“Recaptured” is a series of old content – music, recordings, writings, photos I’ve been coming across in random shoeboxes and plastic crates. (Hopefully) by digitizing/writing this stuff up I will keep it from being lost forever.
After that understated and amazing basement performance I wrote about a while back, my good friend Colin jumped on a plane (or possibly a series of boats) to Norway, to go study music at a school he only called Monkey Island. The way I understood it was that he would study at this strange place on an island with a bunch of other progressive and young musical freaks. The school was not easy to get in to, so I also knew he must have been on to something, for them to let him through the door. (more…)
A while back I wrote a post about my friend L5D playing live in his parents basement. To recap, L5D is my friend Colin Swenson. I’ve known him my whole life, but even if I didn’t know him, I would still dig his music. L5D is a moniker he made music as for a long time. Now he goes as Omnii. Think broken tapes, half-functioning equipment, sun drenched home movies, Boards of Canada, and microphones hanging from trees…that kind of thing. Ever since I posted his old L5D music, we’ve been reconnecting on the music front, which has been amazing. He recently sent me three old L5D albums, and they are all fucking great.
Before we go any further though, if you are in Minnesota, he’s playing a show as Dollar Store Keyboard (a brand new project) at The Rock in Maplewood on January 22nd at 9 pm. Click here for more info.
(1) L5D – NeppodosiaEP.
6 tracks, all great. These are the songs he played live that night in his parents basement. They are gloriously broken, sounding like J Dilla tracks that have been dubbed 400x on a boombox by someone’s little brother until the tape has broken down into a new world entirely. He calls this his “favorite moment in L5D history”.
(2) L5D – Partehtpacse.
Read it backwards. This first song is brilliant, I love how it builds on its own and then starts decomposing until only a shred of itself is left. Thats my favorite part actually. At the end of the track, through all the chaos and noise, you can hear snatches of the original samples. Awesome. Click here to download the entire album.
I also cut together a little “nothing” video to one of the tracks on the album. Nothing huge, but I think it works on some weird level.
(3) L5D – Peace EP.
Higher production values on this one, making it “colder” than the more analog stuff, but also thicker, more complex. According to Colin, it “goes well with percocet”. And I agree. Darker, druggier, crazier. This track comes together around the 2 minute mark. Makes me feel like running into traffic…in a good way? Seriously.
After all of these releases, he went to an island in Norway to make his next (and final) album as L5D. Stay tuned for that, and go to that show damn you.
“Recaptured” is a series of old content – music, recordings, writings, photos I’ve been coming across in random shoeboxes and plastic crates. (Hopefully) by digitizing/writing this stuff up I will keep it from being lost forever.
In the summer of 2002, I was delivering pizzas…I think. Either that or I was just home from college, idle, waiting to start my sophomore year of college. Doesn’t matter. My friend Colin, who I have been friends with every day of my life, save for one (He was born one day after me, I think in the same hospital) is creative. I consider myself creative, but Colin is purely so. The creative part of his brain is larger than the rest. He’s about 90 percent creative ideas, and 10 percent other stuff. He’s amazing in the way that aggressively creative people are: odd, uncomfortably hilarious, and intimidatingly brilliant. We spent the better part of 6th grade making comedy recordings and selling the tapes in our respective classes. We made 50 bucks…which is about a billion dollars in kid money.
Anyway, in 2002 Colin had just started synthesizing his musical influences (shoeboxes full of old tapes, Boards of Canada, Autechre, old metal) into a project he named either L5d (see the play on letters there?) or Advanced Ants Dance, depending on the day you asked him. He’d pack himself into his parents garage/basement on Portland Avenue in Bloomington, Minnesota for hours with his sampler, an old busted floppy-disk sampling keyboard, his bass, and a collection of unspooled VHS tapes and cassettes with strange markings all over them, cutting…pasting…creating. The results sounded like Madlib filtered through Boards of Canada’s screened-in-porch.
One night in August…for some reason (a birthday?) he had some friends over to his parents house to “play” a little L5d “show” for everyone. It was me – in the early stages of my Palahniuk-reading academic paranoia, his friend Ariya – co-conspirator in their tapedeck-rap project Fumanji, Mark – another insanely brilliant madperson who at the time was studying Remote Viewing, and David – a small, absurdly nice kid they (and me, only once) used to call “Squeaky” in middle school, on account of his abnormally high pitched voice.
At the time I was gently fucking around with my own music, and I was attracted to “found sound”, so I brought my trusty Pressman tape recorder over to record the show. It was loose, but there were some snatches of real brilliance, all drenched in that unbelievably appealing tape-hiss sound that can only come from analog equipment and roughly chopped samples.
I came across that tape recently, and digitzed it to put up here. Because it needs to be heard. In the background if you hear a small laugh, that’s David. Who by that point had transcended the high school bullshit, and had a great crew of friends who loved him. He was doing well, working at Batteries Plus at the time (he was still wearing his work uniform that night I believe). About a year later, he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I mention this not to add cheap gravitas, but to give him the credit he deserved as a good person. He’s here on this tape, and was really important to the moment. Rest in Peace man.
So check these out, they are definitely worth a damn…If you click “share” you can download the mp3
Also, this is Mark’s Myspace. I’ve written about his comics/writings/photography here before, check him out. His stuff is like Adult Swim’s editing floor…the shit that was too crazy for the craziest minutes on a late Sunday night.
