"What the HELL happened during those four years?!"

Disruption Theory was released at the very end of 1999, and Normalized came out in September of 2003. The four-year gap between albums, as well as the enormous differences in musical style and direction, have a lot of reasons behind them. But the single biggest one is the "other album" I made in-between those two.

half-pint demigod is many things. On the most basic level, it's a remix album I produced, based on the music of another artist - Seattle singer/songwriter/guitarist Shawn "Yogi" Farley. There's a wealth of information about this record's production, and the myriad conceptual and technical aspects to it, available at various other spots (most notably at Shawn's website.) What I want to do here is to talk about half-pint demigod specifically in terms of what it means to me as a solo artist, and the enormous part it played in getting me from Disruption Theory to Normalized.

At the beginning of 2000, I had just released my first CD, and I had absolutely no idea how to stage a live Andre LaFosse performance. I hadn't played a gig of any kind whatsoever since 1997, my Echoplex hadn't been turned on in months, and the idea of "turntablist guitar," or any concrete approach to non-ambient solo electric guitar gigs, was years down the road. So most of my music-making energies in 2000 wound up being spent on producing remixes for a few different bands and artists I knew in LA; without a live show of my own, and without any sort of real following beyond the handful of people who had been kind enough to find out about and buy Disruption Theory very early on in its release, it seemed like the best way to expand my name and my musical activites.

That didn't really end up being the case; the remix work I did for other acts was usually pretty well received, but ultimately never got any futher than some miscellanous downloads and a handful of comments from random listeners, most of them anonymous emailers scattered across the Internet. The main accomplishments I made with those remixes were twofold: I learned a lot about the craft of producing and engineering, and I caught the ear of Shawn "Yogi" Farley, around the time he was getting ready to release his first solo album, Any Raw Flesh?, which came out in the spring of 2001.

Any Raw Flesh? is, on the surface, very much unlike anything I've done: it's an album of concise, snappy rock songs with flashy live band arrangements, dense vocal harmonies, and elaborate songcraft. It's also very overt in wearing its influences on its sleeve; King's X is a band Yogi has been compared to many, many times, and for good reason, as their sound makes up the blueprint of many of the tunes on Any Raw Flesh?. Beyond that, there's a fair dose of Steve Vai-inflected guitar frenzy, some Trent Reznor-esque electronic forboding, and some very Rush-like proggish flourishes.

All of these acts were deeply formative to me as a listener and a developing musician, and I think that aspect is a big part of what made me connect with Shawn's music so strongly. Aside from the fact that he's ridiculously good at what he does - with songwriting, performances, and production that can easily hold its own with the "big boys" - I "get" where Shawn's music is coming from, because it's based on a lot of the same musical DNA I'm made of.

In that way, beyond simply being a "remix album," half-pint demigod is a sort of quasi-concept album for me. Because I identify so strongly with where Shawn's coming from, and because his music uses our mutual influences much more overtly than I allow myself to in "my own work," these remixes were a way for me to try and reconcile my guitar-rock roots with the point-and-click electronic angle that had become my standard operating procedure by early 2001.

The main technical conceit of half-pint demigod - the fact that I produced all of the remixes using nothing but the original performances from Any Raw Flesh? as my sonic source material - has been pretty well documented elsewhere (particularly in my track-by-track commentary for the album). What hasn't been addressed so much is the extent to which making this record changed me, and the different ways those changes happened.

For one thing, half-pint demigod was the first time I ever had a full-on computer based recording system at my disposal. Disruption Theory, and the remixes I produced prior to the Yogi project, were all done on a Roland VS-880 hard disk recorder, which is a table-top stand-alone device. It was a fine unit for what I did with it, but it was pretty limited in terms of deeply it could with manipulate or finesse audio. But half-pint demigod was produced on a Mac computer, using Logic Audio, and for the first time in my life I didn't have to work within the restraints of the recording medium I was using. And I went to town with it.

The Yogi remixes are, by far, the most heavily-produced and slickest-sounding things I've ever engineered. Certainly, a lot of credit for that goes to Darin DiPietro, the engineer who recorded Any Raw Flesh? and (by extension) all of the source material for half-pint demigod. But having the full-on power and flexibility of a modern (by 2001 standards, anyway) computer-based recording system to make music on was like moving into a mansion after having lived in a modest studio apartment. I grew by several notches as an audio engineer by being able to work with sounds in that way, and by "normal" standards, half-pint demigod is far and away the "best" sounding release I've been involved with.

More crucially, a huge amount of the sound-tweaking for half-pint demigod was done with a program called Pluggo, which is basically a collection of dozens of audio plug-ins, nearly every single one of them explicitly designed to take "normal" recordings and turn them into thoroughly bizarre sounds. Nearly all of the stuttery, glitchy, skipping-CD-player effects on these remixes came about from feeding Yogi performances into Pluggo effects with names like "Slice 'n Dice," "Stutterer," and "Feedback Network."

