MARTIN ATKINS:
Recorded in 1996/97 at my Mattress Factory / Invisible Records studio at 2024 S. Wabash Ave in Chicago. I called it the Mattress Factory, and for some reason I gave myself the production pseudonym The Girl Brothers. I thought it was the name of a UK moving company—I liked the juxtaposition of “girl” and “brothers.” Only later did I find out it was actually the production alias used by Prince collaborators Wendy & Lisa. Oops.
At the time, I was working with a ½” 8‑track machine and ADAT tapes, just starting to get familiar with digital tech and Logic.
I first met Genesis at the Sharon Tate house in California. I was out there working with Skinny Puppy on what would become The Process album, and I needed a day away from both them and Rick Rubin’s Shangri‑La studio. I stopped by the house to say hi to Trent—he wasn’t there, but Gen was, along with Dr. Timothy Leary. Next thing I know, Gen is part of Pigface, improvising on tracks we hadn’t even imagined yet. Six cassette machines onstage and a bag full of tapes. Magic.
By the time I was recording New High in Low, I really wanted Gen to come to the studio and do something. They flew into Midway Airport—this was around 1994, when Midway looked more like a giant 7‑Eleven than an airport. You could actually see passengers and the baggage carousels from the street. The curbside drop‑off was basically the whole airport.
Gen was supposed to read a spoken word piece over some dubby beats I’d built with Bodog on sitar, Dave Wright from Not Breathing, loops from Mick Harris, and engineering by Adam Yoffe.
We got to the studio at 2024 S. Wabash and Gen realized they’d forgotten the text. Luckily, we had both a fax machine and a Xerox machine in the Invisible Records office next door. The words were faxed over from X THEE UNDERLYING in Brooklyn, we enlarged them, and Gen jumped right in.
The coffee‑stained enlarged pages were thrown away after an hour. I drove Gen back to the airport, and that was that. This recording is such a powerful snapshot of the rampant, gleeful creativity happening at that time around Pigface and Invisible Records.
Years later, my drum tech Jim fished those discarded pages out of the trash and gifted them back to me.
Released May 2026 on Overdrive Records.
TRACKLIST:
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
- Part 4
English