November 11, 2014

Do you wonder about what is happening when we say that we are “recording” and then months later we have not put any recorded music into the air for anyone to hear? We sort of care and we sort of don’t care, about time. The truth is that when I have said we are “recording” what I have meant is that we are making sounds, and these either are etched in a permanent form onto a tape or a hard drive or they are not. Over recent months the sounds have been etched mostly into our minds and into the kinesthetic memory of our limbs, and we return to our instruments daily or weekly and reproduce the sounds again for ourselves in the privacy of our own attentions. We performed these sounds and songs on three dates throughout October here in Brooklyn at Union Pool and it felt like a process of tracing the sounds into space; we could feel the quality of attention exposed by the three different audiences who came to the three nights of our shows and these qualities were distinct. I guess it really did feel like a form of recording, letting the sounds out into listeners’ sphere of hearing and allowing them to be picked up by these listeners’ memories. We are curious what was recorded. It felt as though we could sense the various qualities of receptivity in the different evenings, the degree of fidelity resulting from shifting factors. One night the sound system had been blown out by a hard core show the night before and one might have noticed an phantom in the ambient space. In about a month we will perform with our material again, after having played with it in private some more. It changes and expands when we play with it, in private or in public. During the last show at Union Pool we could both feel the pliability of our materials as we were touching them, we both felt the sounds starting to stretch and expand as we were handling them together and passing them back and forth. Melissa said that while we were performing she heard a guy behind her say, “They’re jamming…I heard The Blow jamming.” Yes we are jamming.