"Why bring back the TELEGRAPH name? Isn't TEENAGE BLACKOUT all you anyway? Just use that. It's a cooler name."

I had better explain the tactics of the name change.

I love naming bands. I have whole lists I've made up, dating back to high school. I've named almost every band I've been in, except for THE LIFE AND TIMES, although that's no lousier than OO OO WA. I even christened my old STORYTOWN friends. Anyway, my idea behind the name changes, aside from career suicide, is that each band has its own sonic niche:

TEENAGE BLACKOUT is all electronica / all the time - using ambient & drum n' bass as styles (so far.)

TRAVEL is most definitely a band-four guys in a room playing rock.

TELEGRAPH is my umbrella for more "soundtrack-y" stuff. In the past, it was always a collective of musicians I admired, where I felt I could act more as an orchestrator than a rock n' roll guy. This time out, it's just a drummer and me. However, despite the reduced roster, TELEGRAPH has always been the act with the very grand ideas, really big sounds, and a more spiritual sense.

"Stellar Lovers" just sounds like a TELEGRAPH record. Although Volume 1 of this eventual two volume set is ambient in nature, it's not like "Berlin Record" by TEENAGE BLACKOUT. "Berlin Record" had a really cold, computer-type sound: very remote (that's okay; I meant it to be that way.) "Stellar Lovers" is made mostly with wooden instruments - real drums, piano, acoustic guitar - so therefore it sounds more natural and human.

Although 4 years have passed since the last TELEGRAPH release, "Stellar Lovers" has been in the works since 1997, right on the heels of "Martian Chronicles." Sidetracked by the other projects, I never got around to finishing these tunes. Almost zero of the TELEGRAPH sessions are improvised. To write & arrange can be time-consuming.

This record and forthcoming Volume 2 are as close as I'll probably ever come to a concept album. The album title (aside from being a riff on two of my favorite titles, "Stellar Regions" by John Coltrane, and "Sister Lovers" by Big Star) acts as a framework for an idea. These records are about love: disc one is love lost, disc two is love found. I thought about releasing them as a double album, but the work is better served by giving each a spotlight, so I made them companion volumes instead. I won't say much about disc two here, but it's quite happy. This one isn't so much sad as it is wandering, disconnected. These little 'paintings' tell of letting go, of searching, of wonder (the aviation theme isn't there for nothin'.) It's a very bare album, one that you might play late at night and forget it's even going - the room will just feel different. The music is stripped to just atmosphere, with a little bit of melody to keep you interested. It's a record of theme & variation. Keys are reused and melodies familiar between numbers.

Production-wise I tried a lot of new tricks, too boring to detail here. If you're an engineer and you just have to know how I got that piano sledgehammer at the end of "Aviary," drop me a line, we'll talk shop. Otherwise, I'll leave you with the knowledge that I've been listening to a lot of records from the 1970s lately and I've been studying how "dead" everything sounds - like they were recorded somewhere with carpets on the walls, getting round, bass-heavy, and muffled tones.

Um, I guess I'll give a last note to this volume:

"Stellar Lovers" makes me cringe a little when I play it for people. You'll probably think I'm high saying this, being an instrumental album and all, but this is probably my most revealing piece in a long time. I'm not secluded behind any art-rock guise or sense of cool. In fact, the albums are patently un-cool. For the first time in a long time, you can really hear if I have any 'chops.' Every mistake is there, and I play more complicated stuff than ever. The mistakes left alone are partly intentional. It's a flawed album by a flawed person. I don't think I've let so much dirty laundry out into the public since 1996's "experiment farm road."

PS - These records are the debut of two musical treasures - the 1957 Gibson owned by my father before his death, reconditioned by my mom for Christmas 2000, and my 1977 Yamaha CP70 electric baby grand, this long-discontinued model made famous on PETER GABRIEL 3. Yeah, baby. The piano picked up a lot of 'hum' while recording, but fuck it - it still sounds awesome.

PPS - I should comment, for clarification, that the track "Invisible Buildings" isn't about the World Trade Center, although the title and its melancholy sound might be applied to that event. The song was written before September 11th. In the words of Tim Kinsella, "May we all make it home safely…"