Genericana

Joe O'Connell on his new album: I guess the lodestone in the process of making this was the kind of global avant garde mood that's prevalent in a lot of 1980s albums I admire. Things like Joni Mitchell's Dog Eat Dog and Arthur Russell's Calling Out of Context. These records where singers were making really eclectic and outward looking productions - writing *through* the process of recording, and literally *playing* with technologies that were totally new to them. All the gear that I gathered to make the album was basically discarded or devalued. I got a bunch of stuff from Craigslist that interested me: a cheap FM synth, some Hindustani electronics, and an old three-head tape deck to use as a "poor man's space echo." The icing on the cake is a one-of-a-kind homemade digital synthesizer called "The Mutant". The concept of the synth is parallel to the concept of the album itself.

It's an electronic take on "folk" sounds (bends, drones, modal playing) and folk creative approaches (a cobbling together and reformatting of existing elements).