parae - the blog thing

recording everyday!

2012-01-13T20:16:00.000-08:00

Been working on this "musical/rock opera" thing just about everyday for the past 3-4 weeks. It's called ORESTEIA FRACTUM, and it is an adaptation of the Oresteia by Aeschylus, written in...oh i dunno - here go check wikipedia for more information. Anyways, the long and the short of it is, back in October of last year, my acting teacher John Wilk mentioned that he would be putting together this big multi-media stage adaption this spring at the city college here in SF, and that he wasn't sure if he had found the right person(s) to do the music. On a lark, and because I needed something to do, I offered my services and quickly wrote and recorded demos for two songs using mostly lyrics that he had initially adapted from the text. While he did say that he liked them, he decided to go with someone else. Fast forward a couple of months later, and I get an email about a week after my last class asking if I would be interested in writing more pieces for the project.

I let the gears turn a bit and then started churning out songs that night. The project was designed to have twelve "songs," plus ten instrumental dance pieces (as there are to be dancers involved) which would still be handled by someone else. Oh, and there's an overture too. So after two and half weeks, I managed to pull together demos for the remaining ten songs, and that was with me being sick and out of commission for five days. I ended up salvaging one piece from this past summer from right before Jimo stopped rehearsing with us, and another was pulled from a scrapped intro to a newer PARAE song I had written back in August. Everything else was pretty much written in five minutes.

For the lyrics, I initially used my acting teacher's original script adaptation as a very basic guide, but I quickly located an online copy of the 19th century English translation of the original plays to directly pull lyrics and ideas. It has definitely been a very different experience to "adapt" lyrics rather than my usual routine.

Anyway, as soon as the songs were done being written and were ready to go into full production and recording, two things happened. Tommi got sick with a cold (which was then passed back to me, boo!), and then John asked if I could now do some of the instrumentals for the dance pieces, cause whomever was supposedly doing them got eaten by hamburger monsters. Now, John had already selected some "new agey" material as backup selections just in case, but after talking about it, we both agreed that if I went ahead and did the dance pieces as well, the entire piece would have a more unified feel. So I started churning out various instrumentals. About half are figured out, and Tommi and I are now working on the percussive based pieces. Still have no idea what we're going to do for the Overture. Anyway, it seems like every time I've got a handle on what needs to get done for this thing, and another element pops up! Right now, I think we're gonna end up with maybe up to 75 minutes of music. But the whole thing is pretty wild, and it's cool to be adapting a classic work (and I've always liked Greek mythology), though I certainly wasn't expecting that we'd be doing a musical/rock opera anytime soon! Oh well, the story certainly is bloody. Oh and while the whole thing is being done for a stage show to performed the 2nd and 3rd weekends of March, we're also treating it like an album, and we're going to have some of our friends and associates sing for each of the different characters, so as each character in the songs will have it's own singer for the album.

in case you hadn't heard

2011-12-30T15:44:00.000-08:00

Jimo quit the band.

he officially resigned back in August, though we managed to coerce him into recording one more song for PCN (it always ends in tears), dressing up for the album cover (pre-painting), and playing two shows with us in the interim. otherwise we haven't seen him at all since this summer. he's been off doing something else, in fact, he was off doing something else for most of the year. the songs that became PCN would have probably been done in half the time or less had we been getting %100 from him. we held off on making an official announcement, because we didn't want it to fuck up the meager marketing of the PCN record. it seemed like we might have a little momentum for minute there; it's shame how sometimes people get discouraged or lack the work ethic or drive to continue. seems like most everybody our age has given up on their dreams, in one way or another. i guess this really is a game more suited for kids in their twenties. anyway, it still really sucks for him to bounce out on us, cause the three of us had really great chemistry and creativity when we were all together and excited about what we were doing, but what are you gonna do?

Tommi and I indeed do have a new project that we are working on right now. we've been commissioned, in a way, to compose and record a rock opera, based on some ancient greek plays called the Oresteia. this is not the Russian version, haha. more details to come.

we are also giving it a try playing with a new band member. you can watch the new PARAE Infomercial to find out who! we've been looking for a bass player as well, but so far no luck. there will be shows in the new year, and a lot of new music to come for all 15 of you out there.

our last show at Kimo's playing to two people

2011-12-05T17:39:00.000-08:00

we played our last show ever at the venue kimo's last night, which has changed ownership and is stopping live shows at the end of the month. we were opening up for two other bands, whose crowd didn't really start to show up until more than halfway thru our set. so that left us with Jerry! (who shot video of the show) and Alex! (who was super drunk from attending a football game earlier). all of our other friends and admirers, fuck off. we played quite well considering that we hadn't rehearsed in six weeks until hours before the gig. we played:

the host
what is beauty.
i want to have fun
sex n bones
love 2.0
die young
the revolting youth
older brother
we're breaking up
the tall man
hitchhiker

the other bands were pretty cool. didn't get to see too much of Major Powers and the Lofi Symphony, but we were digging the harmonies and the Queen influence.

We dunno when we're playing next, though we may try to set something up before the end of the year. Jimo is gonna be out of the country for January, but the work will continue. We have some video projects and ideas that we're going to attempt to realize, and other possible developments tba.

stud show

2011-11-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all y'all who came out last night to the show at the Stud. We had a problem right away, one of girls from Blasfemme was under 21 and the club wouldn't let them play. Sucked.

Anyway, Tommi and I played some songs - they were:

Older Brother
What is Beauty.
Eulogy
I want to have Fun
Love 2.0
Die Young
Out of Fashion
Yr Sex
The Revolting Youth

So there were three new ones in there. They were a bit shaky, but I at least managed to remember most of the words most of the time! Everybody asked about the whereabouts of Jimo and if/when he'd be coming back from the jungle. We do not know. We just do not know...

Next show - Sunday Dec 4th @ KIMO'S - PARAE's last show ever at Kimo's :(

PCN CDs are here

2011-11-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

Ok, first off, lest i sound like an absolute whiner in some of these blog posts, let me clarify my position. I think most people would agree, looking for and applying for a job is simply the worst. It sucks. Having a band or musical project is a lot like constantly having to apply for a job over and over. In a sense, you're constantly shouting, PAY ATTENTION TO US, LIKE ME!! And that, at times, well most of the time, makes me feel like an asshole. Now, there are a lot of aspects to life that I have conditioned myself to block out, unfortunately I'm not wired properly to still not feel like an asshole when I'm trying to shamelessly promote the band and get some miniscule fragment of people to ever so vaguely give it a fragment of their attention. Let alone give the music a chance. It's a personal problem. Now, many of my close associates would argue, "But Eriq, you are an asshole in general anyways, why do you have a problem being socially gregarious and uncompromising with your own self promotion?" And the answer is, I just don't know. Maybe if I did cocaine all the time, the impenetrable self-confidence that I require might manifest itself. Unfortunately, cocaine gives me the shits.

Regardless, the album has gotten a couple write ups by some blogs, which is completely fucking awesome. Thank you! At the end of the day, we just want the album to be heard, because I'm sure as hell not capable of listening to it anymore.

So the PCN CDs are here, and third time's a charm, no fuck-ups with the artwork or the printing - yay! They look perfect. Speaking of perfect things, let me briefly address the album cover. The album cover is EXACTLY as I envisioned it from conception. I am so very proud of it. Tommi painted most of it, definitely all the harder technical stuff, and I assisted with more of the grunt work. These internet Gifs and Jpegs do not do it justice - at all. If someone thinks it is ugly, that's totally fine. But it is exactly what I envisioned. It's an homage to a highly unique cult movie series. If you've seen them, then you'll get the reference. What I did not want to do was create a Photoshop atrocity, because first off, my Photoshop skills are severely limited as they are. And that shit just dates the work. What I wanted was something real and organic (like the album), and cinematic - that harkened back to the days when movie posters were painted. Now, we weren't making a movie poster, so the goal was to keep the emphasis on the three of us as subtle interpretations of characters the movie series we're referencing, and to me, I think we succeeded. And just like the music, the cover is something that we made, all by ourselves. Don't like it? That's fine. I think it's cool.

