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I made ‘The Irish Sea’ twenty years ago as a young man far from home, living like Jude the Obscure, smitten and insufficient amidst the romantically fantastic stones and spires of Oxford, England. Improvised over the course of a few days (save the Dylan cover), the twenty-nine minute album was an exercise in embracing limitations. I was always much more of a listener than a creator, but I felt compelled to try my hand at making music by a fascination with sound itself and a desire to manipulate it, and a lack of musical skill or talent was no obstacle. Everything on the album was instinctual and catch-as-catch-can, captured with an old-fashioned computer stick-mic, some rudimentary multi-track software, a cheap red acoustic guitar, time borrowed on a moderately in-tune piano, a clock-radio, and a cold. The process was simple: I’d move my fingers around for a few minutes, get a repeating kernel I liked, record it, and then add layers until something slightly larger materialized.

I don’t recall why I named the results ‘The Irish Sea,’ other than fond memories of a short trip with my visiting Dad on a cold empty day between Christmas and New Years, walking the shore in Bray, Ireland (from whence the cover photo comes). But listening now, it seems an appropriate title. Despite the primitive nature of the recording methods and my own musical limitations, it has an airiness, an effervescence not unlike the sea foam I saw on that stoney beach. It sounds like it’s made as much of air as solid, translucent and wispy but sturdier than expected. It crystalized a moment of emotional transience, mutation from youth to adulthood, heart-sleeved to a degree I couldn’t muster now, but for the most part not too cringe-inducing. At the time, it annoyed me that for all the mind-expanding music I was obsessed with--Brian Eno, Miles Davis, Can, James Brown, Broadcast, Outkast, Erykah Badu, an exponential explosion of sound--my own music inevitably turned out “pretty”. Now, that doesn’t bother me. There’s a simplicity and an elemental passion to what happened when I fumbled my fingers around as a lovelorn kid.

A few years later, feeling less accepting of “prettiness,” I decided to literally tear apart the music of ‘The Irish Sea,’ specifically the 2’41” track “Full of Blue-Green Doubt,” to see if something less lovely could be extracted from it. Tracks ten through twenty-two included here as “bonus tracks” (proving that anything can have a “Deluxe Edition” if it sits around long enough), are the result, which I called ‘Full of Blue-Green Blood’. I have even less recollection of how these sounds were made: I remember an effects processing program that came with a soundcard; a basic WAV editor; lots of pitch-shifting and multi-tap echoing and time-stretching and chopping until the seams not only showed but burst, and then sewing them back together just as violently. I think the results achieved what they set out to do: testing how many disparate sounds I could wrench from a single source, as an exercise in productive deconstruction, sound-sculpting for its own sake.

I haven’t recorded even a moment of sound since these ones--I’ve scarcely even played any impermanent notes. Listening to these sounds, I wonder for a moment what other small but real sounds I could’ve made. But I’m happy to have focused my energy on helping folks hear other peoples’ music via my Musicophilia mix site over the last dozen years. Two decades on from ‘The Irish Sea,’ I can hear it like I’d hear the music of a friends’ young son, something I had nothing to do with, and I’m a little surprised to find it worth the time it takes to listen. It’s sea foam I’m glad I captured. I hope in its very small way it’ll be worth your time, too.