The Incoherent Ramblings::
Build a toy guitar. Get lost in a forest of birch trees. Wear a bed sheet around your neck as a cape. Destroy something to give it meaning. Carry the girl across the river. Esoterrorists, catharsissies and metaphornication. Say what you actually mean. Get lost in a forest that has no trees. Force it out of your soul like a rocket. Wrap yourself in blankets of hot snow. Eat dictionaries. Hear the words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people’s lacks. Taste your own tongue. Read the glowming on everyone’s faces. Transcend your humanity. Eat of the Mango Nebula. Become a ball of light.

The Recording::
This recording was penned in notebooks, fumbled through on guitar and recorded all in the same room. That room as well as the village that surrounded it, the community of people and music in Jamaica Plain (a part of Boston), were a heavy influence on these sounds. The recording process took place over the course of a couple of weeks at the end of an eight month lease in 2010. Once all the furniture had been moved out, the bedroom became a natural reverb chamber. All the tracks were captured using only two SM57's, a two input mixing board and a computer. Various toy and real instruments were used.
Words, Guitar and assorted other instruments and noises were performed by Lee Stepien.
Glockenspiel was performed gracefully by Liz Pelly.
Some photos of the bedroom studio can be seen here::
www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.147075068668254.26322.117246344984460&type=3&l=f30ad6fea9

The Thoughts::
The songs on this record were all written as an experiment and fragments of a larger story. The time where once upon there was a boy named None Birch and his misadventures metamorphosing into a tree to become the world's greatest hero or villain or neither. Full of colorful sideshow characters such as the Indelibile Shrinking Gurl who melts into vapor, The Wonderous Woman with a Body Made of Words and the Sarcastacular Irony Boy who isn't actually a character at all.

The Cover::
When I first heard the word woolgathering, which means daydreaming or lollygagging or lackadaisical, I was immediately struck with an image that made me prefer that word over the latter also groovy choices. It wasn't the image one would think, of a little kid pulling wool off a fence at a farm. For whatever reason I saw this little boy in a striped sweater that was too big for him, gathering firewood out of the snow. However, the last log he picked up somehow sent him floating upwards into the sky and he was left, not so much fearful, but reluctant, apathetic and accepting, wide eyed, to his new anti-gravitational fate.
I don't know why.


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