This is the first release of new TRAVEL material since 2002's "a sleep + a wake." And, if you didn't know better, you would think we were carrying on that album's ambient tradition. However, in the total picture, both "spoken wor[l]d" and "a sleep + a wake" are anomolies in the noise catalog of the band. Two more full-length noise records are being released this year, but the band felt that this album made a nice, gentle reminder that we are not dead. This album, plus the live album, "travel comes @live," we hope to be appetizers to the larger courses of "anti-social butterfly" and "= writes."

That's not to say, though, that this is a light album, or a throwaway. It's a fully developed 17-song, 50-minute record of mellow, almost ambient tracks. A small portion of these songs are "treatments" of tracks that will apper on the coming records. But most are just very quiiet songs from the 2006 sessions that really wouldn't fit well on the other records, but strung out here make a great listen.

Some of these tracks may be the best we've ever produced, even though there are no Matt Hart vocals. It's a more cohesive "instrumental-ish" record than "a sleep + a wake." It's more emotional, less experimental, more melodic.

It's not a fully instrumental record. About 1/3 of the tracks feature spoken word vocals from a variety of narrators. Kelly Morelock organized a set of field recordings where bi-linquial speakers translated Matt Hart poems and read them in a foreign toungue. I took these recordings, treated them in a way the tracks seemed to require, and, voila, something strange and different -- almost like a satellite transmission from a faraway land. It's an amazing sound.