iaila

we are look at 2 new tracks from greg and myself, and 2 more in the works.

they seem to be as mathy hardcore stabby loveless rhythms as we intended

late afternoon

the songs are starting to flood to us.

we have 1 written and done, 1 close, and 1 about 20% of the way.

problemsolving a way around 2 people in NH with no space to play and 1 person in CT with plenty of space to play.

driving sucks

DK

its on

myself, greg, and chris are in it

deep.

I heavily recommend that you all stretch your necks and get ready to thrash

review from drew: I wanted to punch something

review from my neck: holy fuck

get the fuck up

find it

coworkers seem to be interested in music.

i found that a microphone + looper = beats.

its fun!!!



also some glitchyness to come up soon. should be fun!

acoustic

sometimes i hate the loss of electric.

these days i appreciate that loss.



for what i can tell, i will have a room mate until she decides i smell too bad, so i am stuck without any of my amps or guitars since they are in a pile in the room.

so out comes some 5 string guitars that i can play acoustically. soon my kids, there will be music soon.

also talking to 2 of my best kiddies and planning on starting something up.

something fancy.

you'll all be so proud

songs

a song a day is what is keeping a psychiatrist at bay

laserbeams

well, another day and another drain.

a friend of mine is looking to be a director, so i think that this may very well have to be a completely constructed project. totally free of other perspectives but our own.

me = audio

he = visual

we = movie

art for arts sake i think is the idea here

0% sales. 0% sellable. 100% free film.

hm

severe lull in activity

as the project gets closer and closer to initial launch phase, I get busy.

relationships, my mother's new floor, new cat.

tons of tasty distractions from what is at hand.

..... i think its a movie now....

it ends up that no one has created something enough like me to make any sense. so might just have to make it on my own.

....


....

sweet.

echoecho

i always have as much echo on my guitar as possible

reverb, analog, digital, looping; they all really do the job of getting yourself to sound about 10 million times bigger than you are.

but the final question comes down, what is the best for the job out there?

tap tempo?
tape delay?
analog vs. digital?
eq?
anywhere from 40 millisecond to 21 second delays....


there is a lot to look at, and you really need to look at what you need for the context. everything has it's place

pan's perfection

what would be an optimal film for this venture?

subtitled or silent (nothing american and long scripted)
adult themes (a film that has some sort of turmoil that is more epic than normal day - to - day drama)
psychedelic visuals (something entertaining for the eyes to match the music)

pan's labyrinth seems to fit all of these

so why am i questioning it as a film?

dark crystal

upon re-watching, this movie has a lot going for it
pro:
~little to no music
~epic story
~visually stunning

cons:
~childish
~a large amount of inaction
~a lot of script

very compelling.

dwindle

the list is starting to be eliminated

 seven samurai (so long)

 2001 (i cannot improve)

 eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (too much dialogue)

 dark crystal (dialogue again)

 night of the living dead (not as good as i thought)

 all quiet on the western front (too much war)

 pi (almost perfect, willing to reconsider)

Masterwork

Today is the begining of my masterwork.

I have been thinking long and hard about what I need to do as a musician if I want to break into the field of music in some way. While there are many options for me to look through, there is one concept that had been tossed around in my head endlessly. The idea of redoing a movie soundtrack

I want to construct a whole new sound for some movie that will be a rebirthing movement.

Some sort of reinterpretation.

Something to spend a year of work on. Every minute detail. Show what I am really capable of.


So now what movie?

toys

how essential is each instrument that you own?  is that second delay pedal more of an instrument that you play, or is more like a toy?  would that tremorama really flush out your pedal board for later in your musical career, or is it just another sweet investment that you never really needed to invest in?

where does the line end, from your first pedal which is the turning point for dynamic music making, all the way to collecting your 5th germanium fuzz, and where can you define it?

will they become less or more meaningful to you?

can you tell im reading "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"?

hillcrest

music takes a lot out of a person.  emotionally and physically draining, the idea of making your music as heart-filled as possible every night on a 3 month tour across the world seems near impossible to me.