We're playing some SF shows - this Saturday at The Stud, and Dec 4th at Kimo's. It'll be our last Kimo's show, as they are closing / changing ownership and discontinuing live performance. They've always been great spot to play with excellent sound, it sucks to be losing that space. The Stud show will be as a duo, and we're not sure if Jimo will be joining for the Kimo's show. Regardless, Tommi and I have been working on a bit of new material and will be playing some the new songs this Saturday.

album cover

2011-11-13T20:21:00.000-08:00

we finished the album cover painting earlier this week. used the digital camera to photograph it, which was a challenge or trial and error. not sure if i got the best outcome possible, but got what we got. for the most part it looks exactly how if looks in real life, which was the goal. and it came out exactly as i envisioned. tommi did most of the painting, and i assisted in some areas, doing some of the more simpler grunt work.

i have been trying to market the album to blogs and such. it's kind of like applying for a job, which is horrible and generally something i tend to avoid doing at all costs. perhaps if i had some kind of training as a publicist? it comes down to "what do I write?" and "how will that effect perception?" and "will this encourage the reader to actually check out the music and give it a shot?" the worst aspect is, does it even have any effect at all? my strategy thus far has been to construct a simple email that keeps the focus on the availability of the music online at the bandcamp and the purity of the listening experience available alongside the visual art component that we have provided. presenting the album in a vacuum where it can be judged on it's own merits. is that too pretentious? or not high concept enough? what grabs a stranger's attention via an anonymous email? ought i construct an elaborate yarn filled with falsehoods of adolescent travails, like that one band...you know, the one that i can't fucking stand. out of the thousands of emails sent every day, every week, from bedroom garageband auteur amateurs of "check out my track on soundcloud", "pick me pick me!" how is it that we are to stick out and simply upon only our merits? more so than the merit of simply being 20 years old? what does youth/age have to do with anything? how is that relevant to narrative beyond crass marketing maneuvers?

these blogs, they say that they want to discover "new music", they all say they do. but that's rarely true. they all feed off of each other, a food chain of influence and a trade of cultural kineticism. i'm sure each one would love to be the one to say FIRST and have the mantle of kingmaker of discovering a new artist, but unless they exist in the upper echelon blogdom, i doubt that a persistent course in such action lacks the patience of attention for most part-time music bloggers. perhaps there are a few, i wouldn't know where to look, and even less on initiating their seduction.

we announce ourselves into a vacuum of indifference. is it that our work is unworthy? not forward thinking enough, lacking zeitgeist, or simply bad luck. or are we destined to be overlooked along with a legion of like-minded unknowable others only to be discovered by future hipsters 20-30 years henceforth as part of a renaissance of reappropriation and rediscovery? fuck that shit.

i try and create a noise upon the facebook machine. no one cares, no one cares, facebook is a narcissist's domain, especially among "friends", utterly impunible to marketing of but the cheapest and broadest of virility. it is only the blogs, they are the only hope, yet how does one penetrate such a dominion lacking the hype, interest, or appellations of sex and newness? Richard says we should make more music videos, which would be a fun endeavor, unfortunately one of our band members remains AWOL from all group activities. perhaps we ought to cast a stand-in?

we'll be playing a show on nov 26, just myself and tommi - we'll see what that's like. been a long time since we've done a show as a duo, hopefully we each learned something in the interim. we should have some physical CDs of PCN for sale as well.

shows, things, PCN

2011-11-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

we played a few shows, well one PARAE show, that was pretty fun. and then two halloween shows with our ex-bass boy corey (sans jimo) doing Misfits cover sets. the parae show with jimo was our standard 10 song set, and it was pretty blazing. the Misfits sets with corey were a complete mess, but a lot of fun to do, low stakes and all!

tommi and i are still working on the cover painting for Post-Camp/Nonplussed? i've done a lot of the base work, it just up to tommi to finish the actual detailing. it looks really cool, it just needs to be finished already!

we don't have any shows booked at the moment, but something will probably turn up soon. really just trying to get the word out online about the PCN album.

POST-CAMP / NONPLUSSED?

2011-09-14T22:20:00.000-07:00

our new album POST-CAMP / NONPLUSSED? is finished and being mastered this week. it is 15 songs recorded over the past year and it is just under 39 minutes in length. we're still assembling the artwork and cover, but we plan to put out a very limited CD release in October, along with a digital release on Bandcamp, and itunes / amazon as well. we would love to put it out on vinyl, but that just isn't monetarily feasible or realistic right now. we have too many boxes of failure piled up in the apartment as it is. we will be playing some shows around the release, and they're going to count. whatever happens, this one is special.

current conditions

2011-08-21T17:49:00.000-07:00

things are not so good these days, not sure what is happening with the band. it may all be falling apart. if such, material for a record is finished, and those of us who remain will figure out what is next...and then we evolve into something else.

think and die thinking fest

2011-08-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

we played day 1 of the think and die thinking festival in san jose this past friday. the turnout was a bit lower than we expected, but it was a pretty cool event. we played:

the revolting youth
hitchhiker
i want to have fun
the host
what is beauty.
love 2.0
die young
sex n bones
the tall man
we're breaking up

it didn't feel like we made much of an impression, at least not to me. the set was a bit haphazard (though we played solidly), as the stage was composed of big wooden blocks that kept coming apart, causing pieces of the drums to fall into the cracks. the other bands were cool, though it was dominated by these kind of neo grunge indie rock bands. it's a bit weird to see 90s rock being such a heavy influence these days. can't really say that i've seen anyone improving on it yet...

july 3 show

2011-07-04T13:51:00.000-07:00

we played a show yesterday afternoon out in the hot sun of west oakland, and it was pretty great, aside from the crazy drug addled guy who had hair clips in his beard (channeling rap-like poetry a la joaquin phoenix). we were second, and after tinkering with the PA played:

hitchhiker
i want to have fun
the host
what is beauty
sex n bones
the revolting youth & the hipster queen
love 2.0
die young
the tall man
we're breaking up

we're still finishing up the next batch of songs, they should probably be up here on the website by the middle of this month (july) at the latest as ep3. BIG SHOW on July 15th @ Hotel Utah - mandatory attendance for SF people plz!

it's t-shirt time!

2011-05-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

we're making more t-shirts, black ones specifically, as those seem to be the popular ones. again, each one is unique and screen printed by hand by us.

radio show

2011-05-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

well we played the KZSU wednesday night live thing again last night. nice people. if you didn't hear it as it aired, then you never will. it was bad enough that i've been fighting the stomach flu, but after hearing what was broadcast...as was our experience before, the mix was very disappointing. certainly our playing was more miss than hit, but at least that hindrance was due upon ourselves and bound within our own control.

ep2

2011-04-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

ep2 is now up! the songs are all pretty damn hot, well maybe not the last one, but eh, i reserve the right to my own opinion? we decided to throw in a extra 5th song this time since we were running behind schedule (and it was already long since done). about the songs:

PURPLE & ORANGE - we wrote this pretty spontaneously in mid-march, as at one moment Jimo's delay pedal started seemingly at random to be conjuring up a loop which i then started riffing on the bass. ONE NOTE SONG! ha, almost. the title is vaguely a Boris reference. this was done all live except for the synth and vocal ephemera at the beginning.

THE HOST - so this is the Host, version 3. yes, we recorded this damn thing 3 times. the first time was when Corey was still with us about a year ago, but he never finished writing his part for the second half. oh Corey... then we tried again at some point last fall, but it became a complete fucking albatross, so Jimothy decreed that we dump that version too. this was recorded over two days a couple weeks ago. bass and drums and guitars all done live (with one edit near the end, cuz we ain't perfect), with more guitars and vocals overdubbed the next day. Tommi laments that this particular take lacks some special patented triplet drum fills, but otherwise it's pretty scorching and sounds about how we do it live.

OLDER BROTHER - this one i wrote i think last december or january and it came together pretty quickly and we recorded it in february. kind of an homage to the Juliana Hatfield song "My Sister," which is the first song i ever heard by her and still my favorite. not necessarily about an older brother of mine in any literal sense, though it could be read that way. then again, maybe i'm metaphorically the older brother?

SEX N' BONES (Shake Em'!) - another one that kind of spontaneously came together pretty quickly (except for the lyrics). as i recall, i started with the synth bass riff and we just built off of that. Tommi was adamant that we keep the song length to about two minutes, as our illustrious drummer has yet to build up the stamina for long term disco workouts. we're very happy with this one.

INSINCERITY - oh this silly little song is built off of some old chord progressions i had from a few years ago that never came together until now. Jimo handles 95% of the guitar here, and if you can't tell, he was very much enjoying himself. the vocals were a ridiculous choir to do, and i don't know why. i never really wrote a melody for the verses, so i had this pretty weird/cool harmony thing going, but it was a bit too monochromatic and unfortunately just wasn't working. so after doing that three different times (and almost throwing out my voice on the second occasion), on a lark the other day i started sing speaking it at rehearsal, and well...that was better than what we had before. i dunno, i'm not convinced this one is anything special, but Jimo likes playing it i guess. the noise stuff at the end was fun to do, as well as all the delay and shit we put on the guitars.

we did indeed play a show last week, and it was pretty tragic, as we got a bit too loaded before we played and apparently forgot how to play guitar. it was a bit of a weird one in general, very last minute and thrown together. oh well! y'all won't be seeing any video footage from that one.

new songs soon

2011-04-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

four more new songs coming in a few days once they're finished being mixed. they're pretty cool.

we have a show on 4/21 at the Big Gay Whse in SF, it's gonna be hot!

post-mordem on show @ voz de lucha

2011-03-27T16:57:00.000-07:00

we played second and the set was:

statement of intent
hitchhiker
what is beauty
the host
i want to have fun
do you wanna mess around?
die young
love 2.0
sex & bones (shake 'em)
we're breaking up

it was pretty cool. didn't make any money and didn't sell any records, but lots of people there hanging out dancing, slamming about, and enthused. heard there were some shit talkers in the back, sorry bro! guess we're too feminine for ya there buddy. the other bands were cool, though a bit monochromatic, as sound was a challenge in that space (yay Sunn and Orange saving the day via pure volume output alone!)

four new songs coming in April when they're good and ready. forthcoming shows pending/tba.

the show on 2/10/11

2011-02-12T23:40:00.000-08:00

was awesome. we had a good time, almost all our friends came out, and there were some crazy drunks who were hella down to party, yay! some video is up on the new youtube page, and we played:

the host (with extended intro)
what is beauty
i want to have fun
hitchhiker
sing pretty or die!
older brother
die young
love 2.0
we're breaking up

yay to the other bands that played, even if maybe one of them didn't stick around, oh well! =P

recording continues at it's usual pace, we have A LOT of new songs, and A LOT of new ideas. looking at setting up more shows in the coming months out of town and doing whatever we can to do whatever we can, cuz hey, i might not be too pretty and have a big honking nose, but at least not all of our songs are Madonna rip offs. not that there's anything wrong with that.

new songs up!!!

