The various musical elements that make up this release go back as far as 1992 to a stupid poem/song I wrote called Man-made Humans and Hybrid Potatoes, which was my reaction to being told by a girl I had a couple of dates with that my music was too serious.

Man-made Humans and Hybrid Potatoes may have been a silly song but its music made quite a unique instrumental which I performed with and without the lyrics for many years to come and a line from the lyric wound up becoming the title of my first album Eat Plastic.

The first time I ever recorded in a professional studio was a session in 1994 (I think) in which, among other things, I recorded a delay effected acoustic guitar and percussion (the body of the guitar, its external magnetic pickup, and a small chime) version of the MMH&HP instrumental with a bit of a mistake, leaving out a short passage somehow.

I was never able to replicate this exact performance or its very special mood and since it is my first studio recording I decided to re-title the track "Early Work in Ugly Buildings", an apt description of my life as well as my music.

Other than some EQ and compression, only the intro and outro have been modified from the original rough mix on cassette I have carried around all of these years.

The second piece, The Secret Life of Ones and Zeroes has been 20 years in the making. It began as an improvised keyboard solo recorded onto an old cassette in 1999.

Other sections of the piece, including the opening movement, came from multi-track digital home recordings made between 1999 and 2001 on a Boss BR-8 (the zip-disk version). These tracks, comprised of voice, percussion, and electronic effects, were recorded during the sessions for my second album Other Elements on the same recording unit used to make that album and the live EP I recorded with Eric Hensel in 1999.

Finally toward the end of the piece there is a double tracked backwards guitar section recorded during the sessions for my two newest albums, Between the Droughts and the Floods and The Future's as Bright as a Dying Star, both of which were released in 2019.

Several sections of the keyboard solo were further treated and manipulated, while others were left as originally recorded, including my favorite passage, the high pitched Theremin-like section just before the guitar section.

I recommend listening to this piece very loud, in the dark, with really good headphones.