In late 1987, popular Dayton indie act The Pleasures Pale disbanded. Fronted by singer/lyricist Jeffrey Bright, The Pale left an indelible mark on the southwest Ohio scene, releasing one LP (post breakup) then evaporating into the ether of pop ephemera. In the aftermath, during a show at the now-defunct Canal Street Tavern, a young guitarist and composer approached Bright. Above the din, Eric Schulz introduced himself with a direct imperative: “I wanna be in your band.” What ensued was a songwriting partnership that would last into the mid-90s, spanning three different band names, even more genres, and a catalog of distinctive material.

Bright and Schulz were joined in Dayton by bassist Chris “Troy” Green (Dementia Precox, Mom). The three transplanted to San Francisco later in 1988. After spending the better part of a year developing a sound and auditioning drummers, the three began playing the city’s small club circuit, debuting as Darke County on September 9, 1989 at the deliciously funky Chi Chi Theater Club on Broadway in SF’s bawdy strip club corridor. San Pedro native David Rojas played drums for the band’s first half dozen dates. Finally, in March of 1990, Oakland native Christopher Fisher (Impatient Youth) was added as permanent drummer. Thus began a musical relationship that would endure through the quartet’s various future incarnations.

Darke County’s music was a landscape of tall tales and mysteries of the heart, a ghost-town brew of haunted longing and ironic nostalgia populated by tormented characters from the creases and folds of so many darkening American dreams. Fronted by Bright’s crooning and noir-tinged lyrics and Schulz’s eclectic arrangements, the band’s sound was an amalgam of mid-century American styles, sharing more DNA with cool jazz, old-time country, exotica, TV detective themes, and Mancini film scores than with rock, but never straying too far from pop idioms of the day.

Schulz’s composing chops were formidable, often outpacing the band’s ability to fully realize his fevered ideas. From 1988 to 1991, E-Bone, a nickname bestowed by flat mate Green, utilized all at his disposal — the band’s rehearsal room filled with of assorted acoustic and electric instruments, and a 4-track recorder — to capture on cassette a cache of wildly imaginative compositional sketches, many of which were never fully developed — but thankfully have survived.

Eventually, the band’s ever-evolving vision outgrew the initial, theatrical Darke County persona. Veering toward a brand of harder-edged, surrealistic alt-rock, the outfit renamed itself Myself a Living Torch in 1992. Throughout the remainder of the 1990s and into the early 00s, Bright, Green and Fisher would, in varying degrees and ways, fade from the music stage. After leaving San Francisco in the mid-90s, Schulz would eventually resurface and flourish in Memphis as Harlan T Bobo, whose impressive output can today be found on Goner Records.

Work from the early days of the Bright-Schulz collaboration has remained obscure for nearly 30 years. Now, as a project of the Jeffrey Alan Bright Music Archive, this uniquely rich material is being exhumed from cassette, digitized, in some cases finished with further recording, and now presented here — at last receiving the exposure it deserves. Time has only made it more fascinating, poignant, and oddly brilliant, an artifact from what may prove to be the waning years of San Francisco's once vital bohemia.

The forthcoming parade of gothic Americana leads with a three-song release featuring one of the band’s signature numbers. “Milky Way Baby” encapsulates Darke County’s fascination with doped-out, beatnik slow jazz and lyrically plays in a chancy space where promiscuity's spoils teeter on the brink of paranoia and neurosis. Two versions of the song exist: This, the “reprised” version, goes all in on slinky groove and literal sound expressions of twinkling stars, whereas the original is a spare and atmospheric rendering worthy of its own focus in a later release.

Filling out the MWB installment are a flamenco-influenced instrumental sketch highlighted by Schulz's expressive, surf-drenched guitar, and a lilting, saccharine-tender waltz double filtered through the gauze of 20th Century musical history. “Through the Ring of Fire” would, shortly after initial composing, be fleshed out to a lyrically notorious, full-band arrangement titled “Edge of Night” (also forthcoming). “Midnight Lullaby,” the piece in triple time, was a seldom-performed song in the band’s show repertoire. Its initial and only recording was a live-rehearsal, single-mic capture, which here has been mixed into a broader arrangement hinting at tragic sweetness and innocence lost.

Welcome then to the strange and seductive otherworld of Darke County — a land readily found on any Ohio map, but here, in alter-ego, a floating, elusive state on the western edge of the American psyche — a place where dreams drift above the clouds then descend in free fall, eventually to be washed away in the Pacific's receding surf.