Chromo Mountain, 1:30am

Driving through the American Southwest at night is an exercise in surrealism.

In February of 2019 I made an album* of generally not very good and probably relatively unlistenable music. With the benefit of time, however, I see a clearer picture: a weekend spent making a core few songs, especially the ten and a half minute “Chromo Mountain, 1:30am” followed by a frenzied rush to fill in around it with other music in order to complete the “album” in time.

Upon listening now I recognize that this song was a sort of singular act of creation on the project. There are others I ended up liking: Memphis, a downbeat pop song built around an 808 drum beat about an ill-fated road trip I took ten years ago to meet a woman I met on the internet, and Taos Hum where I just got lost in droning synthesizers and layered tape delays. But Chromo was me truly getting outside my comfort zone.

It was a song about a road trip conceived on a later road trip: one weekend in early February I left work, packed a bag and started driving into East Texas. I drove, aimlessly, taking pictures of old buildings by moonlight and listening to, among other things, The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2 and Broadcast’s entire discography. I made audio sketches on my iPad, laying down synthesizer tracks and buzzes that I’d later turn into a couple of tracks on the album while sitting next to a campfire at a State Park while drinking whiskey and staring at the moon. It was freeing.

The next night, back home, I stayed up most of the night working on Chromo. I started by experimenting with making sounds with my guitar that didn’t sound like a traditional guitar: I ran it through banks of delay and distortion pedals, attempting to build feedback loops that eventually my software couldn’t or wouldn’t let me do. At some point I grabbed a bamboo chopstick with a glob of hot glue at one end and played the guitar like a sort of...dulcimer, laying it on my lap and pressing the fretboard with my left hand while thrumming with the right, bouncing the hammer off the strings gently, manipulating the speed of the bounce. I could close the distance between the stick and the strings to increase the speed. It sounded interesting (even if it didn’t sound good).

The weird guitar is perhaps what makes it a little hard to listen to now. It makes me feel self-conscious about it, but at the same time...I love it. The track ends up being one of the most weirdly creative things I’ve ever done, and when I listen to it I’m transported to that lonely, surrealist drive through the Rio Grande valley. It’s the farthest I’ve ever driven without seeing another car. It was magical and terrifying in its desolation.

*I made the album as part of the RPM challenge, where musicians make an album (write, record, produce) in the month of February.

I originally wrote this piece in my journal four years ago today, but it seemed like an interesting thing to post here. You can check out the whole album on my Soundcloud.