period 2 ends when i left for bc with sarah, and period 3 begins when i got back, after having left her in her home town on the way home, and with the previous recording (inri075) acting as a bridge between the two periods. so, this begins period 3, which was a time of great uncertainty and instability in my life that ends only when i move into a new apartment on bronson in early 2007.
that said, what the trivial group project documents, in hindsight, is the period where sarah existed in my life as a physical and emotional entity, which really starts back around inri064 and culminates, in it's iniital phase, in the last recording of period 2, the reflections ep (inri074), so, the story is also picking up a part of the way through. while essentially none of my music up to this point had a romantic slant, and the political themes will pick up again when sarah is no longer a physical or emotional entity in my life, she was really the dominant influence on my mental state over period 3, and these recordings are consequently almost entirely about her, in some abstraction or another.
we didn't stay in bc long when we got there. as mentioned, we didn't really have a plan, other than to get there and hope it worked out. but, i think the reason we didn't have a plan is partly because we had our own plans and were kind of using each other to get there; my plan, which i don't think i ever told her, was that i was looking for a place to transition in, and i suspect she was ultimately looking for a home to wreck, figuratively speaking. but, the lessons from the grapes of wrath, which i had read as child, became more and more apparent as i stumbled through the okanagan valley, and the depth of the mistake i had made in leaving a comfortable existence in ottawa started to become apparent to me. i certainly needed to find some way out of the empty, "normal" existence my family was trying to push on me, but i wasn't going to find it in these rolling fields of sage, or in these camp fire orgies of the lost and dispossessed. i didn't know what to do next, or how to assert some kind of meaning in the emptiness of ubiquitous market capitalism, but i knew i needed to go home to sort it out - and i knew the value of stability, for perhaps the first time in my life.
so, i'm actually the one that decided to go home, and i didn't expect her to follow me. but, she did.
there's a story she told me years later, and i came to realize that it had a lasting effect on her that i wasn't aware of at the time. after an argument about monogamy (one of many...) outside of a work camp near osoyoos, i told her i was leaving her there for good and stormed off down the road. i quickly hitched a ride towards penticton, where i was strongly considering transitioning, and didn't intend to come back. that was that: bye, sarah.
but, rather than go to penticton, i stopped in oliver, and hitched back the other way, instead. i found myself in the position of needing to reconsider my course of action: i couldn't just leave her there, i had to go back to get her. when i got back to osoyoos, i found her in exactly the same spot that i had left her, roughly eight hours earlier. she told me she just froze solid - she was overcome with fear, and didn't know how to proceed, however many thousands of kilometres from home. she was sure i'd come back. so, she waited for me, and just passed the time by picking wild sage in the fields.
so, maybe that's why she followed me home, in the end, after i followed her so far away from home, to begin with.
one of the last stops on the way back was in newmarket, ontario, where we got into a shouting match minutes before we got into the last car. we didn't talk on the way back to ottawa; she got off in her home town, and i kept going. it was mutually understood that the relationship was over.
i still remember the date in late june when i got back to ottawa, getting off the queensway just before fisher, hobbling down the ramp, walking by the civic hospital (and bumming a smoke outside it), smelling the experimental farm again for the first time in months and collapsing on the couch when i got in, for a very long sleep, for the first time in some time. my dad, always one for sardonic jokes, woke me up by blaring the classic kansas tune, carry on my wayward son, on his high end stereo system.
so, that is the context for this song, which was written and recorded over the summer of 2003 (my files are all dated to august 30th and 31st, when i seem to have reset the volume for the purpose of remixing it), as i was facing my first time away from sarah in roughly a year and struggling with the separation. i was undergoing a conflict between my brain (which told me to get away from this girl because she's bad news) and my hormones (which were experiencing symptoms of attachment) which i had undergone many times previously and would undergo many times again. it's not an exaggeration to suggest that sarah sort of drove me crazy, that she sort of broke my brain a little. i can only hope that the resulting art is substantive, as best as i can present it.
but, if it's not clear, the song is intended to be darkly sarcastic. the reference is to "all you need is love", but it's a warped one, and the influence is "love will tear us apart, again". what i'm reflecting upon is the state of delusion that we enter into when our faculties for reason become degraded by the intoxicating influence of hormones. it's really a state of impaired thinking that should be seen as psychotropic - we should talk about being under the influence of love, of being inebriated by oxytocin. a person that is truly in love could have their heart ripped out in front of them as they're breathing, and not be able to react coherently to it, as it's happening. this is a dangerous chemical, indeed.
