care by smileswithteeth

this record started in may of 2016 where, using a grant from quebec’s jeunes volontaires program, i hired a group of jazz musicians to record two days of improvised music. i took that music and spent the next year and a half deconstructing, flipping and recontextualizing fragments of the recordings—a guitar from one session gets layered over a reversed piano line from another and so on…

i mixed the project in banff, alberta, again thanks to a grant this time both from the government of quebec and from the banff centre. i then moved back to los angeles and worked with my friend olivia on the track “spill.” all in all, the project took over two years to complete.

there’s a tremendous amount of care already involved. towards the end of this process, i started thinking of a title that could speak to my own personal growth in the past two years and the content of the music itself. i settled on “care,” but in finishing the record felt that “care” might leave itself open to narrow interpretation. yes, care means love and empathy for oneself and one’s friends, and it certainly meant that to me when i was thinking of the title. yes, it refers to the time spent making the album, but i also wanted it to gesture at something bigger.

i wanted the title to gesture at a politics built on care. to recognize the ways in which we are interwoven and to emphasize the radical power imbued within the act of caring. in doing so we can envision a world with public institutions and a civic culture that embody the socially reproductive work we already do with and for one another.

- gabriel

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