“Each one was based on a foundational sound-clip that I added some overdubs to.
The foundation of Boom Tube came about because I was given a reference CD to listen to the recording of Water Leaking, and there was a strange CD/DVD player at the house I was staying at... this CD/DVD player would not rewind normally, if you wanted to rewind what you were listening to, instead it would play the recording backwards at high speeds and interject small snippets of forward-playing, I suppose to allow you to hear where you were in the recording, so you didn’t rewind too far or something. It was a crazy sound, really cool. So Boom Tube is basically a recording that I made of this CD/DVD player, while I’m rewinding the recording of Water Leaking, but it doesn’t sound like a normal backwards recording because it’s something like six seconds backwards then three seconds forwards, over and over. Also, it sounded interesting to me because of the way Water Leaking is a song that starts very quiet and minimal then keeps building up with new layers until the electric guitar comes in at the end, so when listening to it in a backwards-rewinding it has a very cool feeling with all these layers of sound dropping away one at a time, leaving a simpler and quieter sound with each diminishing layer, like something that is rotting away or evaporating or fading into a gentler reality or something. The title Boom Tube is from old Jack Kirby comic books, it was a teleportation device. We actually did play Boom Tube live at least one time, at a London gig, tried to come up with some way to play this “song” using normal instruments.
The foundational sound-clip of From Draz came from when I was sitting in the recording studio and the engineer was trying to figure out the best way to set the drum sounds for Cult Boyfriend, so they were listening to the snare drum track from Cult Boyfriend and adding and subtracting frequencies to try to arrive at a tone they were happy with. But the process of doing this created a crazy sound, a weird phasing effect, so I recorded the sound of them adjusting the snare drum track sound, which was creating this phased-drum sound while they tweaked the knobs. I added some keyboard and reverb/echo to it also. From Draz is just a sort of scrambled dyslexic way to say Drum Phase, which describes the basic sound of the drum-phasing track. We actually played this song live quite a few times, as a weird krautrock instrumental thing, I might have a live recording of it somewhere but I’m not sure if i do. I know we played it once in Birmingham and once in London, maybe one or two other times too.
That’s the full scoop, if anybody cares!
Jeffrey”