nine vectors of entry is a record i put out in 2019.
on one hand... i loved working with shawn brown. he's an amazing singer. and all of the lyrics on this record were pretty much improvised as a stream-of-consciousness. we'd do a take... and then we'd sit down and transcribe what he sang, so that we could record doubles and harmonies.
and on the other hand... shawn didn't take it all that seriously. that was a heartbreak for me. shawn left to move to another city to "be in a band". i kind of already felt like we were a band, man! we sat in my living room and listened to genesis vi get played on the radio together.
we were calling ourselves fortified universe at the time, and that's the name it went out under.
what's here is not that original recording, though... the original sessions happened in 2000 and 2001. in 2018 i rewrote all of the music. not remixed... rewrote. new music underneath, with every vocal left exactly where it landed the first time.
so the vocals are the oldest thing on this record and the only part of the original that survived intact. everything else is built to fit a performance that was already finished. that's backwards from how songs usually get made, where the words show up last and fit into whatever is already there. but those improvised vocals were the record... to me.
i put it on the shelf after shawn moved on. rewriting the music was a way to finish it for real so that i could also move on. i think it turned out really well, and does the work justice.
i actually flew out to the city where shawn lives now when the record was finished to sit down and listen to it with him. that was kind of surreal. still have a lot of feelings about it, even years later. in retrospect i probably shouldn't have bothered.
the demos from the original sessions still exist, along with material from those sessions that has never been released. that's a different record and a different story. i'll share more of it in a future update.
