Analogue
"Analogue was the first piece I made after I started working at EAI in the fall of '98. I made it in the office, after hours. I didn't have a studio so it was nice to work somewhere. I was living in a sketchy place. Once I was waiting for the super out front and this young family rolled up in the back of a black car, this 19-year old guy, his wife and a baby, they were clearly moving in. People were always moving in and out, the building was gigantic. They had all their stuff crammed in black garbage bags and they were having trouble getting the bags out of the car and handling the baby and everything, so I went and gave them a hand wrangling bags from the curb to the stoop. He was wary, and then effusive. He said, 'Listen, I can't pay you,' and I said, 'Don't worry about it.' He said, 'Do you smoke?' I said, 'No.' He was still staring, so I said, 'Smoke what?' 'Crack. I can't pay you, but if you smoke crack I could give you some nice rock.' Another time the elevator doors opened and I had to step over this guy laid out unconscious on the floor, buck naked. My next door neighbor was standing there, apparently the guy had been running around the halls screaming and trying to rub up on people, so he had no choice but to knock him out. That's who you want next door: a problem solver. Anyway, I did make the song in that apartment, recorded it on to an 8-track recorder. 'The Jar Jar Binks song.' I brought the machine to EAI and output the music through this analogue signal processor that Stephen Vitiello loaned me for the evening. I didn't know how to use it, so the mix is all over the place. It was kind of one shot, and everything was output to Betacam tape, it wasn't digitally edited. The 8-track broke soon after, so the video contains the only mix I have of that song. The images are pages from my notebooks; I captured them using a video camera set to the 'still' function, though I think in one of these shots the opacity was not total; you can just see some movement behind the page."
-- Seth Price, 2011
