Released 2007 as a free103point9 Audio Dispatch. 

Music by Michael Garofalo and Patrick McCarthy.

"Solar Filters" was originally conceived as part of a song cycle about the sun and the way it influences Earth's atmosphere.  We abandoned the project when we realized the idea was more interesting than the music we wrote for it.  "Solar Filters" survived, though, and the shortwave radio textures that open the track (essentially, the sounds of the atmosphere) point to its origins.  During the time we were working on these recordings, cheap and toy radios were important to our performances -- often providing the only amplification for our instruments and voices.  Replicating the sound of these radios greatly informed our approach when committing the track to tape.

"Mother Evening" began, like most of our work, as a live improvisation.  When it came time to record and settle on lyrics, we turned to a type of spam email we were getting a lot of at that moment.  The emails were nonsense -- really just a collection random phrases and sentence fragments -- but there was something poetic about them.  So we took the lines that struck us as particularly sonorous and cobbled together a sort of collage poem.  Like the in-between-stations static on "Solar Filters," we incorporated this digital detritus (literally, junk mail) into "Mother Evening."

The etchings on either side of the vinyl records refer, albeit obliquely, to both the lost song cycle and the subject line from one of the spam emails we used.


 

Solar Filters/Mother Evening 7"

Mother Evening

Solar Filters

Latitude/Longitude was a Brooklyn-based experimental music group. Michael Garofalo and Patrick McCarthy founded the outfit in 2004, and percussionist Jason Labbe began performing with L/L in 2007. 

Songs began primarily as live improvisations that, when recorded, were subsequently layered, augmented, contorted, cut down, reconstructed, and juxtaposed.

Latitude/Longitude worked with diverse sonic materials: test oscillators, homemade cassette tape and field recordings, radio transmissions (FM/AM/SW/CB), toy electronics (broken and functional), and percussive junk, as well as more traditional instruments, such as pedal steel guitar, banjo, mbira, drums, cymbals, and voice.

Other projects include Snake Oil, Zig Zags, and Michael Garofalo's solo and collaborative projects.