2011-02-07T22:40:00.001-08:00

four new songs up! see the main page, if you didn't already.

DIE YOUNG - You wait by the sea, perched upon the rocks in the dead of night, waiting as he watches from afar. This yearning deep inside, for something more, a meaning, a sign, anything but oblivion, and silently he laughs. What would you sacrifice, what could you even offer? And still…what did you ever even do?

LOVE 2.0 - Keiko and Eurydice were two young girls in love, but tragedy struck when young Eurydice was killed in a terrible terrible accident. However, her parents hire super-scientists to resurrect a clone, and now Keiko must contend with a specter of love that has no memory of her or their youthful affair. Is she really even the same girl? Main title theme of Japanese Anime series circa 1982-83.

WHAT IS BEAUTY - A punchline, not a question. A surf anthem for the sharks and the jellyfish; octopus is contemplating an answer with dead stars in his eyes from the edge of the bar, in hours of grand desperation.

"HITCHHIKER" BY THE POLAROIDS - The year is 2069, and the humans had forgotten simple pleasures of the flesh. The Polaroids pay folk tribute to legendary robot rock band ANDY AND THE DROIDS, A.I. that learned how to orgasm and retaught the humans.

adventures in portland and seattle

2011-01-27T17:05:00.000-08:00

well we went to portland and seattle last weekend. it cost way too much money to rent a van and pay for gas, especially since we're all unemployed musicians, but we had a reasonably good time as it was. well not really in portland, as the show we played was bunk. the other bands selfishly made us play last, at 1am, as most of the audience had bounced as we are an unknown quantity in that town. it was a pretty fucked up situation, i highly doubt we will be playing any shows with any of them ever again or doing them any favors. seattle on the other hand was awesome, as our friend ursula set up a show specifically for us and we got to play with her awesome band MY POSSE DON'T DO HOMEWORK. everyone in seattle was super nice and receptive, and we even got some video of the show that we'll be putting up on the internets soon.

as for recordings, well we've been working on stuff at a steady pace, though as usual we're not meeting the deadlines that we set for ourselves. however, we're in the process of redesigning the site, and should have some new tracks up within the week. a new bio is up already, and we'll have a new logo and some new pictures up soon also.

hard at work mixing

2010-12-04T23:06:00.000-08:00

we've been hard at work all week recording the missing bits and pieces and fine tuning mixes, trying different things, messing about with EQs and terribly terribly boring stuff all like that in order to get these four songs we have up and done for all five of you to hear. they are coming along, it's just always a challenge in so many ways. if only we didn't have full time jobs and other such ridiculous distractions. regardless, i they sound amazing, and i think all 5 of you will be very very pleased. my ears are ringing, and soon will be yours!

singles

2010-11-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

hey, fuck - haven't updated this in awhile. we're supposed to be posting two new songs every month, but we're running late with November. I was having vocal difficulties for most of september and october, so my voice was all fucked up and i couldn't sing. found some chinese herbs and i'm mostly better now, but jimo has been pretty sick with a cold for awhile also. anyway, we've got songs MOSTLY done, and i think we may end up posting a double virtual 7" for free once December rolls around. they're all the best stuff we've ever done thus far, so yeah.

in the meantime, check out our current new songs posted back in October:

we're breaking up
AND
i want to have fun

that show on aug 29th

2010-09-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

we played:

GO (intro)
the Host
what is beauty
i want to have fun
statement of intent
sing pretty or die!
love 2.0
do you wanna mess around?
die young
we're breaking up

it was ok. the other two bands weren't very really our thing, kinda butch. some people came, thank you. we did alright.

we're doing an acoustic radio thing with PIRATE CAT RADIO on OCT 17th 6-8pm!

changes

2010-08-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

some changes been happening. corey is on administrative leave from the band for the time being. it's a amicable decision, freeing jimo, tommi, and i to pursue some different directions a bit more aggressively, and freeing corey to go play with many other bands that will most likely not be worthy of his mighty bass prowess. this is not a permanent departure, though we can not say as to when corey will be returning to the group on a full time basis. as for now, tommi, jimo, and i will be moving forward continuing to brainwash the masses.

report on the show at amnesia

2010-06-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

we played a show at Amnesia this past Saturday night. it went very well for the most part, other than we played first and the crowd was pretty sparse (the later crown started arriving around 9:45). anyways, the old homeless dude that is always in the club absolutely hated us, muttering that we sucked and needed to get off the stage to one of buddies, so yeah, fuck him - guess we were doing something right. we were definitely the odd band out, as the rest of the bands were more psychedelic and less song oriented. pretty sure none of the other bands liked us. also pretty sure that the tokio hotel shirt i wore alienated even more the random hipsters in the audience. these kids today can't even comprehend irony on multiple levels. such poorly schooled hipsters, it makes us from the old guard so very very disappointed. they just stare perplexed! we played:

what is beauty
statement of intent
the escapist
i want to have fun
she can't understand me
don't you want to play with me?
love 2.0
i'm a man
do you wanna mess around?
sing pretty or die!
the host

lets talk about the other bands! dominique leone was pretty cool, he had a couple xylophones and three woodwinds accompanying his laptop and delayed vocals. pretty reasonable approach for something held together by a laptop. we all kind of agreed that more live percussion and an electric bass player would have benefited the ensemble. all and all, it was good trancy stuff, my mileage varied from tune to tune. Heguma we didn't really watch, but we could hear them from the green room downstairs. i actually really liked it, good ambient sleepy time guitar drones with vocals, reminded me a bit of flying saucer attack. the other guys weren't so into it. sun araw didn't do anything for me, at all. just didn't seem fleshed out, a drummer could have helped. i found it primitive and too improvised. jealousy is different each time i see him. the first time i really like him, the second i was really drunk. this time he was playing shronk guitar with a drummer. i didn't care for it, but jimo said he dug the guitar playing.

anyway, here's a video of us from the show!

report on show last night 5/20/10 @ the stud

2010-05-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

we played:

the escapist
do you wanna mess around?
statement of intent
don't you want to play with me?
i'm a man
scum
what is beauty
the host
blood and ice

first part of the set sounded good and was really tight. then some kind of electrical issues started occurring when we got to the new song, what is beauty, and my amp and the amp corey was borrowing started shorting out. they were both on the same circuit, and they just both started cutting out. the rest of our set was shakey after that and kind of bummed a couple of the guys out. people said we had a lot more clarity than before (for that space - the stud), and the vocals really came thru (not that we could hear them, as we were onstage behind the PA without any stage monitors). anyways, i thought we played really quite well, even though we ended up cutting two songs from the set ending somewhat discouraged. again, we had some true believers up front, but it seemed like we either alienated the rest of the crowd away, or they were just there for the other bands and couldn't really give two shits about us. whatever, fuck it. the struggle continues.

pirate cat radio reviewed TINNITUS

2010-05-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

Pirate Cat radio, the pirate radio station here in SF reviewed our record TINNITUS. Check it out. They said:

Somehow it makes sense that if Punk Rock can get revival after revival, then Post-Punk should be able to as well. PARAE manage to conjure up all the great college radio sounds circa 1981-84 or so when it seemed like Post-Punk would save us all from New Wave. Do you believe in the Westworld?

Still never seen Westworld. Wonder if it's better than Waterworld...

two shows in one week

2010-04-12T17:48:00.001-07:00

we played two shows last week. the first one was at the Knockout, with Moccretro and Th Mrcy Hot Sprngs. that show was awesome. decent turnout all around, two fantastic bands that we all LIKE A LOT, and generally a good time.

the second one was at Sub/Mission, and it was kinda bullshit. we didn't really know the bands we were playing with, but they were all nice people and such, and i think we'd probably play with any of them again if asked. unfortunately the venue was crap. we had a mixed experience with the venue when we played there in february, but did our best to have a good attitude about it at the time. turns out Sub/Mission is a PAY TO PLAY type venue, which i had no idea about. $350 gets you 4hrs at the space on a friday night. it's a big nice space, with outdoor smoking out back, and it purports to be ALL AGES. what yr $350 doesn't get you is a sound tech or a decent PA. oh and yr show has to be over at Midnight. our people didn't turn out for that gig, as apparently i guess the venue has developed a bad reputation around town, for burning bands i'd assume. we literally had people who were going to come out that night and then decided against it when they found out where it was. as someone said to corey, "someone is paying for you guys to play..." $350 is just a fucked up amount to ask for. if i had known ahead of time that there was a "pay to play" arrangement going on, we probably wouldn't have done the gig, as we're pretty over playing at venues around town that exploit the musicians. especially when they're making plenty of money at the bar (that probably doesn't have a proper liquor license) and also taking a percentage of the door. anyway, not trying to trash talk anyone here, but damned that was a shitty arrangement for a gig, where everyone worked hard and walked away with no money, and on top there was attitude from the staff all night long. oh well, whatever.

