Yucky Mellow by Spherehawk

Recorded September 7-15th, 2025 in Venice, FL.


Explores the Benson Amps Florist > 1980's Boss BF-2 Flanger > Mosky Spring Reverb > Chase Bliss Audio Lossy > Ableton


Lossy audio compression is quite dear to me. At age 12 or 13 I got a cheap HP laptop for school with a cheap-o 99-cent plastic gooseneck microphone to plug into the laptop audio jack. This was 2004, 2005ish.

I was new to guitar, and somebody told me about the recording software Audacity, and that became my gateway into the practice of making recordings which I love to do.

Audacity was extremely basic, and tricky to produce music in, but I got my acoustic guitar and recorded my first songs on that crappy, shitty horrible cheap-o laptop mic.

Listening to my music from back then sounds like an old blues record to me, swamped in a hypnotic cloud of noise with bursts of melody poking through the age and wear. Only, my songs aren't 100 years old. They came out sounding like relics (due to the shitty mic.)

Shortly thereafter, I needed a REAL microphone to record. From there were many more fine upgrades in the musician's endless vain quests of gear acquisition.

...So now BOOM! Full circle!!

I found one of the musical loves of my life, Chase Bliss's the Lossy pedal, which is essentially all the sounds of those terrible awful mics going into crappy laptops recorded at low bit rates with crunchy chewy digital goodness, buffering throughout ...

So I wanted to explore the early digital lofi sound again, and make New Relics. It may sound like a copy of a copy of a copy of a CD of Limewire files, but I wanted that sound because it's nostalgic for me now! Ain't that a hoot.

Also, I used a pedal called the Benson Florist for almost all the guitar throughout the album, it's how I achieved that gooey squiggly cartoony guitar tone.

Instruments used were a silver Gretsch G2655T guitar, Casio CT-S400 keyboard, and Korg Microkorg synth.

The songs on this album were written & recorded in the order in which they appear.


- Trevor

Trevor Brown

This is Tevor's "Alter ego" music project

Bedroom indie psych rock? I guess???

est 12/19/2019