Kinch

Our new EP Collars and Sleeves is available for free download at www.kinchband.com/cas

We recorded “Collars and Sleeves” over a couple days during July in Brian’s living room. He’s Kinch’s guitarist, but he pulled double- or triple duty this EP by also engineering, producing and generally fixing whatever technical malady presented itself during the recording.

The songs were recorded almost completely live. “John Adams” was also arranged the day it was recorded. No one but I had played the song before the day we tracked it, but it all managed to come together.

The spontaneity of the recording process was something we weren’t used to, but it was the most enjoyable aspect of it. There’s something indescribably gratifying about putting four people in a room, having them hash out a new song, and then recording it right away with no time for over-thinking.

There’s also something very gratifying about mixing, mastering and releasing those songs to the world less than two months after they were recorded. We got to decide when we’d release them, what the artwork would be and what we would charge for it.

As to the last point, we decided to charge nothing for the mp3s and five dollars for the physical CDs. Like with our two previous releases — “The Economic Chastisement” EP and our LP, “Advances,” both of which are available for free download on our Web site — we chose to do this for a number of reasons.

Mainly, though, it’s because we view ourselves as a touring band. We will either have a career making music or we won’t have a career making music based on our live shows, where we can meet the people who come see us and build a relationship with them that, we think, will be mutually beneficial to both parties over the coming years.

If some free mp3s will help get people to come see us play live music, then we are for free mp3s. And because we record and release everything on our own right now, we can be.

spoon, ben folds five, the strokes, blur