Perhaps at some point it will make sense to really polish them. The result is that parts of the album are more elegiac, in the same vein as “Hiroshima Tattoo.” The new version combines the last four into two longer, more “ambient” tracks and adds about sixteen minutes of new material overall. The original recording consisted of eight tracks. When I started working with the material late in 2021, it was clear that most of the tracks had “good bones,” but for the “deconstruction” it has made sense to dial things back a bit. Noisy stuff - and often noisier than was perhaps ideal for tracks of these lengths. Tracks were largely pieced together in sound-collage style from fairly long bits of heavily processed audio, themselves often the originally the product of sonification of non-audio files. The approach in the original composition was vaguely cinematic and the success was rather mixed. At the Kototoi Bridge, for example, crowds converged, crushing bodies or forcing them into the river, which was, by some accounts, actually boiling at this point. Despite warnings, death tolls were extraordinary and the circumstances of many of the deaths hard to even process. Innovations in planning were producing new kinds of fires, in cities where there was very little to distinguish military and civilian targets. The accounts of the “Meetinghouse” attack on Tokyo are harrowing. Originally released in 2002 and composed in a bit of a frenzy, after a crash course in the horrors of US incendiary bombing raids in Japan, these tracks were really inspired by the awful logistics of the fire raids: the precise spacing of the planes, the distance from first to last bomber, the grids used to produce maximum destruction in the targeted cities, etc. Like “ Hiroshima Tattoo,” the two-disc “Fire Raids” set is one of the old recordings that I have returned to with equal parts fondness and regret. Identifying the Dead / Stench of Flesh / Cleaning Out the Bomb Bays 16:50.Sweep Conflagration / Kototoi Bridge Guinea-Pig Fleet 21:35.Tokyo (Above the Flames) Guinea-Pig Fleet 18:20.
Marianas, March 9 / 50-Second Intervals Guinea-Pig Fleet 13:56.Prelude: Daylight Overflight Guinea-Pig Fleet 15:05.