Oh yeah, I love doing that stuff. Just exploring sounds and textures, seeing what happens if you attack the guitar
this way instead of
that way, things like that. I get lost in it. When I really get in the zone I'm just wrapped in it. The result are these long, meandering drones and washes of sound.
I'd been doing it for myself since I bought my first guitar in ... 1992? ... but never thought to play it for other people. Most of the time I never even recorded it. When I finally did with
this record it was sort of on a lark. Didn't do anything else like it for close to 10 more years, though I kept playing music like that.
One of my biggest regrets is throwing out a few hours worth of four-track tapes that were primarily either early forms of this, or drumless recordings of me and the guy I did
Slumbersigh with just making walls of noise in my dad's basement. This was around 1994 and 1995. Only two brief clips survive and they're pretty cool (to me). Why did I throw them out, damnit!?
The recording I want most is this 45-minute piece that was nothing but layered feedback. I didn't have a four-track at the time (this was in 1993), but I could
sorta do multi-track by plugging a pair of Walkman earphones into the mic jack of my cheap bookcase stereo. It was one of those dual tape decks where you could dub tapes, and if you dubbed a tape while also recording you could layer the stuff on top of one another. It was really rough and you had no real control, but whatever.
So one afternoon I took a tape I had -- I remember it vividly -- which had R.E.M.'s
Green on one side (written with green ink) and
Document on the other (written in orange ink). Plugged in this shitty yellow guitar I had into my shitty Gorilla practice amp, cranked it way up, and let feedback drone and shift and swell for an entire side of the tape. Then I rewound and did it again, laying a new set of feedback on top of the old. I did this maybe four or five or six times.
It was probably unlistenable, but for
me, at least, it was damn near meditation music. I listened to it quite a bit until I discovered
this Flying Saucer Attack collaboration. (That's also around when I discovered that other people actually did this stuff, and people liked it.)
I have no idea whatever became of that tape.
tl;dnr - right on, Brian!