Liner notes and Lyrics

When we first stepped into the studio in 2017 to record what was initially supposed to be the self-titled Intergalactic Peace Jelly LP, we didn’t have the slightest idea what we were getting into. The scope of what we were trying to do was so much wider than it had been on Allegedly Gelatinous–roughly three times as many songs, almost all of them more complicated to play and record–that we literally could not even have estimated what it would mean to actually see it through to the end. And we almost didn’t get there. By the time the world shut down in 2020, the only members of the band left from the initial LP recording sessions were Schuster and me (JD), and we were living an hour and fifteen minutes apart. We had no money set aside to go to the studio with, and even if we had, our idea of what an IPJ album should even be had drastically changed since those early days. 

And yet, here we are now. We made it happen. We moved back in together, and instead of more studio time, we bought a basic home studio setup, salvaged all of our old drum recordings, and went to work. We took Devon and Bennie in for one last marathon day of professional recording, just to get as many more drum tracks as we possibly could, but otherwise almost every single track on the album was recorded in our apartment. 

We did a complete overhaul on the LP. Old songs were cut, new songs were added, the title was changed, and most importantly, we decided to include the full Colonel Birkenstock trilogy–three of our personal favorite tunes that we had reluctantly excluded from the original album plans. As we kept moving along this path, some common themes began to emerge in the music, which in turn sort of started to narrow our focus on a more specific goal for the album as a whole. It took 3 drummers and 2 bassists to make this thing, but somehow we feel like we came out with something cohesive and hopefully even a little bit powerful. 

Simple Harmonic Oscillator is an album about the tightrope walk that is humanity’s relationship with the physical world. It’s about joy, love, loneliness, and inevitably doom, all at the hands of the natural universe. It’s about what it means to live in a world you know is ending. And most importantly it’s the thesis statement of IPJ’s past five years of songwriting. 

Everything is a simple harmonic oscillator.

And there is no sound in space.