In December 1996, Todd Fogle, Gordon Withers and I started a band. Todd, who then played drums in Mid Carson July, had set up a practice space and recording studio in a converted barn in Kratzerville, PA; the previous spring, he had engineered an album there by Claude’s Dog, Gord's and my former band. We were back in town for four weeks on winter break, and armed with a handful of songs and the warm glow of the kerosene heater, the three of us recorded an EP's worth of demos. We mixed down on our last night, and Gord and I left the next day for spring semester.

The following May, we reconvened at the barn, now with our friend Ethan Page on bass. After considering names like Schroeder and Escher Tennis, the group officially rechristened as Damaramu, a reference to our beloved Dragon Half anime. Over the summer, we practiced two nights a week, reworking songs from the earlier sessions and writing a few new ones. We also arranged a cover of Jawbox's "Mirrorful", fitting as Gord would later move to DC and join J. Robbins in Office of Future Plans.

We played a few shows around Pennsylvania, including a festival at a Pittsburgh VFW with the infamous “Weird Paul” Petrosky and our friends the Beach Blanket Blastoff. BBB guitarist Jeff Irwin put us on the bill, and the band's other guitarist Doug Wright and I would eventually team up in the early aughts in the Boston-based Score One for the Fat Kid. In August, Damaramu laid down all of our songs, dubbed the results to cassettes for friends and went our separate ways: Todd moved onto the Grey AM, Gordon played in Betwixt and I started Idiot Savant Garde.

Twenty-odd years later, stuck at home during the coronavirus crisis and on hiatus from my practice space, I began to go through my old recordings. Using my trusty tape-to-USB deck and Audacity, I was able to restore, remaster and resequence the Damaramu album. For someone who never threw away an old cassette, I somehow had misplaced my copy of the original three-piece demos, but thankfully Gord still had them and Dropbox’d them to me. I refashioned some of those for bonus tracks, along with an extra song he and I had recorded in his garage back in the summer of ’97.

We called this album "The Algebra of Need” after the William S. Burroughs book, a fitting title for a collection of tunes with names like “Break Me Off Some Math” and “Arithmetic”. Only a few people heard it upon its original release, but some years ago it was Gord who introduced me to Bandcamp, which I've come to think of as the great online record store of the 21st century. I'm grateful to share these songs here, and I hope you enjoy them. Thanks for listening.

--Andrew Wagner, August 2020