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Porch Hash Logbook

by Brian Grainger

supported by
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orlandolovekill
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Kevan Fatemi
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Howard Stelzer
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Benjamin Banon
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Tom Gray
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Sonic Tapestries
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bolli1510
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Tom Rimshot
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bruh.I.hate.this
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Jose Angel Morilla Sanchez
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/
1.
2020.09.13 [On The Slow Approach Of A Storm] 02:46
2.
2020.09.20 [The End Of The Fire] 05:27
3.
2020.10.03 [9.00 PM] 08:27
4.
2020.10.05 [12.00 AM] 06:49
5.
2020.10.06 [A Piece Of The Valley] 07:25
6.
2020.10.07 [10.00 PM Evening Chorus] 07:14
7.
2020.10.12 [9.00 PM Wet Pillar] 06:36
8.
2020.11.05 [3.00 AM] 08:20
9.
2020.11.09 [12.00 AM] 08:10
10.
2020.11.11 [11.00 PM] 11:42
11.
2020.11.14 [12.00 AM Leaf Walk] 10:20
12.
2020.11.15 [12.00 AM] 11:41
13.
2020.11.18 [10.00 PM] 08:54
14.
2020.11.29 [11.00 PM] 12:24
15.
2020.12.06 [Sembre Sunday] 07:33
16.
2020.12.16 [16th Anniversary] 09:22
17.
2020.12.23 [Cold Leaves] 04:31
18.
2020.12.25 [Consideration] 05:30
19.
2020.12.26 [Centerville Sirens, Snow Feet] 07:03
20.
2020.12.31 [NYE, A View Of The Abyss, Don't Look Back] 08:21
21.
2021.01.02 [Eavesdropper] 07:52
22.
2021.01.04 [Hopefulness] 10:49
23.
2021.01.05 [Woodpipe] 08:39
24.
2021.01.06 [Pest Control] 20:07
25.
2021.01.06 [Estimated Last Gasp] 11:21

about

2020 was a strange year, and 2021 isn't shaping up to be much different. A worldwide pandemic, political unrest, suffering and death, systemic racism and continual climate change, among many other factors, added up to a lot of anxiety to live with each day, and that much more to unpack in bed each night as I tried to sleep.

I don't mind admitting here that 2020 was also the year I returned to marijuana usage on a near-nightly basis. Those who know me personally can attest to the fact that from 2003-2020, I'd used the stuff less than five times total, all of them social in context (including when I was in Augsburg, Germany having an intense panic attack after my Milieu set was cut short from power supply problems, in front of so many other musicians I'd been influenced by - a perennial thanks to Gerald and Henry for helping me deal with all that). Additionally, no more than a single Coppice Halifax track was made while under the influence (a prize to anyone who can figure out which one), as I've always preferred to work sober, and still do.

Prior to 2003, when I sold off my stash to a co-worker and "cleaned up", I'd been dependent on a number of substances and rituals in order to remain a functional member of adult society, which is a whole other book of stories and I don't want to get into that here. Suffice to say that I had a lot of reasons for relying on drugs, and a lot more for giving them all up, chiefly among them being my desire to move forward with my creative work, which I felt was being hindered by my dependencies.

So, the notion of bringing such things back into my life was not a decision I'd make lightly or in haste, but rather, I'd discuss it at great length beforehand with my family, my therapist and multiple MDs, arriving at the logical conclusion that a prescription for it was in my best interest, especially given my highly fluctuating self-employment situation and need for a non-chemical solution to alleviate stress, flexible enough to use as needed without hangovers, addictive properties or (like some pharmaceuticals) have to maintain a strict level of it within my system at all times for it to work. In this way, marijuana became more of an answer than a question, and unlike all those years prior, this time would be different. I'd be at liberty to use it in a non-toxic and fearless way, safely monitored by professionals, not hiding it from family and friends, not worried about "getting busted" or losing my job, and really able to get the most out of a plant that had been grown within my own state, to exacting specifications, unlike the "who knows what it was" stuff I'd grown up smoking. Gone also were the health risks with carcinogens, instead replaced by a portable convection vaporizer - easier on the lungs, and less wasteful of the actual herb too.

Indeed, with all of these things now carefully considered, paid for and plotted out, it was hard not to be excited about the prospect of having a new and efficient way of alleviating my anxieties and worries, while also providing myself a "hard reset" on days when I just couldn't turn my brain off. Beyond this, I felt like a kid in an amusement park, being able to finally experience my large body of recordings as a passenger, with the THC acting as a crowbar of detached perspective, allowing me to hear many of my albums and songs as many of you do, apart from my own associations and memories that they are built from. It's probably been the one great thing about 2020, all told, and so it felt apt to document it in the same way I've always tried to, with recordings.

That is what you will find here, quite literally an audio logbook of my many evenings outside, slowly drawing vaporous euphoria through a pipe, feeling less and less consumed by the world around me as it seeped into my bloodstream, and more and more simply a part of it. I'd pick up my cellphone and turn on a digital recorder app, in this case a very strangely-behaving Dolby recorder (more on this later), and set it down beside me on either my front porch (under the titular White Pillars on the front of my home) or my back porch (a cozy wooden deck overlooking a steep overgrown ravine) and often times let the microphone pick up almost nothing at all.

By the end of each recording, I'd have traded tension for time-travel, while the wind and the distant traffic became long breathing patterns, the night itself being a grand body inhabited by all the little lights and orange house windows like cells and organs and veins. I have always appreciated listening to sounds from the outdoors, no matter how mundane - you may even recall a few of the Naked Sound releases that deified things like lawnmowers, air conditioners, windchimes and even an empty garage - and so Porch Hash Logbook follows in that tradition, in perfect step with my interests in elevating mere passing moments to some level of artistic worth, if only for my own safe keeping and remembering.

Imagine my delight then, when I brought these accumulated recordings into the studio for mastering and prepping for this release, and discovered that the Dolby software had applied some very strange processing to the sounds - some kind of special proprietary noise-cancelling and stereo-field-analyzing DSP stuff, with what appears to be some selective compression and EQ notch work as well - which manifests in the form of odd reverberations evoking room-like spaces (despite being outdoors) and smearing the sound of passing cars or planes into alien drones, that almost even sound like a vocoder. These mutations only add to the uniqueness of the recordings, for me, and even give me more ideas about what else I might be able to use them for in other studio work.

In the end, I've written a whole lot about something that isn't very detailed or substantial. It feels much more personal and intimate in many ways, perhaps even a little voyeuristic. Due to the onset of the Ohio Winter, I was forced to take my nightly ritual back indoors, but as of my writing this now, the weather is becoming more amenable and so a new round of porch recordings are likely to come. Given the Dolby processing "happy accident", I have some newer ideas about how to subtly affect the forthcoming recordings in other ways, and I'm looking forward to experimenting.

I think the biggest reason for my doing all of this is simply that I am eager to prove to myself, tangibly, that my life is not nearly as hard or bad as it could be, especially with everything else happening in the world, and these recordings serve as reminders of this observation. Hopefully, at the end of all of this hysteria and pain, and seemingly endless wondering and waiting, you and I can meet up for some porch excursions of our own, share a few puffs over some coffee, and we can leave the microphone off, contentedly knowing that things are better than they were before.

credits

released April 2, 2021

Produced & edited by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, September 2020-January 2021. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and photography by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number MMD049. milieu-music.com analogbotany.com 17463.space

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Brian Grainger Dayton, Ohio

Drone music, warm atmosphere and textural ephemera for the working man.

I also release music as Milieu milieumusic.bandcamp.com and Coppice Halifax coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

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