Three strange and wonderful pieces from the Chicago-based duo, making music from objects found in the basement of a local thrift store. Sleevenotes by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Clayton Mills : In 2010 we were invited to participate in an exhibition of site-specific installations and performances at Pilsen Vintage and Thrift, a local second-hand store in Pilsen, a predominantly Hispanic neighbourhood in Chicago. The owner had agreed to make the store's warehouse and basement available for art shows and performances after business hours. The basement was filled to overflowing with sale items waiting to be sorted through, repaired, or discardedÑfurniture, clothes, toys, old tools, instruments, baseball cards, dishes, photographs, electronics, and so onÑand the idea for the first show was to invite artists to transform those materials into installations in the space.We were asked to use the materials to create a sound piece, and in working over several months, we started thinking of the thrift store as a kind of repository for and distillation of the neighbourhood's historyÑa jumbled, dust-covered museum of its past inhabitants. We mined the material for sounds that evoked a sense of the lives embedded in these objects. Our goal was to create a kind of conversation between the different timbres and textures of the objects and to draw out their 'voices'. We ultimately composed and performed H, a long-form piece that used many of the items that we'd found to have interesting sonic possibilities, emphasising similarities and correspondences that we'd discovered (for example, between the sound of an antique music box and rusty nails dropped onto the cement floor). We invited vocalist Carol Genetti to join us for H's one-time-only performance. Afterwards we decided that we wanted to work further with many of these sounds to construct a more complex, idealised version that elaborated on some of the ideas we had touched on in H. The result is Marcel, composed using many of the objects discovered in the basement of Pilsen Vintage, but augmented with other elements and instrumentation.In contrast Paul is assembled from a series of improvised duo vignettes recorded while preparing for H. These recordings were made in situ during our initial investigations of the acoustics of the space, chiefly performed using materials that we discovered there. We spent several nights improvising, uncovering sounds, and experimenting with different combinations and juxtapositions of timbres. We hope that Paul retains some of the sense of discovery and exploration that came from our first encounters with the sounds. The final track consists of an unaltered recording of one of the most remarkable items that we uncovered, a music box constructed in Geneva, Switzerland, in the 1890s, here allowed to speak with its own voice.