well under way.

Well, we had a pretty great long weekend tracking - although we didn't get as many songs done as we would have liked (shocker), we're quite happy with the initial results. We'll be working on mixing and overdubs in the coming weeks, and we may have another major tracking session coming up soon. And we'll probably be posting some rough mixes and recording details here for you any day now - in the meantime, you'll have to make do with these photos and a bit of commentary...


















The patchbay and some gear. this is our first major effort on our own, and things can get complicated...


















But with deep thinkers like James on the job we always make it through.


















Meanwhile, Clay and Ramon get their jam on. With limited time, we tried to stay on task as much as possible, so we didn't produce the percentage of random improvisations that we normally might. But these two will always find a moment to screw around. Who would have guessed?

Keep an eye out for more to come soon...

what does it take to make a record?

As musicians and music fans, of course, this is a question we've pondered at great length, but we wouldn't presume to offer a definitive answer. After all, great records have been made with little more than a four-track and an idea, while others have required many months and untold quantities of self-obsession to create. Some might even argue that whiffle-ball is an essential recording tool, though we prefer ping-pong.

Well, we're not going to do it quite the way anybody else has, but we're getting ready to give it a shot. We'll be holed up all weekend getting started on our next recording project, and we'll be doing all of it ourselves, at least at this stage. We're not expecting it to be brilliant, but we're going to try to make it as good as we can - wish us luck, and look for regular updates on our progress here.

To give you a taste of what we'll be doing, here are a couple of improvisations recorded under similar but somewhat more casual circumstances at the same place we'll be working this weekend. Both of them feature guest appearances from our friend Matt Glagola, of Liverhearts fame (by the way, if you want to see a band blog that's cooler than ours but even less frequently updated, check theirs out).

untitled 11.

untitled 8.

Bonus points if you can guess where we did the recording (and no, it's not the place pictured here - double bonus points if you can identify that location).