Sensitive Chaos Blog

I’m happy to report that the Sensitive Chaos CD is complete and available on CD Baby. Copies are also available direct from the artist and will soon be in a few record stores in the Atlanta area. I’ve also starting sending copies to reviewers and radio and will post updates as they arrive.

From the press kit: Leak is the first album from Sensitive Chaos, a solo project of Atlanta-based producer and electronic musician Jim Combs. Jim is also known for his work with electronic duo TouchXtone, a 2005 Atlanta Creative Loafing Best Of Award winner (best local electronic act), as well as being one of the co-hosts for the Aurora Coffee/Criminal Records Songwriters Series held each Saturday night at the Virginia-Highlands Aurora Coffee location. Jim’s collaborators on Leak were musician Brian Good, who contributed two soprano saxophone solos to the album, and visual designer Eleanor Grosch, whose logo design graces the CD cover.

Sensitive Chaos started for Combs in 2005 with the acquisition of an analog MIDI sequencer, a piece of music hardware that records notes from a synthesizer keyboard and immediately plays them back in sequential order. “I had seen this particular piece of gear, the Sequentix P3, at the 2004 Different Skies music festival. It was being operated in an extraordinary fashion by the English synthesist Paul Nagle (Joint Intelligence Committee, Binar). I grew up on the music of Kraftwerk, Tomita, Tangerine Dream, Michael Honig, and Jean Michel Jarre, and loved the synth work of Erasure, Depeche Mode, and The Orb/Orbital/William Orbit. I’d also accumulated what some would call an entire synthesizer museum over the years, have a well-outfitted computer recording setup, but had never owned an analog sequencer. Paul was improvising these incredibly complex and changing patterns out of thin air and I was blown away by the immediacy of the instrument and the wonderful synth lines being generated. Paul’s P3 was built from a kit, but the P3’s inventor, Colin Fraser, started a run of production units in the spring of 2005 and I got the 12th unit built, one of the first in the States. I started performing with it right away, but it took months before the lights really started coming on.”

Combs’ epiphany came in the fall of 2005 after an innocuous solo gig. “I had been asked to improvise some down-tempo intermission music for a local event and I took a small setup including the P3. The event was noisy so I had a hard time hearing myself, but what I could hear was sounding good, so I just kept improvising and layering loops upon loops. When I got back in the studio and listened to what I had banged into the P3, I was astounded. What should have sounded like a complete mess was organized, and well, …composed. With a little arrangement, that track morphed into the final track on the CD, Nightshift At The Baby Mecha Nursery.”

That watershed moment led to a quick succession of new songs. “I must have knocked out one song a week for a month or so. These songs were much different than the ambient material TouchXtone normally created, though I was using similar improvised composing methods. These new songs were much more verse/chorus/middle eight, and I saw they were going down a different path. All of a sudden, I had an hours worth of material and realized I was making a solo album.” An influential book on the physical beauty of water from Combs’ high school years gave name to the venture.

The beginning of 2006 found Combs creating new songs and looking for vocalist collaborators. “About half the songs I was composing were instrumentals and the other half were firmly in the synth pop realm. All the synth pop sounds I had grown up with started resurfacing and it seemed natural to find a singer to help pull them together. Unfortunately, finding a singer proved difficult, and I ended up temporarily shelving the synth pop material and just concentrated on the tunes that could stand on their own as instrumentals.”

Luckily, a series of solo performances in the spring of 2006 yielded three new instrumentals, all of which found their way onto the new CD. Painting Earthtones In Orbit and Leak resulted from performances at the Aurora Coffee/Criminal Records Songwriters series in March and May, respectfully, and Starry Night was a song literally created by using cards selected at random by the audience at a benefit concert in May. “The book Sensitive Chaos is about how these incredible patterns result out of the seemingly random flows of water. I was striving to produce slowly evolving patterns of sound out of some very random playing on my part at my solo performances. Starry Night was the extreme in this case as different audience members picked the tempo of the piece and the notes I used as I made up the actual song in the moment. While it’s standard procedure to compose in the studio and play the songs out live, I did the opposite, composing live into the P3 at gigs and bringing the sequences back to the studio to arrange and record.”

“I had mixed and sequenced the album at the end of May before reaching out to Brian Good to put a soprano sax solo on a couple of the songs. Brian and I have performed together at the Different Skies festival the past couple of years, and I knew his playing would be brilliant and lend a nice organic quality to the overall mix. Leak and Starry Night really came alive once he added his magic. Those songs were the last two I created for the CD and the sax parts took them to another level. I remixed those two songs and changed the order of the CD; Brian’s contribution was that significant.”

The other collaborator on the album was Eleanor Grosch, a designer from Philadelphia known for her poster art work for Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie, Edwin McCain, and most recently, her own line of Keds sneakers. “I had seen Eleanor’s work on display at an Octane Coffee gallery showing last December and I simply reached out to her to ask if she would be willing to work on a ‘small’ music project. To my surprise and to her great credit, she said yes. We decided to focus on a logo and the final form evolved over a series of iterations in the spring of 2006. The little drip at the end of the logo was the last thing added and I laughed out loud when I saw it. Eleanor had no way to know the logo summed up so many different threads and ideas that went into the album. It’s a very different style than I’ve known her to use in the past. But it works simply because it remains true to the core concepts of order, randomness, and fluidity.”

While there are no plans to perform the Leak material, Combs has solo performances booked through the end of the year and is moving forward with plans for a new Sensitive Chaos CD this time next year. “I’ve got all those synth pop songs waiting for the right voice to come along and I’ve also collected a bunch of new sequences that I need to review as potential future instrumentals. I’m hoping the next Sensitive Chaos CD will feature a balance of both.”

Sensitive Chaos Leak can be purchased from CD Baby

Information on Sensitive Chaos can be found at sensitivechaos.com or www.myspace.com/sensitivechaos

Information on Jim Combs can be found at www.myspace.com/jimcombs

Information on Brian Good can be found at sundaggermusic.com

Information on Eleanor Grosch can be found at pushmepullyoudesign.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 7:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.