Listen in stereo or it probably won’t work.

Stumbled across this in an article on old printing techniques—I removed some specifics to keep it aimed to our purposes here:

“That this was achieved well after the technology of movable type was employed and ultimately abandoned [in this region] is in part due to the continued cultural significance and the aestheticization of the handwritten. The separation made between the handwritten and the printed that occurred in Europe—and the resulting invention of ‘manuscript’ as [a distinct] category—did not have similar weight [here]. Instead, as this example demonstrates, printing became a vehicle for manuscript. The intention was to have no gap between the printed and the handwritten. Printing made the handwritten available in multiple.”

So I found out I was trying to hit you, thru these mixtapes, with the musical equivalent of the handwritten.

Something closer to you and us and our actual spaces. Not for its own sake, but to open arguments of perspective thru sound… closing a gap between rhythms of SONG and EVENTS—trying to each alter each other. And that may not be easily pointable to in much music at hand, but it’s been my experience being with Hover since Matt started it—in another city 5 or 6 or 7 years ago—if there wasn’t some gap being closed, something we were trying to find out about why we can’t get out of bed or why we couldn’t HEAR anything this summer or finish any movies—then we weren’t reshaping that illusion of local music as something functional or less full of unrelenting love. So:

these mixtapes are exercises in a new everyday poetics of space. (“Poetics” in the sense of how what is sung (lived, breathed) is organized, sourced, arranged—all the turns you are—have been—RATHER than poetics as discrete, prearranged rules and measures of a formed song.) I make them not for the music but for the friendship and geography that flows in and out of them as the music’s impermanence. That the music can’t be experienced apart from its surroundings, interruptions, and opposites.

One of the biggest regrets I have about this one is not having recordings of Noah singing polyvocals at the dam (have picture of it in here tho). But if you were around this summer you may have heard of, or probably know someone who heard or was probably ON the previous Hover mixtape (… And Everything Was Better Forever) and I couldn’t get the words right to do liner notes to that one.

BUT the main thing this mixtape is diverging from that one is that instead of being held together by the radio voices—which to me were voices MAKING a space that functionally understood and responded to the voices (i.e., everyday prayings)—in this episode we’re exploring the more intimate moments of the band in rehearsals, outtakes, on the street, making dinner, in the car…trying to find out what these voices of ours can do, in and out of and between (or “about” as in around) songs.

Often when we talk about music we kind of just talk to ourselves: talking to a place in our mind that reconciles all those things that music touches—what are our rivers if not chemical static?—but it’s all still voices—the contradiction in “these nowheres”—One “organic” way I SAW this was when Hover played the patio at BlackStar and (as you can see in one of the pictures) the backdrop was North Lamar 8pm daylight TRAFFIC… (visualize this in left channel of track 8 except nighttime)—and the setlist may have come from me and Matt sitting at a piano playing riffs back and forth scribbling on a paper how to
order these songs parts of names pieces of our friendship to let everybody else in—inviting like a poisoned lawn. Listing and listing. And you can hear it on here.

But to me that visual mattered. Styrofoam for example is a song both TO people and to THINGS—rooting out the usual solipsism of our back and forth radios just going BACK. So for that reason no songs repeat between this mixtape and last mixtape.

For a little bit over the summer Matt picked me up in his new car where he had his whole brokendown life packed-into and we got some slow fast food and then we drove all thru Austin to where he was staying for most of the summer: a Chenrezig attic bunkbed w/ two cats and a projector and his big speakers we’ve been walling music out of since high school. Housesitting and meditating and running—Casey being out of town (on phone you hear on this tape)—Peter working to death—Noah out of town too working on his country album that’ll rebuild Austin—and he showed me these 10 minutes long songs none of which I included here but meant to—songs made out of doors opening, breathing, out of cherry wrists, out of cardboard clouds, inside runs outside, more sound collage made out of studying, observing that evaporating, than proper verse-chorus-verse-chorus… but they were still there, as I hope the TEXTURES on here make a verse-chorus-verse progression walking out of itself…

And as I’m writing this it’s new years eve and the band is in california hiking places I’ve never been, and I’m writing books to throw into the audience on our Jan 11th show because of this band—but we can’t find a home in the music nor as the music just like the songs tell us—

Hover challenges us to embrace that gap, that artifice, that association-making that isn’t natural or unnatural but ends up being more natural than we ever tried. Or I mean achieved. It’s hard to think of local music as something fulfilling a palpable space… but it does. It’s part of reshaping the illusion of local music… that what is around your apartment is the music and raw material…

I missed the show where the fuse blew and the lights went out the whole time (at the Hole show in August it was just for a few seconds—will hear on next mixtape of this series) so the band just played piano covers and the radio and no one recorded it. I forget why. Also the 2nd set of the BlackStar date the laptop went out so we just have my audience recording (hear it on track 8).

I sing a little too much on this one. I guess there is a bit of Somewhere Else too (track 6) but it’s an old recording recycled by accident just like every note. Anyway I’m just trying to do my own duty of shaping the language I’ve been given, and I hope these mixtapes give you ideas with their shortcomings, incongruities, and artifice for you to pick up things around yourself to shape the language of DIY shows.
If you try sitting in a diner or coffee shop or bar with a friend and read the poems or song lyrics they naturally write to themselves you get to see what’s really in the air for people. But how do we change what’s in the air? New ways of showing the nerves… An album should not think itself an album. Especially not when we’re this young with this much to do. And that’s part of what I was trying to get at with the dual-take techniques which I shoulda mentioned earlier. It’s the irreconcilability of Austin itself. Memories of Austin are all the places that aren’t Austin. Padmapa Sangye was asked by his community to give them a meditational saying: he said “all of you have this same mantra: “back and forth wandering on this path of distraction, I get old”—Go on a walk with Hover.

—Tom Jennings