“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Our story begins, as they all do, with dozens, maybe even hundreds, of small moments – incidents and accidents, decisions made both consciously and otherwise – so the real question is not “where does it begin?” but “where to start?”
March 14th, 2020
This is as good a place as any. The COVID-19 pandemic was already raging around the world and in the United States, but of course the full scope of it had yet to be realized in many places, and Fresno was definitely one of those places. Our college had just suspended classes for the following week so we could transition to online learning for, at the time, what we thought might be a few weeks or, worst case, the rest of the semester. We were so naïve back then!
But, it was not all doom and gloom. Max had, just days earlier, finished converting a former storage area at Corridor 2122 into a small working music studio. Max was excited (and exhausted!), and Steve and I were excited for him, and we were all eager to put it to use. So Max invited us over to take a tour and have a little jam session. A county-wide shelter-in-place order was on the horizon, and I think we were all happy to sneak this in before things locked down. Much fun was had, and the rest is history, right? Well…
Lockdown
We were supposed to spend the next week in various training and prep sessions, on campus, to help us transition to online teaching, but things were changing rapidly – or, really, the awareness of how serious this all was could be denied no longer – and the campus shut down almost completely on March 17th. As the three of us scrambled to transition our classes online and figure out how to make the rest of the semester meaningful for our students, we also, individually, went into our own hardcore lockdowns. We all had family members at risk, and we were all taking this whole thing very seriously. Our bubbles quickly became very, very small.
The New Normal?
As the semester wore on and the light of re-opening and re-emerging grew increasingly dim, we, like everyone else, shifted from emergency-survival mode to adapt-and-endure mode.
And then the semester, gradually, and then all at once, ended. It felt great to have made it, and to have salvaged something meaningful from the raging dumpster-fire we all then knew 2020 to be, but we were also facing a summer of locked-down isolation coupled with the new tasks of official online certification and preparing all of our fall classes for going fully online from day one. Amidst so much uncertainty, the one thing we did kn0w was there would be no summer break over which to recharge and refresh.
Small Moments
Max, Steve, and I had been texting regularly, and we all seemed to hit upon the same idea at the same time: we’d all been extremely careful, and our personal lockdowns more locked-down than many. Our bubbles weren’t just small, they’d become microscopic. And the exhibition space at Corridor was massive. And just sitting there, empty…. Surely the three of us could, safely and socially-distanced, gather there once a week or so and have at least some kind of musical experience? Right?
Of course the answer was “yes,” but to say that any of us would’ve imagined we’d be here, now, rambling on about how this all began as a way to give context to a series of albums we’re releasing, well, that’s just silly. This was, originally, just for us, for our souls and our health and our sanity. We didn’t even start recording right away, and when we did, it was partially to get some practice doing so and partially to allow us to listen back to moments we knew where happening but weren’t always able to fully enjoy in the heat of the musicking.
However, after the fourth or fifth session we’d recorded, Max floated the idea of releasing some of these tracks, and that quickly turned into putting together an album, which turned into several albums. You know, as things do.
And so, here we are, releasing these albums into the wild. We hope you enjoy them, and we hope they maybe even help you look back on these times and reconnect with some of the small, beautiful moments that fought their way to the surface in spite of the physical and emotional carpet-bombing so many were forced to endure.