SeedS fully fizzled away by the end of tenth grade (2003). At this point, I hadn't been without a band since Price Tag started in 1996. For the remaining years in high school and most of my undergraduate years at The University of South Carolina (USC), I wouldn't play in another collaborative group. Sure, there was some group playing on the soundtracks for The Human Elbow and, to a much lesser degree, Milligan Tribute Band. And, sure, there were our parody groups, Caucoffin and Crazy T and the Ebony Destroyer. But these projects were more or less instructions handed down by me to the other players.

After meeting Kevin Rogers, a violinist, at USC, plans to make a new band formed again. We played together on the (again, musically directed by me) soundtrack to Kirk Mannican's Liberty Mug over the summer of 2007, but we could not find a similarly-minded drummer or bass player with whom to collaborate. Finally, during our final year at USC, we became friends with a percussionist, Walid Yaghy, and one night after hanging out, we decided to jam at his request. I recorded this one jam session on June 8, 2009 under the name AKW (Alex, Kevin, Walid). The following week, we recorded again with two other musician friends, Stuart Brown and Joanna Helms, to produce our second effort, AKSJW. Unfortunately, however, due to summer plans putting people in different places, this short-lived improvisational group unofficially threw in the towel roughly one week after it began.

This music is completely improvised, but it has a sophistication and rigor that I had missed since the days of Positive Rail.