One of the earlier entries in the Milieu canon, A DUSTY BOX OF OLD MEMORIES originated as an informal cassette, filling two sides of improvisations on a forgettable Casio keyboard, a few FX pedals and a four track tape machine. It was another hot Carolinian Summer in Columbia, June or July of 2005, and my wife and I had just moved into our first actual house together. There was pretty much zero furniture, I don't even think we had a bed yet, and all of our collective belongings were still in stacks of boxes that no one had any energy left to unpack.
The situation struck me as mundane and profound at the same time, a moment of surrealistic-domestic alignment, some kind of a lucid moment that shocked me into the sense that childhood was over, that adult years had arrived. So, in both the need to roll tape and document whatever this newly minted moment was, as well as the naive urge to refute the implication of "adulthood", I set myself up on the carpet of what would soon become my first don't-call-it-a-studio space, with the window overlooking my front porch, chimes, green lawn and both the Columbia water tower and Birch Park across the street. I'd unboxed a cheap Casio keyboard that was given to me for free, along with various FX pedals leftover from my several years of pretending to be in a rock band, my tape deck and an accompanying box of old tapes and photos.
The old tapes, as you may or may not be able to hear, were themselves used as instruments here, being sampled in different ways on 'Daisies' and 'Dry L.S.F. Station' among other less apparent moments on the album. The photographs could also be considered as voices in this session, which were shots from all different eras of my growing up, plus a couple notable old photos of my grandparents on my mother's side - my grandfather pushing a plow on his farm, my grandmother wearing a dress on a park bench - which ended up as the original two cover photographs for the public editions of this album. The album became complete when I filled the second side with a single lengthy improvisation over/under a Radio Shack microphone placed in the bedroom window, recording Fourth of July fireworks outside in our new neighborhood.
It was issued first later that year as a simple ink-stamped CD-R in a papersleeve via my homely Milieu Music imprint, which at the time was totally just a badly-designed website I coded by hand in Notepad, with some PayPal cart buttons and maybe even some MP3s as samples? In the pre-Bandcamp world, things were different, and Milieu Music's formative years were closer to a punk rock mailorder catalogue than anything it resembles now. One year following the Milieu Music CD-R, aspects of the album were included on NIGHT CURRENTS, my second album for the Belgian label U-Cover, which was most likely the first time many listeners interacted with these pieces. In late 2007, the full album was given a wider release through Rope Swing Cities, a netlabel helmed by Josh23, who was rooming with Ten and Tracer at the time, issued in high-fidelity 192 KBPS MP3 format. It wasn't until a full eight years later that I remastered the album at my Botany Bay studio, and mined the two CH remixes (Membrane / Dusty Acre) from the original session tapes, and these recordings themselves would wait another three years before seeing a release on a limited edition cassette at Illuminated Paths, the DIY imprint that also brought you first editions of DAUGHTER and the Party Mix of SHALLOW EARTH. Once again, two more years have passed from even that recent map marker, and for the first time ever, the remastered and expanded edition of A DUSTY BOX sees a complete presentation in lossless digital format, with new artwork taken once again from the archives of my grandparents' photo albums.
All of this history, and I have barely discussed the music itself. How very me. Well, by now I couldn't be faulted for assuming most people who are familiar with Milieu are also aware of this album, but for the newcomers, who I do not wish to alienate or invalidate, but welcome: This album is a warm blanket of many of the ambient sounds, melodic motifs and crumbly textures that are the sum total of synaesthetic comfort for me. The music is pretty, but also a bit disconnected, held back minimalistically not out of a desire to be minimal, but rather, an inability to know my way around a keyboard, at least back then. It could be argued that what I lacked in technical ability, I gained in ambition, and many early Milieu recordings seem to illustrate this sense of reaching past what my capabilities were, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but trying to grow through these aching waveforms all the same. Fifteen years later, listening to these sounds now, I feel filled with a charming sense of naivete, fully aware of the fact that even five years in my own creative continent is a lifetime of distance, so fifteen years is truly ancient history. I am, more than anything, glad that I took the time and spent the effort recording these improvisations, encapsulating a moment that may have otherwise been forgotten, or at best, eroded down to a funny feeling in the back of your mind, a sense of deja vu, instead of this object you now see before you, that both of us can interact with and revisit as often as we like. These recordings are even better than the memories themselves, because they haven't aged the way human recall itself has, and now, here in a snowed-in basement studio in Ohio, remembering feels voyeuristic, but it still feels like me, it still feels like home.
NOTE: The Coppice Halifax remixes are also available separately as digital downloads here:
coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/dusty-acre