"Too often music is just a coffin. We often put it there to wall up days deflating everything else and even that slight seething of the music never being there as your feet scratch the ground and all the familiarity stops feeling like anything. We'll see if these notes on the CD become notes on the music itself, as I try to resist building up any apparition of the music as existing apart from what the band does - maybe does everyday even. To me it's worth remembering the songs as never separate from the actual performances, the never-same rebreathings, the potential in interruptions and dearly continuations. Hearing the same version of a song over and over again (this CD is one of many coming collages, all different versions) we form mental habits shaped around a permanence, containedness, or a culinary (static) aspect of what we think of the songs as that isn't really there, and to open up the songs to the talking, the things outside of themselves, is one way to keep it healthy and malleable to our needs in a music scene as participants and not observers. Another dimension to me at least is that the studio recording - the compartmentalizing that we've let seep into that practice - can actually be a barrier to getting the possibilities/implications of the live show (any live show) out - of/beyond the night. Via collage and use of audience recording, the normal production process can be infiltrated by these outside things from our social reality (news, rehearsing, dialogue, scattered poems, listening to demos in the car and thinking about gas) - makes it so the song is not only itself, but the talking through contradictions inherent in the whole bit of "listening," where too often it gets us a cyclic "escape" that seemingly deflates back into the "mundane," thereby habitually dooming every actual opportunity in our lives outside of those "special" moments. The audience banter is what makes the audience recording, for me. These accidents take on a rhythm of irregularity, a music relating to the music from the performance. Some bits of Matt talking to me when showing me demos appears too not to be taken necessarily at face value but to comment on how talking about these things is as much part of the scene as the music, in a way we could gain from embracing. In certain wisdom traditions, like those populating Sanskrit literature, a sort of highly-condensed "root" teaching-text is memorized before actual instruction on that text, but the commentary that goes along with it is inseparable from the instruction that goes on from within the root text. A Sanskrit professor offered me a reading of a commentary of Chandrakirtis first verse of the Entry to The Middle Way, where the commentary commented the case that the Buddha births the hearers/community-of-practicers and the hearers (those who hear for the sake of others in particular) birth buddhas, in mutual dependent-arising. Exchange should beget further exchange - Proudhon says "utility equals utility" - etc. You already know this (but it can be easy to not act it) that our institutions of subcultural lighterfluid are dependent how we continually communicate around them, and today's music can be seen as coextensive with how it's everyday-ly discussed and then used. Maybe this extends the pleasure of listening. Helps us identify that the' "space" isn't just Hole in the Wall: it's contingent on what we bring and how we approach it, the direct democracy of organizing cultural geography which maybe's the same as love-as-communication. And so part of the project of this was to bring in the talking about the music into relation/sequence - like before Reverie [in track 5] the exact words aren't, as important as the bringing in of the more direct talking that everyone gets- funny how things within scenes exist in constant relation and rerelation- the other day I was watching cars turn in wrecking air on the corner with Matt as he was saying something about Messiaen for a while and I stared, I think, with sudden tangles of "if every shower's worth the rain," if every walk's worth the not-talking, if True Bugs really did what I thought it did (that one Matt did for a classical recital that ended up being at night at Pease where we all sat in a net and looked at cicadas and each other and the evening netting itself and we all sang quietly, without singing, and so the audience-talk bubbles into True Bugs on purpose) - True Bugs ties with the sample put at the beginning of Out of Order [track 7] (to situate the Ginsberg), since Lautreamont plagiarized parts of his high school biology textbook both as an act of textual anarchism and in the crafting of new expressions in Maldoror- the stuff at the end of All I Know (track 6) may be related to that - what the songs really shouldn't be separate from is the untuned way you sing it on the way to hungry pizza after the show (the last seconds after These Nowheres are intentionally that) - the "poem" at the end of From Dusk [track 8], once you hear the obvious line, you'll see it's lyrics from some of Matt's other songs all cut up and rearranged and put in a text-to-voice thing it's funny - and the collision of how the different spaces (house-sit-down-listening-to-demo into live and live into demo-in-apartment or demo-apartment into live) allow the music to construct differently, with these outward and usually ignorable relations concrete in the texture - A Happiness (More Usual) [track 10] Matt took the title from a years-ago poem that I've forgotten but I gave to him once - this giving sense - (Matt blew out one of his monitors when making that one it cost a lot) - some surgery happens at the end of Lemoncake [track 3] - The Day Today [track 12] opened up the set but it gives too much of a guitar-centered feel that the rest of it doesn't live up to so I threw it at the end - How Lucky We've all Been to be here and at least stop trying to feel good for the wrong reasons - These Nowheres is a
banger. On track 5 you hear someone say "look at this picture"around the 3:15 mark-a lot of shows can feel like exercises in genre, familiarity (which isn't a crime), and try to re-present these representations as if they're not constructed, and so you're never surprised - so Hover to me tries to distance ourselves and defamiliarize these things so the language around them can be refreshed for where you are and what's being done. Familiarity is then only a hinge for the deeper community function. That way we're not building a coffin for the time to pass but reexamining our situatedness and own potential not to just feel new to but to really do the giving that fuels the heaving out of all the dead things inside ourselves. If anything maybe this will add to the case that no one really needs a recording studio - that it's all under your feet more than you think. Most everything on this CD was recorded on my voice memos and made in a free-ass DAW so you can do it too and audio quality won't really matter when you're dying - right?"

-Tom Jennings