Shortwave Dahlia dot org

Forgive these notes if they seem a bit scattershot. It’s taken forever for me to sum up this recording and I don’t know if the following text is at all coherent. This is when I could use an editor. Ha!
Illuminated took approximately ten months to record. When I started on it, I had just disbanded The Jeta Grove and was feeling very pessimistic about collaborating with others. Make no mistake, I enjoyed playing with the people I had been playing with–it was just that we were all victims of our own busy schedules and that meant that our goals would take such a frustratingly long time to achieve that it might all fall apart before it was said and done. I’d been there enough times before and knew how unfair it felt, so it was a mercy killing of sorts. The original title was to be All Hail the Misanthrope, sort of a jab at myself (it then became Breaking Radio Silence, and changed at the last minute to its current name).The first songs that took form were “The Human Condition” and “One People” (I had working demos of these two as early as January 2005). Katja Eichner translated some text I had written into German, and you hear her at the end of “One People”. I met her through Scott McClure, the drummer in my old band, Heterodyne. I believe “The View From A Moving Car” may have existed around this time as well–in fact, I know it did because I submitted an early version of it to the Los Angeles artist Chance for a collaboration. As things turn out, he had a song already that worked in that key. We called it a mash-up of his song (”Taste of the Good Life”, which turns up in both forms on his Six Through Ten EP) and, seeing as how the song on my end wasn’t really finished at the time we left it at that. Actually, I like what we did with his song better than my finished product–the snare’s too loud in mine.

There are a few instrumentals on this record at the time I was less interested in making a personal statement using my own voice and I found that I could readily express myself with the music itself. “Reliquiae” was only ever intended to serve as an introduction, a mood builder, and I think it serves its purpose. My favorite of these, and possibly my favorite Shortwave Dahlia song to date, is “Song of Bubastis”. I wrote this for Melanie Simmonds, a friend (and future band member Mark Simmonds’s wife) who is versed in the fine art of bellydance. “Manic, Impressive!” was my attempt at breakbeat/jungle music–mixed results, but I still enjoy listening to it. I also really like “On & On”, a song dedicated to my friend Chris Stvartak up in Chi-town. Its probably the most straightforward thing on here and I think it serves to break any monotony that might have been inadvertently created with the first half of the album.

Of the vocal songs, “The Human Condition” and “Survival” are the best. I loved the socially/philosophically conscious music of the late Eighties and early Nineties and I tried to bring that back in a sense. I didnt necessarily want to be provocative, but I did want to make something that made the listener think–I wanted words and thoughts that actually communicated something of importance.

For its flaws, Illuminated will always be very important to me–it was the first full-length project that I started and finished mostly on my own. I am happy to be moving forward, and that is all any aspiring artist can ask for. The wheel is turning.

xoxo
Jack Alberson
June 6, 2006