Monday, May 1, 2017

The story of Spooky Jets At A Distance


In 2015 Earwig was hard at work on our most experimental, frustrating album yet and I had pinned my hopes to its release. That album, ”Pause For The Jets”, was based around my experience a few years earlier when I was hospitalized due to complications from a life-threatening illness.  While I wouldn't wish that on anyone, I wouldn't trade that time either. Being alone in my mind for so long was an experience that changed my life. While I was sick I was taking a slew of perception-altering prescription pharmaceuticals I kept a journal that tracked my wild dream-world adventures through parallel dimensions in search of the “Enigma Guitar” and lost love. Every night was a new adventure. The continuing storyline from those dreams was filled with bizarre intrigues, mad musical battles and a cast of fantastic characters. That journal provided the basis for my unfinished novel “My Own Secret Service”. Meanwhile mixing the Earwig record took way longer than I had anticipated and I started to sink into depression. Often when I'm working on a new project that gets hung-up, that's the way it goes. For better or for worse everything is pulling me toward a bright-white vanishing point on the horizon and that's all I can see. I needed the Earwig album mixes to be finished so that I could move on. Frustrated by the delays and having no completed songs to send to my friends, I had the idea to record a quick and dirty solo version. On the night of the September Blood Moon I set up minimal gear in my bedroom and recorded each song in one pass using just an old acoustic guitar and a single microphone. These takes turned out stark, rough and un-produced. I wasn't interested in the settings and levels and because of that attitude these versions turned out very immediate and personal in a lo-fi sort of way. You can hear technical mistakes but these's a lot more burning beneath the surface. It's a very intimate personal version of the record. I'm singing directly to you with no reservations. I think that with this alternate version of the album the songs take on new character and reveal new meanings that are semi-obscured by the full album's production. I live in an amazing secluded spot deep in the woods. That night I also recorded the crickets and other night noises outside in my yard and blended those sounds in with the final mixes. These recordings were not intended to make it beyond the ears of a few close friends but I've decided to release it as my first solo album. This is the very same unmastered, untouched, unchanged version that I recorded that night. There is a theory from Einstein regarding non-local entanglement called “Spooky Action at a Distance”. This solo record is relative to that theory and stands alone as a distant, affected super-interpretation of Earwig's album. Spooky Jets at a Distance, nine songs about obsession and entanglement…an intimate, ethereal, solo-acoustic version of the Earwig album “Pause For The Jets”.