Released on the fifth anniversary of the first recordings (heraclitusakimbo.bandcamp.com/album/a-part-of-my-inheritance) I did with this project.

When I brought back some of my father's gear from Manitoba after his funeral, I started mucking about with the pedals. I couldn't do anything satisfying with his guitar plugged into the loop pedal I was trying to figure out, so I went to the closet and dug out the Concertmate-500 (the Radio Shack version of the Casio SK-1) I'd bought at a pawn shop a decade before and set it on the floor next to my bed. Plinking and plunking away, adding the other pedals that I had brought back or had laying around, something interesting started to emerge. The next day, I set things up more deliberately on my organ bench, and started thinking seriously about how the sounds from the keyboard and the various pedals interacted with each other.

I plugged in my portable recorder and started droning away, and then I copied everything to my computer and tried mixing different drones together. Once there were a couple sounds playing off each other, soundwaves complementing and interfering with each other in really cool ways, I felt like I had something. I'd started recording stuff on Thursday, and started tinkering with it in Audacity over the weekend, and on Monday I posted what I had done as a ridiculously long album.

My goal with this re-visitation is to both re-create and re-contextualize those recordings, to step back into the process, and to bounce it off some of the things I'm more typically doing now.

With the "May 28" tracks, I re-created (as much as I could) the rig I used in making the original album, and tried to create sounds using the same approach and limitations. In contrast, the "Re-variation + Variations" tracks use some of the original, unmixed drones I recorded for the first album, but here I have run them through some of my newer pedals in a much more complicated signal chain. The live dub of "Dancing in the Sun" inverts the process I undertook in treating one of my father's recordings: the 2015 version was entirely done in Audacity (mostly with Paulstretching) so for the 2020 redux I did the opposite and manipulated the song live through my pedals, with no after-the-fact adjustments except for some compression and volume boost.

While doing this, I have had many thoughts for the kindnesses shown me along the way, many gestures that meant that that original album was more than the one-off curiosity it could have been. Many thanks to all those that gave encouragement, loaned gear, asked me to play shows, came to shows, bought merch, hung out and so on.