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Make Music

by MINTS

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1.
Pizza Farts 05:56
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Burgserk 06:48
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about

Most of us are in other conventional rock, pop or jazz bands. The idea for MINTS came to fruition when we were offered a string of shows and we couldn’t play them because we were playing too much with our other bands. The thing about being in a pro local band is you have to carefully plan your show schedule as to not “over saturate” your “market.” blah blah blah business stuff. Most of the time, our bands would only play out once a month in our cities. We just couldn’t handle not performing! The majority of us want to be playing every weekend, so we created another outlet for performing and writing. When you’re in a semi-conventional band, you stick to the script (setlist) and it sometimes gets redundant. We had never improvised an entire set before. So Kevin and I booked a show with no preconceived musical ideas and and it forced us to get onstage and step outside of our comfort zone in front of an audience. It was so liberating!
The improvised sets, while pushing us to become better players, it helped develop a more solid musical chemistry together. It also taught us that dischord is okay. Technically, I’m not that great of a guitar player, but I have noise on my side. Once we played a few shows as an improvisational band, we decided to write some songs for the project. Since we knew the songs were very different than anything we had heard before, we wanted an unusual format. On the day of a show, I called in two sax players and a keyboardist.
We rehearsed for an hour and a half, went to the show and played our set. Half of the set was improvised. Nobody clapped. Most of the audience was horrified, which obviously meant that we were doing something right. We went out to eat afterwards to celebrate and "officially" formed MINTS. We had the idea to make all of our songs about food because.. I dunno food fucking rules. So we wrote a few more tunes, polished them up and cut the record in a week at my studio (Free Truman Productions.) I mixed it in one week and voila! MINTS "Make Music" was a test to write, record and release an album with absolutely no musical boundaries in a matter of one month. No time to mill over songs or production or arrangements, just pure acceptance for the live sounds we captured.

This album was created in lots of small little pieces. For the most part, Kevin and I wrote the riffs (with the exception of “Burgserk.” Egan brought that song in with most of the parts already written. Burgserk is Egan's song.) The live tracking consisted of keyboards and drums performed together, then everything else was overdubbed at separate times. I produced and mixed the album, so I was attempting to guide everyone’s performance and sound at every step and turn.

What really interests me as a producer are albums that blow your mind while listening on headphones. Music that breaks a sonic barrier. I mixed this record specifically for people who like to get baked and listen to music through nice headphones. I buried a bunch of weird sounds that are only audible with nice headphones or studio monitors.

I have always been a fan of the idea to create a song with very peculiar non musical noises. For instance, Egan started playing “ Wanna Wanna Wanna Fuckin IHOP” half speed and swung in the studio. Kevin started playing along to it, and it became the basis for the ambient track “Succulent Saxy Sounds.” Later, I captured the sound of my girlfriend vacuuming our house.I also tracked myself running up and down stairs with various shoes and sandals while hitting walls and dropping things. I tracked a five-gallon bucket of water being emptied into a drain. There are two spacey guitar tracks, a track of off time xylophone, one track of Taylor playing sax up front (and two modified sax tracks “way in the distance”) as well as two tracks of Egan and I discussing song titles (one of which is in reverse.)

As a recording engineer, I religiously used Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” cards as a way of changing the normal flow of the studio. Cards are printed with studio strategies such as “Cut a vital connection,” “change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency,” and “Go outside, shut the door,” just to name a few. There are a bunch of wrong notes in one of my guitar solos. When thinking about re tracking it, I pulled out the card “Look closely at the most embarrassing details & amplify them.” The cards drastically affected the way the record sounds.

We have a few shows on the books. Our live sets vary depending on how we are feeling that night. Some night's we will improvise the entire set, some night's we will play new songs, some nights we will play obscure covers. You never know what you're going to get at a MINTS gig, and we like it that way.

credits

released September 6, 2012

Produced, Engineered and Mixed by JCK

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MINTS Akron, Ohio

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