Three Years

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.

Almost Live Volume 3: Stop Making Cents (Playing catch up part 6)

Here we are, finally all caught up! As with the other two volumes this is a practice session for a live set we played, so there's not too much that can be said about it. There are new versions of several tracks originally from our album Hash Not Hash, https://thebrownchristmas.bandcamp.com/album/hash-not-hash

The one unique thing with this volume is that it opens with some actually live, and completely new recordings. We were setting up to play the show and were just planning to do a quick sound check. Well that sound check started sounding so good that we just kept going, next thing you know we have almost 15 minutes of new music. The soundcheck was not recorded on video, but the main performance can be seen here.
https://youtu.be/IyptQVJUYgA

Three things

Here we go, catching up on the most recent three releases. I'm going to talk about them out of order since two of our recent albums have a very similar premise. I'll start with Tropical Fruits of All Kinds, released this past February; it's The Brown Christmas' taste sensation sweeping the nation and causing constipation. I believe this was one of those times Joe and I met with the intention of rehearsing for a live performance, only to end up recording completely new stuff instead.

Often times before I even have everything set correctly to record Joe plugs in and starts pumping out synth melodies. I'm certainly not going to leave a good melody hanging, so I quickly get the recording going and start jamming along. Before long an hour has passed and we have a fresh fruit bowl of new material.

When I listen to these recordings it conjures up images of late night adventures, wondering around quiet streets under lamp lights, and being convinced there's something magical or nefarious lurking just out of sight in the shadows. Highlights of this album include the whimsically upbeat "Out Drinking with a Friendly Moth" and the blissfully cosmic, "Asleep in the Stars" The former sweeps merrily up and down, riding a sultry evening breeze in search of sources of light. While the latter is a more stationary, sedated trip within and beyond punctuated by a deep sweeping bass drone.



The albums for January and March are both practice session of live sets. These are composed of new versions of previously released material. Volume one draws tracks from New Jersey Sound Machine and Go Ahead ...Call the Cops, as well as a new version of 'Nobody Knows what it's like to Eat My Dick Tonight." All this practicing and preparation and I somehow forgot to record the actual live performance. This is the next best thing to live.


Volume two is a large chunk from the album How to Make an Egg Cream. There are two takes included on this album, the first is Joe simply winging it and me messing a few things up. The second take is closer to what our actual performance end up sounding like. This time I remember to record it. It can be viewed here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3KHFw_VeV0

Both of the takes had their interesting aspects and since the only songs we have multiple versions of are "Nobody knows..." and "Cataract Jack" I figured I might as well include both versions of everything.

Noise Fest

We recently did a live performance as part of a 4 day noise fest in Philadelphia. It was actually a combination of solo (Chalk Harmonica Vibe) and Brown Christmas tunes. Here are several forms of documentation as proof.

First a couple photos of us standing stoically over a table of electronics.

Next here's an audio recording of our performance, as well as all the other musicians that played.

https://archive.org/details/cOMMuNcIRCUiT4DAY2015NOISEFEST

And lastly here is a video collage of short snippets from every performer.


We greatly appreciate the opportunity to have been a part of this event. It was a fantastic time with many great artists.