The drone-jazz record that never was can now be yours
tl;dr You can buy a test press of I Heart Lung’s Interoceans, never released on vinyl, right now. Only 2 copies. All proceeds go to Chris Schlarb and his family.
If you listen to curious and complex music — ambient jazz, mind-melting rock, sophisticated synth-pop, deep drone — there’s a good chance that Chris Schlarb has touched a record you love. He’s a songwriter, musician, producer, record label owner, engineer and arranger who’s worked with Minutemen’s Mike Watt, Diane Cluck, Chad Taylor, Tortoise's Jeff Parker, Cynic’s Paul Masvidal… a very long list of forward-thinking folks, not to mention a group of musicians he’s cultivated around Long Beach, California for session work at BIG EGO, his label and studio. He works hard and people like working with him.
Chris has also been a friend of mine for over two decades. We met through a message board hosted on Sounds Are Active, his old label. We immediately connected over a similar philosophy — that music speaks to each other, no matter the sound, era or locale it comes from. Less influenced by mashup culture, more into the ways that improvised music can pull from all sorts of places to create another way to be. You can hear all of that in his band Psychic Temple.
Chris has had a rough year. There’s a GoFundMe that explains the landlord drama and various setbacks that have kept him from steady work. I wanted to help out, so I texted Chris and asked if I could sell the only 2 copies of a record he made that never came out.
Back in 2008, Chris and Asthmatic Kitty — the label run, in part, by Sufjan Stevens — approached my label (Thor’s Rubber Hammer) about releasing the vinyl version of Interoceans by I Heart Lung. This was Chris’ duo with drummer and visual artist Tom Steck, featuring a who’s who of the avant-garde: Nels Cline, Dave Easley, Andrew Pompey, Kris Tiner, etc. I immediately loved the world created on this album — dense, deep drones constructed (and deconstructed) from improvisations. Heady music with a lot of heart.
This is an excerpt of the one-sheet co-written by Chris and me, originally published on the Asthmatic Kitty website:
Improvisation captures the here and the now. Jazz producers like Bob Thiele at the legendary Impulse Records encouraged John Coltrane and others to record in one take, preserving the excitement generated in the moment. Working in this fashion, I Heart Lung (comprised of guitarist Chris Schlarb and drummer Tom Steck) went into the studio and recorded two days full of improvisations that, over the course of three years time, would be revised in the anti-jazz tradition of overdubs, remixing and post-production composition.
On Interoceans, I Heart Lung blends first-take methods with Oblique Strategies: carefully composed, meticulously recorded pieces rooted in improvisation, revised and augmented over time. The results are a compelling vision of chaos and beauty as Chris Schlarb's electric guitar drones and Tom Steck's free-jazz drumming hold and flutter with shimmering acoustic guitars, soaring pedal steel and beautifully captured field recordings. When Kris Tiner's trumpet follows Nels Cline's electric sitar three minutes into "Interoceans II," it's like Don Cherry's loving spirit doting on universal music drones.
Presented as a set of four long-form drone-based compositions, Interoceans hints both at the sonic palette and renegade spirit of ECM Records alumnus Steve Tibbetts and Ralph Towner and the measured studio edge of Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. While influenced by Fripp & Eno, Miles Davis, and Terry Riley, I Heart Lung possesses a healthy balance between tradition and the respectful corruption thereof.
Interoceans was released on CD and digital by Asthmatic Kitty in 2008. (Though, sadly, the album does not appear to be available anywhere — physical or streaming — these days.) It was reviewed favorably by Pitchfork, Pop Matters, New York Times and All About Jazz.
We screen-printed jackets with alternate artwork by Tom Steck, had the album mastered for vinyl by Roger Seibel, went through a round of test presses… and then I ran out of money. I was working on other spendy projects for the label, including a split LP featuring I Heart Lung, and everything got too expensive and complicated too fast. I’ve always felt bad about not making Interoceans happen, but Chris, being who he is, understood. The jackets sat in my basement (and later, Chris' storage), as did these test presses, which, for those who need to know such things, we did reject for snaps and crackles.
So here we are, 17 years later, and my hope is that 2 people will want to buy these 2 records to help out a friend in need. —Lars Gotrich