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About

First release from Pamola, the band I started in high school with my best friends.

This album was recorded with two microphones on a digital tascam portastudio in the winter of 2009. We tracked in Shane’s cellar. We had no clue what we were doing, that cannot be overstated. We played the songs live well, but they are complicated songs. We didn’t have enough microphones to record everyone live at once, so we started with my guitar and Shane’s drums, one microphone for each. Once we had solid takes down Jonathan, Billy, and Ruby’s and my vocals were each tracked one at a time.

The demo was mixed in Audacity. Again, I had no clue what to do, so there are some strange and very sudden mixing decisions made here that are funny to hear now.

These songs were created between spring of 2007 and winter of 2008. Each song started with a general outline by me, then we all jammed until everyone had come up with something for themselves.

“The Deep Breath” is basically a survey of all the music I was obsessed with at this time. You can hear At the Drive In, Slint, Don Caballero, King Crimson, RX Bandits, Hoover, Stravinsky, and Polvo. I had wanted to kill myself for a spell, and spent some time in a hospital, and this long long long way too long song was written by the part of me that still wanted to live. “Winter” was my attempt at writing a slowcore song. “Take Boba Fett Seriously” was written shortly after I had learned about serialism. There is a brief interlude in that song where I play a tone row on guitar, then the other strings each play its retrograde and retrograde inversion. Hilariously, I somehow chopped off the final two pitches of my tone row when we were working out this song, never noticed, and the result is that it is only ten-tone serialism. I also stole a theme from Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps.

The cover art used for the digital release is a still frame from a video filmed of one of our early shows. Our friend Mallow Hunt filmed it, and according to Mallow may still exist on a harddrive of his somewhere. The location is Shane’s cellar, where we recorded this album. Billy is standing in the fore-left, back to the camera. Ruby is hunched over on the ground screaming into a microphone. Jonathan is standing up in the back, his top half out of frame. I’m in the fore-right, on my back.

Artwork

the cover art for Pamola Demos

Figure 1: Pamola - Demos cover art

Tracklisting

  1. The Deep Breath I
  2. The Deep Breath II
  3. The Deep Breath III
  4. The Deep Breath IV
  5. Interlude: Mbira1
  6. Winter2
  7. Take Boba Fett Seriously
  8. I Know I’ll Miss You
  9. An Old House

Release

Date
2009-04-25
Label
Self-released
Format
30 copies were burned onto CD-R, each one uniquely titled and labelled, and given away for free at our first non-Pittsfield show, Braincore, at USM in Gorham, Maine.

Bandcamp

  1. The only track not recorded in Pittsfield. I recorded this using my laptop’s built-in microphone at my table in my apartment in Farmington, Maine. I used an mbira which I had borrowed for the night from my professor. This performance was an improvisation. ↩︎

  2. This song was re-recorded as a solo piece on this record. ↩︎