NEW ALBUM RELEASE: Sonic Chaos

demos 1991–1997

Apr 06, 2023

I really treasure the demo tracks. There is an innocence about the lo-fi unprocessed sound that captivates me. Unlike the produced albums, I can feel the rawness and the hands-on sensibility. I happily spent hundreds of hours looking for albums, dropping the needle onto vinyl looking for sounds, manipulating sounds, and creating songs. I have a close relationship with this music—the process was very intimate, isolated, and personal. These were some of the best moments of my creative life.

In the beginning I had no idea what I wanted. All I knew is what I didn’t want.

The thought of being in a band didn’t interest me. I never enjoyed performing. Manipulating sound is what excited me and sparked my curiosity. I liked the idea of being a mad scientist holed up in the lab. If a sound resonated, I worked with it. If it didn’t… delete. By slowing down, reversing, playing with pitch, and altering directions of a given sample, happy accidents would rise from the grooves to the surface, revealing a sound means of expression.

When I was first learning how to use the sampler it was in a very rudimentary way. Sampling a recognizable riff and looping it. I found this practice to be extremely boring. As I moved forward I learned how to use the sampler as a tool for discovery. By the time I began making demos for Positive, I no longer sampled as a form of riff-lifting but as a way to create new and fresh sounds. My favorite sources to sample were live albums, mainly from the years 1968-1972. The rawness of the recordings and the spaces in between the songs are what interested my ears. The applause, shouts, whistles, tunings, and the rumbles of large rock venues to the claps, overheard conversations, and bottle clanks of the more intimate jazz settings is where the sonic gold was found. My creative ally was constraint. No overthinking. Rub two sounds together, if they complement each other wonderful, if not, try something else.

As Orson Welles famously said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” The demos for the first three albums were conceived and composed with two main pieces of gear: an Apple computer for sequencing and a Roland S-550 sampler.

The Roland S-550 with companion RGB monitor.

The Roland S-550 was a one-of-a-kind 12 bit sampler. Its bass rich crunchy sound was music to my ears. It had very limited storage. It contained two small banks of memory for a total of 28 seconds of total sample time. Each bank could be saved to a single floppy disc. Samples and guitars were limited to a measure or two at most due to size limitations. The one to two measure guitar parts were created with the idea of re-recording them in the studio. However, many times I chose the S-550 version. It just had a raw honest sound.

After months and months of playing around and feeling a bit frustrated, it happened—the magic week that defined the grassy knoll. It started with “Culture of Complaint” followed by “Less Than One” and then “Conversations With Julian Dexter.”

The process just started clicking. I was on to something, and it was exciting. Instrumental tracks with a pop-like structure, sampling for sonic effect not for sample recognition, multiple drum loops, heavy bass lines, hard pans, abrasive breaks seemingly coming out of nowhere yet somehow working—sonic chaos with shades of existential beauty. A mixture of rock, jazz, and classical instrumentation.

These tracks really spoke to me, and I was eager to push the ideas and concepts further. Out of curiosity—or maybe brazenly blind confidence—I decided to shop the music. I recorded the three tracks onto cassette tapes, designed the artwork, and mailed them out to labels whose music I liked. Within a few weeks I had positive responses from TVT, Emigre, SST, World Domination, and Nettwerk. That’ s another story for later.

The latest the grassy knoll album Sonic Chaos (demos 1991–1997) is out now! Streaming and download—free or name your price—only on Bandcamp.