Eric Cook: Audioblog

I received a request via email last month from an Italian music journalist who was writing some kind of retrospective Gravitar review, asking for anecdotes about the band. This was one of the things I jotted down in response.

Rehearsal spots 1993-1994:
We used to have a rehearsal room in an office building in downtown Ann Arbor, which we shared with another band called the Zug Island Quartet (named after a Detroit area industrial zone). We could only practice between 11 pm and 5 am. We would do these marathon latenight sessions, and then I would drive the hour home to East Lansing where I was living at the time, with the sun coming up…

The building was strangely on the down and out — it did have a few operating businesses in it (and downtown ann arbor is fairly upscale overall), but there would be homeless guys asleep in the elevator when we hauled our equipment in at night, etc. Things got stranger and sketchier after a while; John Westerman, the guy from Zug Island who paid the rent on the room took our collective monthly payment to the property management company that he had been dealing with. The woman he had been dealing with there was gone (fired? left? it was unclear), and they informed him that they *weren’t* in fact the owners or managers of the building. What was that all about? Did they lose possession of it somehow, or had we been paying rent to the wrong person while effectively squatting illegally in the building? We never found out, but we just stopped paying rent, and no one came asking why were there.. So I suppose at that point we went from effectively squatting to definitely squatting.

The building kept going further downhill over the next few months, ceiling tiles falling down, just generally a sense of disrepair kicking. More homeless guys in the building. We heard stories of one of the other office rooms being broken into, so Westerman took it on himself to reinforce our door with extra locks and plywood (a good job too). Then one day, we came it, and saw that someone had kicked a man-sized hole in the wall thru the drywall next to one of the door, and looted it. Needless to say, it was clear that our door reinforcement wasn’t going to do the trick in response to that. Time was up, and it was clear that we need to find better practice space.

The next spot was in a self-storage facility in Westland, a suburb outside of Detroit. I can’t remember how we found the spot, there weren’t any other bands in there, and none of us lived near Westland. I do remember that it was convenient to get to from the highway, so maybe that was a factor. In any case, here we were again in practice spot that wasn’t, really. These were little 10×10 rooms, made of corrugated steel (see: http://flickr.com/photos/ericcook/278292012/in/set-72157594343009215/), with us running a powercord out the door and plugging into some industrial outlet around the corner from our building with 2 or three extension cords. I’m not sure exactly I can convey what kind of ear damage that induced.. we used to rehearse *loud*. Turn up any of the gravitar CDs as loud as your stereo will go, and then put it all in a room entirely made of metal. There would be this high pitched shimmer that would hang in the air as the walls and doors vibrated and shook.

This ended after about 6 months. Again, we were paying rent, but sneaking in to do rehearsals only after business hours, here from about 9 pm to midnight. One day Harold drove out to play guitar by himself during the day.. not sure why. The actual owner of the facility was unfortunately on site, and came flying into the room, red-faced and apoplectic, asking Harold what he thought he was doing. “I thought you were using power tools in this unit!” When Harold recounted the story, I got the impression that power tools would have been marginally better than a guitar, amps and chains of pedals, but not by much. In any case, that was that for Secured Self Storage. We were without a rehearsal spot for a few months then, until Mike Walker moved to Ann Arbor and then joined the band.

Look what turned up in the mail yesterday from John — A new hand-crafted WSG:RB!

If you look at the knobs, you’ll notice that everything on it goes to 11.. Sound samples to come soon. Thanks a ton John!

I hesitate to even call them ’sketches’:

1. newdrummachine + decaying delay feedback

2. newdrummachine + gated feedback

I bought a new drum machine off of ebay a few weeks back. Not entirely sure why, to be honest. Something satisfying about the knobs and buttons.

Technoish try-out w/synthopotamus drone.

Drone jam (excerpt): 5/20/07.

The fourth and final track is now posted. This one rounds things out on a bit of a positive note, with a bit of lightly resonant percussion turning into something like repeated guitar strumming. It turns a little more questioning on the end, with brushed metal and close-mic’ed cymbal.

I need to work on the artwork to finish the release off, and then I’ll post the whole thing as a zip on the discography page.

Part three of four posted. This one is a bit darker again — slow drone build-up then layers of static rain sizzling before scraping and clanking out to a finish. Manages to have a good forward propulsion for the main section without being explicitly beaty.

Mouthless part 2.

Reaktor klank-banking, turning into long tone drones with light cymbal-scratch overlays.

The base of these tracks are taken from an appearance on Jason Voss’ show on WCBN in March of 2003. I’ve always been partial to pieces of them, but they needed a bit of editing, cleaning up and smoothing. Which put them on the back burner (for longer than I ever intended!), and explains why this post is tagged both as New audio and Old audio.

I made several passes at going back and re-performing better/different versions with the same setup of Reaktor ensembles, FX, contact mic’ed cymbal, etc, but I always wound up liking the original live versions best. So I finally decide to get these into a more coherent whole for release, and I’m pleased both with how they’re shaping up, and how the material seems to still feel valid to me 4 years later.

This is track one from an in-progress release, tentatively named ‘Mouthless.’ Five tracks in total, each fairly dense drone/ambient/beatless-sound. This one is probably the darkest & noisiest of the set.

I’ll post each track in turn here as I finish editing it, and then post a link to a full zip with final artwork on the discography. More backstory on this release later.

First, the audio. Two tracks from 1997, multitracked metal percussion and delays:

• MNML-02
• MNML-06

Now, the backstory:
These were included on a release-that-wasn’t called MNML — various experiments at minimal 4-track compositions. I put together a whole CDr package w/artwork etc, but only made 3 or 4 copies for friends, because most of it never felt finished enough to actually “release” (a fairly arbitrary distinction for a CDr, I’ll admit).

These were my favorite two tracks on the CD, and evidence I suppose that I still haven’t gotten my fill of the sounds of metal percussion in the 10 years since then, since it formed the base of some of the later Persona releases (see Splinter and Last Songs), and remained a key component/sound source of my work with Ben B. and solo.

I should think a bit more about why that is..