I first met Jerry Blue when he left Oregon for northern California’s East Bay 25 years ago. He’s recorded and performed in numerous collaborations and iterations over the years, including guitar contributions for my Porest project. Naturally, in the USA, one must resort to unthinkable crimes in order to carve the time and space required to create art or music. Among other crimes, Jerry makes loads and loads of home-studio recordings. At age 42, he had a pacemaker installed and finally decided to release an album. Fluttered Thinking distills select tracks from an endless succession of digital EPs he issued during Quarantine 2020/21. These would appear briefly on his Bandcamp page – once, sometimes twice per month before vanishing into the ether. Each track floats its own path into the cavernous genre pool, piled with guitars, electronics, percussion, and sometimes vocals atop jagged rock, cavernous drones, mood electronics and tiny esoteric pop songs. Jerry found a record plant online, run by AI bots that cut vinyl out of your music at around $30 per slab. Instead, Discrepant Records has intervened to bring you this full length cassette on its cassette imprint, Sucata Tapes. Acid Mothers Temple, Faust, Tony Conrad, Keiji Haino, Swans, Butthole Surfers, Arnold Dreyblatt … I’m not dropping names, I’m trying to remember which of these people Jerry has been pen pals or friends or collaborators with since he was in elementary school, but I think it’s almost half of them. Historically, Jerry once blew up his school, then dropped out in order to read real books.

-Mark Gergis