In August 1994, William Seidel and Ryan Weber (AKA Nuisance), put their high-school band on hiatus and headed out into the real world for the first time as foreign exchange students. The two comrades snail mailed each other bits of songs written on borrowed instruments and recorded onto cassette players from Central America to Japan and back again for a year. They’ve remained musical partners for the ensuing 30 years, across distance and through circumstance, rejoicing in the process and project of it all. Their new album, Squash Blossom Necklace, is yet another picturesque vista on their collective musical and life journey together...
In July 2023, Nuisance vocalist, William Seidel, packed up his life and a modest recording set up and left his home for a year-long journey around the world with his family. During the fleeting few moments when he wasn’t moving across the endless plains or up and down the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast of North America, spelunking in Hawaii, soaking in the sulfur springs of Japan, camping under the Banyan trees along the Australian’s Far North and Eastern coastline, kayaking around Indonesia, or meditating in the forests of Southern India, he was tracking vocals in hotel bathrooms and in the back of an old Japanese mini-van taxi named Muriel. Not only can you hear the authenticity and immediacy of writing and recording amidst the chaos of experience, but there’s a cathartic abandon in the lyrics only achievable through the knowledge that comes with traveling with loved ones and months spent in foreign natural environments.
Meanwhile, back the in States, his partner Ryan Weber (no stranger to making albums outside the traditional studio – see Eric & Magill Night Singers recorded while Weber was in a remote part of Kenya serving as Peace Corps Volunteer, or REW<< Departeures, recorded in trains and hotel rooms across Africa and South East Asia) developed a new slew of virtual instruments that are synonymous to Nuisance albums and used exclusively for music tracks (see poeticdevic.es). Once the instruments were complete he laid down the bedrock instrumentation, continuing homages to modern classical and indie, but also phosphorescent organic neo-folk.
As they'd done 30 years prior when they were teenagers, the partners shared tracks across the ever-shrinking planet. The result is a musical expedition only Seidel and Weber could concoct after 30+ years of quiet collaboration. Lyrically and melodically it’s packed with natural imagery and themes Seidel encountered on his travels, as well as musical influences plucked from the air floating in the new environs. Sometimes it sounds like an alternate universe where a teenage Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen are singing to each other over a long distance phone call. At others times, the album feels like George Harrison, freshly back from Rishikesh, is time-warped to a recording studio in a suburban Midwest basement somewhere in the 1980s. Whatever it is, it's an album worthy of a very deep listen and understanding for so many reasons: musically, spiritually, technologically, and lyrically.
