Paid For It, San Francisco artist Mark Treise’s second album as Jealousy, was recorded on a massive, empty floor of a South Los Angeles studio complex called the Escarpment, which had been gutted in anticipation of remodeling. The album, which is due later this month on Moniker Records, is built principally from looped bass lines, dub textures, and Treise’s muddled poetics, which together feel unnaturally swollen and darkly lustrous. “It had great, cavernous acoustics,” recalls Treise in an email. “That’s what I think gives the sparsity of the instrumentation it’s ability to fill a larger space.”
Tracking the instruments, Treise goes on, involved first takes and LSD, which to his mind brought the sessions focus and flexibility. The vocal takes, meanwhile, involved alcohol, which he says enhanced the delivery of lascivious, leering lyrical content. “E”, the bit of hushed menace premiering below, features the first riff Treise ever wrote, at the age of thirteen on his first bass, a Hagstrom he still plays both solo and as a member of CCR Headcleaner.
Lyrically, “E” is about feeling atrophied and trapped, but escaping through the “eroticism of longing for the release of tension,” he explains, and recognizing when “you know there is something more powerful that completes you and that any temporary gratification is still a distraction from it.
“So, you give into a little attitude,” he continues. “It’s kinda bratty and self assured.”
