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The whole hyper-prolific thing is tough to pull off. It turns out not everyone has a bottomless well of inspiration, and for most of us even a half-empty well starts to sound pretty strained and tuneless when committed to tape. What then does someone like Duncan Kissinger have in his Skin Conditions project that makes his 10-releases-in-a-year shtick so consistently interesting?  

It’s tempting (at least for me) to say that his music is interesting because he’s got this way of navigating noise, letting it sneak in like just a little light under the front door, as on “Shower” from last summer’s And Other Feelings, where the intermittent screams of noise rip rhythms into spring reverbed drum machine beats but never quite take over.

That’s true, but it doesn’t quite cover it though, because with Get Well Soon, the recently released MFT exclusive Skin Conditions full-length, Kissinger swings from the blown out and blasting to the so quiet you have to lean in closer, and it’s all in equal parts compelling (and how’s this for prolific: in addition to Get Well Soon, there’s also a new and exclusive seven part archives collection up on MFT; check out volume one of seven here). So where then are the strengths of the Skin Conditions project most thoroughly on display? Are they in the moaning R. Stevie Moore-esque jam of “Odd Universe?” Or on the whispered-over strums of “Don’t Let Me Down?” Well, yes on both counts, but that doesn’t answer the larger question.

I know you didn’t exactly ask me, but I think the answer is five tracks deep into Get Well Soon with the ten-minute instrumental speed bump “Head Cold.” Up until “Head Cold” comes in and slows everything down, Get Well Soon boasts some of the catchiest and fuzziest (“You Have Seen the Light and it Haunts You”), funniest and sweetest (“Jesus was a Boxer, Satan is an Asshole”) Skin Conditions tracks to date. “Head Cold,” though is like a 10-minute wall, and it’ll probably be pretty make-or-break for a lot of listeners.

The song is almost all droning organ, hovering just below midrange, with higher frequencies wobbling around here and there. There’s no real melody. The thick dissonance of the chords seems to shift at random. Toward the end a drum set sneaks in. Even so, this overly long instrumental track is, for me, the key to whole question of what makes Skin Conditions so worthwhile. “Head Cold” sounds exactly like what a head cold feels like.

Get Well Soon feels personal in a way that’s separate from, but still indebted to, the typical singer-songwriter fare. Kissinger doesn’t need to sit there and whisper sweet nothings into his microphone about his heart or his lost love or whatever. The whispering and the playing, they pop up, but they feel incidental, because what’s really going on is a ramshackle song hanging like loose fabric over a life, and it all feels so effortlessly gestural.

None of the songs seem wrapped up in some corny attempt at rendering objective references for the logic of the song (e.g., “These flutes represent the birds I heard one day”). Instead, the songs just are what they’re about. “Stomach” is about drinking too much, and the chorus on the guitar combined with the loosely doubled vocals make the song itself sound woozy and ready to hurl. The pittering pianos on “Live a Little” that close out the album sound somehow just like how you feel when that head cold is finally clearing and you can breathe a full breath through your nose again.

Few of Kissinger’s lyrics here are detailed or hyperpoetic, the chords are simple, the arrangements are skeletal. In fact, a substantial chunk of Kissinger’s tracks as Skin Conditions feel, if not improvised, then very nearly that. Like he thought up the idea ten minutes ago and wanted to get it down before it flew out the window. Or maybe, like he’s picking up on a fragment of something someone said that felt important enough to commit to tape.

Take, for example, “Bitch I’m Fabulous,” which contains a snippet of conversation at it’s very start about being “married to the game,” and how that’d make a good title for a Skin Conditions release. Seconds later, that line pops up in the lyric, like the moment of inspiration can come literally any time right up until the instant the song itself starts. It’s not static, there’s no poetic moment locked in time, it’s just a headlong rush of ideas.