Aeolus 13 Umbra: September 2026

by G. Jack Urso

From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.

In 1998, Joybus, an Alt Rock band from the Albany, NY, area, released the eponymously titled Joybus Ephemera, a project combining uncompleted and completed material. It began in 1991 with a label, Blue Lunch, looking for releases to showcase the company’s talent roster and production abilities. Joybus was put together for the purposes of the project and gigged a bit before they went on to the banality of life’s more mainstream pursuits. Only fifty copies of the CD were produced and that was pretty much it. Life goes on and so did the members of Joybus.

The complete album is available above with links to individual tracks below from the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.

The 1990s were probably the last decade I actually listened to and followed contemporary rock/pop music. While dance and techno were, as always, popular, the bands I was drawn to at the time include Blind Melon, Green Day, Nirvana, Third Eye Blind, Urge Overkill, among similar others, who channeled their angst, disaffection, and dissonance with the times into their music. There is a certain amount of detachment and distance with society expressed in their music that gives it an observational nature.

Rediscovering Ephemera among my mountain of old CDs, I thought that there were some echoes of themes on the album from those ‘90s bands I listened to — in spirit if not exactly in sound.

As I considered this, I thought of Generation Jones (1954-1965), that shadowy generation between the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and Gen X (1965-1980). Too young to have served in Vietnam or participate in the Countercultural revolution, and too old for, or, remembering Vietnam, uninterested in the Middle Eastern wars of the 1990s, then dominated by older Baby Boomers in the workforce, and overtaken by the technical savvy of Millennials born squarely in the modern Computer Age, members of Generation Jones were often put in the position of observers along for the ride rather than the drivers themselves.

Extending the bus analogy, Boomers were driving the bus, Gen Xers thought buses were lame, and Millennials took Ubers. Meanwhile, Generation Jones went along for the ride, not wholly in control of where we going, and not always knowing where we wanted to go. Not so much individually, but collectively as a generation as it regards our cultural impact on society. In some respects, Generation Jones is more of an attitude than an age.

The term Generation Jones also nicely dovetails with the last name of Eric Jones, Joybus’ guitarist, and Aeolus 13 Umbra’s occasional creative consultant, who, while probably refusing the title of band leader, took the lead on wrangling the disparate group of oddballs who contributed to the album. The band itself is also comprised of Dave Ritrovato, vocals; Michael Caputo, drums; and Matthew Smith, bass. The members of Joybus all generally fit into the age range of Generation Jones, including the very many friends they took along on the ride.

Eric Jones joined me to discuss putting the band and album together.

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Joybus (1998), left to right: David Ritrovato, Mike Smith, Eric Jones, and Mike Caputo.

Ae13U: How did Joybus come together?

Jones: Mike [Caputo, drummer] and I had been in and out of a bunch of different projects together, and we decided to start a fresh new one. So, he and I were just basically starting to write some songs and then, Blue Lunch Records . . .

Ae13U: I remember Blue Lunch Records.

Jones: A friend of ours ended up getting involved with Blue Lunch with Mark Wilkin, and his name was Phil Santandera — it’s in the liner notes.

Ae13U: Right.

Jones: I was charged with putting a band together and writing an album. Matt [Smith, bass] was temporarily living in our basement and within about two days of living there, he started picking up instruments. Matt is probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life. I taught him how to play bass and within a month he had surpassed my abilities.

Ae13U: Fantastic.

Jones: It’s just unbelievable, right? And, you know, so here we started writing that stuff immediately.

Ae13U: Where does Dave Ritrovato enter the picture?

Jones: Matt found Dave. He had known Dave from the Quintessence circuit, I guess [Quintessence was a popular Albany nightspot from the 1980s through the early 2000s]. Dave was already a few years older than us and had just gotten his masters.

Ae13U: I’m looking at the liner notes and it seems like you kind of drew in a lot of your friends, including myself, and fellow collaborators into the project.

Jones: Yeah, for two reasons. One was practical. I was I was contracted to produce an album from Blue Lunch Records, right? I had to sort of like Boston [the band] without any of the talent, just make the thing up as I go, and that’s how the band ended up jelling. I would ask friends to write the lyrics for this thing that play horns on this, do this, do that. But the other part of that was that it gave me a chance to play with other people in a way that they could contribute meaningfully.

Ae13U: So, production was more organic than systematic.

Jones: It’s part of the growing process. There’s a lot of experimentation. There’s a lot of improvisation. There’s a lot of bad engineering. Unfortunately, we also were short on time. Most of those songs were written between ‘90 and ‘92, and the second batch of them were written after we had done the initial Blue Lunch recording.

So, you can tell when you listen to it, some songs sound like they’re recorded differently. That’s because they were. They were recorded like six, seven years apart. So, we sort of went back in the studio and Dave and I produced, it’s a fancy way of saying, paid for it, the songs that we loved, that we wrote, that we never got the chance to record.

Ae13U: I know at least according to the copy I have — numbered nine out of fifty — just fifty copies of this particular CD were made. I don’t recall, did you guys gig as Joybus?

Jones: Yes, we did gig as Joybus.

Ae13U: How did the name come about?

Jones: Picking a band name is one of the hardest things anybody can do.

Ae13U: Which you’ve written about in the liner notes.

Jones: We settled on the one that was least offensive to everybody and then after the work came out, we’re like, “Oh, Joybus, yes!” So, that’s how that ended up happening.

