Black mold took over the back closet. You gaffed up some tarps and tried not to think about it. The landlord's guy came over and broke the windows from the inside, like he'd been a squirrel trapped in the attic. After the hurricane blew through you could smell the ocean from the back porch.

Mixed a ten band hXc matinée every Sunday, watched the same three or four late Fellini joints over and over again, lived on the finest eats ever to pass thru a bulletproof glass aperture. At the laundromat skimming a stack of magazines, I was charmed to discover the phrase "il silenzio cosmico", used to characterize the conditions of i Laboratori Nazionali di Gran Sasso in Abruzzo, the largest underground particle physics research facility in the world, relatively insulated from cosmic rays by virtue of being situated beneath nearly a mile of sedimentary rock.

"Canzoni" was a straight out of central casting "tour tape", stitched together from odds and ends that didn't fit neatly into the "one big idea per side / keep it at least somewhat performable" mandate I was mostly sticking to at the time. The masters barely squeaked under the wire for an east coast run with Jason Anderson's Spare Death Icon – my ancient computer died in real time while I was rendering them and as a result I've never been able to fix what still sounds to me like some pretty crummy and ill advised two bus processing. The tour was a blast though and the tape came out on Jason's Gift Tapes imprint, one of my favorite labels of that era and one which I'm thrilled to have been a small part of. A few years later, a remastered LP was one of the first releases on Spectrum Spools, one of my favorite labels of an adjacent but already very different era and one which I'm equally jazzed about having gotten mixed up in.

For many years I never quite got what other people seemed to hear in this one, but at this point I've come around and can parse it as kind of a mirror universe take on the 2008-9 style that currently seems like the peak of the proj to me. Maybe it's somewhere I'd have ended up sooner if the early orientation of Bee Mask had been "all four track / no suitcase". If you're opening your mouth to tell me that there's some sort of lesson in there about not overthinking things, you can close it right back up; I don't intend to ever stop overthinking things.

There's a moment on side B that I think was supposed to be a reference to a particular Rauschenberg but by now I'm much too far removed from art school to say for sure. What I can attest with absolute confidence however is that side A begins with coughing because I heard "Sweet Leaf" playing in a gas station and thought "I should do that too."

Chris Madak
Philadelphia, PA, April 2023