Metanoia by Jeff Schroeder

PRESS RELEASE:

Jeff Schroeder is in transition. Late 2023 marked the end of his 16-year stint as a member of the Smashing Pumpkins, the most recent and most high-profile of his career as a working musician, which included a turn in beloved California noise pop band The Lassie Foundation. It’s without those trappings—or any, really—that Schroeder recorded his debut album Metanoia, out 8/23/24 via independent label Clerestory AV.

Over three days in late 2021, during pandemic social distancing, Schroeder performed solo, improvised guitar instrumentals as part of an outdoor art installation at Toronto’s Fort York. In front of a massive LED wall of shifting gradients and color, Schroeder’s guitar improvisations filled a public space, in dialogue with art and scenery, as part of a series of works titled “The Awakenings Project.” The four tracks on Metanoia were recorded on the final day of performances, then relegated to digital storage as Schroeder picked up his work performing and recording with Smashing Pumpkins.

Nearly two years later, Schroeder felt an artistic awakening of his own come to bear. He knew his current musical journey as guitarist and collaborator for the Pumpkins had come to its logical end, prompting a series of life-altering questions: “Do I still want to be a musician? Do I still enjoy playing the guitar? Do I have the desire to put in the work to improve as a musician?”

He rekindled his love of the craft and along with it the stark reality of a new path, confronting the good and bad of being at the helm of starting over.

“It does feel quite vulnerable at times because there are those that expect you to have a master plan, and making any mistakes makes you look foolish or misguided,” Schroeder said. “I don’t think it’s all inner critic discourse. Some of these voices are real, and that is a dimension of this part of my life that I am learning to negotiate because it certainly has an impact on the artistic process.”

And the process can be long. Schroeder did not listen to the Toronto recordings until March 2024, and with distance, he found the exhaustive nature of marathon live improvisation largely missing from his feelings about the music. Throughout the tracks, what is now Metanoia, the original intent of the performance presents itself more clearly than ever—as a means for sound immersion and, with it, a prompt for meditation.

New perspective is critical and purposeful for Schroeder, as he works to cultivate a spiritual practice into his daily life, within and outside of his music. In titling the record, Schroeder referenced Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Heart of Centering Prayer:

The word metanoia, frequently translated as ‘repent’ (or ‘change the direction you’re looking for happiness!’), literally means ‘go beyond the mind,’ or ‘go into the larger mind.’

The resonance of “metanoia” in Schroeder’s life and the resonance of Metanoia for listeners go hand in hand. Both are nonlinear, as is the journey of an artist. Both are a recognition of the spiritual journey as incremental labor and not a final destination. Both recognize the capacity of sound as a vehicle for personal transformation.

As minimalist composer La Monte Young told a contemporary music class in 1960: “...sounds and all the other things in the world were just as important as human beings and that if we could to some degree give ourselves up to them, the sounds and other things that is, we enjoyed the possibility of something new.”

“Sound as itself, without the imposition of human categories of interpretation, can provide a space of alterity or otherness than the ones we tend to live as we go about our daily lives,” Schroeder said. “When we think about how in our current culture even the most private aspects of our existence have become available as data to be traded and sold, creating these spaces outside of that framework—even if temporary—is important to me.”

Metanoia, then, is a reminder that while the action of creating art is only a moment, the true nature of an artwork can transform with its listeners. The album asks of us what it asked of its artist: Look inward. And look elsewhere.

—Becky Carman

www.jeffkimschroeder.com