As keen readers of this blog would know (if there were any), this time last year Lucas and I drove out to Laughlin to visit his dad and do some work in Bullhead City, with digressions into Chino, Joshua Tree, Twentynine Palms, Oatman and basically anything else planted on the long stretch of the 10 east of San Bernardino.
It rained nearly the entire trip, so in between thatching roofs and haunting caves we naturally found time to mess around on a couple guitars. By the end of our stay we had amassed hours of aimless guitar wanderings to match our peregrinations across the countryside.

My intent from the outset was to turn our lengthy recordings into concise songs. The end result strikes a curious dialectic: on the one hand, the restriction of our discursive, open-ended improvisations into something resembling traditional song forms feels like a forced imposition of hierarchical structure, but on the other I just really wanted to write some real songs again after spending so long in the wilds of junk noise.
When we first recorded I was inspired primarily by the freewheeling, woodwind-laden folk of early Joni Mitchell or Van Morrison circa Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece or even Comus as well as the beaded curtain reveries of Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby or Pharoah Sanders. My original intent was to overdub winds, keyboards, a rhythm section and any number of other instruments to create a “full band” sound but I ended up keeping things pretty minimalist: after tracking drums and bass for nearly every song on the album, I pared things down and drums made it onto only one song in the end. If it’s starting to sound like I treated this material as something tossed-off or underthought, that’s by design: considering the original tracks were records of spontaneous musical creativity, it felt dishonest to spend too much fussing over how these things could be “perfected.”
Half of the tracks began as duets on guitar with Lucas while the other half were recorded by me alone. The former largely speak to Lucas’ developing interest in country music and feature relatively straightforward harmony and arrangements, as in “Sunflower,” “Dead End,” and “The Bridge,” which I’d like to dedicate to him specifically.
The songs which began with only my playing tend to fall into more complex forms, like “A Song for Someone” or “Job Eats Them Raw, with the Dogs,” both of which juxtapose simple repeated lines over shifting chromatic backgrounds to give shape to constantly evolving harmonies, a technique I used to rely on often with Those Darn Gnomes, and inspired by Deleuze’s writing on baroque music in The Fold:
the Baroque universe witnesses the blurring of its melodic lines, but what it appears to lose it also regains in and through harmony. Confronted by the power of dissonance, it discovers a florescence of extraordinary accords, at a distance, that are resolved in a chosen world, even at the cost of damnation. … In its turn harmony goes through a crisis that leads to a broadened chromatic scale, to an emancipation of dissonance or of unresolved accords, accords not brought back to a tonality.
The Fold 81-82
But the distinction between my solo improvisations and those recorded with Lucas is largely arbitrary: “Snakes,” my long-overdue recap of Executioner’s Mask’s Spring 2022 tour, is probably the most conventional song on the record and was recorded entirely solo, while a song like “Sunflower” which we recorded together takes the form of a meandering ambient pseudo-country odyssey.
My music has always functioned as a sort of travelogue, a collection of snapshots documenting specific time spent in specific places, from a week in Scappoose, Oregon to a month hitchhiking in semis down across Nevada or visiting a BAPS temple in Chino to the first week I spent with my future in-laws. In The Machinic Unconscious Guattari declares “new concrete operators” such as refrains “will precisely have a function of cross times and spaces, insides and outsides, and the subjects and objects of the capitalistic universe. They will not manufacture time and space ‘in general,’ but this time and this space lived by a particular assemblage in a particular context which is ecological, ethological, economic, social, political, etc.” (p. 105). I’ve always been proudest of the art I’ve made which I feel maintains its identity through a strong sense of place. In rewriting our recordings into quote-unquote real songs I tried to preserve a certain lyrical and musical specificity and honor the contexts in which the recordings came to be. Of course, to quote The Fold again, “music is in fact not without ambiguity — especially since the Renaissance — because it is at once the intellectual love of an order and a measure beyond the senses, and an affective pleasure that derives from bodily vibrations. Furthermore, it is at once the horizontal melody that endlessly develops all of its lines in extensions, and the vertical harmony that establishes the inner spiritual unity or the summit, but it is impossible to know where the one ends and the other begins” (pp. 127-128).
I was originally planning on calling the album Laughlin Sonata (after Ives — anyone remember that Those Darn Gnomes song riffing on that one? No? okay) but ended up singing on every track save one. The end result draws on plenty of other sources, from vague inspirations to direct cut-ups, incorporating anything from Neil Young to Fantastic Planet, Eugène Ysaÿe to Brian Evenson, Sam Pink to the Smashing Pumpkins, Schatten to Shelley’s “Love Philosophy,” Hannah’s favorite poem which back when we first started dating I painted for her in bat’s blood.
The album artwork incorporates John Martin’s Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium (from his paintings for Paradise Lost, with which of course I have a long history) and El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz, again after The Fold. Deleuze writes “among the apparently Baroque painters, Tintoretto and El Greco shine, and are incomparable” while highlighting their shared trait, “the Baroque contribution par excellence”:
“…a world with only two floors, separated by a fold that echoes itself. Arching from the two sides according to a different order. It expresses, as we shall see, the transformation of the cosmos into a ‘mundus.’ […] The Burial of Count Orgaz is, for instance, divided in two by a horizontal line. On the bottom bodies are pressed leaning against each other, while above a soul rises, along a thin fold, attended by saintly monads, each with its own spontaneity.”
The Fold pp. 29-30
…more on the bicameral folding of floors to come, but in the meantime the rest, of course, is donkeys.
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