Ground Control Touring

WHAT HAPPENDED.

There were about 4 or 5 years of confusions-of-matter and musterless moments, breakdowns/regroutings, and suddenly-empty spaces of amassed time that I’ll try to pointlessly audit. Enjoy:

After 2006’s Meadow, there was an assignment to score a film. It was scored, but by 2008, the film and the possibilities of a release of the music were, at most, forgotten, cock-blocked by producers pointing lawyer-shaped guns at my loins. Outside of the score, other music was made in an ex-grange hall that I’d moved to outside of historic Kingston, NY—sounds that were to be used with other newly recorded material for some sort of grand idea of lyrics and music and written stories along a connecting thread or two. Halfway through the idea, the outside world stepped in. Peripheral figures, distant and close, disappeared or died. Around the corner from the grange hall, on a quarry road, a car burned with a headless body inside, and the local police came around asking me where I was that day. Luckily, for once, I actually was somewhere. They said it was a popular road for dumping bodies. I explained that I’d never been accepted by the “in-crowd.” After chatting with me for a few hours and giving me and my truck (implicated, as well) a good eyeballing, they took the ruling minority’s side and let me go.

I moved out of the grange hall near the bustling quarry road to a smaller, safer space closer to town, to finish the grand idea. I called Merge and we talked of the next release. Not long after, though, the Roland 2480, on which I’d recorded 2002’s Impasse and the 2008 score, broke down and took the grange hall sounds and new songs with it. I drove into some woods near Woodstock, NY, and dropped it off for repairs. A few months later, the leaves were changing, the machine was working, and I went back to work recording and erasing. I brought in a couple of musicians to add percussion and pedal steel. Mixes and writings were collected on a laptop. I called Merge again; I was close to finishing. But, while doing final mixes, the recorder choked another time. I took it back to the woods for a second fix. A few weeks later, my new safer place was burglarized, and they (probably one of my scumbag neighbors) left with the laptop containing the remaining crumbs of the recordings and song notes. I called Merge and requested that they send their Exorcism Squad to my residence to cleanse the area and allow me to continue with my work. This was the one department, though, that they hadn’t fully developed (a pre-Grammy business model). Listeners were becoming anxious and even angry sometimes at Merge and the universe as a whole for the creative delay, never contemplating that, on some level, the real perp was their file-sharing friend.

Eventually, the recording machine was resuscitated and some of the material was recovered. Cracks were patched. Parts were redundantly re-invented. Commas were moved. Insinuations were re-insinuated until the last percussive breaths of those final OCD utterances were expelled like the final heaves of bile, wept-out long after the climactic drama had faded to a somber, blurry moment of truth and voilà!, the record was done, or, let us be clear, abandoned like the charred shell of a car with a nice stereo.

And so, I offer unto you:

Our Blood

WRITTEN & RECORDED BY RICHARD BUCKNER
ALL SOUNDS & IMAGES BY RICHARD BUCKNER EXCEPT:

PEDAL STEEL ON TRAITOR, CONFESSION, HINDSIGHT BY BUDDY CAGE
MARACAS ON COLLUSION BY STEVE SHELLEY

MIXED BY MALCOLM BURN
MASTERED BY JEFF LIPTON
LAYOUT BY JILL DRAPER

THANK YOU TO: JON MARSHALL SMITH FOR THE U48, JEFF JORDAN FOR THE HOFNER, JAMES EDLUND FOR THE EV MICS, MALCOLM, JD FOSTER, ADRIAN OLSEN, ANDERS PARKER, ANDREW COLVIN, MERGE, AND JILL