House of Mirrors
Sense of Scenery is a mere attempt to make sense of your surroundings. My first memory is of music (The Police) and for as long as I can remember it has remained the most sacred of things. There seems to be something highly ritualized and ancient in the human psyche or collective unconscious regarding it: its attempt to communicate features of life that there appears to be no words for; to pound out all the hurt and joy on basic tonal devices. I suppose it says, “I exist”. Sometimes it communicates something hideously complex, but most often, it doesn’t and shouldn’t. So the title of the project came to me as I sat on my parent’s washer, stoned out of my brain in 1999. It remained a kind of personal fantasy until early 2002. Up to this point I had played around with different projects and ideas, but SOS had always been my primary daydream. I tried to band together various people from classified ads, but when that failed, I decided to record ’Ill Fantasy’ during the winter of 2003 in the attic of a friend of a friend‘s house, of whom I was band mates with in another act called ‘Experiencing Difficulty‘. ’Ill Fantasy’ was an LP’s worth of acoustic/solo songs, released in January, 2004, of which I printed very few off; but it served its elemental purpose, which was to see if I could actually do it. I decided that I liked it, but an LP worth of crappy acoustic songs somehow wasn’t to my liking, so I immediately started writing for the ’twentyfourseven’ EP, which took almost a whole bloody year to record, and was released on December 1, 2005, although it was finished in April. ’twentyfourseven’ was an epic journey for me because up until this point, I really hadn’t thought about what shape or style I foresaw the direction of Sense of Scenery going in. Starkly, I simply ’did what I unconsciously thought should be done’ and let the puzzle sort itself out, so to speak. This was when I realized that Sense of Scenery was going to be a bridge between the sub-conscious and conscious. Its function was going to mimic what all imagery and symbols hide between you, me, everyone and everything…whether they or “it” knows it or not, regardless of its communicatory accuracy. ’twentyfourseven’ itself refers to the question of whether or not the world really exists if your eyes are shut or if they are open. I originally wanted every word on the album to be printed backwards, but alas, I settled for no capitalization, to mimic a kind of child-like run-on-thought; where everything is bunched together and the world is a hushed, silent movie of sorts. The illustrations, on the other hand, have much more to do with the brutality of ’growing up’, where you learn that the adult world can and will leave you high and dry. Thus we have the scarification, something beautiful (or ugly) undergoes something, and chemically, it becomes something else; like trauma; like growth. Ok, enough about that, cause I’ll just ramble on and on, like some prick that just won’t shut up about his beefed up, custom, ‘69 Mustang or whatever. The main feature of the music on ’twentyfourseven’ was to experiment with a full band, rather than just a single acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, I had to use a drum machine. After the release, I realized that I had to find a drummer. My solitary existence as a musician now eventually reveals how futile it is to create a communal “sound” without a band. You can hire a band, and you can imitate a band, but you’ll never sound like a band, band. After recruiting the first, real/human, SOS drummer in September, 2007, we started rehearsing new songs. Alas, it wasn’t easy, but little by little we keyed into a kind of fusion and consistency with new material. Naturally, I wanted to record it. ‘The Disaster of Imagination’ LP was supposed to be an EP, but I figured, hey, if I die tomorrow? Basically, the answer was: Why the fuck not? The workload of writing, producing, co-engineering and mixing such things were definitely underestimated in the beginning, though. I can’t remember when it was started, but I know I was pretty much done in April or May 2009. Released on October 31, 2009, it has been akin to feeling as though I had a very long run in a chemotherapy program of some sort. I haven’t much to say about the album at this point, because it’s would be like asking someone to eat a “wafer thin” wafer after eating 300 lbs of pure lard. Everything needs to settle. This isn’t to say that I liken the experience to eating lard, but rather, it’s like, uh, imagine finishing the last bit of mortar on the Chartres cathedral and someone asks you to explain the process and what it means. It’s like, “How the fuck should I know? I don’t know anything anymore. Get out of my face! There’s the door, go check it out for yourself…” …or something like that. SD, SOS. www.senseofscenery.com
