While growing up, New Year's Eve was always a special time for me: that was the one night of the year that I could count on my parents and both of my sisters to be gone until at least 2:00 in the morning, which meant, for my ever-growing sense of youthful anticipation, the opportunity to partake in the exquisite coupling of creative solitude with energizing externalities, myriad and insistent. (As the sounds of celebratory human ruckus at Times Square blared from the television, I would "make stuff up" on the piano in the adjacent room.) On one of these yearly occasions, I decided to invite my pals, Mike Greenlees and Jim Drummond, into my ritual. Mike brought his drums, Jim brought his stream of consciousness, and, suddenly (though we didn't know it at the time), CHEER-ACCIDENT was born. ("Literally in the opening seconds of 1981..." so the mythology goes.) As somebody may have once said, "never let an origin story go to waste," and so, fast forwarding several decades into the future, you'll find us, once again, engaging in this perennial brainstorming session, this time in the form of neighborhood improv gatherings. (Fortunately, here in Chicago, you can throw a rock and hit somebody who knows what to do with sound in a spontaneous way, and many of these people live in rock-throwing proximity to our beloved CheerAx Basement.) When we restarted this tradition in 2015, I would unfailingly spend a fair bit of time in the first few weeks of the year, mixing select moments of improvisatory wonder, thinking that surely some of it would turn up on an album someday. Well, given that that's still yet to happen, I decided to (in a timely manner) whittle 2022's three-and-a half-hour session into a Bandcamp-exclusive album. Rather than having to wait for some nebulous time in the future for it to see the light of day, y'll have access to it... right now.

This is the first of its kind. Hopefully in a series.

From a mixing standpoint, I wanted to approach this material with the same degree of whimsy and wrongness that permeated the original event. The aesthetic is anti-purist from both directions: ya don't get a "genuine" document of an actual occurrence, nor do ya get the benefit of an ideal recording setup, where every instrument can luxuriate in their respective isolation. It's the worst of both worlds! Since I was one of the improvisers in the original performance, I decided to carry that sense of adventure into the mixing and editing stages, not being overly concerned with the preciousness of "capturing" something sacred, but allowing myself the freedom to shoot out in whatever direction the current sonic landscape suggested.

Having said that, when I listen to the end result, it's clear that the personalities of the people involved, and the atmosphere of the event, continue to shine through. In other words, the "after the fact" liberties taken (and there were many) serve as more of an extrapolation than a negation.

--- Thymme
(2/22/22)