Flow on, silver juice, flow on...into the vein-streams of the nu generation via 90s classics like American Water and Starlite Walker and thence to the new century. They say time has no meaning, but we know otherwise. The pages of history condense eons and epochs into the stuff of mere chapters - sometimes as little as paragraphs - but how many lifetimes have we lived since the salad days and nightz of the original Silver Jews, when they walked the back-alleys of the earth just a scant couple decades ago? Since we"re asking pseudo-rhetorical questions, who knows how many fans of the arena-rock Silver Jews (circa Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea) even know of the humble-yet-powerful origins of the band captured in the hiss-laden boombox mics of 1990-91? Just a few guys in a room, that what makes these recordings: muppet baby versions of the David Berman, Stephen Malkmus and Bobby Nastanovich that we know today. There wasn"t much going on back then, though we"d hardly call it nothing. Still, these young post-collegiates were footloose and fancy-free, to say the least - working dayjobs with all the impermanence that implies - and not just working for the weekend, but trying to live the weekend every day of the week! Tough guys at a party; quick studies, quicker still with the wit. Legends of their own minds...prophets even. If only six-packs worked the way they did back then, then we might get together with them and see the light they saw on those endless nights-into-dawns. The stupid little laws they broke. The archaic little drugs they took. All these things that might not hardly mean anything anymore added up to make these songs, to make these moments in a room, captured so incredibly imperfectly! The air is still locked inside them; the space in the room has depth and definition, defying all laws of audio science. Now these moments feel like they"ll last for centuries, growing stranger all through time. The songs lodged here are the tracks from the original 7" EP "Dime Map of the Reef" and the 12"EP The Arizona Record, documenting the telepathic counter-intuition between these singers who went into such specific different directions later in life. "Trillion Story Walkup" aficionados and apologists know that there"s loads more from these muddy wells, enough so that we might well get around to another dose, another couple sides of Silver Jews early times before too long.