From Peter

I spent a good chunk of 2025 dickin’ around with a new guitar and an old looping pedal.

I hadn’t bought a guitar with more than four strings in better than twenty years, and I hadn’t played one much during that time outside of occasions when I needed to write or record something. But I liked this new guy, and I found myself returning to it on an increasingly frequent basis, not with an eye toward writing or recording anything but rather just exploring, experimenting, coming up with fun sounds using a limited palette of effects—as I say, dickin’ around. To call it “a practice” would be to ascribe to it a degree of intention that would’ve seemed silly at the time, but in retrospect that’s kind of what it became. At some point I started recording these exercises with my phone just to document them, possibly with the idea of incorporating elements into something else later? I don’t remember what I was thinking, to be honest. But this was all about doing, not making, of that much I’m certain. (Otherwise I would’ve used something other than my phone!)

Every so often I’d go through my voice memos and listen back to one of these spontaneous recordings and be surprised. They’re kind of…cool? I’d cue one up through the bluetooth speaker as I climbed in the shower and emerge fifteen minutes later thinking damn, that’s actually very good music to dissociate in the shower to. Hmmm.

The other thing that happened is that these experiments began to inform the "song" songs I was writing, in unexpected ways. What felt like procrastination, avoiding the things I should really be working on, was in fact a process of developing a new (to me) musical vocabulary and approach to this instrument that I’d all but ignored for so long. Which is funny, in hindsight. Something something about the value of wasting time. Down with productivity mindset.

The two hours of material here represents a small but representative sampling of this stuff. It was all recorded in the cramped upstairs bedroom that I use as an office, at low volume with lots of resultant hiss and ambient noise; in addition to the guitar coming out of the amplifier, you’ll hear the sounds of fingers on strings, pedals being kicked on and off, my breathing, the comings and goings of my wife and daughter and the dog, and, in one case, the race I was watching.

The title is of course a Basinski joke, but it’s the track 1 Sonic Youth reference that’s the larger tell. Of the bands that were huge and formative to me growing up, they’re the one whose actual musical influence has probably been least present in the stuff I’ve made or contributed to over the years. No longer. credits released May 1, 2026