Decomposure- North Carolina EP

Album Overview

Right now i'm trying to write about this little album i put together a few months ago in, you guessed it, North Carolina. The motivating impulse behind it was simple: go on vacation, write and record a new song each day, leave with an EP. And that's pretty much what happened, although i think a little more explanation is in order. But in the spirit of the album, i'm capping my writing time for this little overview at two hours. So, it's 8:37 now, let's see how this goes, starting now. And let's begin another sentence with a conjunction.

We should back up back up a bit: i've always been interested in the way limits affect the creative process. Actually, that's probably not true; i doubt i was considering art that conceptually back in elementary school. But still, before jumping into past albums i've always dedicated a bunch of time upfront to defining the fences the album inhabits - narrative, themes, sonic palette, song length, etc. But i was finishing up Hour 12 (the first song on the future Horizontal Lines B) and for a variety of uninteresting reasons, the track was taking an inordinately long time (four months) to complete. And at some point it occurred to me that i had never tried limiting the actual creation time for each song. In fact, over the years, many of the limits that i had imposed on myself had the effect of elongating the production process. i simmered on the thought for awhile, and long story short, i headed out with my wife in May to a little cottage in the Outer Banks with the intention of compiling an EP.

We arrived on Sunday night, and it was raining on Monday, so my wife and i mostly just hung out, read books and marvelled over the existence of Fox News. However, i did spend a few hours Monday evening combing through my badly-labeled library of field recordings for interesting sounds, but that was about it as far as productive time. Tuesday opened bright and clear, so Nicole headed off to the beach, and i stayed inside with my little 10" laptop, a basic toy keyboard and a few pieces of recording equipment and attempted to birth a song. That's essentially the week in a nutshell: i'd wake up at 10 am or so, do my morning thing, then work at getting the song written before 3 and the vocals recorded before 5. Around 5 o'clock, Nicole would return (in fact, you can hear her walking in just as i'm shaking a pepper grinder to finish off Saturday's recording session), and i'd try to finish as much of the editing and sequencing as possible before 7. Then we'd do things like a regular couple on vacation until midnight. If i still had stuff to finish, i'd give myself until about 3 in the morning, then get some sleep.

The fun of it was that i wasn't sure i could pull it off at all, or if i did, that i'd be happy with the end result. i've long equated work volume with quality - more time must mean better art, and less time means more shallow and childish, of course. And while i doubt i'll shake that completely loose anytime soon, i've also been realizing that this standard is not how i actually evaluate art made by other people; in fact, it has almost nothing to do with it. When i run through my internal 'music that has stayed with me for years' list, it's about where i was when i heard them (often alone), mental pictures and tones, a few fleeting points where the music and i seemed to mirror each other...it's a lot of unpredictable, intangible things that have nothing to do with bones or hooks or depth. The point isn't that i truly expect this little album to be anything like that for you, but that it's okay for me to allow myself to do something small, and not worry too much about whether people much smarter than me will decide they like it.

But i hope you do enjoy it; i certainly enjoyed creating it. It really was nice - for one week, i had a taste of what it would be like to make music as a day job. And though i of course wish it could continue, i'm trying to focus on being thankful for what i did get to do. Just don't be surprised if something like this happens again. i've been thinking of this as a one-shot tangent, but i also said the same thing about Humidity Patient Guide, and i wonder how many sideroads you can take before you're going somewhere entirely different...

Miscellany

-All the photographs used in the album art were taken by my wife during our vacation. She jokingly refers to them as 'all the fun you could have been having instead.'

-The percussion in Tuesday comes from a chopped up 2007 recording of myself popping plastic bags full of air.

-Wednesday incorporates an old recording of wind chimes, a reversed 'woo' inside a pedestrian tunnel from a visit to Vancouver in summer 2006, me chastising my dog as i'm recording the vocals, and a drummer from my church rehearsing a song completely unlike this.

-The song intro includes the original embarrassed humming i did next to my wife in the car on the way to NC so i wouldn't forget that keyboard bit.

-Thursday's country thumping includes a spatula hitting a chair, a handful of coins, venetian blinds, dog food and a pizza cutter, with bass provided by a beer bottle.

-During Friday, my dog skitters across the floor in pursuit of a ball every four bars, while the garbled audio hiccuping in the background throughout is from a weird moment when my wife's laptop began glitchily playing a C-Span healthcare debate, completely unprompted, all alone in our living room in the middle of the day.

-Friday's piano is a looped clip from a sketch of something i was working on for HLB before i left.

-One of the field recordings i skimmed through on Monday was a 174-minute recording of the 2006 Maple Syrup Festival in Elmira. About 12 minutes in, i walk past a teenage street drummer, who is absentmindedly playing a snare with brushes while talking to his friends. And that's where the 11-measure beat anchoring this song comes from. More than the beat itself, what makes the recording truly special is the snippets of conversation i can make out behind it: 'not a bad deal', 'i forgot about that' and especially 'that was my friend Terry who i hadn't seen since i cut his hair' for the win.

-'Brave New Pope' breaks the rules somewhat in that it was written several months before 'North Carolina,' then recorded long after vacation time was up, but it was recorded in a day, so it counts. Actually, the included version is the second 'final' version of 'Brave New Pope' - the original version was just a stripped-down session where i sat in my living room and played it live (yes, i own a piano now - thanks mom and dad). i was happy with it, and it was going to be in the album right up until the day i sent the album in for engineering, but then the idea for the current mix took over.

Oh, lost track of time, it's 10:48. Um, edits don't count.

Cheers, Caleb