Transactions of… (tracks 1 - 3)
Crimes Against… (tracks 4 - 9)

These recordings represent some of my earliest sound experiments, with Aaron Lund circa 1989 - 91. The Philosophical Society (our name chosen through the Dadaist method of opening a book at random) was never active as a live band, and none of our tapes were officially released. Created for the most part on long afternoons after school, these tracks were made on a cassette 4-track using a motley collection of record players, reel-to-reel machines, dictaphones, found objects and toy instruments. We practiced a kind of open collaboration, adding layers to each other’s tracks, sharing equipment back and forth and improvising together. For the second tape, sampling became a primary strategy, utilizing an 8-second digital delay/sampling pedal. Aaron would disentangle the clumps of magnetic tape that seemed to be a ubiquitous form of litter in the late 80’s, splicing it back into cassettes. These warped, degraded sounds were then sampled and used as the instigation for many of the tracks on “Crimes Against…”
There is a freedom to naiveté. We were basically ignorant of industrial, noise, musique concrete, experimental music, and so on - though we listened voraciously to the college radio station in Kalamazoo, WIDR - especially David Livingstone’s “Corpse of Milk”, a freeform mix of strange sounds and oddities. We started to become aware of (and seek out) fringe music... (S.N.)

I think of the PS as an audio conversation- I'm really interested in the process of one artist borrowing from another, and then transforming the material into something completely new. Seth and I had a collaboration where this transformation came not only from the sounds we found, but from the tracks we each created and shared.
Found sound was everywhere, whether records purchased at thrift stores & garage sales, cassette tapes from used answering machines, and field recordings with various tape recorders. Not being a musician myself, I grew to like the idea that you didn't have to play an instrument to make music. I was inspired by the production techniques of hip hop artists like Public Enemy or Grandmaster Flash and by import Dub albums from Tackhead or Mark Stewart. (A.L.)