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Releasing a tribute to rivers, a dubble object of DADA EGGs + general Tributary liner notes

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894

9 July 2021> For the last Sound Furies album we posted 1 track daily for the 12 days up to its release on Xmas ǝve of 2020. For our next, Tributaries, we'll release a song a week for the next 25 weeks (in riverse order than the album) w/ accompanying liner notes hear on 5cense. Then on December 24, 2021 (our 25th anniversary) we'll release the album as a whole, as an anniversary present to our selves. We already released stream #25 (Kanawha) in tribute to Gian, who died a few months ago, so instead we'll reveal general liner notes about the entire album in this post. For starters, here's the cover:

The imedge was appropriated from a saddlelight view of a delta we forget which, doesn't matter... every tributary belongs to the same 1 river in the same way the 25 streams of Tributary are seamlessly a part of 1 record + like our previous 3 outings shd be listened to in album order. Whether we release it on vinyl remains to be seen... no 1 got our previous records so seams pointless. May-b we'll press 1 or 2 copies in wax as a record of our ǝxistence, like we did w/ our 1st LP, un. Our move back to Italy in a month complicates the issue as far as when/where to receive the physical product, but perhaps we'll use the same folks that pressed our 1st, who happen to be in Bologna.

In any event, the album was made + mastered w/ this in mind, the 25 songs are broken up onto 2 discs, each w / 2 sides of seamless music w/ no breaks in between (so in a sense 4 songs). Here's the track list + the date we'll be releasing each stream:

Disc 1: Side A
1. Silver
2. Niger
3. Columbia
4. Dungeness
5. Pishon
6. Gambia

Side B
7. Congo
8. Ayung
9. Oceanus
10. East
11. Piscataqua
12. Sandy

Disc 2: Side C
13. Gila-Salt
14. Red Nile
15. Ogeechee
16. Rom
17. Snake
18. Fishkill

Side D
19. Jordan
20. Anacostia
21. Manú
22. Sacramento
23. Tiber
24. Styx
25. Kanawha

Yep, a dubble album... rather ambitious considering both our bedder-½ + a.I. believe there ain't such thing as a classic dubble album, at least that anybody has yet pulled off. Sure lots of bands have laid down over an hour of good material spread across 2 (or even 3 discs) (The River, London Calling (+ Sandinista! ), the White album, Exile on Main Street, Trout Mask Replica, Double Nickels on the Dime, Zen Arcade + the 4 most recent Swans albums), but we're talking about where the album has a certain cohesiveness, an "album object" in much the way we talk about book objects (call us art snobs). The Wall or Quadrophenia (+ Tommy) perhaps come close to what we're talking about, but there's always a weak link in the batch of tracks or they come off as too rock opera-ish. Not that Tributaries is a dubble opus, but we tried... again, mostly cuz we wanted there to be 25 songs, 1 for each year of our marriage.

Each song is a tribute to a river, but also a journihilistic record of a certain era in our lives when/where said river played a vital role, so in a sense the streams are journel entrées. The lyrics to each we already posted on the album page if u wanna sneak a peak. Like our previous album, Tributaries was recorded in isolation during the covid pandemic, w/ the addition of a few new toys purchased twards the end of last year to keep us from going stir crazy (we din't travel or go out or spend money on anything in 2020 b-sides food so why not?). For starters, an e-drum kit:

... not real drums, but a step up from the finger pads we were using before (+ sure our neighbors appreciate that they're electronic). We ain't so coordinated to do 3-4 things @ once w/ diffrent limbs so often we plug the kick-drum line into the floor tom jack ± record individual drums + cymbals separately (mapping them most of the time to the "Dirty Jungle+" kit in Logic Pro X) + indeependantly combine w/ loops + programmed beats, etc... nothing we'd be able to recreate live. We also got a mandolin (used on 6-7 songs):

We don't typically tune it how you're sposed to + keep breaking the bottum strings so often we use just 3 (really 6 cuz they're dubbled up). We also got an autoharp (used on 4-5 songs) + a ukulele (tho we didn't use it on any songs) + our bedder-½ got a flute (also not used). Mostly we used our acoustic guitar, don't think we used our electric on a single track. We used various tunings but the most commun way we tuned was D-A-D-A-A-D or E-G-E-G-G-E + as on previous albums we seem to gravitate twards minor pentatonic scales.

Hear's our electronics set-up (w/ Arturia mini-Brute 2S sequencer + Behringer model D "miniBoog" ):

For recording we used Logic Pro X + then mastered w/ Adobe Audition. As on prior albums, we opted for a quieter "wall of air" approach rather than caving into loudness wars... even the digital version was mixed as if vinyl was the target medium (so streams will sound a lot quieter when mixed in w/ other digital tracks). For eggsample, hear's what the "Kanawha" waveform looks like:

Our Minear's d-zzz still made it a pain to mix (w/ constant tinnitus + being ½-deaf in 1 ear), bud it wasn't acting up as much as last year so hopefully the mix is bedder balanced. The album's perhaps a bit mellower than our previous LPs + perhaps not as dark. It's still for the most guitar-driven (what we use to write songs), but we tried to mix it ala wall of sound so it all blends together as 1 instrawment, nothing standing out, but at the same time recorded acoustically raw w/ minimal FX. Primary notes were attenuated + dissonance + resinants were accentuated, augmented in2 feedback loops + almost every stream has a subtle backwords reverb effect on the vox (where u flip the track backwards, apply reverb then flip back farword) to cut the edge so everything blends bedder.

Musically haven't a clue what genre you'd call Tributaries, but hear's a mixtape of rivery songs we listened to to inspire us:

We also rewatched sum river movies (Apocalypse Now, Deliverance, Fitzcarraldo, The African Queen, Bridge Over River Kwai, etc.) + revisited sum river books (Heart of Darkness, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Singing Fish, etc.). Lord nose weave obssesed plenty over rivers (Huck Finn + Finnegans Wake run deep thru A Raft Manifest + now we've embarked on thriver meme, but it was our bedder-½ (the voice of Sound Furies)'s idea to make an album about rivers, as they play an important role in their current research in food systems, how rivers are the lifelines of sum countries.

Most think of Siddharta by Herman Hesse as a YA self-help book (or maybe it's just us? cuz we haven't reread it since jr high), but rereading it now it's got sum great river passedges:

He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this?

However, amongst the thousands there have been a few, four of five, to whom the river was not a obstacle. They have heard its voice and listened to it, and the river has become holy to them, as it has to me.

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?"

That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.

He saw his face reflected in the quietly moving water, and there was something in this reflection that reminded him of something he had forgotten and when he reflected on it, he remembered. His face resembled that of another person, whom he had once known and loved and even feared. It resembled the face of his father, the Brahmin.

They all became part of the river. It was the goal of all of them, yearning, desiring, suffering; and the river’s voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire. The river flowed on towards its goal. Siddhartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he had ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and the goals were reached and each one succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew.

893 <(current)> 895> Losing the thriver meme thread 2 river change in a release psychle of living + dying in unknown landscapes
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