I Past Through Minor Chord In a Morning
Dave Graney and Clare Moore – featuring Stuart Perera.
Digital album , out Nov 11th 2024.
14 songs. All new studio affair, no songs written as chords and lyrics on a guitar.
Could be called our basement tapes album. (Our studio is downstairs)
Could also be our most post punkest of albums. Certainly our most auto-harped album.
Some songs started life twenty years ago, some six or seven years ago, two built from processed and distorted sounds recorded almost thirty years ago. Four began life as bass and drum improvisations into a single mic four months before the albums release and two as fresh as two months ago.
I want to call it our QUANTUM AMERICANA album. Though I am truly bluffing here as my understanding of anything “quantum” is anything but quantum… It sounds good. I am trying to suggest a multiverse. Multi dimensions. Because I find most acts and sounds billed as “americana” to be very passive and inert. Built around four or five agreed iconic figures. Ball park figures but very uptight in their ways.
I am suggesting a Quantum Americana would stretch out and bend and turn in on itself and find new slipstreams and portals. Other ways.
After we finished our April 2024 album (strangely)(emotional) Clare Moore suggested I do an album of freewheeling lyrics and perhaps even talking/speaking. That’s where it kind of started.
Cover image by Izabella Shaw.
I Passed Through Minor Chord In A Morning at Bandcamp.
Album and t shirt bundle available.
Elvis Never and Still Got The Truth were slabs of cut and paste chaos which I’d been experimenting with since 2021. I had bought a 4 track cassette recorder and was bouncing sounds into and out of it and bringing them into the digital realm. I had no grid or sequence to cut it all to but I could hear a beat and sang to it and then cut and pasted and deep fried it all some more. I was most happy that the songs were barely two minutes in length.
The title track was started by Clare Moore with a beat, keyboard bass and vibes in 2008 and she had Stuart Perera play some guitar on it. Its been sitting in the archives since then. The lyric is talking about Minor Chord as a physical place - a town that the singer passes through.
I’d Rather the Frills goes back to 2004 and an experiment with open D tuning and some 12 string raga guitar moments.
Four songs – 1985, Did You Have Servants?, Acceptable Back Story and Girls Are Famous came from an improvised session of bass and drums being recorded by one mic and a stereo Zoom recorder in our studio in June 2024 just before we headed off to do some shows interstate. We then forgot about them.
Et Tu Doudou dates from 2018 and concerns a story Georgio “the Dove” Valentino (who we had just been touring with) told us about a childhood totem he had taken with him on an epic journey of many years from Florida and around the USA and Europe and the trauma he felt when it was stolen from his car one dark night in Belgium.
A Rampart Across Time was a piece of music recorded to his phone in 2021 by Stuart Perera which I turned into a song and sang along to. Stuart added some more guitar parts.
Emcee Bitz and Parking Lot Scenes were both studio improvisations that happened when I learned how to loop a drum beat. Emcee Bitz is a lyric about performing your life story and Parking Lot Scene takes it title from a movie about Grateful Dead fans who would gather in force and go off piste in the parking lots around the giant venues they would play.
The Trojan Egg was built up from the skeleton of a song that appeared on Fearful Wiggings in 2014.
There are some two minute songs and several almost ten minute songs. Some have sonic origins going back two decades and others were brought into being two months before the album was “finished”.
Dave Graney – guitars, bass, autoharp, some keys and some beats and lead vocals.
Clare Moore – keys, vibes, drums, percussion, backing vocals.
Stuart Perera – guitar.
