I’m back from the desert with some new (old) songs.

After recording the first improvised sessions which would become Laughlin Cantate, Lucas gave the same material his own spin in a new band with Roger called Time of the Ork. In the interest of further mutation and cross-pollination, Recantate incorporates Time of the Ork’s versions of the songs with my recordings plus new material to create something new: “The Bridge” gets a chance to sprawl into dirty pseudo-psychedelia, “Dead End” pulses with new life and “Job Eats Them Raw, with the Dogs” manages to expand on the atmosphere while shortening its runtime.

While we were on the road Hannah told me she never feels more American than driving long distances across the country. The first book I cracked open on getting home was Baudrillard’s America, his travelogue of the “sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity” we call this country. The very first page immediately transported me back to the start of our trip, driving north from El Paso to the Carlsbad Caverns:

Nostalgia born of the immensity of the Texan hills and the sierras of New Mexico: gliding down the freeway, smash hits on the Chrysler stereo, heat wave. Snapshots aren’t enough. We’d need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the unbearable heat and the music. We’d have to replay it all from end to end at home in darkened room, rediscover the magic of the freeways and the distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed and live it all again on the video at home in real time, not simply for the pleasure of remembering but because the fascination of senseless repetition is already present in the abstraction of the ourney. The unfolding of the desert is infinitely close to the timelessness of film…

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