And that became one of the big "light bulb" moments of my life. When I first heard those Pluggo effects, one of my very foremost reactions was: "THIS is the kind of sound I've been trying to get with the Echoplex!" Hearing how these plug-ins could glitch up sounds - and hearing how they could take short loops of audio and turn them into dynamic, evolving musical events - was a very inspirational thing for me. A lot of brain power was spent during that period thinking about how these sorts of technical and conceptual ideas might be applied to Echoplex performance. A couple of months after starting the Yogi remixes, I played my first Echoplex gig in several years with some of these ideas in mind, and there was no turning back.

There's another key way in which half-pint demigod steered me towards a new lease on Echoplex life. The whole process of putting together the Yogi remixes was extremely tedious - we're talking about hours and hours, spread out over days, weeks, and months, manipulating sounds by moving them around a computer screen, pointing and clicking a mouse countless times, and trying to find some order amidst a lot of chaotic source material. It frequently felt like I was taking a jigsaw puzzle apart, and trying to put it back together in a completely different shape that would somehow make coherent sense - or would at least make artistic sense out of the thoroghly stitched-together nature of the process, and the end result. Make no mistake: I was delighted to have the chance to do the work, I relished the experience, and many of the difficulties were brought on by my dogged insistence to follow some very obstuse technical and musical concepts through to their completion. But there's no getting around the fact that making music in that manner was a very slow and often arduous process.

There's also no way of escaping the fact that by the time I handed in the final mixes to Shawn in the summer of 2002, I had heard every sound in every one of the 11 remixes literally thousands of times. The dark side of having a digital recording studio in your home computer is that you can spend endless amounts of time obsessing over every minute detail, and I certainly did that.

By the time I was done with half-pint demigod, I was all too happy to consider alternative ways to create and record music. So a huge part of why Normalized is what it is comes specifically from being a reaction to the way half-pint demigod was made. I was really, really tired of thinking in terms of elaborate sound design and slick, vast, lush audio production; if half-pint demigod was a big-budget technicolor movie, then Normalized was a dirty, gritty, black-and-white independent film. (Which reminds me that I've never talked about the very serious influence than Daren Aaronofsky's film Pi had on the making of Normalized... but that's another long and drawn-out essay altogether.)

Here's a striking and fundamental difference: with the Yogi remixes, I spent months and months building up tracks that were typically five or six minutes long, by moving data around a computer with a mouse and listening to fragments of sound countless times, over and over. With the live Echoplex solos that made up the bulk of Normalized, on the other hand, I could create a five-minute track in exactly five minutes' time, and I could do it by spending those five minutes playing the guitar. And the performances had so much sonic complexity to them that, when I turned in the final master for Normalized to the pressing plant, I was still noticing new sonic details in the Echoplex performances, nearly a year after having performed them.

So half-pint demigod is very much a transitional record for me. It was made at a point where I had no idea what I wanted to do with my own music, or even if there would ever be a second Andre LaFosse album. When Shawn suggested the remix idea, it was like an oasis in the proverbial desert: after having had a very bleak year of waking up to the harsher realities that many independent arists face when they release a first album, I had a chance - for the first time in my life - to do work with the assurance that it would be heard for an existing audience, and released by an outside label. So a huge amount of the time and effort I put into it was done due to Shawn's oft-stated desire to share the work with his listeners.

Enough about all of the background info: how does it actually sound?

It's a pretty audacious record, both sonically and technically, and is a pretty intense and overwhelming listen. (I seem to recall Rich Pike and Mike Keneally talking briefly about the material on a None Radio episode, with one of them mentioning that they'd recently run into a friend who had heard the remixes and "was still recovering from the experience.") As I mentioned before, this material is extremely heavily-produced, with nary a proverbial hair out of place.

What's kind of ironic is that, for all of the technical and conceptual hoo-hah behind the making of the material, these tracks are possibly the most stylistically accessible and straight-ahead things I've ever created. It's not that difficult to imagine hearing this stuff being played on modern rock or "alternative" stations next to Nine Inch Nails, Chemical Brothers, post-2000 Radiohead, Bjork, or other sonically-adventurous-yet-accessible-acts.

Does it sound like an Andre LaFosse record? I think that's ultimately in the ear of the beholder. To me, there's a certain production aesthetic present here that's shared by both of my solo records - a sort of stark intensity, for lack of a better word? A lot of half-pint demigod's overall sound is literally a cross between my two solo albums: something of an expansion on the more spacious and lush atmospheres of Disruption Theory, while also setting the stage for the more agressive, glitched-out sound of Normalized. Certainly, a lot of the rhythm production in the Yogi remixes is a natural evolution of the programming work that showed up on my first album, and in terms of my drum programming chops this record is the high point in my career thus far. And if I wanted to slip into Brian Eno/David Bowie/chin-stroking art-school intellectual territory, I could probably describe all three records as being some kind of "electronic-meets-organic" conceptual trilogy.

half-pint demigod still sounds good to me, nearly half a decade after creating it; I'm very proud of the stuff, and what I was able to accomplish with it. To go through that kind of work, with that particular kind of approach, for that kind of result, is impossible for me to consider now - it's an album I could only have made at that particular point in my life and my career, when those things were in places they had never been before, and will never be again.