Para quem acompanha as páginas do TBTCI, o duo Jeremiah Foundation de Wichita no Kansas, não vai se tratar de nenhuma surpresa.
A eletrônica freak experimental dos caras continua a gerar preciosos trabalhos, caso do mais recente, "Longevity".
A eletrônica freak experimental dos caras continua a gerar preciosos trabalhos, caso do mais recente, "Longevity".
Acidentalmente os caras por vozes evocam fantasmas esquecidos do Wolfgang Press e Cabaret Voltaire, todavia o mix de outrora onde, no caldeirão tem espaço para fritações gazers, experimentos krautianos dentre outras esquisitices, tudo em doses não lineares.
"Longevity" é talvez o trabalho mais intenso e denso de Jason e Justin, e para melhor entender os segredos e curiosidades do álbum, os caras, a pedido do TBTCI, explicam em detalhes quase sórdidos, as sete canções, ou melhor, os sete exercícios sonoros do disco.
Música para dançar com o cérebro.
"Longevity" é talvez o trabalho mais intenso e denso de Jason e Justin, e para melhor entender os segredos e curiosidades do álbum, os caras, a pedido do TBTCI, explicam em detalhes quase sórdidos, as sete canções, ou melhor, os sete exercícios sonoros do disco.
Música para dançar com o cérebro.
***** Interview with JEremiah Foundation *****
This album is properly named in a lot of ways. My first thought on calling the album 'longevity' because we have been a band for about 18 years and have seen a lot of bands come and go in our local music seen in Wichita, Ks.. A lot of that is because we are brothers and we just do what we love without pressure of making it a living, but we also take our music writing and performances very serious. Music is what we do and who we are. It took time for us to figure that out and I think it was a lesson that I have been learning from a friend of mine in the Record Label Industry. Phillip Kim once told me that being a professional musician or a group, that he would look into, would be a person or group that has perseverance and longevity. Looking back it took time for us to build our sound and we have a better idea of who we are. Our songs on this album are also songs that took time for us to write. Many of the songs were parts from other songs, songs that didn't work or just wasn't the write time for them and now is that time. We hope you enjoy and get some kind of inspiration from this play by play of 'longevity'.
Android - Is the first song written by Jason for this recording. His writing style has changed a lot from when we first started. Jason use to write a song with his guitar parts complete and have all the lyrics written out, but now, and this song is an example, he will have snippets of different things that he and Justin will work out together. This song started out with the sample “This is how you make an Android.”, a sampled beat to use behind a four on the flour beat and the idea of having a keyboard bass line that is filtering out as an arpeggio keyboard line that is filtered out is coming into what you hear. These things were all put together in a looped sequence and we began to jam. Jason started with a blues type riff that he wanted to also have bend type sound, so he would play the normal note and slide down to make the note flat. Jason could’ve just used his tremolo bar, but he liked the sound of slide his finger down better; the tremolo bar is used in the chorus. For this song lyrics came last and Jason had to think about what he was saying with the sample of “This is how you build an Android.”. We can’t remember what Jason was reading at the time, but this idea of time being burnt by the sun struck a chord. So, “Sun keeps on burning, Time, Time keeps on burning, ‘Til it dies.” was penned. That brought the idea of people wanting to live forever and not wanting to die, so much as so to build an android and transfer life into this other robot type being. In essence it’s about the human condition and dealing with death.
Phonecalls - This song is a revision of a song entitled ‘long distance phone calls’ from our third album ‘fall of the roman empire’. ‘long distance phone calls’ came about from a long hiatus due to our jobs. jeremiah foundation was on hold, as we were working out of town and only home for the weekends, as well we were kind of in the middle of recording. Justin was going through a dry period for writing songs, he had a lot of ideas for lyrics but nothing was working and he couldn't write any guitar parts that he was happy with. While working out of town and writing little snippets of lyric ideas, this song came through as a break through. ‘long distance phone calls’ was influenced by "Turn on the Bright Lights" album from Interpol. Although the revision only uses the chorus, second verse and bridge lyrics, yet it still holds its meaning. Which is being honest that the person in the song doesn’t want to stay. Even though staying would be better for them, they are leaving regardless.
Rumors - Is two songs that Justin wrote, both songs had nothing to do with each other, but they were kind of the same chord structure. Justin decided he had to drop one but couldn't choose so he took his favorite parts from each song creating what would become ‘rumors’. Since ‘rumors’ was already finished and was shown to Jason and made ready for his parts, it could have been added to ‘unknown author’; the last recorded album. We were in the early stages of ‘unknown author’ and decided to let the song grow, which took three more years for this song to transform, by that time Justin felt the song was no longer relevant so he changed the lyrics and the ending was added as a group collaboration. The ending of the song Jason was going crazy on the keyboards. When it came time to record Jason’s keyboard parts Jason was frustrated that he was messing the part up while recording, with the other worldly guitar line, like it belongs somewhere else. After taking a listen to the song before taking another take, Jason’s keyboard line worked, which is fitting to the song, Justin says it reminds him of Radiohead ‘The King of Limbs’ album. ‘rumors’ was also one of the first to be played live, but it didn't go over very well, which landed it as a b-side on our singles album, wasn't meant to be a part of the album, but ‘rumors’ recording was so nice, it had to be on the album and took some extra love to make it ready for live shows. We also did some experimentation with drums sounds on this song. Jason played drums, at Adam Phillips house ( He’s a really good friend and owner of Spektrum Muzik, the best record store in Wichita, Ks.. ), that was recorded onto an 8 – track cassette recorder set to a higher pitch, then we took the recorded material and sampled it from the tape at normal speed.
