SUNSHINE: THE LOST ALBUM

"The boys of Trim Reaper were never quite on board with the presence of Mystic Franco, for reasons I never managed to fully understand. His visions were the guiding force behind the Sunshine sessions, doomed as they may have been - not that I'd ever deign to blame him for the record's eventual abortion, although the tapes being erased due to a malfunction with his experimental five-track recorder (a curious device that haphazardly rigged an auxiliary monophonic tape machine to the rear of our state-of-the-art four-track) was ultimately the sort of affair where the blame could, in fact, be pinned on him.

I still loved the man, though - like a brother, or perhaps an eccentric uncle. Certainly not a grandfather, though, Mystic Franco was far too young to capture that energy, although last I saw him he was gracefully aging in that esteemed direction... but I digress. Ah, youthful memories! I truly did feel his advisory position in the studio was a defining feature of the record we were striving to make - his strangeness and brilliance pushed us in new, exciting directions. When the energy was low, he would fix us one of his wonderful cocktails, a fairly singular concoction he called The Clamatoe Dome - a sinful blend of clam juice with pulp and the strained runoff of tinned marinara sauce (a flavor combination far more satiating than you might initially expect), spiked with our finest rye whiskey and poured over half a sphere of ice: the titular Dome.

Under the influence of many a stiff Dome, some of our finest musical discoveries were made - take, for instance, the seventh movement of Snargle's Up, which I wrote in collaboration with a flamboyant young wordsmith named Gerald von Pincer (snargle of course being a term of his invention - typically I'm known to speak plain English!); the infamous descending pipe organ figure (reprised, of course, by the tubular bells in the second half of movement eleven) was the result of a drunken raid on the local clergy - Mystic Franco had connections with the church, naturally, so we were invited to perform and record, and his Domes loosened us up to the point that we didn't give a second thought to filling that holy space with our unholy "baroque and roll" racket.

Truly these were momentous days! The church in question was oddly shaped, semispherical in the fashion of of one of Mystic Franco's split orbs of ice; the acoustic resonances were fairly unusual, and our fair domesmith felt that the geometry of the space "illuminated" the music. Listening to the results, I found it difficult to deny - not that the Reapers agreed. But of course, this is all settled history, no? The band's disputes over Franco's presence and the direction of the record... to hear the lads tell it, this is why it all fell apart, but I don't think that's entirely fair. There are still unknowns to recite, after all, a portion of the story that has remained untold all this time."

-Peter Lopez, Page 183