Waxing (un)poetic about the pandemic and how it altered the working practices of collaborative musical entities of pretty much any capacity to at least some extent has become a cliche at this point. And yet, it perhaps serendipitously(*) hit this band at a time when we had become exhausted by and disillusioned with the "old fashioned way" of chasing the rock n roll dream - jam in a basement, pick the best bits, cut those best bits down endlessly until they're a copy of a copy. Eventually drop half your paycheck on studio time to possibly get a half assed recording of them put to tape, play it live to a crowd of 15-20 people max, most of whom are friends, family, significant others; no one who is genuinely just wandering in seeking out a mind bending musical experience in their home town like the 500+ lifers who showed up at a matinee Battle of the Bands at the end of School of Rock (seriously, way to jip an entire generation of wannabe musicians)...but I digress...

For the first few months of Covid we stayed away from each other, mostly because we felt like we had no other choice. Then we realized 3 guys jamming in a fairly large basement of an apartment building one of the guys also lived in probably wasn't super risky, and we missed playing with people as opposed to laptops and loop pedals/drum machines. As has been our custom for some time, we recorded those practices on a single mic. As has also been custom, we sent them to each other.

But then a funny thing happened - there was no compulsion to get to the "cut the best bits" part. Something about the circumstance of Covid made us more appreciative of the process and the experience. We realized that was what we liked about playing music together from the getgo, not whittling it down to some contrived "epic" ready for a genre catered playlists that will only ever be appreciated by people you will never meet halfway across the world who only "like" your band because it has vague superficial similarities to some big name band (some of us) don't actually like that much, and consequentially never do more than scratch the product's surface.

Alcove is done with that phony ass bullshit. This is us at our most authentic (with some *slight* tweaks granted). Take it or leave it. This is the model for the future for us. Some themes and motifs may reappear on future releases but these aren't meant to be "new songs". You could call this free improv. We like to think of it more as "spontaneous composition" as Can termed it. We chose to release this particular session first because we felt it was our most consistent from the 2020-2021 era, but rest assured we have more up our sleeve...from the future...or the past(?).

(*) - in a macabre way, to be sure

- Matt