The middle part of this track is built around one of the very last pieces I created using the sampling software in the De Anza College studio. I was happy with the results, but it was definitely not a finished work unto itself. Lots of random little location recordings I’d been accumulating are distributed throughout: an odd, raspy drone that came out of the telephone in a cheap London hotel when you pressed a button labelled ‘music’; a spectacularly drunk Scots woman encountered outside of a train station; a very complex, evolving drone being loudly emitted by a bank of air vents in the underground parking lot at the now-demolished Vallco shopping mall in Cupertino; and one of my earliest field recordings (I think it was #5 on the first cassette) made in 1995 while sitting next to an emphatically rattling window on the 26 bus travelling down Stevens Creek Boulevard. Several of these ingredients had been transferred over from the abandoned ‘‘Patapheromone’ project.

One of the sources that always gives me a chuckle when I hear it is the flute recording, although it is processed & layered for use in this piece. In January 2000, during one of our trips to see Current 93 perform in London, my friends John & Greg Scharpen dragged me along to see a show by a British folk singer they both liked at a pub called ‘The Queen’s Head’; this would have been fine with me, except that a ridiculously long & convoluted series of bus rides were necessary to get to the venue – and when we arrived, the ‘venue’ actually turned out to be a shed next to the pub, and the ‘show’ actually turned out to be part of a monthly talent showcase arranged by the locals for the locals. The people in attendance were completely baffled by the arrival of these three very scruffy-looking Americans, and the atmosphere was decidedly uncomfortable for everyone. One young woman, still in the early days of learning the flute and performing one of her pieces in public for the very first time, was particularly unsettled by having unexpected guests in the audience. I recorded her performance (which was rather good, I thought) and decided to feature a version of it on this track, thus immortalising her forever in the annals of rock & roll history.

The track name, which translates as “Extinguishing the Unnecessary Lights”, is taken from a painting by Yves Tanguy.