Musicians Featured:

• Josh Ottum - electric and acoustic guitars, SynthPlus 60, vocals

• David Givhan - electric bass & guitar

• James McAlister - drums, percussion

• John Clement Wood - SynthPlus 60, Yamaha Grand Piano

• Rosie Thomas - backing vocals on “So Good”

Cover Artwork:

• Cover photography by Josh Ottum

• Back cover photography by Devin O’Brien

• Layout by David J. Woodruff

Liner Notes from Mike Powell:

In his 1933 book Game Management, the environmentalist Aldo Leopold described the phenomenon of animals settling at the boundaries of a particular habitat: the bushy tangles encircling woods, the gradient where marsh gives way to pasture, or old heather to new. Leopold, building on the work of the ornithologist Herbert Stoddard and Partridges and Partridge Manors author Aymer Maxwell, called these tendencies “edge effects“: The edge being the edge of a habitat, the effect being life, or at least a variation in the patterns thereof.

The artificial and the authentic. The subliminal and the stated. The weeds that spring up around astroturf, and the real feelings evoked by the cheap ballad on the pharmacy PA. The applicability here isn’t just poetic, it’s tactile: Listen to Ottum’s guitars drip and ooze on “Now Or Never,” or the way “Lung X-Ray” seems to recover itself mid-thought, the synaptic blip of a dimming mind. The surfaces are smooth and the delivery is gentle, but the music never quite settles. Even in romance or nostalgia, we’re indeterminate: “Now it’s you and me fully loaded after hours in the hall / Pyromaniac cafeteria’s ‘bout to fall,” he sings on “After School Special.” Are we about to make the news? Edge Effects trembles like a yolk.

Ottum wasn’t sure he’d even end up finishing another album. It’d been about ten years since he’d tried, during which he made the domestic-maturational rounds: Grad school, home ownership, professorship, parenting. “Along with that comes a lot of existential crisis stuff,” he says. “Who am I? I hope I can keep making music, but I’m afraid I can’t. You know, that type of fear.”

You know—who doesn’t? But behind every crisis is the need for expedient solutions and the release of ego that sometimes follows: Call it the edge effect at Thinking and Doing. Ottum and his band made the album in five days: two for basic tracking, one for overdubs, two for vocals and detail work—no preening, no vanity, no dicking around. What if you took the palliative sterility of ‘80s soft-rock and smeared the lens? What if you asked the prom band to play vaporwave? Can you squeeze jazz from a children’s synthesizer, or meaning from a battery-powered amplifier? Edge Effects.

The first time I heard it, I kept thinking about the marine layer north of San Diego, where my wife’s parents live: how gray and dense it seems in the morning, but how easily—and invariably—it burns off by lunch. As a citizen of the desert (a place of hard light and decisive angles), I find fog seductive but untrustworthy: How is something shapeless actually there?

Wouldn’t you know that Ottum grew up in North County, playing trippy instrumentals with friends over an ocean view: Pat Metheny without the jazz, Windham Hill for kids who come home with sand in their shoes. Edge Effects is marine-layer music: sparkling, eerie, postcard perfect, a little sad. Like the fog, it telegraphs its impermanence—it burns off. Out of the mist, decisions are made: “Grab your friend by the throat and tell him that you love him,” Ottum sings on “Catch On.” But most of the time, we stay on the threshold: Neither turf or grass, past or present, burb or brush. They’d build here if they could.