Ae13U: Considering how you took along so many friends along for the ride in producing the album, it seems like the perfect fit. Speaking of taking your friends along for the ride, who did the art for the cover and liner notes?

Jones: That’s Michael Neff. He had fun with it, and he’s a brilliant artist, really. I gave Michael complete artistic license. I shared some general ideas on the layout, gave him the copy and I said, “Have fun with it,” and so he did. Everyone loved it. I am still very grateful.

Ae13U: That cover is the perfect visual analogy for the album.

Front cover. Liner notes page 1.

Liner notes page 2. Liner notes page 3.

Liner notes page 4. Liner notes page 5.

Back cover.

Digital Segues

Ae13U: One aspect of the album that got my attention is the electronic segues on three songs, “I See Dinosaurs,” “Take,” and “Life Student.” I love these and wish you did more for the album. With today’s click – copy – paste audio software, I don’t think people appreciate it was a bit more challenging to put these sound collages together thirty years ago. As late as 1995 at WAMC [Northeast Public Radio], I was still using a razor blade, splicing block, white Crayon, and splicing tape to do edits like we hear on the segues on Ephemera. By 2000, I think, most radio stations had switched over to sound editing software. Given that Ephemera was released in 1998, sort of in the middle of this change, I wonder how you put these segues together.

Jones: Yeah, that stuff was actually done back in ‘91 and what it’s what happens when you give a monkey a Fostex F-15! Basically, it was that old four tracker from the eighties that I bought from my high school friend, Sean Feeney, and I had been getting into a bit of trouble with that thing for a few years at that point. So, if I remember correctly, I think all I did was download, or I should say record, random samples of shortwave noise. My idea was to take satellite signals and different, you know, blips and bleeps and all that. As I’m traveling through the dial, running the 4-track, all of a sudden I hear somebody talking, and I’m like, “Oh, it’s a phone conversation!”

Ae13U: Those old cordless landline phones weren’t very secure.

Jones: And so, I just kind of let it record for a little while. Then, at some point, I just mixed it all together. There’s a song on the record called “Happenstance,” and there’s a lot of happenstance on this record, including a lot of those [segues]. A couple of those segues Matt had put together. Everyone had fun playing with that thing.

And the one in particular that you’re referring was just a happenstantial random shortwave recording. I’d run through, you know, I’d record ten minutes or fifteen minutes and then I’d back up and I’d run another track and then I’d run another track and then another track. Once I loaded it up, I just bounced it down to a master by fading and twisting and turning and all that.

Ae13U: The segue that leads into “I See Dinosaurs” [whose lyrics this author contributed to] starting off with announcer from The War of the Worlds 1950s version, that was just perfect.

Jones: There’s also another little show of our sense of humor is just before “I See Dinosaurs,” you hear somebody speaking and it’s backwards. It’s our dear friend Hajji who has passed. But it’s him, you know, the whole Beatle “I buried Paul” with John Lennon saying “cranberry sauce backwards.” That’s Hajji saying, “I buried Matt’s cranberry sauce.”

Ae13U: [laughter] No comment on Matt’s cooking I guess! Those segues were pretty influential for me. I did my own take on “I See Dinosaurs” using my original lyrics with some changes, and your segue as the leader. My piece, American Air: The Sound of the 20th Century, is more directly influenced by the introduction to Joybus’s “I See Dinosaurs.”

The segues, given that they repackage sounds from other sources, sort of align themselves with the observational proclivities of Generation Jones.

Jones: I agree with that to an extent, but if you listen to Dave’s lyrics especially, there’s a lot of coming-of-age stuff going on, like transitioning for either from college into adulthood or into a career.

Ae13U: Right.

Jones: There’s a little bit of putting that off, there’s a little bit of delayed acknowledgement of inevitable responsibility . . . also moving on in terms of, love, and love lost, and love accomplished. It’s just It was the “fin de siècle.” We were not expecting this explosion of good times and great oldies, but . . .

Ae13U: But as it turned out, we were let down. After the fall of the USSR and the First Gulf War, everything was anti-climactic. Even Y2K fizzled out. We didn’t even get a good Y2K.

Jones: Exactly. So, I think there was a lot of that spirit. I had just graduated from college and I was facing my student loan debt, right?

Ae13U: Oh, yes, we all shared that burden!

Jones: There's a song on there called “Signature” that I think David written partly out of my situation. Because it's like, “Yeah, I've got all this debt and no money.”

Ae13U: Yeah, and life sometimes doesn't change.

Jones: I just focus on self-reliance and the ability to have positive experiences.

Ae13U: Which I think, perfectly sums up Generation Jones and a good note to end on.

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Ephemera was put together throughout the ‘90s beginning with some experiments in creating sound collages as we hear in the segues to the collaborative effort leading up to the album’s release in 1998. Joybus’ experience was probably pretty common with many bands at the time across America who had talent, tape recording equipment, and a connection with a local label.

Today, the production process is more decentralized with affordable software not only being able to emulate the sophisticated production of professional studios but also AI music generators which can translate your ideas into a range of styles, with vocals. One can literally sit in one’s bedroom, create an album, and make it available to the world, just as Grammy-award winner Billie Eilish did with her brother Finneas O’Connell for her first LP.

Yet, as the production process becomes more decentralized, the artist becomes more isolated. Collaboration is still possible, but often at a distance — via email, social media, and Zoom. Ephemera was produced at a time just as software was just beginning to radically change how we do things.

Powerless to change it or slow it down, all we can do is just go along for the ride.

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