Orchid Eaton:

‘Where All Ends Meet’ is their sophomore effort. This album was created in separate spaces, shared back & forth through the ether, before and while everything came to a dreaded pause. It’s a vain hope but also illuminating: a thread to walk, many chances to heal. Brian and Matt have been taking turns living in intermediate states (welcoming babies and losing a mom and a dad-in-law). Where threads are tied and untied, on and on. Matter neither being created or destroyed.

Even objects live past lives. Craigslist soundboards, thrift store keyboards, cigarette smoke microphones, tape machines suffused with stories. These songs passed through analog equipment in their respective home studios, required into electric current, squeezed and smoothed into a hazy hug. A comfort; like swaying of grass in the wind; witness to the beauty and the horror. Of all.

It may be a cheap way to prolong life, but these machines and tools are Orchid Eaton’s preferred wavelength. The nine songs are a rumination and acceptance of impermanence, birth and death, as much as can be considered. All are past and present at once. Maybe in some form they live forever. These songs were purposely constructed but patiently waited for, like a cup being filled by ground water that once fell as rain. Down to the center where there are always layers lower, those that ring truest in our heart of hearts.

There used to be this destroyer called the USS Eaton, I found out later. A great steel hulk used in the Pacific. It crashed 3 times after the war (the worst with the USS Wisconsin) and then was sunk for target practice in 1969.  The same year Gary Usher and my Eau Claire, WI hometown hero, Curt Boettcher made their last record as Sagittarius; the immersive, sunshiny, Moog-strewn, hippie-nadir ‘The Blue Marble’.

I also found an orchid outside Eaton, WI last year.  It was all on a wavelength.  Somehow it all led me somewhere. 

Sometimes you know exactly what you want to say. Sometimes you’re up until 3:23am witnessing your mind churn like a front-loaded washing machine.  And you have no quarters. Or is it no quarter?

You’re more in the latter category.  And by you, I mean me. I’ve spent a good too many years cloaking my intention in a series of ‘you’s’.  To some formless wisp of smoke that is somehow still malleable. So now, by design, it is I. 

What do I have to say? I guess that depends.  

These days I breathe cleaner.  I spend more time in a crystalline fog of my own design.  But I made the confines, set the rules.  And I permit the world to be as it will.  I’ve always enjoyed listening anyways.  

Stasis.  But also harmony.  Static harmony. 

Also, to be unafraid as I can be. To rock my sometimes circular feelings to sleep like a doting father.  Because I’ve learned how to do that. To nurture. And to continue, however futilely, to throw a layer of suppressive soil over the ego.  

So here we go.

I recorded these basement pop songs by myself during work days and late nights when my daughter was sleeping.  A Tascam mixing desk & antiquated ADAT machine were used for tracking.  It often gave me scary warnings like ‘Error 7’ and spit out my tapes in perceived disgust. I didn’t let that stop me. No click track or punch in’s were used in the making of this record. You’ll be guaranteed to hear the creak, shuffle, slide, and warp. 

I played some drums but then I thought better of it and asked Brian Moen (Peter Wolf Crier, Laarks, Shouting Matches) to help me.  He played drums and meticulously and heroically exported my garage band tracks into pro-tools and transformed them into the earnest, visceral and 2-D psychedelic end versions you hear here.  Brian is a superior and generous human bean. Thank you for your energies, mon frere. 

Some other people did some things too (Emily Mohrbacher, Evan Bierer, Luisa Rivera) some people were the mains of support (B. Lev: for the everything \ Hartke: for the Bach & mics \ Dan Choma: for the mics & drums \ Graham O’Brien: for the drums), and some people were themselves (TJL, Christian, Svec, Bobby, Krinsky, B. White).  

Additional thanks to Tom Herbers for the Optigan and Pea Hicks (optigan.com) for the new discs. 

Thank you to you too for listening.  

I’ll see you out there somewhere

-Mah Lev.