release as an lp for Leaving Records but i swapped it out at the last minute for ISHI.

album & first song titles (blatantly) stolen from robert hunter.

photo is a screencap from when i trolled boiler room by playing experimental music & text-to-voice broadcasting all the mean comments from the chat room during the LR showcase.

the a-side was written for a house show i threw on my 29th birthday and was performed at a moderate volume in my living room after the cops showed up following a particularly caustic & uncharacteristically lengthy rene hell set. icepick sequences drum on your skull while wormy counterpoint works it's way around your ankles. intensity intensifies with clipped white noise blasts & four-on-the-floor thumps, delay tails spilling over each other as the progression gets caught and tears itself loose over and over again, until it all falls apart around 10 minutes in. the pulsing clock is switched to a slow random gate, the envelopes opened & the worms become fog horns, the icepicks subway brakes. a tape echo in sound-on-sound mode spins along in the background, preserving a ghostly trace of the serene unease, melting it into a dream, referencing what happened last time around as voices surge and fade until the whole thing just grinds to a halt.

PICKING GRAPES is a stretch where you lie on your back and reach up with one hand, trying to make yourself as long as possible from fingertip to toe, like you are trying to pick a bunch of grapes that's just out of your reach. you really feel like you are getting taller right there on the floor as you try and separate each bone and muscle, letting the light inside. that's what this one sounds like to me, stretching and shimmering, lighting up like the neurons in our brains, tones stacking like vertebra.

SAVE ROOM is what usually happens when i try to make something serene. there is a safe feeling but it is undercut by rips and tears, dissonances, scraping fingers on the door, whisps of odd colored smoke curling through the light in stagnant air. i think this comes from not feeling safe as a child, finding comfort in chaos, these shimmering harmonic clusters are one of my ideal versions of ambient music in that it doesn't go anywhere but also you can't really THINK when you listen to it.

LOGGERHEAD is a kind of sea turtle. this is the image i see when i listen to this, sea turtles cutting through rich blue water and wavy green ribbons of seaweed, stately & sweet. aside from being really excited about ISHI when it was done, i probably shelved this record because in 2011 i was starting to think that making music with stringed instruments wasn't so cool anymore. of course this was a pretty dumb line of thought but it put me off them for a while. prior to modular & prior to moog i spent several years releasing STRING MUSIC, both solo & in various groups, influenced by incredible astral travelers like MV&EE, Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, No Neck Blues Band, The Tower Recordings, Spires that in the Sunset Rise, Jackie-O Motherfucker. this track features a cumbus saz, a turkish instrument that looks like a banjo with a broomstick for a neck, with a contact mic shoved under the bridge. i can't say that i really ever learned how to play the thing but sometimes understanding what you don't know is just enough to make something turn out alright, especially when you can just run it through a big muff. anyways i like how this one came out and how it sits on the tail of the album and i can't believe there was a time when i was afraid to put something, anything on an album.

thank YOU