Recording the Changes in the Air

After a year away, my recent trip to New Mexico, a place I lived for nearly 6 years, inspired a new understanding of remembrance. More practically, I felt inspired to go back through the extensive recordings NIck and I made during the course of Regular Humans, our two-person band that hosted a rotating cast of musicians and soundmakers throughout the five years of our intensive working time.

Our plans at making it 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 moved with the seasons, clustering near the wood stove, fleeing the sun, with equipment concentrated onto shelving we built to fit it all into a living room. We moved from house to house, starting in a remote mountain village, moving briefly to Española, Nick’s living room, and finally one of the two rooms in 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. 

We kept coming back to our work as a duo—we went through phases where we each played acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, and/or drums with our feet. This next sentence is a musician meme. We worked with at least 5 drummers: one had never played drums (most successful collaboration); one who wanted to join the band and then couldn’t commit to being in a band; one who, on the third practice, made a baker’s dozen dick jokes; one who wondered if it was cool that he showed up 2 hours late. We went through so many guitars, recording interfaces, drum kits, amps, and mics that an exhaustive list would read like the inventory of a small music store. Towards the end, we tended towards me on bass and Nick on electric guitar. 

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. “Transfiguration” and “Approaching Winter” are prime examples of these improvisations. I missed recording many of these, 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. I continue to function under the perhaps naive assumption that recordings can somehow preserve the spirit in the air at the time of their creation. 

What kind of spirit is this, then? I look to the lives of the members of the band. 

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. He went through a relationship with a woman who was beginning her fall into the deep end, learned some lessons about what was important for him in a relationship, and the next woman he dated is the woman he is now engaged to be married to.

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. I had just left a abusive relationship, and was in the beginning stages of a therapeutic relationship that completely remade my most basic relationships, most especially with myself.

Our most long-lasting collaborator was in graduate school during our time together. She was trying out drums, writing harmonies for her songs with us, and performing out live as an adult for the first time.

For me, this time with Regular Humans was an unsteady and lurching move towards production and online community building after a decade or so of unstructured, unfocused music work. I had been doing it because I loved it, not because I was trying to “make it.” In fact, I had ended up in New Mexico as a surprise crash landing at the end of a music tour. Regular Humans, as much as we played together, never traveled farther than Taos or Albuquerque to perform. We played maybe two dozen shows live during our time together.

So perhaps the spirit in the air of this time had less to do with output—you can hear how these are not perfect takes or recordings of any of these songs—but about creating safety for experiments in expression. Our most heady ideas had to do with the way that overtones would emerge from chaotic, repeated signals. And what can emerge from spontaneous, improvised, free-form moments of musical expression. 

On a more practical level, our conversations were about groceries: they didn’t have half and half so I got cream, where is the beer or weed I like, and what do you have to eat? We built cabinets together, replaced engine mounts in cars into the middle of the night, and rode out the vicissitudes of relationship, career paths, and rotating musical collaborators. There were some very happy times together.

As I curated these collections of sounds, I felt again the frustration and impatience, the almost-there takes, 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 sounds chaotic, noisy, and has an occasional harmonic resolution.