A New Album, and When Does the Art Start
Today I’m happy to announce a new album from Inverse Room, my solo rock and roll project. It’s available on all the usual streaming services, but if you prefer, as I do, to own your music, you can buy a CD or high-quality digital files here on Bandcamp.
The Mystic Initiate Enjoys a Sunny Day
This album is the result of fifteen years of tinkering, which I did during and between other musical projects with friends—The Starry Mountain Sweetheart Band and The Bemus Point—and alongside my solo electronic music efforts. Every year or so I’d demo a new track, then put it in a folder on the computer, where it would wait to be finished.
In traditional rock recording, a “demo” refers to a casual take of a song, either tracked in the band’s practice space or in an inexpensive studio, without much concern for virtuosity or audio fidelity. A collection of demos usually serves as a rough sketch for an album, which would be recorded “for real” with a reputable producer and engineer.
But in an era when musicians can record their own music on the cheap, and make it sound pretty good, a demo can be something else. For me, it’s kind of a sonic Ship of Theseus—I just open the multitrack sketch I made and start replacing things, this time trying really hard to get each right. I’ve written previously about replacing old, poorly tracked acoustic drums; on these songs, I also replaced most of the vocals and some of the guitars, and added new keyboard sounds and hand percussion (recorded “for real” with a microphone in my small home studio). Though many of these songs have their origins a decade ago, much of what you hear on this album was recorded in the past six months.
“A Little Something”
Here’s the opening track of the album, “A Little Something.” This song exemplifies a favorite technique of mine in writing as well as in music—just trying something out, developing it, deciding which of the flaws are actual flaws and which are serendipitous features. The opening minute of the song derives from a quirk of the room I started writing it in—my computer was twenty feet away from the drum kit, so I set up the software session with a very long buffer in the beginning. I’d “roll tape,” then walk to the drums, put on my headphones, sit down, and wait for the cues I’d recorded on guitar and on a scratch vocal track. The resulting “empty” space was full of random room and instrument noise that I figured I’d delete when I mixed the song.
Instead, it reminded me of a favorite jazz recording, “Let the Juice Loose,” a Bill Evans tune performed live by the Gil Evans Orchestra at Sweet Basil in 1986. The recording plays on the listener’s sense of when the song actually begins. You hear the musicians getting comfortable, then, over a couple of minutes, gradually taking up the groove. There’s no countoff, no moment when the lights go up on the song—turns out, it began the moment the players picked up their instruments. You were listening to it all along. This is also a technique used to great effect in Louis Malle’s 1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street, which documents a rehearsal-style performance of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya in a crumbling theater. Its opening shows the performers out on the street in New York, making their way to the theater and entering. The film never announces that the perfomance itself is about to begin—it just does, reminding you that the preamble to the performance was also a performance.
In “A Little Something,” I decided to lean in to this effect, then dropped the track at the beginning of the album, to emphasize the sense of sound organizing itself into music. As for the lyrics, uh...they are from the point of view of some mind-controlling entity, entreating the listener to find secrets hidden in their own consciousness. I guess?