anyway, we're working on new songs, gonna be doing some more recording. hopefully playing again soon!

recording again

2010-03-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

we've been recording again, this time for a proposed 7" ep (not that we've sold anywhere near enough records of tinnitus to justify such an endeavor). oh well, we're moving ahead anyways cuz we're excited about the songs. two of them are leftovers we're re-recording from the tinnitus era, one is re-purposed from corey's wildmen/archrivals days, and the other two are brand new. we're about halfway through recording, and everything has been moving along very quickly with first and second takes. above is a picture of corey doing vocals in our new rehearsal room.

last night we played a show

2010-02-25T14:59:00.000-08:00

we played:

statement of intent
do you wanna mess around?
dead roses
sing pretty or die!
don't you want to play with me?
S.C.U.M.
i'm a man
no questions, no answers
anal fixation
the host (working title)

the space (Sub-Mission) was really big and cool. too bad turn out was low, wish we had gotten confirmation of the gig more in advance, as we weren't able to heavily promote it the way i had initially planned. the PA was pretty awful unfortunately, low vocal levels and lots of feedback coming off the mics. it's definitely a space with A LOT of potential though, and we'd be into playing there again. the other bands were cool (though again we were the weird one), and we sold a couple records. our most consistent and stress-free show so far.

we're going to be doing some recording and try to shoot a music video in the next two weeks before Corey leaves to go on tour with the Saucy Jacks for most of March. figure if we can get some tracks started before he leaves, it'll give us something to work on while he's gone. our next shows will be in April.

(((tinnitus)))

2010-02-23T11:19:00.000-08:00

it's been a busy couple of weeks. we got our records and cds in at the beginning of the month, and we've been slowly trickling them out into the world. in fact, our record is available for purchase at these SF bay area stores:

Streetlight Records (SF)
Amoeba Records (SF)
Amoeba Records (Berkeley)

if yr at all enchanted with us, please pick up a copy from one of those fine establishments. if you can't find it in the racks, ask a sales person, 'aight!

here are some lovely pictures of us:

we're playing a show tomorrow night @ Sub-Mission Gallery (mission @ 18th st). it's all ages, and it's kind of our record release show. we're pretty excited!

feb 2nd

2010-01-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

feb 2nd is the semi-official release date for the cd and vinyl of our new record, not that it means that much. we're supposed to get the goods shipped in on the 1st, so that's pretty exciting. we got the test pressings of the vinyl and they sound pretty great, i will put up some pictures later on. CDs will be $10, and VINYL (which includes the a CD) will be $15. we would very much like to be able to sell the damned things for cheaper, but it just doesn't seem feasible with numbers and costs and such.

we're still working on finishing up Buffie's record. six of the songs are finalized, it's just the last three that have been a little troublesome. but we recorded a few things last night, guitars and noise made with the kaoss pad, so everything that was missing should be in place now.

we've been working on some new songs that i think we're all pretty excited about. for the most part its all up-tempo catchy poppy rock stuff. Corey has a lot of new ideas and riffs, and Jimo has been working with his new toys, which include a boss digital delay pedal and an almost-new Orange Thunderverb 200 amp. i've started fucking around with Jimo's q-tron pedal and found a pretty cool sound for guitar, just not sure how or when to incorporate it yet. anyways, we've got five songs picked out to do for an 7" ep, that is if we sell any copies of TINNITUS. two of them are leftovers from TINNITUS, one is a redux of song Corey wrote for his short lived garage band from last year, the Arch-Rivals, and the other two are brand new (one of them exists only as an awesome title so far - BABY, BABY, BABY...BANG! BANG! BANG!). my goal is to get these five tunes recorded by March and if we sell some records, we can have a 7" out by late spring. we'll see!

buy our record in mp3?

2010-01-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

so the TINNITUS record is now available on mp3 store across the internet, which is kind of a weird feeling. we paid $50 to a website called TUNECORE (to which we uploaded the album) to distribute the album to all the different MP3 retailers they have available. so it's up on AMAZON, LALA, RHAPSODY, probably iTUNES (i haven't checked to see if it's up there yet, but they do indeed have separate iTUNES stores for different countries, like Japan, New Zealand, Europe, etc. and it'll be available on all of them). what this actually means though is jack shit. here we've got this record that we've worked very hard on, and like it's super cool that it's available to some random person in say Japan, but it's not like some random kid in Japan knows or has a reason to know it exist. and even as such, an MP3 is such a shitty and undesirable format for "purchasing" and "owning" music as far as i am concerned. i just can't imagine EVER paying money for an MP3 file under any circumstances. there was like one time where i almost brought myself to do it in order to get what turned out to be an easily attainable BORIS b-side (floorshaker - that song is awesome), but i routinely mock any of my friends who admit to having purchased an MP3. especially if they could have purchased the CD or VINYL at a real store or online. it just seems like a shoddy disposable product most of the time. it's my understanding that the different retailers tend to offer differing terms of MP3 quality, as what we uploaded to the TUNECORE were the Master Wavs straight from the CDR. from what i know, iTUNES gets away with murder selling low quality files that sound worse than a 2nd generation dubbed cassette tape. i mean, 128kbps just sounds really crummy, no matter what magic AAC crap they claim to do. i really don't know what LALA or AMAZON or RHAPSODY or even whatever the fuck it is that calls itself NAPSTER these days actually offer. but if one is inclined to purchase an MP3 version of our record, i would recommend looking at these aforementioned various retailers and choosing the one that offers the highest kbps. and then pirate it to all yr friends! cuz that's how i find out about new music, shit!

so yeah, buy our record in MP3 for under $8??

or, CD and VINYL coming soon!!

end of recording

2010-01-04T11:20:00.000-08:00

we finished recording Buffie's record last night. it consists of nine songs and is about 40 minutes long. it took nine days to get it done, with the majority of Jimo's lead guitar parts being done yesterday and the day before. recording vocals was not too tough, we only made Buffie cry once, so yeah. actually i got to be a bit of a tough slog towards the end, as i was very adamant that we finish yesterday on schedule. unfortunately i ended up a bit grouchy towards the end, as some of the songs presented some unanticipated difficulties. whereas we thought that the simple blues song Movie Star would be one of the easiest to track, it ended up being very challenging to capture the right feel for the tune since it was so structurally limited. i don't know how many damned takes we did of Buffie, Tommi and I trying to play the song through in one take, but it just took forever. Jimo also thought he had the lead guitar parts "in the bag," but it turned out to be far more arduous, as he realized that he hadn't played any heavy blues since becoming part of PARAE. the other song that gave us trouble near the end was Electricity, which actualy was very seamless except for one vocal hook part. Tommi had the brilliant idea that Buffie should spell out the title of the song, which she absolutely refused to do under any circumstances. so after trying a multitude of different things, eventually we settled on her hollering a nasty primal scream each time through the Scrotum Smasher. i supposed it works well enough...anyway, now all we gotta do is mix the damn thing, and we have about two weeks to do that. on the whole, i'm pretty proud of it and happy to have been involved with facilitating the recording process.

we're gonna be redesigning the website a bit in an effort to streamline some of the useless areas of it and make it look more in line with the artwork for the new TINNITUS record. we should be getting our test pressings of the vinyl any day now, and it should start popping up on MP3 retail sites after tomorrow (for whoever uses those things).

project buff buff

2009-12-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

for the past week and a half we've been working on Buffie's record. she's a good friend of mine from college and is out here for two and a half weeks to make an album with us. basically, tommi (drums), jimo (lead guitar), and i (bass) are acting as her backing band, and we spent the first six days with her rehearsing and learning her songs. this past saturday we started laying down drums, and after two days we have drums, bass, and rhythm guitar for five tracks out of the nine done. we're currently a little bit ahead of schedule, but i'm still imagining that it will be a tight crunch to finish recording, as we only have eight more days to finish before she leaves town. after that we'll have a couple weeks to mix, and she'll take it from there! i do believe she is open to entertaining offers from record labels, so if i must say so myself, aside from the powerful vocals and strong songwriting, her record is going to be awesome.

our new record TINNITUS will be available on all the various MP3 stores starting Tuesday January 5th. it probably won't show up on itunes or amazon until a bit later, as apparently the lead time for these things is 2-4 weeks depending on the retailer. but we made jan 5th the official mp3 release date since that's corey's birthday, so happy birthday to him and his big broken ankle. skateboarding accident xmas day, haha... so if yr the type of person that is inclined to purchase MP3s, the album will be there in that medium for you to purchase and then pirate accordingly! for all you normal people, the album is still on track to be here in late January on Vinyl and CD. we should be getting our vinyl test pressings next week, so we're super excited about that!

we are ever so vain in our pursuit of folly

2009-12-12T15:55:00.001-08:00

OK! we delivered the master of our new record TINNITUS to the manufacturer yesterday, Pirates Press, which is based here in SF. me and Tommi and Jimo all went in and met with our sales person and it was a super cool experience, nothing but positive vibes. we all left with a good feeling about it all, and Damon the guy there had so much information about different types of vinyl and printing options and more than answered all of our questions. so other than the fact that the damn cd/records are gonna cost a shit ton of money, they'll at least make for a fine looking artifact!

we had the record mastered by Timothy @ Stereophonic sound again (he did the Meta Ambigue 2cd thing), cuz he's super nice and willing to work with us nitpickers, and oh yeah, cheap too, yay. we're all quite pleased with the final mastered sound, basically pumping up our mixes with more low end heft and overall punch without brick-walling the fuck out our tunes (as is currently the custom/trend - loudness wars sux).

