#cointet

2012 has been quite productive for us. Worked hard over the summer finishing writing the last song for Younger Longer  and the subsequent obsessive rehearsing of it leading up to our long weekend of recording at Chris's house. Neil and I listened to these recordings last weekend and let me tell you...I could not be happier with where they are at this stage of completion.

It's been about a year since the release of Pictures of Louis Pasteur through CDBaby.com and that has been a wonderful educational adventure on what is possible for independent musicians in the current digital marketplace. We are still learning how to do all of this by ourselves. It's a challenge, for sure, but one that I think is necessary and rewarding.

We recently discovered what this Bandcamp thing is all about. It's exciting. It really is. The two Cointet albums that we've been able to upload have just been sitting around on our hard drives for about four or five years. No joke, that's how long ago we made The Hiatus Nearly Ate Us. Sure, we never intended for any of those recordings to become anything more than fun jam sessions for our own personal enjoyment, but we have them, we like them, and here comes along an opportunity for us to put them out there so anyone can listen to them. The thing to keep in mind of these (listen to me sitting here being all protective) is that these were improvisational jam sessions. "Telephone Cancer" has been played around with for the sake of production experimentation, along with "Skin Peels," but the two albums we've uploaded are examples of the recordings are that have kept us a band for eight years - free form experimentation to see what we're capable of. There are dozens more like these just sitting on hard drives. Not all of them are worthy of putting out there, but it's been a great documentation of our evolution.

When we first got together as a band we had one microphone intended for chatting in message rooms on a Windows XP era PC. We set it in the middle of the room, hit record, and let it go for the rest of the day. This is how these two albums (I call them albums - "day long jam sessions" might be more appropriate) were recorded. We've come a long way since then, especially with what we attempted this summer, but the simplicity and relative clarity of these recordings remains something special for me personally and certainly for us as a band in whole. Please enjoy.

Sweatum's Cough