Music for Measurements Liner Notes
I remember rehearsals from my time in the Richard Swift band being not so much rehearsals but extended communal DJ sessions. At the time, Swift had two turntables, a mixer, and a pair of ESS AMT 1 speakers set up on one side of his recording studio (National Freedom in Cottage Grove Oregon) where we rehearsed. The members of the band would take turns selecting and playing cuts from Swift’s extensive, well curated album collection, while the rest of us sat in a corner of the studio in a diner booth Swift had thrifted or scavenged from somewhere in town. At some point, one of us would mention the necessity of practicing for the upcoming tour, and we would put away the records, plug in our instruments, and play. Usually we ran through the set once or twice, punctuated by tongue-in-cheek jam sessions. After which, it was back to listening.
Swift’s taste in music, manifested in his record collection, and these DJ sessions at his studio, exercised a formative influence on my conception of what makes for a good recording: novel and overwhelming aural texture, good vocals, mystery, melody, and great drums. Swift also had a penchant for music that he called “properly weird.” Not weird in a contrived, self-conscious, or shallow way, but intrinsically off-kilter: a good singer with a memorably unique voice, a drummer with an egg shaped approach to time keeping, a guitar player that never bothered to fully tune their guitar, or recordings so compressed and distorted that the instruments melted into a unified, abstract, electric representation of a band. Sandy Bull’s recording of “Memphis Tennessee,” Joe Meek’s space-aged 50s pop productions, Broadcast’s Microtronics, R.L. Burnside’s Sound Machine Groove, Pressure Sounds Reggae-Dub comps, and Bo Diddley all spring immediately to mind.
So, why all this reminiscing? It was in the spirit of these DJ sessions that I recorded Music for Measurements. I set out to make something that would be at home among Swift’s record collection, with tracks that might be selected for inclusion in one of our ad hoc DJ sets. I recorded the album over the course of a few years, mostly on an old Tascam 246 4-track cassette recorder. Two of the tracks “Lobby Call” and “Skin Tight” I recorded with Swift at his National Freedom studio. Asthmatic Kitty released the album as part of their Music Library series in 2009. “Lobby Call” ended up in a Visa commercial that Visa assured me was “low budget” when we were negotiation the license fee—Morgan Freeman narrated the spot, it featured Colin Kaepernick, Drew Brees, Andrew Luck, and Larry Fitzgerald, and the commercial ran for an entire NFL season every Monday night… This same song made it into the season finale of the first season of HBO’s Bored To Death, where it set the mood for a boxing match gone wrong.
Asthmatic Kitty’s Music Library experiment was short-lived, and so the record went out of print pretty quickly. I’m quite fond of this record, and always regretted releasing it under a fictitious band name “Law of the Least Effort.” So I’m re-releasing it, under my own name.
A lot has changed in the world, and in my life since the record came out. Swift and I drifted in and out of contact over the years until his passing. The last time I saw him was at party and small show he DJ’ed in Portland, Oregon. After the show he played me some music he was working on while we sat in his car reminiscing. As usual, he played the music at a blistering volume, and it was beautiful.
I remember rehearsals from my time in the Richard Swift band being not so much rehearsals but extended communal DJ sessions. At the time, Swift had two turntables, a mixer, and a pair of ESS AMT 1 speakers set up on one side of his recording studio (National Freedom in Cottage Grove Oregon) where we rehearsed. The members of the band would take turns selecting and playing cuts from Swift’s extensive, well curated album collection, while the rest of us sat in a corner of the studio in a diner booth Swift had thrifted or scavenged from somewhere in town. At some point, one of us would mention the necessity of practicing for the upcoming tour, and we would put away the records, plug in our instruments, and play. Usually we ran through the set once or twice, punctuated by tongue-in-cheek jam sessions. After which, it was back to listening.
Swift’s taste in music, manifested in his record collection, and these DJ sessions at his studio, exercised a formative influence on my conception of what makes for a good recording: novel and overwhelming aural texture, good vocals, mystery, melody, and great drums. Swift also had a penchant for music that he called “properly weird.” Not weird in a contrived, self-conscious, or shallow way, but intrinsically off-kilter: a good singer with a memorably unique voice, a drummer with an egg shaped approach to time keeping, a guitar player that never bothered to fully tune their guitar, or recordings so compressed and distorted that the instruments melted into a unified, abstract, electric representation of a band. Sandy Bull’s recording of “Memphis Tennessee,” Joe Meek’s space-aged 50s pop productions, Broadcast’s Microtronics, R.L. Burnside’s Sound Machine Groove, Pressure Sounds Reggae-Dub comps, and Bo Diddley all spring immediately to mind.
So, why all this reminiscing? It was in the spirit of these DJ sessions that I recorded Music for Measurements. I set out to make something that would be at home among Swift’s record collection, with tracks that might be selected for inclusion in one of our ad hoc DJ sets. I recorded the album over the course of a few years, mostly on an old Tascam 246 4-track cassette recorder. Two of the tracks “Lobby Call” and “Skin Tight” I recorded with Swift at his National Freedom studio. Asthmatic Kitty released the album as part of their Music Library series in 2009. “Lobby Call” ended up in a Visa commercial that Visa assured me was “low budget” when we were negotiation the license fee—Morgan Freeman narrated the spot, it featured Colin Kaepernick, Drew Brees, Andrew Luck, and Larry Fitzgerald, and the commercial ran for an entire NFL season every Monday night… This same song made it into the season finale of the first season of HBO’s Bored To Death, where it set the mood for a boxing match gone wrong.
Asthmatic Kitty’s Music Library experiment was short-lived, and so the record went out of print pretty quickly. I’m quite fond of this record, and always regretted releasing it under a fictitious band name “Law of the Least Effort.” So I’m re-releasing it, under my own name.
A lot has changed in the world, and in my life since the record came out. Swift and I drifted in and out of contact over the years until his passing. The last time I saw him was at party and small show he DJ’ed in Portland, Oregon. After the show he played me some music he was working on while we sat in his car reminiscing. As usual, he played the music at a blistering volume, and it was beautiful.
https://caseyfoubert.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-measurements
