We had been spending more time in the studio away from people in the scene. Trying to break apart our sound and find something new. Jordan had been encouraging me to work more with the synths and was pushing me toward long ambient pieces without an arc or a form. Not exactly the first place I’d ever go creatively. Noodle with intent he would tell me as he rolled another joint.

The studio was just an empty room in a mostly empty building on east Hastings street. The front door was clogged with debris, the wooden stairs too narrow, and aside from a few vagrant musicians sleeping in other rooms the place was abandoned. The building had a perceptible lean, floors were uneven, ancient appliances emitted unnatural hums and surprising smells.

It was October so the rains were coming cold and hard and the street, when witnessed in the evenings from the third story window, unopenable due to thick layers of paint, was often little more than slick sidewalk gleam amid dark umbrella tops in the light of the street lamps.

Jordan had been inspired by an idea of creating audio collages as soundtracks for imaginary movies. Something that he’d read about in one of the dogeared foreign magazines that he’d been reading.

He’d called the piece Isolated Scenes for a Disembodied Ranch. A young woman, maybe a ghost, was wandering the rooms of an old farm house that had been left untouched for decades, possibly longer, and she wasn’t looking for anything. He was clear that her motivations were purely ephemeral or unknowable and not attached to longing or memory. The ranch was surrounded by hills and low hanging mist in the mornings. Silence abounded but no signs of life were evident, neither animal nor human. And the ranch with its corrals and outbuildings and discarded tools changed shape as she explored it. Buildings appeared and disappeared, mutated, but it was always the same place, immediately recognizable but never the same. | image @cy.twombly