14 years ago, in 2005, I decided that I wanted to start a band.*
I never started that band. But I did write the instrumentals for its debut album. These are those songs.
The writing process for this album overlaps with the writing process for my album Retail Monkey – ADD/Nihilism, which was released in 2017. Retail Monkey’s songs were written between 2004 and 2007. Piranarama’s songs were written in the middle of 2005. While Retail Monkey was intended to be whatever Steve, Joel, and I could imagine, regardless of if we thought it was playable or remotely sensible, Piranarama was definitely intended to be a live act.
At the time I could play most of the guitar and bass parts for this album, but the drums were a few years beyond my skills. I wanted to take the position of one of the guitarists in the live act and find people to play the other instruments, as well as someone to do vocals since I hadn’t yet developed a workable scream. I never made it happen, and eventually the idea fell by the wayside…
When I finished up recording the drums for A God or an Other’s Chaotic Symbiosis in February 2017, I decided on a whim that I might as well finally record Piranarama while my drum mics were still set up. I knew these songs through and through after all the years of imagining them and ended up recording the drums in a single day with no click or reference tracks. I recorded the guitars and bass over the next week. I didn’t write vocals back in 2005, since I intended to have someone else do them, so I took a few months to place words over the vocal patterns I had always imagined. The vocals were recorded in May of 2017.
At this point the project sat for a year while I worked on other things and while Laura and I moved from Washington to Colorado. I put a few finishing touches on the tracks in May of 2018 and then worked on mixing until October, when I decided it was done. This album was actually 100% complete before the aforementioned Chaotic Symbiosis, which we released in November, as well as my other recent solo album Grim Christmas, which I put out in December. Those release dates were solidified already, so it made more sense to me to wait a bit to put this one out. I selected the release date as 2 years from the day that I started recording the album.
This album is a period piece. It represents my own spin on the type of music that was popular in the Redwood City scene at the time. It’s nice to have it as a finished product after all this time, chuggy breakdowns and all.
*Technically, “another band,” as I was already in a few bands at the time. However, none of them that played anything like this kind of music.
Cassettes were made in the print shop and are available via Big Name Records and Bandcamp.
