Long Pause: “Off The Charts”!

The new collaboration album with Elam Blackman called “Off The Charts” is up on Bandcamp today! I think/hope we broke the sophomore album curse? We call this project Long Pause. The way it works is Elam sends me occasional voice memos of mostly spoken word bits with some songs sprinkled in. When the spirit moves me, I create ambient music to accompany his poetry. Eventually these stack up enough and we have an album. I love Elam’s words so much. They are a meditative/ASMR antidote to the chaos and noise. I also love Elam. Old friends. Back in 2012 we both found ourselves washed ashore in different spots of the San Francisco Bay, twisted wrecks, long relationships over in other places, trying to continue somehow. I would take the ferry to his spot, he’d pick me up, beat me very badly at Boggle or Scrabble, and take me back to the ferry. Somewhere in there healing happened too. To quote Elam toward the end of this recording: “Darkness at the window, I don’t want to tell nobody / That would be cruel if I was gone without goodbye / Darkness passes and stays and says not to tell / You walk through, I tell you just how dark it gets before the light breaks through.”