Hidden Archive Discovery
After a year away, a recent visit to New Mexico prompted the discovery of thousands of hours of recordings by a band from the past.
Why release music from a band that no longer exists?
I’ve always held the belief that recordings can somehow capture the spirit of the air in the space where they’re recorded. After a year away, my recent trip to New Mexico — a place I lived for nearly six years — inspired me to go back through the extensive recordings Nick and I made during Regular Humans, our two-person band that hosted a rotating cast of musicians throughout five years of intensive working time.
Our plans to take work to a recording studio never materialized, constrained as we were by finances and lured by home recording. Most of the recordings were made on a Tascam DR-05X, a two-channel midi recorder set in the middle of the room as we played.
The spaces we played
Those rooms hosted many of the tracks released on Regular, and they held many years of earlier time and experience of Regular Humans work, week by week, year in and out.
The horses loose in El Valle, from the front door.
We migrated around that house. The back bedroom studio, cooler in the summer, was painted, walls and ceiling, in full gloss a color between aqua and baby blue. The front room where, in the full windy blast of winter night the floor was barely above freezing – that room had, a sort of compensation, or ode to positive thinking, the warmest colored carpet available: fire engine red across the broad floor, as thin as newspaper.
What started in that remote mountain village adobe then moved briefly to Española, then Nick’s living room, and then finally the living room of my tiny casita in Pojoaque.
Mics were strung from hooks attached to vigas or simply laid on the nearest box. A number of times we ran lines from each instrument and multitracked into my cheap laptop computer.
The pitfalls and the spirit
The pitfalls of a music career are various, and we were beset by the pure joy of playing, the ecstatic moment of expression with no further goal or aspiration. Most rehearsals, we would start with a warm-up jam that, many times, functioned as a sort of emotional exorcism. I missed recording many of these instances, drawn as I was to play along.
Paradoxically, I was very serious about documenting these experiences, and we worked diligently to get songs right, which is why there were thousands of hours of music when I turned to the archive.
What kind of spirit was this, then?
During our time together, Nick left a job of a decade and spent two years at jobs he hated. The result was that his obsession with working on cars grew into a career as a mechanic.
For my part, I was in the process of starting a career in education, just getting into a master’s program after 30 years of doing manual labor and music work. I had just left an abusive relationship, and was in the beginning stages of a therapeutic process that completely remade my most basic relationships, most especially with myself.
So perhaps the “spirit in the air” of this particular moment had less to do with output — you can hear how these are not perfect takes or recordings —but about creating safety for experiments in expression.
As I curated these collections
As I curated these collections of sounds, I felt again the frustration and impatience, the almost-there takes, and my forgetting to arm just the guitar track for the entire recording session. I recalled as well, and sometimes felt I could hear, moments of transcendence peek through. What I heard most, through the failed attempts, the spoken-out-loud stage directions, and the musical experimentation, was a deepening of trust between and within ourselves. THAT sounded chaotic, noisy, and sometimes melodic with the occasional harmonic resolution.
The archive opens
After five years of weekly rehearsals, live shows, recording with a variety of artists and in various rooms across northern New Mexico — these recordings deserve to be heard. Not as perfect productions, but as what they are: documentation of two people learning to trust each other enough to fail spectacularly and keep going, and occasionally find those moments of grace.
