1. Stasis
2. Fracture
3. Plow the Deep
4. Downside
5. Artifice of the Snake
6. Willow by the Tarn
7. Lost in the Tide
8. Transport
9. At Home in a Distant Land
jordan smith: guitars, bass, banjo, miscellaneous string instruments, general direction.
matt dunphy: percussion, programming, production, photoshop, electric guitar.
ryan shorb performs acoustic guitar with jordan on "at home in a distant land."
all songs ©2002 j. smith & m. dunphy. all rights reserved.
Track 1: Stasis
Recorded entirely by Jordan in Hanover PA in 1999 after staying up all night, saved to disk just before he had to dash off to work, this track is meant to be minimalist. We almost lost it, as Jordan didn't have a CD burner at the time, and had converted the track to MP3, recorded it to minidisc, then to tape, then back to minidisc... the fidelity was awful! However, a copy of the original MP3 was discovered, and nursed back from fidelity hell.
Track 2: Fracture
This song was written almost entirely in a matter of four hours. The original idea we had was to bang out an EP, and then remix and rework the songs into fuller versions for a follow-up EP. 11 tracks total, Jordan plays all acoustic guitar, except during the slide guitar section, on a slightly out of tune Fender Stagemaster.
Track 3: Plow the Deep
Recovered from an old recording Jordan made on the microphone that came with his computer, sounds from a recording of stream in Caledonia State Park
were dubbed in as this track segued from the harsher introductory tracks into the dronier bulk of the album.
Track 4: Downside
In 2001 at Matt's apartment in Spring Grove, Jordan was downstairs with a beat Matt programmed on the Korg ER-1, playing this guitar line through a cheap crate amp. Wanting to capture the song for later re-recording, Matt just dangled the Octava 319 mic over the edge of the loft and did a long take, walking around and making some percussive noises that were later cut out (the door slamming shut is still in there though.) Later, Jordan came upstairs and we recorded it directly from Tony's mixer into the Delta 1010. Later we overdubbed Jordan playing the overdubs on the Harmony acoustic guitar. It was released on "Drawn by a Still," pretty much just guitar and ER-1.
Track 5: Artifice of the Snake
Scott Conrad left his Ampeg guitar amp in Spring Grove for a few months, and Matt recorded the basis of this track by running his guitar through this amp with the spring reverb turned all the way up. Jordan later added various sounds using a decrepit Harmony-brand banjo borrowed from James Keagy. There is a much longer version of this track somewhere.
Track 6: Willow by the Tarn
The original purpose of recording the lick in this track was for massive overdubbing, but there was something kind of hypnotic about listening to this melody played over and over again. Something kind of catchy about it not being a loop, amongst so much other loop-based composition on the EP. The acoustic bass line was added not long before the EP was finalized, to add some underlying dynamic to the droney acoustic guitar line. The synth pads are courtesy Tony Topper's Yamaha S-80.
Track 7: Lost in the Tide
Jordan recorded his electric guitar through several different reverb settings on Matt's Alesis Wedge reverb unit, and provided Matt with a multilayered, one minute long track. Matt rearranged the music - which consists entirely of guitar-through-reverb - and added samples that he and Jordan recorded of a stream in a Pennsylvania state park earlier that year. If you listen really closely, you can hear Ryan Shorb mumbling nonsense into the Yamaha analog delay unit at some point.
Track 8: Transport
This is basically an amalgam of recordings of the train that went past Matt's apartment in Spring Grove several times a week. Given that the last track is very different from the rest of the EP, this track serves to bridge the two parts of the CD, via a rather blunt sonic analogy.
Track 9: At Home in a Distant Land
Ryan Shorb and Jordan Smith recorded this track live in 1999, after much practice. A slightly shorter, reverb free version appears on Shui.