Untitled

Charles brought up the idea for us to put out a split LP in the winter of 2020, before we shut ourselves in. He told me about it the way he told me about other ideas he sometimes had, with a restrained kind of zeal, colored with self-deprecation and his niche humor, which I somehow always laugh at. I heard it as a nod to the split singles I obsessed over in high school, that impossible magic of two bands putting songs on one disc. He pitched it as something almost unheard of. “Who does that?” he asked. He was dead serious.

Charles and I hold our own kind of collaborative space, sometimes playing together, sometimes him mixing my stuff—lots of talking, lots of thinking out loud. In our hearts of hearts, I think that we might be creative loners, at least sometimes. His work has always pushed me, especially during periods when I may have lost my path a bit. When we went into quarantine, I suggested we send files back and forth and try to make something together from our respective posts. It didn’t take at first. There’s certainly magic when it comes to making music with other people but doing it on your own is its own thing. So, what we sent each other wasn’t some exquisite corpse of guitars, etc. Instead, it was the two sides of this record, two independent halves that would come to rely on each other, not as a whole, per se, but maybe whole-adjacent.

When I heard Charles’s piece alongside mine, something resembling a narrative started coming together, and maybe that’s really what we were trying to do—piece together a unified story out of our individual processes during collective and individual angst and isolation. It was visual for me, less plot and arc than images: Charles and I in our respective studios directing fictitious sessions players to breathe life into the idiosyncratic sounds in our heads, an illusion of something more collective than it was. This makes sense to me; a lot of us were longing for a time different than the one we were in.

I’ve been trying to think of my work as less precious than I’m used to doing. It’s hard. Maybe it’s because realizing that nothing lasts forever, music included, has always been a hard pill for me to swallow; maybe it’s because sometimes it feels like music is one of the few things I can control. I’ve come to think of my process as subtractive: no matter how cluttered with bad takes a piece is, at some point I can sweep the trash away until something listenable starts to form. Perhaps it’s not the rosiest perspective, but I’ve learned to count on it. It’s not groundbreaking either. It’s revision, which sometimes makes things even harder to let go of.

Better than Invisible was a pandemic goal. Instead of learning to make bread, I finished my side of the record. At the risk of sounding whatever I sound like, it was a grounding force and guiding light, a source of stability and even a silver lining. But I finished it, and then I was where I was, where we all were. I told Charles it was done and ready for mastering. I let it slide slowly out of my hand, my grip loosening gradually, until it was no longer mine. We listened to our sides together at Charles’s house, outside on his patio, ten feet apart from each other. It felt good. Then it really was out of our hands and into other hands, mastered and pressed and sent back. The pure joy of listening to the thing on my own turntable was almost enough to keep me from hearing what I would have called “last minute tweaks” just months earlier. Maybe mistakes are eternal, even if nothing else is. Nothing else is ever finished either.

Charles came up with the title for our record. There’s something perfectly self-deprecating about it to me, perfectly Charles. Invisibility can be considered the lowest bar when it comes to art; simply being better than that doesn’t really say all that much. But also, invisibility can be something else, something subversive and covert, something that erases and evades, silences, banishes, sidesteps, and dismisses. Something that gets us, but not how we want to be gotten. Sometimes the less we see something, the more we feel it.

But then again, maybe it’s none of that. All of it. Maybe all of it is none of that. Maybe Better than Invisible is just a short sequence of words that leads to a longish sequence of sounds, and to try assigning meaning to it misses the point. Sure, there was meaning along the way, but like the files we sent off, that’s out of our hands now. It’s for others to interpret. Or not. At least it’s there.

-Ben Felton, September 2021