MORNING
released OCTOBER 4, 2016
RELEASE 1
Oh hey it's this band's 10th birthday. That's cool. That means it's this EP's 10th birthday. I recorded the whole thing the day it came out. I had wanted to start with an album, but after the 1 song I'd written beforehand was done, 5 more songs fell out of me. The one song I'd already written was the first one, "Fall of Mantis", which I'd written for my band at the time but had decided to save for this. I re-recorded it in 2025 and that version crushes this one, but I still like this very first one. Everybody starts somewhere. I mean, this wasn't the first thing I ever released anywhere, just the first one to be called Hello Whirled. At the time, I thought "Pamphlet" was the hit. I'd been listening to a lot of The Field Mice, and this song definitely came out of that. I'd probably like it more now if the vocals weren't so brutally trebly. I'd been recording on cassette 4-track before this, so although I was recording digitally now, I was still approaching the process like I was using tape. "Everyone In Your Hands" was done live with my 8-track's 2 built-in mics so it's sharper and louder than the other songs here. Really, I could just complain about the mixing the whole entry here. I made this a decade ago. I had music from older solo projects that sounded a billion times worse. The last song has some good ideas in it, but I'm so embarrassed by the title that I won't even write it down. It's one of the only times I ever mixed multiple vocal tracks in mono, which I think is pretty standard, but which I've never much liked doing with my own music. I prefer a little separation. Otherwise it gets too cramped.