In the dead of winter, early 2007, guitarist Scott Stimac booked a remote cabin in the deepest of snow country, Northern Michigan. Josh Machniak flew in from Seattle and Sean Madigan Hoen from New York, the trio collectively making the voyage north from Detroit in aged Ford Explorer packed-to-the-gills with equipment. These were wasty times, and for some participants perhaps the very last of the “good” wasty times. Persistently inebriated, the trio spontaneously wrote and recorded nearly twenty songs in two days, otherwise enjoying a diet of canned foods and tobacco. With no recording engineer among them, the artifacts—many recorded straight to 4-track cassette—are considerably raw. This rawness only intensifies as the nights unfurl and the members switch instruments. The resulting document Great Lakes, Great Times is therefore as much an exercise in automatic writing as it is a chronicle of stupidity, and herein lies the magic of this lost lo-fi classic.

            Further description fails here.

            We must defer to the lyrics themselves for apt representation:

            My god, the drinking pageant is rigged/ I need my rubber sheets and a cup of coffee/ Christ, you know, I’m all excited all the time!

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