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the fun years

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the fun years, “baby, it’s cold inside” (Barge (2008)/Keplar (2025))

Newly remastered and reissued, this drolly titled 2008 album is generally regarded to be the jewel of the fun years’ discography, so it is quite a pleasant surprise to have it back in circulation again after the folding of the duo’s previous label (Barge). Notably, baby, it’s cold inside still feels fresh and contemporary almost two decades later, as Ben Recht & Isaac Sparks were definitely on a trip very different from the rest of their early 2000s ambient/drone peers. Stylistic resemblances to ambient and self-deprecating humor aside, the fun years share a hell of a lot more common ground with avant-garde turntablists like the late Phillip Jeck, but innovatively enhance the crackling, hissing magic of Isaac Sparks’ vinyl manipulations with looping melodic accompaniment from Ben Recht’s baritone guitar. That was (and continues to be) a cool vision, but my favorite aspect of this duo is how their compositions sometimes resemble a complex puzzle being slowly assembled or disassembled piece by piece.  

The album’s centerpiece is the opening “my lowville,” which slowly and elegantly expands from a subtle, droning backwards loop with vinyl crackle into a beautiful and bittersweet guitar melody as more and more looping notes accumulate. That intricately assembled puzzle-piece melody alone is enough to make it an absolutely sublime highlight, but that proves to be only a mere starting point as the piece expands and intensifies into a wonderfully immersive maelstrom of sensuously hissing and layering magic.

The following “auto show day of the dead” is initially a bit more somber, as a minor key piano loop and warbly swells of backwards melody weave a gently hallucinatory and vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding spell. Unsurprisingly, it follows the same “slow-motion loop architecture” arc as its predecessor, as that introductory motif is gradually fleshed out with new crackles and shivering guitar intrusions, but the sounds ultimately become increasingly gnarled and distorted en route to a buzzing, spacey crescendo. The colorfully titled “fucking milwaukee’s been hesher forever,” on the other hand, evokes a lazily summery and hallucinatory suburban idyll of hissing sprinklers and distant barking dogs that gradually dissolves into a gently pulsing and trebly reverie. 

Elsewhere, “re: we’re again buried under” is arguably my second favorite piece on the album, but it is more of a quiet headphone pleasure than the instant gratification of “my lowville.” In fact, it has quite an ingeniously elusive “barely there” feel, as field recordings lazily pan and fade in and out of focus over a low rumble. It is essentially just a hyper-minimalist one-note drone piece at its core, however, and the subtle mutations of that drone are endlessly compelling even when it is reduced to little more than a hum and some crackle. Notably, all of the album’s pieces segue into each other like they are all just interrelated passages in a single album-spanning opus, so the closing “the surge is working” has the feel of a culminating crescendo for both the previous piece and the album as a whole (particularly when the intense and insistently strummed roar of shoegaze guitars comes in. 

To their credit, however, Recht and Sparks do not end the album with that roiling eruption, as the piece’s coda dissolves into sensuously shivering and hissing washes of static that gradually collapse into confused rhythms and submerged, blown-out wreckage. That last bit is an especially fine example of why the fun years is such an enduring and beloved project, as Recht and Sparks are both uniquely skilled at painstakingly crafting ambient loop-scapes and uniquely skilled at finding interesting and unusual ways for them to detour (rather than simply fading out once all of their loops have finally locked in place for the big showstopper). 

The overall effect is akin to time-lapse footage in which new lenses and filters are constantly being sneakily and seamlessly swapped in: the overall image is certainly evolving, but the once-familiar details of that image are in a permanent state of flux as well (submerging, breaking apart, blurring, smearing, or resolving into sharper focus). In short, Recht and Sparks are a couple of ingenious textural wizards, which makes the fun years an endlessly absorbing project for anyone who chooses to their work listen closely enough. While this particular album is justifiably a fan favorite, the sublime pleasures of this project definitely run much far deeper than this album and god was like, no. That said, this one is certainly an ideal entry point for the curious.

Listen here.

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the fun years, “god was like, no” (Barge, 2010)

The last album that Ben Recht and Isaac Sparks put out (baby, it’s cold inside) was named Boomkat’s “Album of the Year” for 2008, so there was quite a bit of buzz and excitement surrounding the release of this follow-up. Fortunately, god was like, no (the band’s vinyl debut) does not disappoint and delivers yet another pleasant batch of warm and crackling soundscapes to enjoy. Also, their streak of witty album titles continues unabated.

the fun years is kind of an odd project, the sort of thing that shouldn’t nearly work as well as it does. For one thing, although Recht and Sparks got their start in Cambridge, MA, they are now based on opposite ends of the country and collaborate mostly remotely. Also, the duo are pretty disparate in their backgrounds, with Isaac being a former hip hop DJ and Ben being a computer science teacher with a PhD from MIT. Even the instrumentation itself is a bit peculiar, as the fun years’ combination of baritone guitar and turntable manages to hit an improbable common ground of blissful, droning ambience between the expected directions, never veering too far into either rock or cerebral abstraction. 

Perhaps the key thing that draws these two together is a shared fascination with the unadulterated sound of their respective instruments. Lots of processing certainly occurs on god was like, no, but Recht’s guitar still generally sounds exactly like a guitar (not laptopped into oblivion) and Sparks largely uses his turntable in a very “Phillip Jeck” way: as a means of sound creation rather than as a sampling device.

The album opens with its best song, as “breech on the bowstring” beautifully combines a cool jangly guitar loop with a melancholy chord progression of slow-motion swells. However, each side of the album essentially feels like a lengthy single piece, as all the songs segue seamlessly from one to another and everything stays very firmly in the same vein. So, in essence, “Breech” is merely an especially excellent beginning to a very good long-form piece. 

The album’s other “song” highlight is “makes sense to me,” which gradually boils up into a masterfully restrained intensity as the guitars increase in both frenzy and volume. That is not to say that the rest of the songs are worse, it’s just that those two pieces are the times when melody comes most strongly to the fore.

While it is definitely Recht’s guitar work that gives the songs their structure, emotional shading, and recognizable melody, the less tangible contributions of Sparks are equally important. Isaac’s textural wizardry is the main thing that separates the fun years from the horde of other people making guitar-based ambient music these days, providing a grittiness and hissing pulse that takes the music to a deeper level. Also, the duo prove to be quite adept at turning the omnipresent vinyl crackle into an asset, using it as a fog for sounds to hide behind before subtly sneaking their way into the foreground. 

As such, god was like, no only truly reaches its maximum potential when headphones or extreme volume are involved. The balance between melody and manipulated static leans a bit too heavily towards the latter for most of these songs to make a substantial immediate impact, but there is quite a bit of compelling microcosmic activity to keep me interested once I’ve been lured in. As a result, I think the duo’s masterwork is probably still ahead of them, but this is quite a likable and ambitious effort nonetheless.

Listen here.