we were also pretty damn meticulous with the artwork. i would have really liked to have made the LP a folding gatefold, but it was just gonna be too much money (it's already more than we can afford considering the tenuous nature of our theoretical popularity potential). it's been brought to my attention that there are indeed a few people out there who may harbor a general excitement about our band, and per chance may even desire to purchase a record or cd. i remain ever skeptical of the existence of such persons, but look forward to the opportunity of being pleasantly surprised!

we're playing one last show of the year, again at the Stud, cuz they let us do whatever we want and it's our party, so we'll cry if we want to, next Thursday Dec 17th. it's going be x-mas themed, and should be pretty epic. we've written our very own fucked up christmas carol (the same one we talked about doing last year, but with revised lyrics), and it sounds like Ween playing Christian Rock. it's gonna be so very very wrong. we'll also be doing a cover of my favorite Misfits song, cuz it took about 20 seconds to learn and is awesome.

after that, Jimo and I will spend the next 3-4 weeks recording an album for one my dearest old friends from college, Buffie Roseanne. she's coming out here from NYC and we're doing it for the glory of it all. and because she is awesome. she hid her voice from me for so long!

aside from that, we've got 6-7 new songs we're currently working on, and looking at booking shows in the new year and doing some guerrilla touring, as the record should be here by late January for us to hawk.

the KZSU radio show

2009-11-05T17:13:00.000-08:00

so we went down to Stanford University and played on the college radio last night! it was pretty cool. we basically had an hour to play but only 40 minutes of material properly prepared. we tried our best to pad things out, but still ended up blasting through all of our tunes at breakneck speed. i was under the impression that there would be some sort of interview interspersed, but the host - the big chief - while a nice enough guy, really didn't have a whole lot of real questions to ask, aside from when's yr next show, what's the band name mean. funny how he saved a lot of the more in depth questions for after the show when we were off the air and breaking shit down. anyways, it was pretty cool, we ended up padding out the set with a bunch of shit corey didn't want to play, as he suddenly became the voice of professionalism once we were on the radio, haha. but we managed to bash through them anyways without crashing and burning. i even managed to consciously eliminate all swear words while singing, and then twice accidently drop F bombs on the air between songs - oops! anyway, we played:

statement of intent
don't you want to play with me
the escapist
fear of death
no questions no answers
persona
sing pretty or die
do you wanna mess around
dead roses
scum
you don't love me anymore
anal fixation
-----
goodbye horses
barnacle carnival
369

everyone down there at the radio station was super cool and nice, and we even got a cd of our performance afterwards. from listening to a bit of it, all i can say is - oh those poor kids mixing us, i guess they tried their best. i realize now, we ought to simplify our sound for these live on the air radio show type deals, as the people mixing us we're doing it cold with no idea of how we're "supposed" to sound. and unfortunately, once they'd figure it out, we'd change everything for the next song. i think in the future jimo and i should limit ourselves to one or two guitar tones and volumes so that overall our sound will be more cohesive. also i wish i had remembered to ask for more reverb on the songs where i needed it. oh well!

sunn enforcer

2009-10-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

i got a new amp! off ebay! very exciting. it is a SUNN Enforcer from the early 80s. apparently only 100 or so of these were made. it definitely an upgrade from the albatross of the b52 at100. here are some pictures!

drinking 4 loco before the show...not a good idea

2009-10-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

we played EL RIO last night, and it was a pretty shit show. the sound guy had a bad attitude the whole time and was giving us negative vibes all night. the guys in the band that asked us to play (domestic electrics) were all really nice, and they brought in a good crowd. unfortunately that crowd (and part of ours) came after we played, cuz basically we had to start right at 8pm, which was ridiculously early. especially since there was no third band. it was just lame. bad experience, bad night. not fun. and we weren't playing coherently, so the whole thing kind of just became a big goof, or least it was for me. by the end of it i was laughing throughout my vocals, cuz shit was just going wrong and we were sounding so bad, so it was just totally fuck all, haha. i feel bad for our friends who came and had to watch us flame out in such an unexciting way.

anyways, it looks like EL RIO is another place we probably aren't going to play again (unless the circumstances are absolutely right). it just doesn't make sense for us to keep playing these shows with straight ahead MOR indie rock bands. it's not a crowd that is at all receptive to us. these are adults that are just there to see their co-worker's band play once every six months and otherwise don't give a shit about live music. it's just not something where we can cultivate an audience. i mean, generally i like to think that my attitude is that we should always play the best that we absolutely can and put on a awesome show, but after a certain amount of piss in the face - it comes down to - fuck it. ha! we suck tonight, bummer for you kids!

as for playing first, the benefits of playing last are far superior. i felt like such a dick by the end of the night, waiting to get paid while tommi and corey loaded out during the other band's encore (cuz they just refused to wait any longer). i mean, they were all nice guys, and it was their night, it just wasn't any fun to be there by the end of it.

oh yeah, we played:

statement of intent
don't you want to play with me
the escapist
no questions, no answers
dead roses
SCUM
do you wanna mess up the intro?
fear of death
goodbye horses (everybody loves that cover...)
sing pretty or die laughing thru the verses

report on the show last thursday 10/17

2009-10-19T15:33:00.000-07:00

we had an excellent turnout for our KIMOCHII party last thursday at the stud. i attribute it to the fact that it was the first show for each tiger butterfly and the glassines. people always come to your first show, haha. it's getting them to come back that's the tricky part! skeletal system also played, and they were excellent, probably my favorite of the evening. we finally hit around 1am, and were typically pretty loaded by that point, but i suppose we did our best. we played:

anal fixation (sound check - i forgot like half the words)
statement of intent
do you wanna mess around?
no questions no answers
don't you want to play with me?
the escapist
369
dead roses
she can't understand me
goodbye horses (q lazzarus cover, from silence of the lambs)
sing pretty or die!

i couldn't hear my guitar for much of the set as i had to play through my old crate amp that we usually allocate for the keyboards. we had an excellent practice the night before and in a moment of drunken excitement i spilled modelo especial all over my accursed b-52 amp. not sure if it straight up died or not, figured best to turn the damn thing off before it shorts out or i get electrocuted. anyway, that's being repaired...so i bought an old rare SUNN off ebay in celebration! cuz really, i've had enough fuckery from that damn b-52. goddamn shitty sounding amp anyways.

we're still working on the artwork for the record at a snails pace and letting some friends give us some feedback about track sequence and such. so, delayed as always...

oh yeah, the laptop got fixed. some kind of problem with the logic board, whatever that is. it's been acting a little wonky, the hard drive thinks it has 8gb that i know it didn't have before and crashes once it's filled up past those 8gb (cuz i got too much crap on the damn thing).

it all might be gone

2009-10-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

my laptop died friday night rather mysteriously. i took it to the apple store on saturday, and they were like - hmmm, dunno what's wrong, gonna have to ship it to a third party repair place, that'll be $310 please, oh and another $99 if you want us to try and save everything on your hard drive - plus tax! so there's a small chance that all of the 24 bit final mixes of the record are gone along with the raw tracks to half the album. kinda fucking shitty. there are only two 16bit copies of the record out there on CD - corey has one, and jerry has the other. all those times tommi kept telling me to back everything up and i just didn't get around to it yet...ha!

in other news, we're playing a show, at the stud again, this thursday the 15th. we're under-rehearsed as usual as corey has been sicker than hell for the past week with swine flu / strep throat or something. my goal is for us to not be completely fucking wasted, as we're playing last (AGAIN), so i suppose i'll have to be the drink nazi all night long. good times! anyway, that's about it for now...

it's finally almost done

2009-09-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

last night we recorded corey's final parts for the record. it's took awhile and a dozen or so beers, but we got some really good bass lines and vocals done. my goal is to have the damn thing done by the end of the weekend (but it'll probably take longer to get final mixes).

on tuesday we did a photoshoot for the record where me and corey and jimo were zombies chasing tommi thru a graveyard. here's some pictures:

we're going to probably make it look like it's a old B movie poster or something.

other than that, we're going to be putting the rest of the artwork together over the next couple of weeks, and will probably start playing more shows again in october!

