Album Notes

For the Eleven Eyes project, Zru Vogue's duo of Andrew Jackson and Rick Cuevas set out to create a musical work that was experimental, collaborative, and would stretch the concept of "Zru Vogue" in new directions. They weren’t interested in doing the same things they’d done before. The challenge brought about a period of intense creativity for them both.

Songs were recorded in Logic Pro (a couple of them beginning life in Garageband), and mastered in Waveburner on the Mac. By intention, most songs were kept primarily instrumental. Both Andrew and Rick working in Logic Pro allowed for a kind of collaboration that would not have been possible for them previously, in which they sometimes worked separately, then combined the tracks together within the music software program.

The eleven songs on Eleven Eyes have a strong sense of place, yet they exist somewhere outside of time and place. Zru Vogue takes a trip through exotic worlds and comes back with these souveniers.

Eleven Eyes was composed, performed, recorded, arranged and produced by Rick Cuevas and Andrew L. Jackson during February 2009. On this album, they both performed acoustic and electric guitars, e-bow guitars, electric bass guitars, keyboards and synthesizers, digital loops, electronic drums, hand drums, home-made marimba, shakers, and drum programming. They both sang, too.

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For some time, Rick and I talked about doing a new Zru Vogue project, but the timing had to be right. I was deep into my own album project The Ubiquitous They, and Rick was also in a creative surge, turning out a couple more solo CDs. In the mean time, we were still getting together regularly to play acoustic guitars, and to jam with our band (Tad on bass and Patrick on drums). Finally in early February 2009, we got together on a Saturday night to improvise some new Zru Vogue music. After we had laid down some rhythm tracks, I picked up a copy of Dada Manifestos that was hanging around the studio and started reading. Rick said, "let's make that the words to the song." So I read it into the mic, and after a few more overdubs of e-bow guitars and such, we had the song "Charming."
That started the ball rolling. After that, we began working individually on tracks that we then got together weekly to add, subtract, and morph into the 11 songs on "Eleven Eyes." At the same time, we tossed around random ideas for song titles and such. Creativity ran rampant. The album title comes from "The Eleven Eyes of the Helioptropic Rhinocerotron," which was an idea for a title that popped into my head one day. Rick, in his practical way, said "I like the ‘Eleven Eyes’ part, let's use that and record 11 songs." We never did get around to doing anything with the Heliotropic Rhinocerotron. Maybe on the next album.

-Andrew L. Jackson, April 1, 2009