Dan Gilmore - Know I've Been Here Before Cd

New CD edition from Les Archives de la Médiocrité.

A limited (very high quality) dubplate edition also exists, of which there is one left.

https://mediocrite.bandcamp.com/album/know-i-ve-been-here-before

»Know I've Been Here Before« by Dan Gilmore is a suite of eleven songs, based on reassembled and overdubbed audio files recorded between 2007 and 2010. What I hear in these recordings are not only various sound sources such as the guitar, the (self-built) synthesizer, or microphones, not only movements, rhythms, textures, or even harmonies, but also ideas, aspirations, circumstances, a mode of production. It is music that, through association and disassociation, makes (me) both thoughtful and thoughtless. This sounds familiar, but how did I get here in the first place?

»Know I've Been Here Before« is the third publication by Les Archives de la Médiocrité. The album follows appearances by Gilmore on labels such as Regional Bears, HologramLabel, Edition Erich Schmid, and Gateway Gardenia. The artist, who is based in New York, runs the label Spoor LLC and is the former head of the Careful Catalog imprint.

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In the aftermath of one or several weather events, a chore I tasked myself with was inventorying the first hard drive I ever used as an archive way back when. Somehow, this second-hand, dented, partially ajar, ratcheting, non-bus-powered brick has outlived some of the slim passports and clean libraries who would barely whisper until they’d suddenly croak within a year or two. None of the files were unfamiliar in the auditing process. I’d spent many years, memorable and unmemorable, rearranging them, carving dust, positing what they could be in the background of other chores, making noncommittal plans for what seemed like a necessary endeavor well after I’d move on to other things, like recording my chores.

Everything sounded good. What had been the problem? As far as I can tell, I was trying to conjure or force ideals of imperfection to take a desired form, with just the right cracks and blemishes, wounds for character. Then real faults or accidents would crop up; I didn’t know how to handle them, work without a recipe, eat around it. Or maybe it wasn’t the right shade of boring, or I’d simply liked other music too much. Playing with stage fright to the same rough crowd in the same room every night, that whole thing. “Haha!”

In two afternoons, I fished out whatever surfaced first to make arrangements in an expansive timeline of unfinished songs, the way I force myself to finish all things these days, and did not make efforts to change or improve upon them, or even form much of an opinion. Sometimes I’d feel compelled to converse with them (that’s when the band comes in), or I’d write lyrics and then sing (to myself) not the lyrics, but something else, and keep all the parts that didn’t sound like anything. “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub”

I’d absorbed a lot of art and information signifying this methodology during the years that followed these false starts; perhaps I was able to employ it once the music became more expressly about that, but I guess I needed a few more hammers to the head before I could chisel out my truest failures into something useful, never mind all the dust. “Aha!”

Days later, I found a missed e-mail from a stranger in Switzerland asking for mediocrity, and I had just the thing. Weeks later, I realized that the title (merely something I wrote on a Post-it while expecting a phone call) was borrowed from someone else’s song that’s never been released, and goes by a few different names. On the same morning, I saw the cover in progress; at first, I had suggestions for different colors. Then I remembered that it is good to acquiesce in these situations, and that my taste is not important, especially when I’d already entrusted the matter to someone else, and that I was not the sole consumer. Surely in time it would grow on me. “How are you?”

Months later, with hay(or some other)fever, I recalled being stuck on a stalled train during my commute like two weeks before the blizzard, listening to Love In Us All, when an older passenger, who up until that point had been freestyling about microwaves, suddenly took a breath and began preaching about insides rotting like meat from the grocery store, and I started to feel sick and had to turn the music off.

One time, I left town for a few days right before a heavy snowstorm and parked my car in a remote, secondary lot. When I came back, much of the unattended mess had already melted, but I still had to scrape some. Another time, the pollen was so intense in that spot that I could barely keep my eyes open. More than a few times, I’ve had to leave a place due to storm evacuation orders or some other reason beyond my control, but I still live in roughly the same area today. Maybe I haven’t learned any of this yet, what with all the sounds and water, wind and swans, cats and dogs. It couldn’t have all been about the rustling and washing.
credits
released July 1, 2026

Recorded 2007–2010; assembled, overdubbed, and mastered February 2026 by Dan Gilmore
Sleeve design by Laurin Huber and Caroline Schöbi
Inlay design by Kim Fiebiger