KIMOCHII

2009-07-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

we had our first night of our new KIMOCHII party at the Stud last night, and it went very very well, as we broke even, yay! people came, they danced, they ate cake, it was all in all, pretty awesome. other than my camcorder crapping out halfway through the night, and some minor technical difficulties with the DJ mixer, everything came together, and people even ate most of the big costco cake i brought, haha!

the girl with violent arms played first, and i caught most of Mario's set with my camcorder. i really enjoyed his performance, and like me, a couple people also mentioned that we wished had gone on longer. 123picnic played next, and it was good to play a show with them again, and they had a new drummer and 2nd guitarist. we played third and the set was:

anal fixation
statement of intent
don't you want to play with me
the escapist
fear of death
no questions no answers
dead roses
you don't love me anymore
do you wanna mess around
sing pretty or die

we played pretty well, as we weren't too drunk. tommi did really good for having worked a 14 hour day on two hours of sleep the night before and only one energy drink. i think we lost the audience once we got to the ballad, so probably no more ballads anymore unless they're at the end of the set. we want to keep our shows high energy throughout and keep the smokers dancing.

anyway, we'll be doing this KIMOCHII party now every third thursday of the month @ the Stud, very exciting!

you missed it, but we got some video

2009-07-17T17:40:00.001-07:00

so we played the stud last night, and for the first time in a bit of awhile, it was good one! we played:

sing pretty or die
statement of intent
the escapist
persona
don't you want to play with me
dead roses
do you wanna mess around
fear of death
no questions no answers
anal fixation

and it was pretty rock solid up until anal fixation, cuz of course, we had to fuck up the easiest song! light leaks were really cool, and so were the ferocious few, even though there was some retarded drama between both of those bands. anyway, we kicked back and drank and hung out with friends and stuff. later we tried to catch last call at aunt charlies, were the door guy had the gall to charge us cover at 1:40am, so yeah, fuck that tubesteak party. last time we hit that up. plus the additional drink kinda brought out the craziness, but eventually we made it home with only minor bruises. video will be up on the youtube shortly. gotta go stop by the stud and get my extension cord back!

more recording and a show on thursday

2009-07-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

so we have a show on thursday at the stud. if yr reading this, y'all should come.

we've been doing a lot of recording, in fact all of the drums are now DONE, yay! we still have a bit of percussion and electronic beats that we plan to do, but the meat of the drums are all done. in fact, we've got the new version of 369 almost done, it just needs bass and some percussion. recording it was much easier this time than the previous version that jimo and i agonized over (polishing a turd, if you will). it's faster, more disco, and more streamlined. we did the drums for hibernating rattlesnakes last night, and i am quite pleased. it will be the longest song on the record and features a 45 secord or so drum break. the new version of dead roses is pretty much mixed, and corey's other song the mole just needs finished lyrics.

slowly moving towards gathering artwork and an album title.

recording last night

2009-06-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

so last night we finally got around to actually recording. we did the business live, with the four of us all playing together, and our friend Em joining us on tambourine. we did Corey's two songs, the Mole and Dead Roses (which we were re-recording, as we deemed the previous version from February to not be good enough). it took about five takes on each tune before we got one that we were happy with, as the mic on Jimo's amp cut out on the first couple of takes for the Mole (fucking shitty xlr cables). anyway, we basically did all of Dead Roses live, over-dubbing the vocals and backing vocals (on which Tommi hollered louder than i've ever thought capable) and a 2nd guitar part Jimo wrote. i think it's going to sound so much better than the previous attempt, as we're all playing together, the sounds of the instruments are a bit rougher and dirtier, and our playing is more focused and tighter. the previous version just sounded too clean, but not lived in enough. with the Mole, Corey's still gotta finish writing all the words, and Jimo still has to record his guitar solo thing (which i think we're gonna do tonight). after all the bullshit with recording the Mole, mics cutting out and my hand cramping up from playing the bass, we finally got a good take - but lo and behold, one of the drum over-head mics had some kind of power surge or some shit that caused it to clip really terribly three times during the first chorus, so i had to pull some voodoo in order to save the take. hopefully the voodoo will be for the most part inaudible in the final mix, but...fucking murphy's law.

we've still got two songs to go...running a little bit behind schedule, but i figure we should have a record by the end of august.

oh yeah, we're playing a show! thursday july 16th @ the stud!

status report

2009-06-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

still rehearsing, soon to be recording. we finished no questions no answers awhile back...not sure if it's going up on the internets or not. we're going to re-record dead roses, cuz i want a rawer sound for that song. basically just arranging these last three songs for the record, which is taking a fair bit of time. hopefully we can get started recording them in the next week and then things will move a bit faster. my goal is to have everything tracked by the end of the month.

we still have no idea what the record is going to be called, nor any of the artwork put together. been trying to take steps in those directions...

also working on getting some show together around town for july and august. would like to put together a week long tour once the record is done, but it ain't done, so no movement on that front yet...

2 shows, one week

2009-05-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

so we played 2 shows this past week. the first one was opening up for two star spark at their cd release show. not a good show for us. we fucked up persona and it turned into an argument onstage between me and corey. wasn't cute.

then we played a free show at thee parkside yesterday/saturday afternoon. it's amazing, people won't come to free shit. it was all ages too. we played to bewildered looks of boredom. except for our friends that come to every show and heckle us. we did in fact record the show, so once that gets a good looking at, we'll probably put it up maybe? jimo says we sounded pretty good. i thought we played solid, not that it seemed to matter, ha! but we're getting there anyways.

we played at thee parkside:

statement of intent
persona
the escapist
don't you want to play with me?
dead roses
the dichotomy
do you wanna mess around?
anal fixation
no questions, no answers
sing pretty or die!

we're going to record the band's arrangement of jimo's no questions, no answers this week, and then i would like, a song a week for the next 4 weeks. that probably won't pan out though...never does. oh well!

currently...

2009-05-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

a couple of finished new songs are up on the myspace. the dichotomy was the one that took forever, and it sounds about as good as the band can make something like that sound at this point in time, so yeah, which i've accepted as ok. the other one, statement of intent, that's the one where jimo wrote the riffs, and i did the words. we tried to do it all live and just overdub the vocals, but ended up having to overdub the guitar afterward too. that one was kinda hard to mix at first, but i think it came out really good. it's not 100% perfect performance wise, but %95 ain't too bad i suppose, as long as the energy is there.

we've been working up a few more new ones, two are jimo songs, and one is by corey. not sure how many are going on the record. guess we'll sit down and listen to them all together once there are 15 and see what the general feeling is. we don't have anything resembling an album title, album artwork, nor quite enough money to put out the kind of elaborate vinyl product that we envision...so we'll see how long it takes. maybe july?

we are playing some shows though - this sunday May 10th with Two Star Spark (which is their record release show, a record i just happened to record and sorta produce!) @ Kimo's, and then Saturday May 16th at Thee Parkside which is a FREE ALL AGES deal. maybe we should pass around a collection plate, cuz the venue is only paying us in beer. i'm not against playing a free show, but i would like to make enough money to break even on the rental van.

been talking about getting a DV camera with Jimo helming the project parae - the tv show. so yeah...we'll see what comes out of that!

herrachick show

2009-04-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

well we played a show and scared off half the audience by the first song again. fucking people 21+, they've just heard and seen it all already, haven't they? we were pretty noisy. i don't think we made much of an effort to properly soundcheck our acoustics to the wetness of the room at the eagle. it all definitely sounded pretty washed out from where i was on stage. whereas the band before us, aim low kid, they had a much cleaner sound than i had anticipated based off of their myspace jams. whatever. they played for like an hour or something...i hollered and cheered for them to warm up my voice, which pretty much blew out 3/4 of the way thru our set, cuz i couldn't hear shit. anyway, we played:

do you wanna mess around
persona
don't you want to play with me
the escapist
eve white/eve black (siouxsie cover)
fem politique
dead roses
statement of intent
anal fixation
sing pretty or die
teenage werewolf (that fucking cramps cover, which we failed to even complete cuz we were pretty drunk and the guitars were totally out of tune, haha. a total fucking abortion)

anyway, it was a successful show i guess, cuz we got hella paid, so yay, more funds for the record, i guess. but the whole thing left me kinda bummed. the other guys seemed fine with everything, i dunno, i guess i was expecting something more? everyone at the eagle seemed cool and nice, except for one douchbag patron in leather who bitched about having to pay cover as we loaded in and shot us some nasty words. so we dedicated dead roses to him.

moving along

2009-04-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

so we think we've finished mixing the song that has been a total pain in the ass. not sure if it's any good though. we're sitting on it for a few days and soliciting some opinions on it for the time being.

gonna record the next one later this week at some point. it's called statement of intent, jimo wrote the music and i did the words. it's very riff driven and is my usual musician based meta commentary style horseshit. we may try to record it live (and just overdub my vocals), as it's another under two minute barn-burner.

our next show is april 15th @ the eagle tavern here in SF. it's $10, or $5 if yr in drag, 21+ and we play around 11:30pm. come out!!

that show in san jose...

