Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I read a review of the minimal house album/mix "Closer to the Edit" by Richie Hawtin ( richiehawtin.bandcamp.com ), and it sounded fascinating, but these were the late days of music scarcity, where you couldn't just go to Apple Music or that other place or YouTube to listen to an album you read about, and I din't have $18 to grab every cd that sounded interesting from a review... (Napster was of course around, but I never really learned how to use that very well, and always felt a little bit uneasy about it)

So I decided to make something from my imagination that was based on the review...

I didn't want to use samples of other people's music, but I had already recorded about an albums worth of things, (which more or less corresponds to "Who murdered the Mountain?" although that's a 2008 version, I think, where I cut out/edited some things I felt shy about...) so I decided to sample myself...

I edited the entire "album" into one long .wav, then cut it all into 10 second samples. I loaded those into iTunes, and shuffled them all, then put them into groups that I used to make two minute "songs" or sections, which faded together to make the entire 16 minute first track. It took a lot of time and a lot of work, but I enjoyed it and have loved listening to it ever since. I think that was the summer of 2002 when I finished it?

The other tracks use the same samples but do other things; I think maybe track 2 was made in that form around 2008 or 2009?

One note about the track (AM Coda), back in 2002 when I was working on this I woke up from an early morning dream that I was playing AM radio static as an instrument, and thinking I should record that, but when I woke up I realized the sound I was hearing in my head was exactly that track that I had already recorded. I never did record AM radio static itself, but hey, there's still time, right?

The funny thing about this recording being that I started out with a review of a minimal album, and I ended up with a recording that's pretty maximal.

(and so you know, I did later end up getting Closer to the Edit for myself; and I loved it!)

October 6, 2025 note: I originally published this to Bandcamp with a 6/11/2009 date but I think that was a particular mix. My memory of this was creating it in summer of 2002, so I'm changing the date to August 31, 2002. Right or wrong.