So how do you make a song that means the world to you and play it every night for a thousand people and have it mean the same amount to you?

how many times does it take to play a song until it looses its meaning?

does "your hand in mine" mean the same to explosions in the sky as it did when they wrote it?

is this why clapton no longer plays that song about his son?  and why radiohead no longer plays creep?

unanswerable

we have truly hit the information age.

this post itself will arrive at your doorstep the instant i say it is done,a nd you will read it faster than i wrote it, and the information will be piped through "a series of tubes" to everyone world wide (assuming they want to read it)

so why is modern music still being composed with 4 dudes, each with drums, guitar, bass, or keys?

if we are truly learning the most that we can, then why don't we constantly use this information to make the next best instrument?

people eat up technology, and i guess thats why it is inside the guitar pedals, but i feel there is more out there.  more instruments that are better and still analog, or amplifiers that are tube driven but with 4 channels on a footswitch that lets you stack by turning each one on separately.

improvisation

while working on songs for aggroslacker, i was wondering where the line begins and ends for improvisational pieces.

how does someone name a song that completely improvise every time, where the song never sounds the same any time, and maybe the only similarity is the key signature?

how do you work on songs in an improvisational way?

is a song still improv if you start with the same riff every time, and build to somewhere new and different?  what about two riffs?  what about 5 different riffs?

and where does that line finally fall between and orchestrated song, and a song that is a "jam"?

axe dude

why is the musical world dominated by males?

is the guitar too phallic?

are songs like action films or like "chick" flicks?

is the pay less for girls like in corporate america?

maybe there is some sort of draw for males to play music, but i have never found that my music impresses any girl that i like, and girls are no reason to play music at all.  maybe i was hoping to find a girl that played music and play duets with her.  

it seems that this is not the case though.  to find a girl that even thinks about playing music is hard, and then one that isnt just a romanic musician (someone who wants to play, but never sits down and makes something out of that idea) is impossible to find.  i know 2 in the local scene around here.  

something about equality in the sexes has to reach the world of music.  im tired of playing shows with a band of dudes, and there is another band of dudes.  

genrism

today i will be playing some doom metal / drone with my friends.  its codenamed aggroslacker.

love it or leave it.

what i query to the young out there, is the idea of musical genres.  the idea itself really helps people find what they like (just as i post about playing music within these genre definitions).  what i have seen in the real world, is just the opposite, especially within the youth.  a common occurrence among questions about music, it is often to be heard something along the lines of "everything but country and classical" or something along these lines.

is this the same sort of idea as racism?  if we all hate something, will it disappear completely and will it have been a genocide, or is going to be with us forever, as part of history?

can we inspect these genres in a close manner, and see that there is some sliding scale from rap to classical, just like there is a sliding scale of skin tone from africa to europe?

shipwrecker for download

here we have it, the good tracks, the bad tracks, the ones that dont fall into either category, and finally the shit that doesnt even sound like me.  all for download at:

http://www.last.fm/music/terrible+horrible+enormous+things/shipwrecker

and the album cover is floating around the internet somewhere too...

homestead

moved into a new house over the past couple of days, blogless.  

while i try to figure out how to put my rpm challenge on the internet, i can at least divulge the track titles

terrible horrible enormous things - shipwrecker

1 ) experience death without self

2) cured are the defeated, rested are the worn(live)

3) rain focused glow

4) the sea sings

5) tell an old story

6) stay in bed with me, darling

7) i fear there is too much at risk

rpm and it's 99.9% completion on the last day

having this album so close to completion really makes me think about what pressures bigger bands are under all the time.  who do they have to answer to when they have nothing left?  what sort of time scale are they working on?  do they have to go to work at a real job when they arent writing music?

it also makes you think about albums and if there are any songs they had to crap out last minute...

did the beatles ever have to do it?

what about explosions in the sky?

or godspeed! you black emperor?

i think it pays to have to answer to no one, but i still want to complete the challenge.  ive failed before, and now im much better, and i will not fail again.

i thought about posting a preliminary copy of some songs, but itll just waste precious mixing time.  dont worry, there will be awesomeness soon.

where is the math these days?

as i sit here procrastinating getting my move-out on, im listening to 2 + 2 = 5 by radiohead.  its probably the only song i would want to hear if i saw them live.  its pretty, hard, and emotion-filled.

so what is in the title?

i guess the idea that "two and two always makes a 5" is an interesting idea in a disassociated reality from our own, where something is terribly wrong.  who knows for sure.

one thing about the idea that compels me is to create a whole system that works like the idea of 2 + 2= 5.  someone has probably done it already (just like everything else) but the exercise of creating such a complex system of equations would be mind boggling.  of course, if our universe is infinite, then there must be some plane of existence that contains a system that works off the idea that if you have two apples, and put them together with another two apples, you have five apples.

it begs the question, if you take three apples away from five, are you left with one apple?

if you have an apple and put it with another apple, do you have two and a half apples, or three, or something more bizarre?

anyway, i thought id slap up a photo of a show.  

F1rst post

eventually i imagine many more great things to come from this... as for now, I must move houses and crap.  i hope someone eventually finds this.