After completing The Butterfly Sessions and winning the bet, Chris and I started having loose and informal jam sessions in JMU's studio A. At that point, I had gotten into the live recordings of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew tours of 69-71 and I was very intrigued at the idea of simply coming up with something "out of the air", so to speak. Chris and I were also heavily influenced at the time by the technique The Beastie Boys had employed off their last couple of albums (notably-Check Your Head) of taking jam sessions and splicing them into feasible tunes--something Teo Macero also did with Miles over his early 70's electric period. What Matriculated was a loose set of musicians who came and went into a cohiesive unit of musicians who genuinely liked to play together. Although I had personally vowed never to be a part of a band again, I found myself in the midst of a very real democratic and really functional group.