The release of our album Chicago Onion Farm ca. 1900, marks three years of releasing a new album every month. That's a grand total of 36 albums, just under 24 hours of audio recorded between August 2013 and November 2018. Why on Earth would we do that? Well it was a mixture of necessity and insanity.
First a little background; our music is almost entirely improvised, so the way we create an album is a little different than the average band. We'll get together, jam for an hour or so, then I go through trim things down, do some basic mixing and mastering, give it a name, and call it an album. Now for a stretch of several years I had fallen behind on editing, which resulted in hours upon hours of music just sitting on my hard drive. So I finally decided to tackle the massive project of editing everything into albums and releasing them online.
The first album in this series was Saturnine Frequency Noir, released in early April of 2016. Shortly after this I lost my job and was unemployed for about 4 to 5 months. I treated this as the perfect opportunity to fully commit to the project, and made editing these jam session my full time job. I would wake up everyday, eat some food, and then edit for 6-12 hours straight. Except on the weekends, which were spent drinking at the beach. It was honestly the best summer I've ever had.
I didn't initially plan to do monthly releases; in fact originally I believe I was planning on quarterly releases. However, as I began to realized the scope of project it became clear that releasing a few albums a year was not going to cut it. Starting off I had enough recordings for about 12 -18 albums, at that rate it would have taken me at least 3 years to release everything, not counting anything new we would record during that 3 year period. So I figured why not try putting out an album every month.
Flash forward three years and we're finally all caught up. Now we can return to a more leisurely release schedule.
But before that, a quick wrap up of the past few albums.
California Knock Out Party, released in November and Four Star Luxury, released in January are both improvised live performances. In both cases we had a show to play and not enough time to learn and rehearse a set list. We figured we would probably give a better performance if we improvised on the spot with no restrictions, rather than trying to adhere to a set list we barely knew. Admittedly we weren't flying completely blind. I programed a couple beats and melodies in advance to give us a base to sculpt our music on, and to keep the performances flowing. I'm also realizing while typing this that I haven't upload video of Four Star Luxury to our youtube yet, so expect to see that very soon.
Veterans of WWIII I think was a short jam session before rehearsing for a live set. This was originally planned to be part of another split album, but scheduling conflicts with the other band caused that idea to fall through. This may be a relatively brief album, but it's packed with a lot of new experiments and musical motifs. Take for example the melancholy synth guitar and bass sounds of "Lost Islands," playing a some what Latin inspired melody. Then there's the high energy rave orchestra hits of "Show Down in Gamelan Town" and "Fury of the Volcano Goddess." Even the version of "No Body Knows..." that closes this album has a very unique arrangement, unlike anything heard on any previous renditions.
That brings us to the grand finale of this series of albums, Chicago Onion Farm, ca. 1900, a solid release that sets the stage for the future of The Brown Christmas' sound exploration. While not actually the most recent thing we've recorded (that would be our Christmas album, which was recorded 2 months after this) it is still a good representation of the current direction of our music. A further distillation of techniques and themes that have been present in our music for awhile; catchy melodies and gentle ambiences along side walls of noise, creating flowing stream of consciousness style music. Tracks are concise but full of textural and tonal shifts, all while being an interconnected part of a larger experience. There is perhaps more use of layered pads and arpeggiation than past albums, and ...I want to say 'solo' shredding? This album is spacey, spooky, playful, triumphant, melancholic, and the perfect place to end our three year run. Expect us to expand more in these directions on future albums, but more important expect the unexpected.
