A Love Song For Scission
According to Scission’s page on BandCamp:
Scission was a improvisational noise band from Connecticut, ranging between 2 and 8 members during its life span. Scission also featured many guest performers. Their sole public performance was an apocalyptic three hour set on Easter Sunday in 2001.
Scission embraced chaos in their entirely improvisational sets. Scission sometimes recorded in “glorious monophonic” and employed other various unorthodox methods for recording material, and consequently, the “production value” aspect of their sets generally took a backseat to the importance of the energy at hand. During their brief life span, 7 albums were released and over 60 hours of raw material was recorded. Much of this material has still never been released.
Scission was a very important project for me. While it continued the improvisational style that I begun with Travis Morgan and Todd Appleton with Meatmarket, Scission quickly grew into something more than a pure noise project.
Every recording session was open to anyone who wanted to come and hang out and watch. Members would drift in and out of individual tracks and switch off instruments. Anyone who was in the general area was welcome to participate, leading to a large number of guest collaborators. No session had a plan, we just began recording and things fell into place. The albums contain very little editing work and were mixed down to mono live as they were being recorded. I started with my two mainstay devices from Meatmarket, the Korg ER-1 and the Pro Co RAT but collaborators quickly started to bring in a massive supply of thrift store and home made instruments to flesh out the sound.
It was a very productive and special time and one day it stopped. There was never an official ending to the project. I have never collaborated with many of the members before or since the project. It was one of those situations that just happened to be the right thing and time for everyone involved. I tried to resurrect the project several times but due to lack of interest and scheduling issues it has never happened.
There will always be a hole in my heart the exact size and shape of Scission.