BURNING MACHINE (2002)

Most sounds - Matt Stevenson
"Lost Highway" vocals - Lora Bloom
"Prowl" - Mike LePostellec, guitar; Steve Bloom, bass

1: Prowl
2: Life Under New Management
3: Radio XXX
4: Lost Highway
5: Nekra
6: Warlord
7: Rev 3:44

CD art by Matt

Ah, BURNING MACHINE, our least-known, least-distinguished album (which makes it extremely obscure and highly undistinguished indeed). It's barely Radio Eris in all but name. Lora appears on one track; her brother and our friend Mike LePostollec appear on "Prowl," and a now-deceased Philly artist was sampled on one track.

Basically, B.M. was created as a deck-clearing exercise; it contains the last of the 4-track cassette recordings, many of which pre-dated LORALAI but post-dated SK. It's essentially all the feedback experiments I'd made, plus a computer-created collage that's sad evidence of a man who needed a girlfriend at the time ("Radio XXX"). "Life Under New Management" refers in title and feel to my corporate bank job at the time - we'd just had a merger. "Warlord" has a couple whispered lines from MOBY DICK and a weird ripping, carpet-bombing feedback setting I stumbled on one night.

I wanted to finalize and release these pieces, so I used the recording software Steve had handed off to me with the LOSERS masters and gradually pieced it together. Lora and I were more interested in becoming actual musicians at this point, and hadn't collaborated on random recordings much, so there wasn't a lot of new Lora readings to make a "LORALAI v2" from. Meanwhile, we soldiered on at open mics and some hit-or-miss gigs as a duo. Bleak times for the band. -Matt