Chemic

Chemic, from Louisville, Kentucky was born out of the songwriting of Scott Kirkpatrick, and the tasteful minimalism of a tight family of players. The album, Fever on the Forest Floor, began in June of 2006 when Scott approached me about producing an album of his songs. Scott and I had made music and art together in a variety of capacities up to that point, yet Scott wasn’t content with the two of us wandering through the woods.

We decided to reign in our talents and focus on a singular project. Scott wrote the songs and I produced. He had amassed at least four albums worth of material and we began the process of narrowing down his catalog. We began the recording on six tracks with the plan to move on to twelve more after that. We had always planned to leave the songs open for everyone to explore and experiment, all the while guarding the core aesthetic closely. Songs started small, with just Scott’s vocal and guitar or keys, and expanded with layer after layer of other instrumentation. More often than not, I found myself mixing the songs back down to their quiet nature, or using to original vocal track where Scott was wandering through a bit more. I also made a conscious decision at the beginning to record and engineer in such a way that I would not be using any post recording effects aside from compression. This, we feel, left the record feeling subtle and intimate.

Very quickly after Scott and I began, my little studio became like a baseball dugout. All our friends and brothers sat on the couches and waited for their turn at bat (I don’t know how many baseball dugouts reek of Taco Bell and beer, however). Shane St. Clair played keys on the album and added a level of vibe that took it to next level, Ric Sinclair played drums with metronomic subtlety, Derek Keijner came in to track noise and eventually played some beautiful electric guitar parts. A couple of other friends from out of town came in on random days to impart a little soul onto tape as well. The greatest part about all these brothers is that they are all phenomenal musicians who could play circles around anyone, but respected the aesthetic enough to know that the minimalism we were trying to achieve was more important than our individual egos. We also felt like this wasn’t a Scott Kirkpatrick record. This was a family record, a Chemic record.

We were never so self-important to think that our record would change the world, but we took it seriously. Music had changed all of our lives in a profound way and we wanted to make Fever in such a way that someone could be affected deeply. We also wanted Chemic to be bigger than the music and incorporated images into the aesthetic. The artwork of New York artists Johannes Deyoung and Natalie Westbrook seemed perfect for what we wanted to couple with the music. They invested in the album as well and are just as much a part of Chemic as the musicians.

After releasing a song in February on a local compilation in Louisville, KY (Louisville is For Lovers Vol. 8) we started playing shows around town. We quickly gained a reputation as band with a tight and entertaining live show and kept building a buzz for the release of our full-length album. Fever on the Forest Floor came out in May of 2007 on our own indie label, The Eleven.Five Library Recordings and is quickly selling out of our first printing. We have worked very hard in getting this album into other’s hands. We feel as if each song stands alone and the album as a whole spans an arch that (at least for us) bridges melancholy and hope.

-Keith Miller