In 2022, I took a year off to travel and explore life without a pager.

One of the projects I started was BIG PIT, with members of local Toronto/GTA bands Sarin (now sadly defunct) and Teleportoise.

We played POST Festival in Indiana and a bunch of local and not so local shows, then released an album.

It turns out you can just e-mail producers and engineers who have worked on albums you grew up on, and they will work on your music for an appropriate day rate.

We ended up getting the album mixed by Matt Bayles, of Mastadon, Isis, Botch, Pelican, Russian Circles, and Sumac fame (well, famous if you’re a recording nerd like I am).

We chose to self-release, and managed to recoup our costs through album sales and playing shows within about a year, which to this day surprises me. I still have several boxes of vinyl kicking around, as we had planned a 10-date US release tour, which got cut down to 2 shows because my US artist visa didn’t turn up in time.

You can listen to the album at the link above, or here:

Pretty good use of a year off, in my opinion!