The Cheetah

 

Tracks 1-8 were written and recorded at SOMA EMS with Chris Girard and Greg O’Keeffe in 2002.

Track 9 was recorded at The Wilco Loft in 2003

Tracks 10-12 were recorded at home

  1. Tectonics - A bizarre groove. The arpeggiated synth sound is the Aries Modular that I borrowed from John McEntire for a while along with the great ARP Sequencer. Chris played the weird chords and I was jamming along playing the sequencer manually at times.

  2. Ginny Wrapped In The Sun -Early experiments with using jazzier chords to write with. This song features the great Noel Kupersmith on upright bass and Rob Mazurek on cornet. It still sounds like someone should sing over it.

  3. Einladung - One of Chris’ signature finger picking tunes laced with upright bass and synths and clavinet.

  4. Catch That Martian - A theme for a Saturday afternoon cartoon. Lotsa bells and whistles here. The jet that screams by in the middle was recorded outside the door of the studio during the annual Chicago Air Show weekend in 2002.

  5. The Cheetah - Another classic Girard fingerpicking song that we tried to subvert whenever we could.

  6. Biarritz - This is the sound of the Crumar DS-2 where the “Sample and Hold” LFO is controlling the filter frequency. (Nerd talk continues for a bit here) A sample and hold circuit is supposed to produce a random level with each iteration, but the sample and hold on the Crumar DS-2 is a sequence that repeats. While technically not a true sample and hold waveform, the resulting pattern is pretty mesmerizing.

  7. Tardigrades - A theme for a detective show based in the 1990s. The sound in the middle that resembles crunching celery is actually a group of friends stomping on the ground put through a phase shifter. There I said it. We change time signatures and feels and everything in this tune.

  8. Roebling - This rolling three chord hammer-on pattern is pretty bad ass. Girard is one of those guys who plays all day for hours making up cool shit like this. I loved how the chords just never land anywhere, it just keeps going. The end builds up pretty nicely hearing it again for the first time in a while. Greg’s beat against Noels upright and Rob’s horn and the vibes sound good 20 years later.

  9. The Monster - This was all me at the Wilco loft in 2003ish. I had just gotten an RMI Rocksichord and recorded this great loop and augmented it with tons of Korg MS-20. I played the drums as a kind of unwitting tribute to Jaki Leibzeit.

  10. Marsella Rambla - Ah this track still delivers after all these years. Chris and I were mucking around with the software called “M” for the mac which was a probability based software sequencer and controlling Absynth with it. These narcotic chords were never played by a human, however lots around it was. That bridge section with the pick bass is such a cool moment to me.

  11. Soybot - I don’t know why we decided to take the piss out of Bob Geldof at the top but… The opening synthi chimey texture was the result of some max programming that would send realtime parameter changes, rhythmically to a Yamaha TX816, the same keyboard “engine” that produced the ubiquitous synth ballad keyboard sound from the 1980s. I had a DX7 in high school and was under its spell back then but now I had the opportunity to update my experience with this old piece of hardware. Is this even interesting to anyone? There’s banjo on this song too.

  12. rRan - Another, spookier result from messing with the TX816 and sending it sysex commands so it sounded like it was breaking. The strings at the end are inspired by the soundtrack to “Night Of The Hunter.” I thought it would be cool to try and screw up the sound as much as possible but still keep the musical info there.