Listen to Location Location Location’s debut, Damaged Goods, and it’s easy to visualize the three musicians sweating it out in the recording studio, locking in on a groove and just jamming. With, it should be noted, occasional breaks to contemplate the basics, then add subtle overdubs: some bit-crunched guitar here, a marimba there, perhaps a harmonized line or a spacey reverb effect. But essentially live, essentially just three guys in a room, giving their all. But that’s not how it went down at all. 

Recorded during the darkest days of Covid-19, Damaged Goods is actually the ultimate pandemic project. Not only were guitarist Anthony Pirog, bassist Michael Formanek, and drummer Mike Pride safely socially distant during the recording project, two of them have not yet met in the flesh. Nonetheless, Location Location Location is a band. 

“I think that’s probably just our personalities, the way that we work, and the way that we wanted to hear it,” explains the Virginia-raised Pirog, who was living in Monterey, California during the sessions. With Pride and Formanek on the East Coast, and getting together not in the cards, the three made Damaged Goods by sending sound files and audio notes back and forth while trusting the others to do their best.

“The whole thing was pretty new,” Pirog continues. “I was really excited because I’m a fan of both of their work, both composing and playing. So that was a big thing to deal with in terms of ‘What are you getting from the piece to react to? Are you initiating the piece? How do you supply that and have it be something that people can add sound to?’

It’s obvious that both Formanek and Pride were on the same page. “Improvising like this definitely presents a set of potential challenges,” says the bassist. “But I’ve got to say that in this project I never felt that anything was stifled at all, or disconnected. When I would hear something from Mike or Anthony it just immediately gave me thoughts about what to do. In most cases I’d just dive in there pretty fast. The initial ideas were mostly pretty quick, pretty immediate. So in a weird way it didn’t feel like we weren’t improvising in real time, if that makes any sense. Which was a little surprising to me!”

“Everybody listened really deeply, and nobody tried to put a certain personality on it,” Pride says. “We were just experimenting, and then at the end we liked what we had, and we had a record.” A very fine record, it should be mentioned.