Right about the time that Watch Winds Down started recording our last album, Rafter decided he was going to move to San Francisco. It bummed me out because I was so into what we were doing, so he committed to coming up on the weekends so we could still practice and be a band. But Ryan once again wasn't that into it and it ended up falling apart again.

So instead, I started commuting to SF every weekend to record with Rafter. It was around this time that he started getting seriously into recording. He bought a reel-to-reel 8 track and eventually got a bunch of mics and a DAT machine. We recorded a whole bunch of stuff over about a year's period, some by ourselves, some with other people. One of our main collaborators back then was a fellow named John Hughes, who went on to play drums in the droney, space-rock band Tarentel. We called the project +/- (plus minus). It's kinda weird that there's a band right now with that same name.

We tried to figure out a way to put a live show together but there were just too many things going on in the music for us to do it justice in a live setting.

The weekly commute pretty much killed my social life, as I would go to school during the week, leave on Friday for SF, and come back Sunday night. I was pretty miserable as far as that went actually, but we made some cool music and +/- was a huge learning experience for me, as I got to play all kinds of different instruments and that led me to really open up as a musician and not just a bass player.

I was 18, about a year out of high school, when Rafter and I decided to make it easier on ourselves and move to San Diego. We were both huge fans of what our friends down there were doing in bands like Heavy Vegetable (actually Thingy by that time), 3 Mile Pilot, Physics, and all that other good stuff. So San Diego seemed like the next logical step in our "careers".

Plus Minus self-released a record of some of our very early recordings, but nothing else, which really is a bummer because some of that stuff was great.