I consider myself very fortunate to have stumbled into this recording. I feel as if I was there for it, rather than that I wrote it or recorded it, even though I came up with the whole thing and made every sound.
I had a friend at Pitzer who played flute, and for some reason I got it in my head that I wanted to try to play it. I do not know what possessed me, other than the fact that I love the flute and have always wanted to play with a flute player. As an aside, My Bloody Valentine sealed the deal with me when I read that they had a flute player on the Loveless tour, the one that I missed by a week when I read about the gig after it happened.
In any event, I can’t remember which I did first: the flute track or the guitar. I imagine it was the flute track, because the guitar I actually know how to play and could adjust to the sounds I made on the flute. I had, more or less, not simply a poorly formed embouchure but rather no embouchure at all. I produced a lot of white noise from blowing into the flute. I had no idea how to finger the thing except that the more fingers I put down the lower the note would be–like on a penny whistle–and the notes that came out, at least in terms of the tonality, came out entirely on their own accord.
Let’s imagine that my deduction is right and I cut a guitar track after the flute. This much I know: I had been around that time playing with an arrangement of Ornette Coleman‘s “Lonely Woman” for acoustic guitar, entirely for my own enjoyment, of which there exists a recording I’ve never made public. I used the tonality on “Flute Tune” that I’d used for “Lonely Woman.”
What made the recording, however–and this had never before nor has it been since the case–was the reverb, or delay more properly put. My friend Brian had a digital delay, and I used it to bounce this track to tape. That delay made every thing sit well. Believe me, the dry version is nowhere near as good to listen to as this is. I had misplaced this mix, as it turns out, for years between various moves, and had found it, in a copy of the original copy, about six months before I made The Bathroom Mirror. Someone was looking out for me.
I have a vivid memory about this tune. The night after I recorded and mixed it down I listened to it a number of time. I was dazzled by it, partially because it came together in a way that I didn’t really feel I was responsible for it. I drifted off to sleep with the sounds of it in my head. That night, I had a vivid dream that in content was a nightmare but which I don’t remember feeling terror over. I dreamed I lived in a medieval town of some sort, where the houses had thatched roofs. Somehow, at night, the town had caught fire and everything was burning. A man spoke to me and told me his son was in their home and had burned to a crisp. The man then said that the Devil had come to the town. I have very vivid memories of flames and floating embers, as well as the orange light that came from them. No idea what this was trying to tell me, but I have always felt that this record does have a power to it to call things up.
