it's alive.

Though the cost of the operation is to be forever resented, my reel-to-reel recorder has been brought back to the land of the living, to the elation of the general populous.

I originally purchased the tape recorder during the summer of 2004 (the original Bummer Summer, for those in the know), when songs were running wild and I needed desperately to document each sighting. I'd also procured an incredibly nice electric piano from my friend Kelley who needed a place to store it for the summer, so much of the aforementioned sightings involved me attempting to play things on an instrument I know very little about.

A couple songs that evolved from this era are "Lifeboat Violin" and "The Fly," both of which are on my .mac page. Most everything else I'd totally forgotten about. It had been an infuriating year and a half knowing there were songs sleeping in this AKAI sarcophagus with no reasonable means of rousing them due to a broken motor.

To be totally candid, a great majority of these forgotten "jems" were recorded while I was drunk after a long night of work at Legal Seafood. They're also not quite the jems that a year and a half of mythologizing had led me to believe they were, but I'm nonetheless always fascinated to hear my older recordings and see what things about my process have changed or remained the same. I guess I weigh out the work of actual recording artists in much the same way. Growth has always interested me. There seems to be a fair amount of really nice instincts I had initially that I've buried, and also a lot of pretentious inventions that deserved that fate. Raises the question: is growth really growth?

Most of the songs on my tapes are very small fragments that seem too devoid of context to make any sense, but a few are decent. "Angel Post" is the first real piano-based song I've written, and I still sorta like the very elementary melody it has. I was most interested in this character/confessional song about an old west pastor whose family all died during the process of building a chapel, all of which is of course chalked up to the wisdom of God. Not my outlook on things at all, hence it being a character song. I'm not sure how long it is, as there's no clock/timer mechanism on the reel-to-reel, but I think it must be around 12-15 minutes long, which is pretty crazy considering it was entirely improvised, and most of it involves lyrics (though, to be fair, there are some non-rhyming verses in there).

I don't have splicing tape. In a notorious incident dating back two years, cranberry juice found its way onto the recorder and soaked my tape. Thankfully, this didn't destroy anything, but it did make the tape sticky, and eventually caused it to snap in three different places. Not a big deal for tape like this, since it can be spliced together. Cue first sentence in this paragraph. Until that happens, my apartment will continue to be a hi-fi jungle, lengths of audio tape dangling from my cabinets like vines in an attempt at organizing them into some kind of order. I can already see this being something that never gets amended.