Advection – Teen Trax EP 1 (lo)

Culled from a few hundred session files, Teen Trax is probably the most charming, fun music I've ever written.

It mostly came about in the days of pre- or early-social-media internet, in my teens and early 20's. None of these tracks were ever published beyond mp3s posted to LiveJournal or CD-Rs given to friends. Most have never really left my hard drive. (A small number of them are more recent, but to me have the same spirit as these early tunes.)

A few of these are quite overwrought, but it's mostly very playful, naive music.

One thing I kept thinking of while putting this collection together was the immense number of hours that went into all these tracks. This was where I cut my teeth on production, melody and harmony, arranging, recording – so many things. It's always a trip coming back to one's early work, and I'm glad to see it finally taken off the shelf.

Teen Trax is a lot of music, and while compiling it, I was aware of how tedious these archival, hard-drive-dump releases can get. Close as I am to the material, I made sure the cutting floor was about three times larger than the final cut. I also performed some emergency mixing and arrangement surgery on certain tracks, and remastered everything. What you're hearing is an archival release that's been polished and arranged just so. Hope you like it.

The LP is the main course, containing the most complete, catchy material.

The EPs are each a collection of b-sides, miscellany, segues, sketches, ephemera. EP1 (lo) is more downtempo, easier to put on quietly. The tunes on EP2 (hi) are more aggressive, up front, and brightly colored.

Special shoutout to Will Silver who drew the video game art by hand back in the day on his G3 clamshell laptop. (Come to think of it I recall him loaning me the same machine for all-nighters at a back table of the local Denny's, where many of these tracks were written. Suburbs, baby!)