Now that "Excursions" is about ready to go to mastering, and even though at this point nobody's really heard it but me, Dr. Goedken, and my very patient girlfriend, it seems like now's as good a time as any to detail the backstories behind the album. Track by track.

1. Triangular

   This is one of those tracks that I started on, got stuck, got very frustrated about, set aside, came back to, and decided was one of the best tracks I'd done in a while. In a fit of listening to desi of various stripes, I felt the compulsion to write something pretty heavy on the bhangra side of things. I got the chaal beat, bought myself a tumbi and recorded a few overdubs of that great jangly noise it makes, wrote a synth lead part...and then promptly lost the plot. The bassline was a bastard. I tried techno basses, hip-hop basses, drones, tamburas...nothing worked. By accident I loaded up a set of acoustic bass samples, and they seemed to fit a lot better than anything I'd tried so far. Everything gelled after that.



2. Wonderland

   My attempt to write something like Royksopp's "Poor Leno." And sing like Erlend Oye. At the core, it's a pretty simple set of melodies and lines, but everything gets processed, side-chained, filtered, transposed, effected and so forth many times.



3. Under the Gun

   This track evolved from a number of things I had converging all at once. I had some tribal drum stuff going in one track, some breakbeat going in another, and a raft of oud samples in another. With a little coaxing, I mashed them together, made sure everything was in the same maqam (hijaz, for those of you playing along at home) and it just sort of worked.

   The vocals were another matter entirely. It took me weeks and a lot of retakes to try and get a set of vocal takes I was even moderately pleased with.



4. Down The Line

   It all started with a cowbell. I had this odd distorted cowbell sound that I was fond of, and I tried writing a Diplo-ish hip-hop beat using it. After sitting on hold with the cable company for a while, I also became fixated with the phrase "please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed" and wrote some lyrics to that effect. After recording some heavily-processed dholak, I realized that none of these elements were working right together. I scrapped everything but the original beat, got some new lyrics from Dr. G, and twiddled out a little rhodes riff. That, plus many vocoders, and suddenly I found myself on the tail end of a song. It's short, concise, and turned out to be one of those tracks that I thought might've been a B-side but ended up stronger than I'd otherwise expected.



5. Entwined

   This was the first thing written after the release of A Million Different Moments. In a lot of ways, it shows - there're still some AMDM-style production tricks there, and the vocal stylings are in a higher register which I slowly drifted away from as production went on.

   It was originally nearly 8 minutes long. Late in the process I pruned the hell out of the intro and breakdown, shaving a few minutes off the track.

   Again, the vocals were a real bugbear here. I could not get them to sit right in the mix much at all. I got them as good as they were ever going to get by switching to a different pan law, and borrowing a tip from Andrew Sega to try a multiband compressor on them. oridnarily, I'm scared of tracking with a multiband, as it's an easy tool to ruin a mix with. But keeping the effect fairly subtle squeezed them back down into the mix appropriately.



6. You're Not That Charming

   It just sort of happened. I had a breakbeat that I chopped up and resequenced, and everything sort of followed. I wrote the lyrics during a slow afternoon at the office, recorded most of the vocals in an evening, and there was very little divergence between my original intent for the song and the end result.

   Once I had Jill and Dan recording backing vocals, the whole song filled out nicely.

   Unusually, a lot of the synthesized noises are just heavily processed samples. A b3 organ features heavily in a number of spots.



7. Racing

   On an abnormally long drive to Washington DC, during which Ned Kirby got us lost in Michigan (which wasn't even on the route), every member of both Null Device and Stromkern ended up exhuasted. Dan commented to me that the last few hundred miles through Pennsylvania and Maryland became "just a blur of orange cones and concrete dividers." I found that phrase laden with potential, and sent it off to Dr. G. He returned with the lyrics to "Racing."

   In a lot of ways, this song is almost a pastiche of stuff I was listening to at the time. The subtle glitchy drums were inspired by Styrofoam, the strobey synth stabs from The Streets, the string lines from Bjork, the whistly synths from Orbital, etc. The end result sounds nothing like any of those, but still...

   It took months to get the strings EQ'ed right. I've never been entirely happy with my performances on a few of the violin overdubs.



8. Twisting and Turning

   One of my favorite tracks, and one of the most frustrating. I'd placed an ad for a hindi/urdu singer to work with, which had put me in contact with a friend-of-a-friend named Ravi, and he in turn had worked with local chanteuse Ramya Kapedia. They came by the studio shortly after the new year, and we all left that meeting full of enthusiasm, and I ended up with some of Ramya's recordings. I wrote up a "concept" track, using a sample of Ramya's performance, just to see if I could fit it all together.

   The sample fit together. But that's when everything else fell apart. Ravi got snowed-under at work, Ramya fell into the depths of her doctoral dissertation and suddenly I couldn't get a hold of anybody. I was stuck with my favorite track and I couldn't release it because I didn't have sample clearance. I spent weeks trying to find a replacement singer, trying to fit public-domain samples in, and generally beating myself up over missed opportuntites. Thankfully, Ravi got back to me and told me that he had made the recordings in question, and that I could use them. I did a little happy dance, recorded the english lyrics, and spent a few days working with Dr. G to tighten up the arrangement.



9. I Promise

   Another track that was several other songs at one point. The breakbeats were from one place, half the lyrics were leftover from one song, the other half came from an unrecorded track. The duduk and santur were each from separate noodling sessions. Only the bassline was a part of this track from the outset.



10. Snow and Joy

    When I let Dan just kind of blitz on the guitar for a while, this is what results. The sustained vocal notes also still give me the chills.

    It took a while to get the vocals placed properly in the arrangement. Originally, there was a lot of space between each phrase, which didn't work. Putting them close together didn't work either. A happy medium was later found.

    I was also going to get a raft of backup singers, but it turned out all I needed was Julie, whose work in light opera was pretty much enough.



11. Return

    Last song written became the last song on the album. I was just messing around with some drum patterns, heavy on the toms, going for a mid-tempo trip-hop kind of thing. I just kept layering and adding pretty narrow-band EQ to things, and with some prodding from Dr. G, this track resulted.