About
White Flight is the first solo project from Justin Roelofs, former songwriter of the Anniversary.
Exploding with rhythmic and melodic ideas, "White Flight" is a boundary-blurring collage of pop hooks, staccato beats and dense, organic instrumentation.
Recorded over a year in Overland Park and Lawrence, Kansas, the record is, in many ways, the result of a summer Justin spent in South America which culminated in drinking the psychedelic potion Ayahuasca deep in the rain forests of Peru. This experience not only inspired in him a more dynamic appreciation of music but re-connected him to the power and joy of making music in the first place. Audio samples from that summer are woven throughout "White Flight", from the shaman singing on "Obsidian", to the children's song which starts "Oz Icaro" to the haunting whistling which ends the album.
Raised in suburban Kansas City, Kansas, Justin returned to the suburbs to record all the instrumentation for "White Flight". "I felt it was important that I return to this area where much of my conditioning has occurred," he says, in the "Making of White Flight" documentary. "It's a place where the conditioning is put on an individual in a very heavy way. So one has to break through it and become free."
In a makeshift basement studio next door to his childhood home, he programmed beats, worked out kaleidoscopic guitars and cut and pasted on Pro-Tools until the songs took shape. Returning then to the indie-rock oasis of Lawrence, Kansas, Justin spent the next few months writing and singing, building the vocal layers into the spectrum of harmony and spatial eerie-ness that gives each listen a sense of new discovery.
Credits
All Sound Vibration White Flight.
Horns and Endo King Krelly.
Additional Beat Maestros Hanz Bronze, J. Adams, Free All Beats.
Final Mixmaster conducted by Jim Vollentine and Sir Gone Beyond at J.Rocks Secret Batcave in Austin, TX.
All Thanks to All the Spirits in All Directions who landed in the microphone.
Artwork by Pre Sense Form.
Released March 6, 2007 (Digital/CD) on Range Life Records and 2X LP on Black and Greene.
Links