Watererer Does It Again

Edition of 50. Purchase on Bandcamp or send me a note for Venmo. No Spotify, no problem.

On a cold winter day in Pittsburgh, the Watererer trio of David Bernabo, Matt Aelmore, and PJ Roduta entered The Church Recording Studio and improvised four hours of material. It was a new approach. It's true that Watererer's previous five records leaned heavily on improvisation for sections of songs and parts, but that tendency was anchored by through-written compositions and studio-as-instrument experiments. Here, the moods of the day and the influence of a Youtube playlist containing songs by James Brown, Change, Joaquín Orellana, and Kali Malone guided improvisations that quickly grew rhythmic and more open to dissonance and entanglement than past Watererer efforts.

Dave Hidek engineered the initial session. Roduta and Aelmore selected drums and bass rigs from the studio's collection, while Bernabo tried out a split signal approach, running different pedals to two amps. The result was thick and full.

The initial concept was to take these recordings and treat them as concrete material or sound and pursue a process of abstracting the music through manipulation and addition. But the improvised takes seemed full of life all on their own. So, they stayed. A half year of mild tinkering and overdubs -- vocals, pitched percussion, and modular synth -- followed at Bernabo's Woolslayer Travelling Studio. Singer Muoysorng Meng dropped by to guest on "To Have." Carl Saff mastered the record.

The result: EM Stealth Sound New Geometry Hippocampal Ice and Space, a paranoid and urgent collection of songs that dissolve and reconstitute, thick with detours into loneliness, absolute nothingness, love and community, and unexplained phenomena.