So...I recorded an EP.
Actually, that's not strictly true. I don't know if I recorded an album or an EP. It's short--just four songs--but it's a longish sort of short: a bit over half an hour. But all that's just an issue of length and semantics, and I won't bore you with it. In this day and age, it all seems a little arbitrary anyway. After all, Delirium Cordia, one of my favorite "albums," by a brilliant band called Fantomas, is just one song, over an hour long. (So is Dopesmoker, by Sleep, come to think of it.)
It's called Lo-Fi Lullabies.
I've always been a huge fan of feedback. I grew up on Nirvana, Sonic Youth and the rest of the early nineties Sub Pop catalogue. But I latched on to a different side of the sound than most of the other grunge kids: instead of Goo and Daydream Nation, I had a cassette tape of Sonic Youth's Kill Yr Idols/Confusion is Sex in my car: this skronky, dissonant, screaming, tribal ocean of Seattle-soaked indie, lo-fi noise. Sure, I loved "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and still firmly believe that In Utero is one of the pinnacles of the Mountains of Rock Music, but the song I played most (again, taped, in my battered Oldsmobile on the icy ride to school across the sparse, barren wasteland of Emptiness, Michigan) was "Endless, Nameless." Literally just eight glorious minutes of screaming, feedback, hammering drums, and destroyed instruments.
My love of noise was refined in 2006, when my parents got me Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music for Christmas (Listen on Spotify here). It's an hour of two heavily-layered, 100% stereo-panned tracks of guitar feedback. It's not for everyone, but it is, without a doubt, one of the corner bricks of my musical basement. (I recently bought a German First Pressing of the album on vinyl, and one of my life goals is to find an American First Pressing: the last ring of the those copies of the record is sealed, so the last ten seconds of feedback will repeat infinitely, unless you lift the needle and stop it. It's the holy grail for my record collection, and I'll find one someday.) Metal Machine Music was the same sort of sound coming from the angry Seattle kids I had glommed onto, but it was distilled, somehow. Refined. The Grunge scene was making visceral, powerful music, slashed with gouts of noise. Back on the East Coast, fifteen years before, Lou Reed was painting with abstract sound. And that was when I realized that noise could be elevated; could be art.
All the while, I was making music with my brother. I got my first guitar when I was fourteen: I'd asked for Neil Gaiman's Sandman series for Christmas.
(I was, and am, and always be, a die-hard, unrepentant fan of comic books, and Sandman is the ne plus ultra of the medium. My wonderful wife, Bird, completed my Sandman collection a few years ago. I cried when I had finished reading the last book.)
My brother, Sam, had gotten a drum set, and had been drumming by himself for a couple years. So, I asked my parents for comic books. Then Sam went and told them that I'd told him that what I really wanted was a guitar. I woke up Christmas morning ready for quiche and cocoa and a full day of reading. Instead, I found an acoustic guitar--a Yamaha dreadnought--under the tree. My brother tricked my parents into giving him a bandmate, but more than that, he gave me a second voice.
I recorded all of Lo-Fi Lullabies with that guitar. It feels right.
I was duped into buying a Peavy Raptor from a guitar shop: it was my first electric guitar, and I hated it. It was a total shred machine, replete with Floyd Rose whammy bar, locking nut, blah blah blah. I hated that fucking guitar. I wanted something I could beat on and abuse: I didn't want precision and frills. I wanted something dirty and noisy and rough. I sold the thing for more than I paid for it and used the money to buy an Epiphone G-400.
When Bird and I moved to Maine, I knew we wouldn't have space for the huge collection of amps and guitars I've accumulated over my life. I brought along nothing but those first two guitars, the acoustic and the SG.
In college, my brain exploded.
I discovered Zola Jesus, White Hills, Kyuss, Sleep. I discovered Neutral Milk Hotel. I got into the deep catalogue of Trent Reznor--if you dig past the Nine Inch Nails stuff, Reznor is actually a brilliant composer; NIN is great, but his soundtracks (with Atticus Ross) to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Social Network are transcendent. I discovered Tom Waits in college, and David Bowie. I discovered whole down-tempo genres where Tone was king, Stoner Rock, Lo-Fi, Doom Metal, Sludge, Noise, Ambient, Post-Rock...it was a fuzzy, floating rabbit hole to outer space, and at the end of the tunnel was SQURL. Three EPs, a live gig at Third Man Records, and the soundtrack to Only Lovers Left Alive. That was it. And all of it--all of it--was brilliant. Music composed of drones and harmonic feedback, woven together into a polyphonic river sometimes serene, sometimes disturbing, always beautiful.
Lo-Fi Lullabies is, despite all the music I've recorded over the past 12 years, my first album. It's built from strange brick. Stereophonic panning to create tension and draw out subtler sounds (thank you Lou), multi-layered harmonic feedback tracks mixed behind the melody to add ambience, repeating modes and motifs, guitar parts falling out of sync with each other only struggle back into harmony, three-part vocal harmonies, monastic chant. (As for so much else, I have to thank my Dad: he exposed me to so much strange, wonderful music when I was growing up. The Monks of Westminster Abbey, for example, an entire album of ethereal monks.) The first song on the album, "Prayer to Mary Part II and Part I" starts with a waltz. I play a floor fan, water-filled wine glasses, and an open-tuned pawnshop guitar as percussion instruments. The last song, "Witch Wings" incorporates a cigar box guitar that sounds like a sitar. Over the whole thing are the fingerprints of Folk, a genre I fell in love with five years ago. There are acoustic instrumentals, and two of the songs are inextricably tied to my (forthcoming, one day at a time) independent horror film Marlon.
And then there's Chaos Magick--there are sigils and aural rituals on this album--but Chaos Magick is an enormous tangle of a thing. I'll write about it someday, but what it means here is "witchy, ominous overtones and occasional mystic ambience," I think.
It's folk. It's Lo-Fi, and Ambient, and whatever you care to call it, it's that, too. I'm not positive how I'm going to release it yet, though it seems likely at this point that it will be up and available before Christmas, a small little independent release with a lot of dependence on word-of-mouth to help it out.
Bird has been incredibly supportive. She always is. Whether I want to make a movie, or write a novel, or record an album at our kitchen table, she's there, pushing me to finish things, and not to give up, and always, above all, to Make Good Art. (If you need a creative push, click that link. Neil Gaiman will change your life.)
So. I recorded an album. I'm going to be writing about it (and vlogging about it: Mariah tells me people don't read anymore, but as a writer and lover of words, I don't want to believe it) for the next couple months, in with the day-to-day blogs and updates. I like gear and stories about how music is made, so I'll probably get into that, too. I might make some instructional videos on how to play the songs (trust me, they won't break anyone's brain: I shunned shredding back then, and I sure as hell can't magically sweep-pick arpeggios now), and maybe some exploratory videos on feedback techniques.
My new Franklin Covey fountain pen, and the in-progress watercolor cover to Lo-Fi Lullabies Bird is working on.
In the meantime, I have stories on my hard drive and in notebooks scattered around the house that need attention. Writing this, I realized how much I missed making sentences. I just got a new fountain pen (on clearance, for a dollar), and I think it's high time I found out what fantastical lies it has hidden in its crisp black barrel.
In the meantime, here's a track from Lo-Fi Lullabies. I'll leave it here for awhile. I hope you like it. Either way, I'd love to know what you think.
--Max Peterson
Two days before Yule