“I moved to Richmond, VA, just before I was legally able to drink alcohol. I entered the city during an era of vinyl resurrection. A common friend date included going into the basement of Plan 9 records and sifting for hours through loaded shelves and wooden crates of LPs.”
“This was a treasure hunt, all of us looking for different versions of gold. One of my friends only cared about finding various Zappa records, while I dug through chipboard boxes to find obscure noise, old electronic nonsense, straight funk, and spoken word oddities.
Soon afterwards, I began to make “mixtapes” for friends’ birthdays. I would layer children’s stories or instructional records over deep funk grooves, old time bluegrass, and random vintage radio hits. I didn’t have a “normal” two-turntable setup to accomplish this, so I recorded straight to a cassette 4-track. I spent hours, sometimes days, on each creation. I made around 20-30 “gifts” in total, and I’m not sure where they all are today.
Around 6 years ago, I sold or gave away most of my 300-400 piece record collection, storing only around 50, in preparation for a journey through South America, which is where Lobo Marino was born.
Years later, while digging through my parents’ attic for the few items I left behind, I found a handful of my old layered cassettes. I popped them in the car on the way home, and my sad little stereo blasted a Gremlin adventure story woven within free jazz and Tower of Power.
I was instantly transported to those moments in that dark basement when I originally found these sounds. I rarely let an entire song finish; the tapes flowed from sound to sound, keeping the instructional record or story vinyl as the only binder. Maybe I’ll do it again one day, mixing in my own music (now on vinyl!) with some creepy book on record.”
—Jameson Price
Lobo Marino’s We Hear The Ocean is in stores now via Bad Friend Records. On vinyl.
