Produced by Jon Ireson (see his comments below)
Recorded May 2020 - May 2021.

The Virtualistics. The band never met. We remotely collaborated during a difficult pandemic year but there was little contact between us. The four of us never practiced together. We never sang together nor did we pre-plan the final sound in any way. We were virtual entities, duly recording our tracks on various home devices and sending them in for assembly to our wonderful Producer, Jon Ireson. Those famous photographs of The Virtualistics playing on stage and hard working in the studio, those tired looks of a fifth take, none of that happened.

I would start by writing new songs and then recording the shell and putting the arrangement together. Then I would email samples around, trying to get Chana and Mikaela together for a Zoom meeting where I would watch and listen to them record in a spare bedroom and into Chana's homemade sound box. Their tracks were sent to me and I would do the first arrangement pass and add any changes to my tracks, and then send off the whole jumbled thing to Jon, usually apologetically. He recorded the bass, fixed the percussion and timing, recorded the extra elements (organ, guitars, and guitar solos) and mastered the sound issues from all our funky home studios and recordings.  

Amazingly, it sounds like we were together, unvirutally, I guess is the word. It sounds like a 9-piece band that is funkin' up the place even though we were half-depressed and struggled with work, virus, and bad politics. Half of the songs were released as singles mostly because I felt better releasing something and it helped battle general Covid-19 depression as I fed upon the new release excitement every few months.

It's been a year of virtual studio sessions that required huge leaps of faith when you're contributing to a song that isn't finished, just a shell really, and it often sounded that way. It's like that game where everyone adds one line to the preexisting story going around in a circle and by the time everyone creates their part of the story it is unbelievably creative and interesting. Start with fresh lyrics that I’m constantly tweaking, add a riff or two, start weaving in counter melodies, add some phat beats – each song went around the Virtualistics circle a few times. 

All these songs were recorded and produced during the pandemic by The Virtualistics.

Jon Ireson, Producer, says: Patrick Ames and the Virtualistics
I mixed Patrick's last album (Liveness) at the beginning of 2020 and by May he had more new material ready to be molded. Although the lyrical themes all come from Patrick, it definitely helps that we are on the same page politically/philosophically. As the tumultuous events of 2020 unfolded, the songs he was sending me about racial and social justice, trust in science, and the hard work of affecting positive transformation in the public square were echoing my own thoughts in real time. When the world goes haywire, music is there to make sense of it. Enjoy!