| Kid Kilowatt "Guitar Method" CD/LP |
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RECORDED: Fall 1998 - Spring 1999 LABEL: Hydra Head Records RELEASED: tbd HISTORY: First press |
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Prior to Kid Kilowatt was a band called Ester Of Wood Rosin (with Aaron Stuart of Piebald on 2nd guitar instead of Kurt Ballou), which existed sometime between 1996 & 1997. A four-song demo was recorded with Kurt using an 8-track tape machine in January of 1997; the track listing for the "EoWR" demo is "Tug Of War", "Ted Nugent", "Sugar-Coated Nightmare", and "Hyper Jam w/Kurt" - Kurt played saxophone on that song. The demo insert cards were hand-made by Stephen in his high school graphic arts department, with the most rare of the designs being the front cover card in woodpaper-type stock. Ester Of Wood Rosin played very few shows, and none were beyond local. When Aaron left the band and Kurt Ballou of Converge took his place on guitar, the band name changed to Kid Kilowatt, lifted from a Guided By Voices song on one of their earlier albums. The band played only a handful of shows under Kid Kilowatt before dissolving due to everyone in the band's other musical commitments taking up too much time. Soundboard DAT's of some of these shows exist in the GodCity studio vault. Before the dissolve, the band recorded "Bicycle Song" and "The Scope" on Kurt's 8-track machine in July 1997; this version of "Bicycle Song" appeared on the Hydra Head Records CD sampler Vol. 1. For documentation purposes (and perhaps just out of sheer boredom), the band got back together in autumn of 1998, only in the studio, to begin recording almost the entire catalog of Ester of Wood Rosin and Kid Kilowatt songs. Recording sessions for this project happened completely sporadically; a week night here and there, maybe a full day during one weekend of a month or two. A few brand new songs, like "Memorial Drive", "Glass of Shattered Youth" (non-LP), "Cadence For a Rainy Day", "Cadence For the Desert Sun", were put together in the studio. The last Kid Kilowatt song ever recorded is the version of "Tug of War" that appears on one of the Hydra Head Records CD samplers, completed in late spring of 1999. The only known outtakes from these sessions are a version of the song then-titled "Blue-Green Heart" (later the name of a band Kurt Ballou formed that released a 7" which included this particular song re-recorded with a different title), and an early blueprint of what later became the Converge song "Distance And Meaning" on their "Jane Doe" album. |
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