Spontaneous Combustion

WHEN THE WATER BROKE...

"In October 1998, Liquid Tension Experiment reunited at Milbrook Studios in upstate New York to record our 2nd album. A few days into the sessions, John Petrucci's pregnant wife went into premature labor - leaving myself, Jordan and Tony stranded in an already set-up and booked recording studio. So like any creative and productive musicians would do, we decided to stay and JAM... And JAM we did!!

Over the course of two days, we played for hours on end. We consciously did not "compose" or "write" anything... We just were enjoying the free spirit of jamming and improvisation... Never discussing any preconceived ideas, riffs or direction... But simply "diving in without a safety net" and going wherever the music took us.

Several of these jams ended up being used on LTE2. "914" was slightly edited, but was left in it's original trio orchestration. While "Chewbacca" and "Liquid Dreams" were two of these original trio jams that John ended up adding guitar to.

The rest of this music has remained unreleased... Until now!

For some bizarre and still unexplained reason, the master tapes of these jams were misplaced during the mixing process. But luckily, I am the ultimate archivist and record everything I do! So the only remaining recordings of these sessions in existance was my live 2-track stereo DAT mixes.

So what you have here is as live and raw as it gets... No overdubs, no editing, no mixing - just 3 guys, their instruments and their spontanious imaginations feeding off of each other!

I think there is some truly magical moments in these jams that I'm glad will finally be shared with our fans. It was making me crazy having this cool music in my iPod all these years, but not being able to share it with anybody! So finally - almost 10 years later - here are myself, Jordan and Tony flying on the seat of our pants and letting it all hang out!

Better late than never!"
-Mike Portnoy (July, 2007)