Anamnesis

The Story of My First Record

Original Album Art, a photo of Williamsburg, Bedford and Grand, 2002/2003

In 2002, I moved to NYC from Boston after graduating from Northeastern there. With a degree in Rhetoric/Communication with a minor in Easter Religion, the goal was to blindly “be a musician”. With my college band Loop Dreams, I really thought I had a shot at it. I’d formed a 100% improvisational band with curated players that have never played together, with the express goal of sounding like a trip-hop/house/jungle/d&d DJ. This project was initially called “Learned Evolution,” a name that would eventually become my first company. Players in this experiment included Joe Russo, Stu Brooks, Garrett Sayers, Dan Chen, Noam Schatz, Adam Macchia, and many more killers. Eventually, I changed the name of this project to “Noism.” Some excellent moments from 2001–2002 captured here:

Short on jobs and money, eventually, I starting spending the weeks on my little 3 piece shitty drum kit (eventually planter box), one electric and one acoustic Yamaha guitar, an Access Virus analog synthesizer, and a single SM57 microphone. I purchased Ableton 2, and maybe my first ever foray into music production with a computer.

The goal was to create a concept record, with nine different tracks, each representing the stages of conscious evolution. This is around when I was really diving very deep into the Integral thing, studying directly with Ken Wilber in Boulder a couple of times, trying to figure it all out. A record that explored these stages seemed like the great basis, and I would go on to develop that record of the next year.

The record would be called “Anamnesis”. From Wikipedia:

In philosophy, anamnesis (/ˌænæmˈniːsɪs/; Ancient Greek: ἀνάμνησις) is a concept in Plato’s epistemological and psychological theory that he develops in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo and alludes to in his Phaedrus.

The idea is that humans possess innate knowledge (perhaps acquired before birth) and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge from within.

Terms that have been used to characterize this concept include Doctrine of Recollection and Doctrine of Reminiscence.

I dug out the record during the first phase of the pandemic, as well as this art I’d made many years ago. This is now the official album art, as distributed in 2020 when I put it on all major platforms

Over the next nine days, I will tell the story of each track of the record, its meaning, and how each was made. I’ve always wanted to write this up but never found the time. Anamnesis is one of my proudest projects, and I truly think it holds up all these years later. There are a million things I’d change now, but I’ve left it as was made and finished in 2004. I burned 30 CDs, gave away maybe 20 of them, and the rest are buried in a box somewhere, maybe.

Here is the complete record and tracklist, linked to the story of each track:

1. Freetermined
2. Sobjective
3. Chaordic
4. Hearth
5. Creatstruction
6. Simplex
7. Holon
8. In-to-under-out-over-from-through-for-between-towards-at
9. LOVE

Nine days, nine tracks, nine stories coming next…

Love,

jb