This track took a long time to get where it is today. The form of the track heard here took about a year from the first build to completion, but a lot of the samples and ideas had been floating around since Hosey still called Mississippi home. A rough, rudimentary version of this song (which was always named "Tesseract") was played at the first show as a Turntable/Bass combo way back in May 2004 (Hi-Yo, Thirsty Hippo!). That version was very different, only containing two of the samples that would eventually find their way into the final mix. There's still an open-air cassette recording of that show floating around somewhere...
So, where to begin? The first sample you'll hear is from In On the Killtaker by Fugazi. It's the guitar "beeping" intro from album-opener "Facet Squared". The second half of the track features a guitar sample from "Not the Same" off Where You Been? by the much-beloved Dinosaur Jr. Towards the end, there's a little piece of "Violet" by Hole. You'll remember that song from Live Through This. That's all the big samples, there are several more smaller cuts throughout the song but this would start to get messy if everything was listed.
Tesseract is about all the usual Hosey stuff: submarine battles along the arctic coast; mermaids; isolation.
Payce.