
Enjoy these soothing sounds as the soundtrack to the following tale..
I am…or was…or whatever, in this band — a three-piece rock group called Silencer Assembly. It started with me on bass and my friend Mark Pino drums. We wrote a handful of songs and played the hell out of them for a year and half or so, and then decided that we needed to add a guitar player to the mix, so we asked Ian Robertson to join us. We boiled our oeuvre down to eight songs and the three of us rehearsed them for a long time, and since we could never get our shit together to play any shows, we decided to record those songs, and go from there.
At the suggestion of my friend and fellow bass player Ian Miller, I asked the homie Scott Evans (KWC guitarist / singer, Tape Op magazine contributor, and all around awesome dude) to record us. We met up at Sharkbite Studios in Oldtown Oakland back in late August of 2012 and banged out a quick and dirty one-day session. We hit a few speed bumps — my amp, which had been acting up and I did nothing about, took a shit straightaway (my bad); we had a few issues with one or two of the songs — but at the end of the day had achieved what we’d set out to accomplish: eight finished songs in the proverbial can.
We went back and forth (and took our damn sweet time) with Scott (who was super patient with us) while he mixed the music over the following couple months, and in October of 2012 we took possession of six nicely mixed tunes (two songs got cut from the final product for various reasons).
In the meantime, everything with the band ground to a halt. Stopped dead in its tracks.
I don’t know for sure what happened, but I know what wasn’t happening: We weren’t playing. We met up for beers one afternoon, talked a little about the music, and decided to give up our practice space in West Oakland, which I think was more of a definitive course of action than we envisioned at the time, and despite our best intentions our hiatus became official. Meanwhile, these recordings were collecting dust.
Fast forward several months…which is to say, pretty much right now. I was recently asked to take up bass duties in another band (which I did; more on that later), and for various reasons, I didn’t feel I could do that without releasing the Silencer Assembly stuff. I know Mark and Ian were in favor of getting this music out there, and much in the same way that I don’t know exactly what happened to the band, I don’t know exactly why I never put these songs out. So I did it, and they were unmastered at first because I’m a kucklehead and I just didn’t get them mastered, but Ben Adrian stepped up and did a quick mastering job on them because he’s a really nice guy.
Anyway, you can have these songs for free. Yeah, I know the Buy Now field on the Bandcamp page says “name your price,” but we won’t be offended if the price you name is $0.00, so just go get the music.
Also, if you’re in the Bay Area and you’re looking to record some music, I highly recommend Scott. He’s extremely professional and disarmingly casual, super cool and a no-bullshit kinda guy, he knows sound and does great work for a fair price. And Sharkbite was a great place to spend a day making noise.
So there it is, in a nutshell.
And here are some photos from that Sharkbite session…































We started with the recommended dose in a cold shot: 10ml, or two teaspoons. This is a ridiculously small amount of liquid — literally a couple of thimbles full — but keeping in mind that this stuff contains 40x the caffeine of regular coffee, and this is Broughton’s suggested starting serving for BBotE for beginners, it seemed a logical first step. Just to put this in perspective, 10ml of BBotE is the equivalent of 400ml of regular coffee, or about 13.5 oz, approximately one to two standard diner mugs full. (Standard restaurant coffee mugs usually contain eight to ten ounces…less actual coffee if you dump in a bunch of those little plastic containers of Carnation creamer and processed sugar packets.)
Pleased and emboldened by the tacit nature of our first foray into cold BBotE, we then tried an alternate serving suggestion, mixing 10ml with three tablespoons of hot water. As with the cold shot, there were no unpleasant variables in the taste; the hot water slightly enriched the coffee flavor, but also watered down the viscosity a bit, making the mixture tea-like, with a soothing, roasty-flavored, a light see-through brown color (usually the last thing I want to see in coffee) with an ultra-thin and oily film on top, and it went down easy. Too easy.
