here are a few pictures for looking at...

this is the living room studio in rangeley, maine

this is the living room studio in annisquam, massachusetts (with matt t. and his guitar)

a picture of my main guitar in my bedroom studio - there's all sorts of equipment and amplifiers and what-not lying around. It's usually not like that at all. Honest.

for those who are interested - I have included here a diagram of what I did to get that organ sound at the end of Alice One. The idea of using re-recording as a method to increase the reverberation of a room I appropriated from Alvin Lucier and his 'I am sitting in a room', which everyone should hear. When you play back a recording into the room it was recorded in, and then record that playback, and then play back That recording and record that, etc ad infinitum, the natural resonances in the room get reinforced and eventually dominate over the source material. It's done to great effect in that piece above. I wanted to do something like that, but in a more structured traditionally musical sense the method has some problems. For one, you are at the mercy of the dimensions of the room you are recording in. The height of the ceiling and the distance of the walls from one another determine the pitches of the resulting dominant resonances. So... I am too much of a fiddling person not to mess with this. I cut four pvc tubes to 1/4 the wavelength of four pitches (D, F#, G, and A), these I capped off at one end and tuned to make sure they resonated accurately at those pitches. I placed the tubes in front of speakers in pairs, D and F#, G and A - and pointed them at the microphones - so that in addition to the natural resonances of the room, the most dominant reverberatory tones should be the ones that the tubes are tuned to. The song at that point has boiled down to just D maj, D sus4, back and forth. So the only note that changes is the F# which goes to G, then back to F#. So then I just recorded that guitar part and recorded the playback and so on and so on for about 30 iterations. What you hear is the first recording, then the 4th rerecording, then the 8th rerecording, it sounds less and less like a guitar and more like some freaky giant organ. My only wish is that I had pushed it further out, like 60 iterations to see what came of it. Because it was getting bizarre.

here are the drums that Dennis used for fireflies and for ghost litter (the mics in the foreground are for my guit-box):

the reed organ I bought on Ebay for $1.37. Sounds lovely:

my baby taylor (used on the seven holidays) - me playing at the california brew haus and apparently too focused on playing to realize that my tongue was doing something very odd.