it may come off as intentionally defiant, but it's intended to be unintentionally deluded.
i saw sarah a few times that summer. she called me on canada day, and i biked out to her home town to see her on her birthday, a few weeks later. but, i was lonely that summer without her, and that is really what the song is expressing. i hope that the guitar part is particularly expressive.
the initial intent was for the first part of the song to be this sarcastic commentary on the concept of love, and for it to open up into a sort of dance punk thing (i guess it sounds like john mcentire remixing the strokes) that represents the shift away from feeling and the shift into numbness and obliviousness, but i separated out and shelved the first part because it was just too difficult. so, the second part of the song - into oblivion - is a first draft of the interplanetary isomorphism, a 33 minute symphonic piece and the first part - all you need - has been a stranded demo, since 2003.
is the first part really that difficult? well, if you can find me a more raw piece of music, i'd like to hear it. but, 20 years later, that's an asset more than a drawback. i mean, it still hurts a little to listen to it, but i can listen to it at more of a distance, now, and realize the artistic value of it. so, the point of this is in large part to salvage something that has always had value but was previously a little too raw for me to share.
in mid 2021, i remixed the first part - all you need - to turn the vocals down a little. unfortunately, some of the sarcasm ends up lost in the new mix, but it sounds a lot better and i'm happier with it. i think the sarcasm is heavy enough to not require the use of tone to demonstrate it, but the initial mix makes the sarcasm in the line "yeah. all you need is love." quite a bit more apparent.
in early 2022, to salvage the concept and complete the recording, i added a lengthy "soul swap" piece to the beginning of the track. this stems from a number of discussions i had with sarah where she tried to convince me that she would make a better jessica than i would and that i should go back to jason, something that perhaps ended up being sort of accurate (in terms of her being a better jessica). i can't know how much that thought guided sarah in the years to come, and she wouldn't admit it to me if it were true because she'd realize it would upset me, but that's the idea, here. of course, we don't actually have souls and can't actually swap them, although i'd love to shapeshift into a new host as this one becomes old and unusable. it's strictly a poetic suggestion, to extrapolate on the idea that sarah and i, in some ways, changed places. i don't know how long a soul swap ought to take, but i made it lengthy enough to be a difficult piece of music, and tried to present what i imagine it ought to sound like. so, yes, the 40+ minutes of noise flipping stereo positions is meant to abstractly represent the sound of souls changing hosts, however absurd the idea may be in real life. the female channel in the soul swap was also isolated and added to the end of the collection as a 40+ minute drone piece, as it has an aesthetic interest on it's own.
i also wanted to reclaim the piece as a segue between the 8th symphony (reflections) and the 9th symphony (interplanetary isomorphism) for the trivial group double cd, which meant removing the vocals and manipulating the soul swap so that it is of a length that fits on the first cd. but, then, i decided i should also have a vocal version of the album construction. so, these tracks were added to close the disc a few days after the soul swap was built.
unfortunately, i got into a fight with my stepmother in the fall of 2003 and could no longer stay there, something that may be a consequence of leaving over that summer and assuming i could just come back. i was only back in town for a few months before i was thrown out, something that i'll pick up on in the writeup for inri077. so, this is the sum total of material worked on in my parents' basement when i got back from bc before i got thrown out, completed in 2021/2022 to be a standalone conceptual ep, and a component of my next full length record.
initially written and recorded over the summer of 2003. track 2 was remixed on june 14, 2021. tracks 1 and 6 were created on the morning of january 3rd, 2022 from the base of an aborted noise piece that was last edited in early 2004 and contained samples of the recording of all you need. tracks 4 and 5 were created on the evening of january 9th, 2022. released as a two volume set on jan 9, 2022. as always, please use headphones.
the album version also appears on my ninth record, {e} (inri08x): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/e
the condensed version also appears on the fundamental theorem of poeticity:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-fundamental-theorem-of-poeticity
this recording is a part of the following collections:
1) flac dvd disc vol 7
2) mp3 dvd vol 3
3) trivial group box set
4) blu ray disc vol 2
5) period 3
this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2003, 2015, 2017).
disc one:
1. soul swap
2. all you need
3. into oblivion (initial construction)
4. all you need (album mix)
disc two:
5. all you need (condensed)
6. her
released september 1, 2003
j - electric guitars, effects, electric mandolin, analog synthesizers, drum programming, sound design, tone generators, cool edit synthesis, digital sampling, digital wave editing, vocals, production, composition
