This one took forever to make because of a multitude of factors, the utmost of which being that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make another DAVE album. DAVE 2 was supposed to be the last one, and seemed so final to me. But I can’t just not write music in the way that I do, it doesn’t work like that. It’s my fatal flaw as a musician.
A lot of the making of this EP was a blur because, for most of it, I was running on too little/too much sleep, was suicidal, and drinking far above safe levels of caffeine on a near-daily basis. Monster Energy and honey-roasted peanuts fueled the creation of a majority of it, and I think that shows. My mindset when writing the parts for davEP, and Jungle Jim’s especially, was something like “well, I have nothing to do today and, even though I really want to, I haven’t killed myself yet. I guess I’ll work on music for the next couple hours.” And thus, davEP was thrust into the world a few months later.
The bass parts were primarily written in my dorm room, 417 Walnut St SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, Territorial Hall Room 276. Whoever has that room now must feel lucky. Some bass parts, like the main riffs in Flight at the Ford, were written before I even left for college, but they were filled out with new parts later. You can hear a version of Anthony Jr as early as January of last year, when I played at Feel It Records. During this time I was also writing a lot of the parts that would later be used on Jungle Jim’s, which saw moderate success (for me) and renewed my belief in my own abilities to make music. (Special thanks to Rob for being the first Jungle Jim’s enthusiast, you have no idea how much that meant to me).
The drum parts are a different story. I didn’t have access to a drum kit for a while, not until I joined IHNLFMLY, and even then I had no way of getting there. It wasn’t really until summer that I actually was able to record anything. Because most of the time I only had my phone to record on, and I can’t play things and record at the same time, the majority were done without listening to the backing bass track. I think the only ones where I had the bass to follow were Wizard and Flight at the Ford. While it physically pained me to be unable to play drums for so long, I think it was for the best, because it allowed time for the bass parts to grow. Especially after playing some of them live, I was able to add certain things to the bass lines to make them unique, and let them stand on their own. It also gave me ample time to think of what I wanted to play on the drums, so I had SOME sort of idea once I actually sat down.
This did not stop me from sitting in the space for, at some points, four hours working on one song. I would get off work around 9 PM, get to the space at 9:30, and stay there until 2 in the morning.
As a result of all this time, the songs are exclusively very difficult for me to play. But all of this produced probably my favorite DAVE project to date.
Two bands that were the biggest influence on me over the course of recording davEP were Breadwinner and the Dazzling Killmen. Breadwinner informed a lot of the bass parts, and because I had to wait until summer to think about a lot of the drum parts (and coincidentally I found out about the Dazzling Killmen around the same time), the drums are very influenced by them. I would also listen to 80’s King Crimson a shit ton, especially Discipline and Three of a Perfect Pair, which I think you can probably hear in some of the basslines especially.
However, more so than any other thing I’ve made, this EP was also heavily inspired by friends of mine, mainly little musical motifs they use that I’ve stolen for my own evil uses. Ray from Umbrella Man comes to mind first. I listened to No Want, No Need almost every day for a couple months leading up to the release of Entry Point Null, so it was on my mind a lot. At least two or three parts on the album were directly influenced by songs he’d written, specifically the chorus of Assimilated was on my mind when I made the opening of Voynich Manuscript, and the majority of THE POPE IS FUCKING DEAD was based on dicking around with the Luckless bassline.
My friends Sam (of Samuel Wyeth) and Ruth (of IHNLFMLY) were hugely inspirational for me in much the same way as one another, they have a way of writing parts that confuses the fuck out of me. The way they play with rhythms and time signatures was for sure in my head when coming up with a lot of the bass parts, and especially as I was sending demos back and forth with Sam I was just absorbing all the things he had made.
Nightmarket made me critically re-evaluate my place in the music scene I believe, in the best of ways, because it showed me that there’s at least one other band doing something adjacent to what I am doing. Nightmarket is hands down my favorite band in Minneapolis, and Bennan and Andrei are incredible musicians who especially influenced a few of the later songs I made, like Voynich Manuscript and Wizard, with the repeating, chord-based bass parts and crazy drumming beneath it. Obviously it is a cheap imitation, but it’s an imitation nonetheless.
First Edition, Signed Holy Bible
- The name came from those photos of a bookstore with a signed Bible on their shelves.
- This song was really inspired by listening to too much 80’s King Crimson. The bass part, with the weird repeated chords, was likely inspired by Three of a Perfect Pair, and the drum part for the end was almost directly lifted from the beat for Thela Hun Ginjeet
- The beginning drum part is something I’ve been playing for I think years at this point but have never been able to get consistent, until I sat down and worked on it
- There are four different bass tracks on this song, two of which were recorded using Isaac Reiner’s bass setup with Robert Henry’s bass, and two of which were recorded in my apartment on my four track.
Voynich Manuscript
- The title came from a manuscript written in an unknown language which inspired me to make my own language in eleventh grade physics class.
- The bass part after the trempicking was based around some of the stuff Nightmarket does, though maybe that only makes sense in my mind.
- This song I believe took the longest to record, just because the drum part is so fucking stupid
Anthony Jr.
- For the couple months leading up to winter break, pretty much all I did was watch the Sopranos, neglecting work and food and reading and writing for hours of fat Italian men. That’s where the name comes from.
- When I played the song over winter break, when I was in Ohio, the whole song had been completed, but I legitimately could not think of a drum part for the ending, therefore it ended like a minute early
- It was the first song that was fully complete for davEP. There’s a demo version of the song that I’ll probably release someday which features my roommate screaming at Fortnite in the background. It was recorded on the same karaoke machine I used to record Jungle Jim’s.
- I have played this one way too fucking much and I’m sick of it now.
Flight at the Ford
- The title is a Fellowship of the Ring reference. I only realized upon actually reading the book that the phrase is “flight TO the ford” and not “flight AT the ford.”
- The chord bass part was made all the way back in 2024, and if I remember correctly was either a contender for DAVE 2 or made too late to be on there.
- Me yelling at the beginning is because the song is a bitch to play, and probably took the second longest to record on drums.
- The hammer on chords are extensions of the kind of shit that I do in Willamette Valley Dream Survey, I know that was definitely on my mind when I made the main chord-based part.
Wizard
- The title is a reference to one of the WIZARDS songs where Axl goes “I’m a Wizard,” because that’s all I heard when I was making the opening riff.
- If I remember correctly, the opening was either going to be on Jungle Jim’s but I had nowhere to go with it, or it was just a part I had made a while ago and forgot about.
- The drum part makes me think of my friend Marian and I don’t know why. They were also inspired by a lot of brutal death that I listen to, and a little bit of Zach Hill’s drumming style.
THE POPE IS FUCKING DEAD
- I’ll let you guess what happened around when I was writing the song
- This was the second bassline done for the album, and the only time I’ve ever based a drum part off of what I’ve written for the drum machine, as the machine part was done first. That’s why, if you listen to the show at the Yard, you can hear some differences between that drum part and the one I use live now. The drum machine informed the drum part, and then the drum part informed the new drum machine part.
- Originally I sent a skeleton of this bassline to Ray (of Umbrella Man) as a concept for a shitty nu metal project with me and him, and then I just started jamming on it for like a month and here we are.
