Old Fire

Iterations employs the vocal talents of Bill Callahan and Emily Cross across seven genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, all imbued with poetic heft and seared by the West Texas sun. It was beneath this same sun that Lapham lost both of his parents, mourned a withering relationship, and shouldered the fallout of the pandemic, turning his life into the rusted-out scraps he then used to build Iterations from the ground up. It's a continuation of the narrative established with Old Fire's full length album Voids.
Old Fire's writer and producer, John Mark Lapham, explains that these songs were recorded in the same span of time, a very fruitful period. “With the way I record for Old Fire, I get so much material recorded with the various contributors that it's oftentimes hard to switch off the construction process. I get really immersed in these recordings and keep going until there's nothing left to work on, and no further directions where these songs can go. As for the alternate versions on this mini album, ‘Blue Strings’ and ‘Mephisto,’ I got inspiration while working on the original versions, and knew there was a different way of presenting them. Especially in the case of ‘Blue Strings’ and its sister track ‘Blue Star,’ I really wanted to strip away all the drums and other dynamics and put it into this other, softer, ethereal space. I don't see this as a remix, it's just a different chapter for that particular story. Same for Bill's track ‘Mephisto’ that was sourced from ‘Corpus.’ These songs felt like only half the story was told initially, so wanted to flesh out these other iterations, and see where they went. As for the other tracks on the album, these are branches stretching out of the suite that took up the second half of Voids. I kept building that suite and taking it to different places, but certainly didn't want to present a triple album to the label, so opted to hold some back to keep it cohesive. I see these new parts as a continuation, and completion, of the story.”