These two long tracks are low-key monsterpieces, an offshoot of the guitar work of people like Günter Schickert and Manuel Göttsching. You could link this up between Oren Ambarchi and Bitchin’ Bajas and have quite a night of it. There are horns? It’s somehow both krautrock and Seventies Miles without feeling even a little bit borrowed. Elevated and crunchy and smart, and more carefully arranged than you might expect at first. Jake himself writes: “I don’t think it’ll ruin too much of the magic to say this was almost entirely made in Ableton, except for the guitars (me), sax (Rob Frye) and strings (Joe Starita). I had a lot of fun designing a device/instrument that turned out to be the upright bass sound. I also had fun programming all the drums and their effects. A lot of synths I use are VSTs of certain synths I love, like the CS-100, or classic organs. It took me a long time to finish this one, maybe two or three years total. I’ve been working on these two tracks for that long, not necessarily at the same time, and there were many different project files in between. It was a big subtraction game at a certain point, if you can believe that—27 min track lol—but my process really tends to work from making huge long arrangements at almost every minute and subtracting to see what phrases work where, when, etc. My project files are abysmal looking, though. It wasn’t until I got them pretty fleshed out, arrangement-wise, that I brought in sax or strings, and they would just kinda replace ideas that were already there. In Rob’s case, he helped me find some weird zones, harmonically. I got to have fun with the strings, sonically, and had fun exploring different VST plug-ins for phasing and filtering the strings.”

– Sasha Frere-Jones