Trades EP by Red Sled Choir

Thank you: Bon for all the feedback, encouragement, early ears and inspirado, Drew for all the music and handcrafted mixes, Kate for your endlessly wonderful Holga photographs, Ben Lovell @ Lily Tapes and Discs for wanting to put this on cassette, Henry & Silas for making good noise with me, the Swifts for tolerating the noise and being ever-supportive, all the good ones in the Mid-Hudson Valley, Courtney for your bells, JT for your printing prowess, Kaleb @ Standard Art Supply for making things possible, Bubba & Ithaca Underground for all of the opportunities to try these songs out live, Benjamin Torrey for documenting so much of that with a remarkable care and sharing it so willingly, and all the good people who have come out to see the various incarnations of this project over the years.

This music was/is a great big experiment that began in the fall of 2014. Having (at least temporarily) run dry of musical ideas for the guitar, I decided to set mine aside and settled on a specific set of "tools": my trusty (if busted up) casio, my glockenspiel, my largely neglected Electribe sampler, my (also busted) (and less trusty) banjo, and my voice. The idea was to make quieter music with more textures and more layers that could be executed live. And this, of course, led to looping. So after settling on the right looping pedal, I set about capturing some of the sounds that had been rustling under the carpet for a long, long time. The first ones to come out were the quietest ones. It was winter. But as the days stretched out a little more and got a little brighter, so did the sounds. This led to the second batch of songs (these ones!). And being that it is now summer 2015, it feels only fair that these should be the ones to share first. Because they feel ready. And the first batch will have to wait until winter again. Of course, it's never so clean and simple as I've just described. All is not light and bouncy, by any means. There is surely darkness in here and maybe it all sounds dark to some people. But that's neither here nor there. This is just the way the sounds feel to me.

- Matt
June 2015