I remember renting a bunch of SM57s, a 16-channel Mackie mixer, and an 8-track ADAT machine (16 bit!) from Rock’n’Roll Rentals in Austin, Texas. With production assistance from best mate Chadwick Smith, we wired all the above gear together and recorded 10 songs in a carpet-insulated room that had once been a garage.
It was the summer of 1998.
I was 23 years old.
Red Boxing was a band named after the red box tone generator in phone phreaking, a type of hacking (that I may or may not have engaged in) before telephone systems went fully digital.
In any case, I sang and played the guitar.
Longtime friends Urny Maxwell (vox/guitar), his brother Yogi Maxwell (drums), Mitch Clark (bass) and I had known each other for years and performed in various bands/lineups around this time. (Urny and Yogi would go on to form Cruiserweight not long afterwards.)
Big thanks to Yogi for surprising us with this effort to get all the tracks online and archived. I hope we correctly recalled all the song titles — it’s been quite a few years and the memory has certainly faded with time.
Here’s the full tracklist of the resurrected songs, for anyone who wants to dig in:
1. Remote Sensing
2. Into the Stratosphere
3. Dirt is Our Candy
4. On Strike*
5. Language and Genome*
6. Good News for the Standard Model*
7. Come Let Me Down
8. Continent
9. Untitled / Bonus Track
10. Scopic Drive*
* indicates the 4 songs released on a small run of demo cassettes in 1999.
For me, these songs are a time capsule, a snapshot of who we were and how we were having fun in the post-punk, math-rock, emo-ish scene of the late ’90s in Austin. For you, whether you were there with us back in the day or are hearing Red Boxing for the first time, I hope these songs bring a little of that same nostalgia.
The lost tracks of Red Boxing are finally here. I recommend you turn them up loud.
