Nothing Is Cohesive part II

NOTHING IS COHESIVE PART II [Outtake from Nothing is Cohesive]

Music: Transcendence and Ben Belin. All instruments: Transcendence and Ben Belin. Recorded at: No one remembers where. Miami, FL 2003. Engineered, Produced, and Mixed by Ben Belin.

Ben Belin played drums with Transcendence during the Nothing is Cohesive era in a brief period during which both our regular drummers Ricardo Mazzi and Bill Sommer were out of town for extended periods of time. This is why the Nothing is Cohesive album has four different drummers on it, including guitarist Fernando Perdomo. Nothing is Cohesive has if nothing else a very appropriate title. One night while sitting in my car outside at a party at about 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning I was listening to some of the rough tracks from the Nothing is Cohesive album that we were still in the midst of recording. I realized that if I held the fast forward button down on my car stereo system while listening to songs that it created this incredible forwarding effect that we used extensively on that album in between songs much to the aggravation of the other guys in the band. I came rushing into the studio the next day and made everyone come out to the car and listen to this new effect I had discovered by fast forwarding through CDs as they played. No one quite got what we were supposed to do with it or why we needed to do anything with it for that matter. But Ben did. We recorded several instrumental passages like this – several of which managed to make it to the album, including the title track. This one – Part II – got cut by an almost unanimous vote by the band. I was the only member who dug the piece. I thought it was mad brilliant. Ben had taken all the audio files from the album, isolated them, and cut them all up and messed with them. He turned them upside down and backwards, pitch shifted them, sped them up, slowed them down and then mixed them all together into one five minute noise opera. I loved it. I wanted to open the album with it. But I was alone in that decision and a band, if it’s a good band, is a democracy. So the mob ruled on this one and the song never made it to any album. Until now.

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