1/4 tonne overhaul – 2013 — duo days

By eric on December 11, 2013 in Posts

nick: guitar, live reel to reel loops, field recordings, gardening
eric: drums, amplified percussion, loops, libraries
mark molnar: cello on ‘ulna nerve hoot’

recorded at Farm Red Orach by eric (two stereo mics)
Thanks to Mark Molnar for listening, uncovering, advising, encouraging and tweaking these recordings.

photo on cassette face andre guerette
Cover illustration – jeremy gordaneer
a.a + ulna nerve hoot
b.b

1/4 tonne drawing by Jeremy Gordaneer
Notes about this recording from Nick.
Soon after being asked to open for Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley for the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival in June of 2013 at Sala Rosa in Montreal, I lost the majority of the gear to which I was relying heavily on at the time to a break in of my then quickly dying truck. I had packed the back cab the night before I was leaving to work on my set in the country and covered it with scrap wood, fabrics and garbage to give the appearance that that’s all it was. The next morning I arrived at my truck to find a smashed out window and the contents of the back cab gone, aside from what I found trailed down the alley, the things that were too heavy to carry. Whoever carried the other things home had a non-lucrative bounty of analogue tape machines, a broken wind instrument, various small pedals, cables and a diary of writings from a recent residency I took part in on a ship in the arctic circle. Needless to say, the diary was a devastating loss, the rest, replaceable, somewhat. With the pending performance a few short weeks away, Eric gave me a call and offered to help me pull something together to which I was then completely unprepared for. We’d worked together quite a bit over the past few years and this was a great opportunity to workshop something new and somewhat impromptu. Days after the performance we decided it was best to record what we’d worked on. Eric thankfully took the reigns of the process and in a few hours we recorded the full set twice using two microphones and a Dictaphone receiver in a cabin close to Montreal. The set was made up of 2 compositional framework pieces that were improvised around cues. This recording process has now become one of my favourite ways to operate; having a finished body of music in an afternoon. Also, another favourite new way of approaching the recording process – handing the entire collection of bed tracks to another set of ears to extract the best parts and produce a record with it. Huge props to Mark Molner for both performing his subtle but deadly cello bits in Ulna Nerve Hoot and for editing/producing this release which gave grace to the abrasion and grit to the velvet.