This is the first in a series of singles I’ll be releasing periodically, created out of half-finished songs and samples locked away on an old hard drive. The title Revisionist History is a multi-tiered joke on my own musical abilities and the term itself, really I just want to have fun with this project and get better with structure before working on new Ghost Gloves material.

Download it here (2 tracks, 256kbps .mp3 files, 19.7mb .zip file). ◊

So here are some of my hip-hop producing efforts from around 4-5 years ago, originally for a collaboration between myself and my MC friend Erik but released here as intrumentals. At the time I wasn’t listening to much real hip-hop, but the project seemed like an obvious idea and a step forward from what I was already doing, and I banged out three very rough demo tracks within the first week out of excitement. From there I would come back to the project every so often and get really into it again for a few weeks at a time, and eventually these songs (and some more throwaways) were finished over the course of a year or so. The project slowly fizzled out as a lot of mine do, our interests were elsewhere and neither of us were particularly good at communicating what we were thinking or tapping into the same wavelength – essentially the whole point of collaboration. I was drawing a lot from early 90’s beats along with MF Doom, Prefuse73 and the like, whereas Erik seemed to want to channel Busdriver and Aesop Rock through Dead Prez and TI. No congruence there at all really. We gave it another go a year later, with me producing a song that was much more along his lines – not included here as it was stylistically something else entirely – but again nothing came into fruition. The friends that connected us were all disappearing and our lives were going in opposite directions, and we eventually lost touch completely. So these songs don’t encapsulate any hard feelings or failures for me; the epochs evaporating from each beat are of hangouts past in the sweltering summers of Virginia’s swamplands. I’ve collected my favorite tracks together here as an EP with some slight mastering and a few edits, honing it down to how I imagined it all those years ago.

Tracklist:
1. LSD5
2. Clever
3. Profit2
4. Profit
5. Build4

Download it here (5 tracks, 256kbps .mp3 files, 39mb .zip file). ◊

Recently I’ve been intuiting my way around Cubase in order to finish some songs that my good friend Ryan and I started recording when we lived together over two years ago. We entitled the project Psychic Grooming, an inside joke swiped from a local strip mall as well as a nod to the etheral nature of collaboration. At the time our creative process was to take turns recording guitar riffs onto either a very cheap used BOSS sequencer I bought from Guitar Center or a two-pedal LoopStation of Ryan’s; then looping the best takes and layering them alongside drum samples procured from our drastically-overlapping record collections. Sort of our take on post-rock by way of Washington D.C., Chicago, Norway, and southern California.

Various limitations in our recording equipment and collective attention spans kept us from completing anything and our collaborations sat there, collecting bit rot amidst dramatic moves and changes in both our lives, until I recently rediscovered the materials and began to see something already there that I couldn’t really envision two years ago. The various loops were in need of a little polish and some serious composing, but there was enough material for three songs – a lightweight but solid EP – and I made a promise to myself that I’d finish the project, at least attempt to nurture that vision with the benefit of hindsight, and without losing too much of what those collaborations encapsulate.

So far I’m really excited with how it’s turning out, and the only serious hurdle has been figuring out how to structure the disparate pieces into fluid songs. My music skills always leaned more towards tweaking the moving parts than seeing the entire machine at play, so it’s a challenge I’m used to but one I’ve never fully confronted – it’s the reason I don’t have that much to show for my many years spent learning how to create music. So in that regard, the name Psychic Grooming is somewhat literal for me; giving me a chance to tend to my own mental limitations and possibly see beyond them, even if for only a brief moment. ◊