2009-03-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

was fun! it was at this place called the smile factory, which was really just a rehearsal room in the back of an old thrift store that had been converted into a tax office, or something. anyway, we rented a minivan drove down once everyone was off work. corey's mom and her partner were there, haha. unfortunately they couldn't stay for the show, cuz it was getting late. anyway, we hung out, watched the other bands, dranks some sparks and tecate and had a pretty good time! we played:

don't you want to play with me?
do you wanna mess around?
persona
fem politique
the escapist
you don't love me anymore
dead roses
i was a teenage werewolf (the cramps)
anal fixation
sing pretty or die!

the set was pretty solid, no major fuckups, though tommi insists that many drum fills were all messed up - but none of us noticed, ha! i could have done the cramps cover better, cuz i re-heard the original yesterday, and my vocal take was soooo vanilla compared to the original. oh well! all of our songs came off pretty good, a couple people kept hollering "do you wanna mess around" at us afterwards, so yeah.

sunday we spent hanging out and working on the mix for the dichotomy song, and eventually we went down to the studio to put things back together and record some percussion type parts for the song. hopefully we'll get the mix close to finalized tonight or tomorrow and be done with the damn thing!

going to san jose

2009-03-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

so we're playing a show tomorrow night in san jose. i think we're all pretty excited to get out of san francisco, especially with the weather being so nice this weekend. it's an all ages show put on by a friend of jimo's at some new venue that may or may not be a house...we're not really sure. it's called the SMILE Factory. anyways, other than the hundred bucks it's gonna cost us to rent a van, it should be a total party.

as far as recording goes, we finally have got all of the major tracking done for the song that has been a real pain in the ass (the dichotomy). corey laid down his bass parts this past wednesday, and i honestly didn't think he'd have it together yet, but he brought his game proper. pretty much all that's left to do is mix it and add some auxiliary percussion. i've let jimo kind of take over with producing the direction of the song, cuz i kept getting lost, and had recorded a bunch of unnecessary bullshit keyboard and guitar parts. anyway, he's really kind of pushed the damn thing back into focus with burning it down to the essential rhythmic components. it'll still sound huge on some parts, but we're trying to focus on the rhythms of the drums and bass, with the guitars and synths being more secondary. plus, he's got some really fucked up guitar playing on it that he's pretty proud of.

after this weekend, we're gonna work on getting solid on a few more songs, and then see where we're at with what we've recorded so far and see if we wanna write a couple more songs or not for the record. i suspect we'll probably bash some shit out...

things we're working on

2009-03-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

so we got the new version of do you wanna mess around? up over on the myspace, and it sounds pretty fucking good. jimo and i are probably gonna do a remix/re-version of it with synths replacing all of the guitars just for shits and giggles (on top of the original bass and drums take). we were supposed to start that yesterday, but we got drunk on lemon drops made from the lemon tree we discovered in the back yard of our apartment building, and we ended up watching the movie stuck, which was pretty cool. been a bit hungover all day, sux.

anyway, we've been rehearsing over and over this god damned song i wrote called the dichotomy. it's been a really annoying and fucked up process for everyone in the band, but hopefully the end result will have been worth it. i basically wrote the song backwards, having only a few bass riffs that i wrote on the keyboard like two years ago, that have slowly been fleshed out into this labyrinthine suite-like arrangement. it's a bit of a mess, and corey has been very vocal in stating his opinion that the song sucks. but the more we rehearse it, the more it's starting to sound more parae, as in almost like real music. if it still sucks after we record it, then i guess he'll have been right, but jimo has been backing me up on this one. it's kinda like the blood brothers, public enemy, public image ltd, and miles davis all mixed together. poorly. talking about doing two versions of it, one stripped down live style with just vocals, guitar, bass, and drums, and one with all the needless bells and whistles, like queen on acid. hopefully it will be easier to record that it was to write and arrange. not sure when we'll start, as it's about 85% of the way there with the guys. maybe next week?

we've got several more songs that are written and arranged, it's just a matter of rehearsing them so that we're tight on them (and the recordings don't half ass suck). corey has a new song we've been jamming on, and jimo keeps threatening to write a song called hibernating rattlesnakes. oh yeah, he was supposed to do the lyrics to that last night while drunk...that didn't happen.

re-recording: do you wanna mess around

2009-03-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

last night we re-recorded do you wanna mess around. we were only about 80% happy with the original version, and of course it turns out that this new take is 100 times stronger! continuing with are no click tracks prerogative, we recorded the bass and drums together as a single take with jimo playing guitar along in the headphones (and tommi and corey pretty much nailed it on the second take). it just sounds SO MUCH BETTER, almost like a real band! after that, jimo and i obsessed over the guitars a bit, which was not too bad, at least until we ran out of beer. but i'm happy with all of my parts, haha! i got a really cool fuzz sound out of my death by audio pedal that i never get to use. and jimo got to use his q-tron a bit too! we're gonna do the vocals tonight after i get off work, and hopefully have it mixed by monday.

sing pretty or die!

2009-03-02T18:44:00.000-08:00

so we got a new song up, it's called SING PRETTY OR DIE! and we're pretty proud of it. jimo wrote most of the music on piano, i wrote the bridge on guitar, he sings the first part, and i sing the second part. it's basically about when yr hero's sell out, and do so very poorly. the initial inspiration came from a jaguar love show, they fucking suck. we recorded it a couple weeks ago very quickly over two days, and it was the first time we did a song without a click track. and what we learned is, we don't need no fucking click tracks anymore. they were actually holding us back! we finished mixing it over this past weekend and added a few guitar overdubs just to fill out the sound. anyway, we think it sounds pretty good!

report on the show at kimo's for tommi's b-day last night

2009-02-19T16:04:00.000-08:00

we got fucked up. it was tommi's birthday yesterday, and we all had a bit too much to drink before we played. so had the audience apparently, and they seemed pretty forgiving, haha. new killer daze, the band we share our practice space with, played first, and they were cool. i thought the sound guy should have mixed the vocals a little higher, but they were tight sounding, had a smoke machine and some imitation pyrotechnics which were fun. dadfag played second, and they were a lot of fun, i'm glad they played with us! we played:

don't you wanna play with me? (was kinda fucked up, but generally held together)
birthday suit (i invited jerry to come onstage and play with us, and corey was like SIKE! just kidding - and then i couldn't stop laughing the whole song)
the escapist (we didn't fuck this one up, yay!)
you don't love me anymore (somehow this came across alright too!)
do you wanna mess around? (we were a little shaky on this one, fucked up a transition)
dead flowers (corey's guitar was WAY too loud - oops!)
i was a teenage werewolf (cramps cover - i remembered all the words! went well for a song we learned less than a week earlier)
fem politique (smashed through this one)
sing pretty or die! (best thing we played all night...though i don't know if i was on key towards the end, couldn't hear shit in the monitors)
anal fixation (played this cuz we were nervous about the ending on persona, so we cut it. instead we fucked up the ending on this one, ha!)

anyway, it was a fun night, but load out was a real bitch, and it took like forever to get home. lots of our friends came out, yay!

report on the show at thee parkside last night

2009-02-05T12:57:00.000-08:00

so we finally played thee parkside last night. it came about when a week or so ago, and old co-worker of mine from the jazz club, Patricia, called me up and asked if we wanted to play a gig with her new band and a friend of her's that would be stopping though town while on tour. anyway, her new band, We've Been Robbed, played first. a bit of a mix of 90s alterna-indie rock, their first song reminded me a lot of the breeders. it was their first gig, and they had only just found a drummer a few days prior. but they were good, showed lots of potential once they get their sound tight!

we played second, our set was:

don't you want to play with me?
do you wanna mess around?
dead flowers
fear of death
sing pretty or die!
mongoloid (mangled and fucked up)
the escapist
you don't love me anymore
birthday suit
anal fixation

we started off real strong, btw this was our first show as a quartet. nick and jessica were at the show and nick was like, wait what bands is this? during the 2nd and 3rd songs. dead flowers is a new song that corey just wrote less than a week ago, and we're gonna fast track recording it in the next couple of days before he gets bored of it, haha. anyways, we were doing alright, but kinda stumbled through the bridge of our other new song, sing pretty or die! then david in the audience was like, play mongoloid, and so corey started the riff, and off we went even though we had already decided we weren't doing it cuz jimo didn't remember the chords and i couldn't remember all of the words. it was kind of a sucky rendition. anyway, we came back strong for the rest of the set and then got the hell off of the stage. c.gibbs played last and he did his folk type thing with acoustic guitar, a fuzz pedal, a looper, and some kind of wood block he hit with his foot to make a bass drum sound. he was really good! i mean the lyrics i didn't really pay attention to, but the guitar playing was very good and fun to watch. he was a super nice guy too.

anyway, our next show is in two weeks at kimos on tommi's birthday. we're playing with DADFAG and New Killer Daze (who we share our rehearsal space with). it'll be fun i think!

ciao jerry!

2008-12-29T11:49:00.000-08:00

jerry has left the band. it's all very amicable. both he and the rest of us had come to the decision that it was time to move forward as a four piece without him. we all value his contributions over the past year and wish him well and all that shit.

anyways, we're super excited about moving forward as a four piece. figure it'll be easier keeping everyone on the same page and also aid in having a more coherent live sound with less shit going on the whole goddamn time. jimo and i will be splitting keyboard duties as necessary rather than try and find a replacement. we reckon that four people is a good amount for a band to have, as it was, five just seemed to be a bit too much noisy sound. we plan to be A LOT more productive, with writing and recording, primarily getting the 2nd half of the new record figured out. we have like a half dozen songs that have just been sitting around, so we're ready to move!

videos up!

2008-12-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

videos r up from the show last friday!

post-partum bloody xmas

2008-12-20T15:33:00.000-08:00

so we did a show last night at el rio here in san francisco. we called it our bloody x-mas. there were 3 and a half bands, and there were supposed to be drag queens, but that didn't work out, unfortunately. tommi and i did bake a cake. a red velvet devil cake! anyway, we played with 123picnic, Deeper, and Corey's side band the Wildmen, with Walter Crasshole DJing.