Hello ( it’s time to come home ) - This song was created from another song Jason wrote back in the 90’s, which became the chorus. Using what was then a guitar line for the versus. The next part was the drum machine parts which was created partly on the GameBoy DS cartridge of the Korg MS-10, called DS-10, and partly on Boss Dr. Rhythm. Jason on this project made a rule to try to not use the same drum sounds or keyboards sounds on any song, so everything had to be created. It was great making our own drum sounds on the DS-10. The chorus was then made and the lyric of “hello, how are you?” came to Jason as he was fleshing out the chorus with the beats. Once the chorus was made it was time to make it into a working song. Jason chose not to play anything during the verse, except after singing to echo what ‘New Order’ would do. Justin also fixed a broken Juno 106 that the band stopped using about 11 years ago, because we love the sounds that we can create with that synth. With the Juno Justin added some great atmospheric drones that bend and squelch. The drones aren’t constantly droning to leave room for space while using a lot’s of reverb and delay. At the time that this song was being made ‘The National’ released ‘Sleep Well Beast’ and there is this line about your head in the speakers that Jason really liked. This song became an answer and response type song, with the chorus being the answer, but the response is always about being self - absorbed. The answer again then is “it’s time to come home.”.
Brother - This song started with the idea of sampling a guitar playing one chord or note and bending that sound on the keyboard to make the other notes. Jason liked what he could do with it, so he took an acoustic guitar and dropped the 6th string to d and put a capo somewhere on the guitar, leaving the 6th string open, then tuned the 1st string to d. After all of that Jason sampled the guitar with a condenser mic and a sm57. The condenser going into the sampler and the sm57 picking up the guitar, then going into a mixer with reverb and coming out of a speaker for the condenser mic to pic up. While Justin and Jason were working on making this an actual song, Jason came up with the lyrics. The idea of all human kind being brothers and not understanding why do we have to fight. Raising the question “Why can’t we love one another?”. The drums from this song are a combination of a sample from the ‘Black Keys’ that is chopped up and other parts from the Dr. Rhythm. At the end of the song the Dr. Rhythm parts were put through guitar effects pedals and a bass amp, then the pedals were turned on, off and manipulated as the song was recording. The Dr. Rhythm was also going straight into the board to mix both of the sounds together. The keyboard pads were recorded into a 4 track cassette recorder and then played back into the digital recorder. There is a lot more tweeking that went on with this song, but we can’t give away everything.
Leave it all behind - This song, like rumors, was a totally different song when Justin wrote it, he was writing a lot of songs on his acoustic guitar around 2011. Jason and Justin played around with the song in some jam sessions making ‘leave it all behind’ a must, but we had to wait as we just started our "unknown author" album. In the end Justin changed his lyrics, as he seems to do a lot, from a song about longing to something a little different. An example of the changes can be seen in the first verse "it's been years since we have seen the sun, we haven't talked in miles friend" to "forget your laws, burn your books" which was a line in an older song that will never see the light of day. This may seem to be an anti-establishment statement, Justin wants people to know that is not what he means by that line. This song is a prelude to going on a journey, tying into the near end of a journey with his song ‘this is not about you. Love’ on ‘unknown author’. When going on this journey it’s about not letting things hold you down, this song expresses some bitterness on the second verse "I like you where you are, at a distance" this line fits in as a reflection, the journey Justin talks about is more of a spiritual journey, as in, to find himself. In the recording Justin felt like the music of a spaghetti western should fit, kind of like getting ready for the show down, although it might seem like the end, but the show down was to start the journey. Listening to this song you can hear his acoustic guitar lines, Justin recorded those as scratch tracks, to follow along with and then delete them, but found they sounded nice with the song; the scratch track stayed. The drums were sampled by Jason playing on a live set at his practice space, using mainly room mics to capture a trap type sound.
Watchers - Is most likely the simplest song on the album. ‘watchers’ moves through progressions of drum tracks, long reverbs on the guitar track capture the haunted emotions with help from heavy swells from a long decay on the delay. One of Justin’s guitar tracks also has a phaser added to it post recording, he hates phasers but a lot of shoegaze bands in the 90's used them and he wanted to add another layer, that wasn't there yet. And Justin was inspired to play around with his track digitally to reach what he felt the track might be missing. Needless to say; Justin owns a phaser now. Really, though, this song is the same thing over and over, until the end and it is almost as close to the same thing still. This song came late in the recording and is the only song Justin wrote during the recording. It is safe to say that this is the newest of our songs. Justin meant for Jason to add something more to ‘watchers’ but the heavy pad keyboard lines, the drum track and the bass line seemed to move and work fine on its own without adding anything more. Note the whistle. Also, some nice “ooo's and ahh's” which seem to work as a keyboard in the start that also come in when Justin isn't singing. Justin thinks of Chvrches, Jason being inspired from cut/copy. This song is close to Justin's heart and comes hard for him, as he has written many songs in the past on the subject, he says this song finally puts it to rest, at least for now he feels. Justin has written his emotions on this subject before and this time got it right. He says this is a song with multiple meanings that all weave and tie into each other.
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Thanks
https://jeremiahfoundation.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/jeremiahfoundation/
