In early spring 2002, I was still living in an apartment in downtown Toronto with Tara, Dallas Good and his girlfriend Amanda, Kate Boothman and Greg Keelor. We spent many nights smoking hash and listening to records, philosophizing and making lots of music plans. I was in a dark lost kinda place in my head during this time, and after working on the "HEADQUAKE TAPES" through 2001, Dallas and i started coming up with ideas for a proper new Elevator album.

The plan was to make a cross over type album that would start in a dark hellish negative mindset, and cross over into a more positive light. Similar to the idea we had done a few years earlier when we gradually changed our band's name from "Elevator to hell" to "Elevator through hell" to "Elevator through" to just "ELEVATOR". To let the art lead the way so to speak, to hopefully work its magic and actually lead me into happier days. One long crossover title song was mapped out, three heavy negative "Darkness" songs, and seven positive "Light" songs were written.

In May we travelled back to Moncton to do a few shows, i went out to Mark's house with the 1/4" 4 track one of the days and recorded him playing drums for most of the tunes. Back in Toronto our friend NICK HOLMES was now working at Blue Rodeo's brand new studio and thanks to our friendship with Greg and the rest of the band, we were able to get a few nights there to play around and record for free. We dumped Mark's 4 track drum recordings onto the 24 track and layed all the rest of our tracks down in 3 nights. Mixes included.

At the time, and probaby due to the dark state of mind i was in, i wanted the album to sound really strange and thick, all liquidy in a crazed manic fog. We intentionally played all the tracks loose and strained, as though it all could crash apart or melt into tape hiss and noise at anytime. For example "Black" could have been a tight little punky tune, but we did it as wild and chaotic as we could manage. Even the "Light" songs were disjointed and dripping like a wet blanket once done. Partly planned and partly a natural reflection of our minds at the time. We may have recorded tracks in a professional studio for this album, but all the mixes were dubbed back into the 1/4" 4track at the apartment where more tracks, reverbs, and extra sounds were added. Then the whole thing was mixed through our old compressor to make the master.

Another new friend named Brian Taylor came on board and we started our own label called BLUE FOG RECORDINGS with him to release it. Though it probably remains as one of the least successful ELEVATOR albums, looking back now i can clearly see why. With its strange dense production and songs, it can be a rough listen for even fans of our earlier stuff, but it still has a lot of meaning to me and is an important part of my puzzle. It also worked it's Dark to Light magic and started the path that would eventually lead me out of the hole and into warmer planes.

While re-mastering these songs from the master tapes for this digital release, i noticed how much more alive they sound than the original CD release. We had it mastered at the time by someone in the business and they really just killed it. Understandably i realize they probably had no clue how to make this mushy mix sound "good" but it ended up just getting all more flat and lifeless. Now i can once again hear all the subtle and beautiful analog compressed muck that i wanted in there originally and I'm happy it's back and i can share it with you here. Hope you like it too.

As a bonus track for this new digital release, here's a version of Simon and Garfunkel's "SOUND OF SILENCE" that we recorded during the album sessions without the intention of having it on the album. We rehearsed it a few times for a live show and just decided to record it too. A different remixed version was previously released on a limited CDR compilation in 2003, but this is more straight forward original take and has never been released before.

RICK WHITE - voice, guitars, synth, bass, drums, tapes, percussion.
DALLAS GOOD - voice, guitars, organ, piano.
TARA WHITE - voice, bass.
MARK GAUDET - drums.