Promissory Note by Jesse Eckerlin

I came up with these songs between 2008-2011 when I was in my early 20’s. All are compositions, except for tracks 1 and 6, which are improvised. The songs were recorded on a Zoom Handy Recorder H2 in the bathroom of my old apartment in Hull, Qc in 2011. No external mic was used, and these are single takes w/o overdubs and basically no mixing. 7 or 8 copies of an intended run of 50 cassettes were home dubbed and given to friends. Work and my writing “career” took over soon after, and none of the songs were otherwise released or ever performed live.

I lost the SD card with the original recordings years later, but I managed to track down a surviving copy of the tape from an old friend during the pandemic. I digitized it, cleaned up individual tracks to the best of my abilities with RX 11, and sent them to Harris Newman of Grey Market Mastering to see if anything could be done. The surviving recordings are deeply flawed, almost a palimpsest of amateur technical mistakes, but they have a certain charm, and Harris was able to bring out the best of their warped 78 vibe and turn many of their weaknesses into strengths.

One experimental field recording track has been removed, and the original art, album name and some of the original track titles have been changed, but otherwise everything remains the same as the original private release. 15 years later, I am still very proud of these compositions, and I feel extremely fortunate to be able to share them with you.

Thanks to Curtis Blondin, Khashayar Mohammadi, James Farr, Mike Nelson, Alex Bimm, Harris Newman, Mark Molnar, and Brooke Lockyer for encouragement when I needed it the most. Thanks to Eric Bent for the cover art and to Andrew Nelville for designing.

* "A north door opens and the cat prowls our world" is taken from Earl Birney's "hokkai in the dew line snow"; "They followed a stone wall past the remains of an orchard" is from Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Promissory Note (NC001) is the first release from Negative Capabilities, a Montreal micro-label and zine dedicated to releasing and celebrating outsider/primitive guitar and left-field acoustic music. For more info, please visit negativecapabilities.bandcamp.com or email contactnegativecapabilities@gmail.com. Thanks for listening.

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Micro label specializing in digital and cassette releases of outsider/primitive guitar and left-field acoustic music.