Sensitive Chaos Blog

Sensitive Chaos is getting close to completion. Plenty of material has been recorded and Jim is assembling the final mixes and deciding what tunes will make it onto the CD. The focus of the album has shifted back to its original vision, that being an outlet for Jim’s instrumental soundscapes. “I worked for 6 months to include a vocalist in the project,” said Jim. “It has proven difficult to do, though I’m still talking with a few folks. I’ve got a good set of song-based material that I’ll hold aside until I can find a collaborator, but rather than wait until then, I decided to move ahead with instrumental material that can stand on its own.”

As mentioned last month, Jim collaborated with Philadelphia print and design artist extrordinaire Eleanor Grosch on a Sensitive Chaos logo. Eleanor has previously worked for such musical luminaries as Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie, Edwin McCain, and the Dave Matthews Band, and the shoe company Keds just released an Eleanor designed pair of sneakers.

The CD has been titled “Leak”, inspired by Eleanor Grosch’s logo art. “That bit came in at the end of design, after Eleanor and I had talked about the meaning of sensitive chaos being water. All the chaotic elements were there in her original designs, but when she came back with the dripping bit, I just laughed out loud. It was so poetic, but unexpected. This is a very different logo than I had conceived in my head. However, my goal was to let Eleanor take a simple set of attributes I had in mind, and express them in her special way. The more time I spend with her design, especially as I create all the CD cover artwork, the more I love what she’s created for me. It’s perfect.”

“Also at my Aurora gig in May, I created a new song that fits the Leak theme, so I’ve ended up using that song as the title song for the CD. So a few final touches and sweetening (I’ve enlisted saxophone and EWI player Brian Good to add some sonic flourishes to two songs), and this will be ready to go to the pressing plant.”

Sensitive Chaos has been slowly and quietly making progress. Glacial progress. The kind that sinks ships.

Several new songs, spontaneously composed from scratch at Jim’s last Aurora Coffee gig, have been refined and recorded to hard disk. One, called Luck Of The Draw, is a spooky, slow tempo Depeche Mode-ish number that is just screaming for a David Gahan vocal. And the second is more vintage Jim ambient groove, complete with a cool sampled conga section slapping away in polyrhythms in the background, all Carlos Santana-esque.

And on a completely separate, but related thread, Jim has been collaborating with Philadelphia print and design artist extrordinaire Eleanor Grosch on a Sensitive Chaos logo. Eleanor has previously worked for such musical luminaries as Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie, Edwin McCain, and the Dave Matthews Band.

One of Eleanor’s own Aesop’s Fables Series prints, “The Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing”, is at left. The whole series, and frankly any of her work, just knocks us on the head. It is so smart and fun.

Jim is thrilled to have Eleanor’s unique visual sensibility added to the Sensitive Chaos crew. The finished logo design is wonderfully, playfully, chaotic that winds up being about as balanced a mix of mess and order as you can get. Well, maybe more mess than order!

Look for a grand unveiling in the near future on the Sensitive Chaos web site, T-shirts, and a CD cover near you.

In the meantime, check out Eleanor’s posters and merchandise. Classy, classy. Makes you or your home look immediately better.