Jon McKiel Bobby Joe Hope

How do you speak through a stranger? Contain multitudes. And begin to find new kinds of design in accident. True story. In September 2015 Jon Mckiel bought an old Teac A-2340, a reel-toreel tape recorder, tapes included. He exchanged a few emails with the online seller while negotiating a deal, but they never met. The first time Jon tested out the machine at home it disclosed a beautiful dream. A single tape of astounding samples from an unknown source. He nicknamed it the Royal Sampler. They began to jam together. I want to hear you speak. The tape might have been a lost demo for the games of hide and seek that accustom us to evasion. A collaboration constructed in echo. The completed songs seem to start mid-sentence, waiting a little further along the trail. Watch your step the ground gets uncertain by the bend. The maple trees in giggling fits. The shoreline no longer sure. I hear the mourning dove. Bobby Joe Hope was recorded during the summer of 2019 by Jay Crocker (of Constellation Records' JOYFULTALK, who knows a thing or two about composition methodologies involving electronic debris and surprising bric-a-brac). Under the watchful eye of Edward Snowden and a Blue Heeler named Judy, Jay and Jon transferred all the material they could excavate from the Royal Sampler along with the dialogic samples Jon had been making since that fateful September introduction. They combined these two sampled sources with the following design principle: even in the songs organized around a Jon sample, the stranger would be woven in. A shared sonic architecture. Bobby Joe Hope shares a skewed grace and tuneful ease with the work of Chris Cohen, Chad VanGaalen, or Sandro Perri. There's a masterful craft at work, and an attention to the intricate beauty of the smallest details, generous and clear. Tell me what you see. A game of hide and seek. A field wears the fog like an ancient argument. Wayward voices take shape just up ahead. Count down from 10 and be alone again. Abandoned to potential. In the green wide open. The rest belongs a mystery.