Cargo Records

Middlemarch

He Can Jog delivers a rarefied buzz of audio excitement, containing shimmering tones, playful percussion and heart rendering melodies. He Can Jog (an anagram of John Cage) is Erik Schoster, who spent his formative years playing the trombone and photocopying Marxist zines in Madison Wisconsin. Under the golden bake of the Midwest he cultivated his sound via the clicks of the trackpad, scrapes on metal, and twists of knobs. Erik named the album ‘Middlemarch’ after George Eliot's novel because it is very much about “becoming” in the context of a community and its intersections.

‘Middlemarch’ the record documents Erik’s personal community and the relationships that were developed during its production. ‘Contractors And Architects’ for example, represents a bundle of memories from the winter of 2005 centred on Erik’s little apartment in River West Milwaukee. Nick Sanborn (from Decibully) wrote the lyrics which literally deal with lost friends and memories, but for Erik the sounds themselves have very special and particular memory associations. He counts the whole record as a catalogue of these memories of people and places and his own process of becoming. ‘Middlemarch’ spans more than four years for Erik, a time period in which his compositional process has evolved and changed. Software programming, electronic synthesis and the sampling of acoustic instruments serve to generate his sound. Erik describes his method as sculptural. He works through the sounds and allows them to direct his process. Improvisation is also a core component of He Can Jog’s method – manipulating the soundstage through custom programmed MAX patches.

“Despite its irregular rhythmic intervals and heavy, thorough treatments, the overall effect of Middlemarch is benign.” – The Wire