123picnic and Deeper were really really good. Super glad to have played with them, hope to do so again in the future! we really tired to make the event a real party, Kristy from Deeper even brought balloons. unfortunately they ended up tied down due some policies at the venue or whatever. i dunno, they seemed unduly strict at the club last night, but whatever. like there was some drama at the end of the night with an ID, and it was just retarded. i really did not have the patience to deal with it.

anyway, we played:

do you wanna mess around?
birthday suit
don't you wanna play with me?
the escapist
persona
fear of death
undercover lover
fem politique
mongoloid (devo)
anal fixation

highlights included, my beloved pink furry guitar strap breaking after the first song!, constant electrocution from Corey's vintage Vox amp which isn't grounded!, Corey striping down into his underwear!, and the random dancing underwear guy in the audience! yeah, you missed it...boo! however, we did get the whole thing on tape. Nick was kind enough to film us, so all that good stuff will be going up on youtube so you can see why you should absolutely come to our next show - where we may be an even better band!

until then, we're taking a break until the end of the year, and then we're gonna finish recording the new album in January and get some more shows line up shortly after that!

112808 show

2008-11-29T21:48:00.000-08:00

so we played the retox last night. it was kind of a fiasco. the Gibbs invited us to play and they were awesome. so were the Prey from san diego. anyway, we played:

fem politique
the escapist
don't you wanna play with me?
persona
fear of death
undercover lover
do you wanna mess around?
birthday suit
anal fixation

i thought we played pretty good. anyway, afterwards we had a bit of a band meeting in the van outside and it was decided that something is missing, as we still tend to frighten off audiences back to the bar and incur quite a bit of bewildered looks. is it that we are too loud? too noisy? not catchy enough? all of the above? do we try to make ourselves into something we think an audience wants in order to seek out an audience? well whatever we do, we've decided to get more aggressive with the marketing of our live performances, or something...

that nov 4th show

2008-11-10T21:50:00.000-08:00

so like we played at el rio last monday. a fair amount of people came, but we didn't make any money, haha. we played:

persona
fem politique
don't you wanna play with me
fear of death
you don't love me anymore
369
the escapist
undercover lover
birthday suit
anal fixation

we played pretty damn well i think so thank you very much. the power was cutting out for the first third of the set due to power strips foolishly plugged into power strips. it was pretty fucking retarded. but the sound overall was pretty good. people said it sounded perfect from outside, haha. anyway, we played with Street Pyramids and the New Agents, who were both pretty cool. unfortunately everyone who worked the door let all the friends in, so not enough money was made to pay the sound guy, so we were like - gotta go! when it's our event, we at least break even, haha.

anyway, we're playing next on black friday, nov 28th, at the goddamn retox lounge with our buddies the gibbs, and their buddies the prey (from san diego). we're trying to get 2 or 3 new songs ready by then, hopefully they'll be good to go!

seven

2008-10-23T23:10:00.001-07:00

so we got seven mixed now. they sound pretty good. at this point we're just rehearsing a bunch for this show on nov 3rd. after that, full speed ahead on more new tunes.

six down

2008-10-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

six songs mixed and done so far. three more of this batch to finish. jimo and i got more, just need more time for the band to learn them...wish we had more time to do this stuff.

recording and mixing

2008-10-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

so we've been recording. a lot. we have 3 songs completely done (which are on the myspace page), and 6 more almost all done or done and ready to be mixed. i've been procrastinating a bit on mixing, cuz it is just such a tedious process. having jimo help is really good, but it's still painful trying to figure out how to fit everything together sonically. especially with the song 369. so at this point, we're kinda stuck for recording anything else, cuz we don't have anymore songs ready that the whole band can play. we have about 2 1/2 half that we've been working on, but they've still got a ways to go, and while i've got like 3 or 4 more that we could start doing, and jimo's got a bunch too, it's just a matter of finding time work them out and still rehearse the ones we have so we can play live and sound decent. probably we're going for more than we're able to do, oh well! hopefully we can get the next 5 or 6 sorted out over the next few weeks and start recording again by november. our goal is to have a 7" by our show in december, and the record done by january or february, and try to do some kind of southwest tour that hits las vegas and los angeles around then. also gonna try and get us into SXSW and Noisepop, cuz we're like noisy pop...sorta.

nick's palace or worms cd is now available at amoeba and aquarius records here in san francisco. so yeah...i'm credited with recording and mixing, but let me also say that i produced the fuck out of that thing.

should have some pics up in the next few days of our latest drunken adventures.

sept 4th @ the stork club

2008-09-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

gonna make this short cuz i'm not feeling to good right now, kinda sickly. anyway, we played:

fem politique
don't you wanna play with me
inspire
birthday suit
fear of death
the escapist
persona
anal fixation

thought we played more than that, but i guess we decided to quit while we were ahead. it was really hot and sweaty, i even took my shit off. we were getting electrocuted by the stage equipment like a motherfucker, i could feel current going through my arm whenever i held onto the microphone, and corey got shocked real bad a couple of times when he bumped into me. good thing we were drunk! i thought we played really well, consistently full of energy throughout, no trainwrecks. balanced sound - not so much. i was really unhappy with my guitar sound, way too trebly. i had just gotten my amp back, and then i let the other bands borrow it cuz their amp blew a tube or something. so my settings were all fucked for a club. we ended up with a soundboard recording of the show. turns out i was over singing again, but at least mostly in key. there were no stage monitors to speak of, so we could barely hear vocals on stage. anyway, we ended up playing last, cuz the bands that invited us wanted to go first. none of their people stuck around for us. and my coworkers and boss that came all had to leave before we started playing around midnight. fortunately corey's gang of richard, gilbert, and david were with us and they were a lot of fun!

anyway, since the show, me and jimo have been doing a shit load of recording everyday. we're moving full speed ahead on the record, so perhaps it might actually be close to finished around my birthday after all! we now have five songs pretty much all recorded, and just did drums last night for two more.

new song up

2008-09-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

at the myspace - don't you wanna play with me? pretty good, maybe almost final mix. oh i hate mixing, thank goodness jimo is here to help!

oh and we're playing the stork club in oakland this thursday sept 4th!!

assorted recordings

2008-08-09T13:46:00.001-07:00

so we're recording our record thing. right now, we really only have six new songs that we can play. we each individually have enough material, like another six or ten songs...just getting everyone on the same page is kinda tough. it's really kinda hard to focus on new material with five people in the band at once. anyway, as for the recording, it's going pretty well i guess. drums are done for five songs, synth for three, bass on two (we were gonna do more bass the other day, but corey fucked up his finger somehow while wrestling with his friends...i don't know either...) i did guitar and vocals for don't you wanna play with me on thursday, so that one just needs lead guitar and it's totally a hit single.

nick's black metal record is still being mixed. i've got rough mixes for 6 out of the 7 songs, though they all still need more work, mainly with getting the drums to sound right at the proper levels of compression. basically, he wants the guitars to be really fucking loud, so that's what i'm trying to give him, really fucking loud guitars. but i don't want the drums to be completely buried, otherwise it'll just sound like total guitar wankage.

also on thursday night i started recording four songs for two star spark, my friend charlie's pop rock band. this went really well, we managed to record all the drums in 45 minutes, cuz elliot was able to do each song in one take, with just one overdub of a section total. he really had his shit together and impressed me. and he's a very dynamic drummer too. after that we did all of the bass, and then a few flourishes of keyboards. so all that's left to do are charlie's guitars and vocals. i think it's gonna come out really nice. i honestly wasn't terribly impressed by the tunes from the scratch demo tracks we had done, but once we started tracking the drums and bass, the songs really came alive and are definitely gonna sound really cool.

first song done

2008-07-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

so the first song recorded and finished for the record is now up on the myspace. it's called Anal Fixation, it's the one corey inspired, haha. we recorded it on sunday and basically played it live and over dubbed the vocals. i think it took about four or five attempts before we got a clean one without any mistakes. we wanted it to sound live and full on energy, and i think that was definitely captured. so even though it's somewhat muddy sounding, it sounds real and fast!

we've done bass and drums now for two other songs, and are well on our way to making a record. the god damned jazz club is closing in a week, so me and jerry are gonna hit up the piano at the club before it's completely shut down early next week and record as much as we can with what has already been demoed and requires piano, cuz fake piano sux.

currently mixing nick's palace of worms black metal record and started recording some songs for two star spark. buy mainly focused on making our record and getting a bakers dozen of songs done by my birthday at the end of october.

started recording

2008-07-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

so yesterday was the first day of recording some of the new tunes. started with tommi doing drums for two of the tunes, don't you wanna play with me, and you don't love me anymore. of course my damn computer software was still refusing to work properly, at one point the entire OS X operating system failed and the computer insisted that it had to be restarted. it was pretty fucking retarded. and all my plugins for mixing weren't working, but i got that fixed finally this morning by pulling off all the various version of digital performer on my computer and doing a clean reinstall of the software. so unless it starts crashing again once i start piling the effects on, we should be good to go.

as for the recording of the drums, for once, (once!) we got the mic placement just right in all the sweet spots. of course after we had broken down all of the mics and run through one of the songs we did with the band, tommi was like, oh i played that chorus part wrong, i actually do it like this! so now we gotta redux it. anyway, hopefully i can get it all to match up soncially! damnit! anyways, the drums were sounding really good, jimo was with us for most of it and said that they sounded really professional. they definitely sound better than the stuff i did with nick's black metal project (!) i think i've just finally really found the proper spots for the overheads and the bass drum. it's like the overheads need to be about 2.5 feet above the top of the cymbals (about half way between the drums and the ceiling (which is only 8ft high). and then the main bass drum mic just right at the edge of the tip of the hole, with a 2nd mic on the back end by the beater (to get more of a popping sound, or nail in the hammer). suppose we should get some grease for the beater at some point still, since it does have a tendency to squeek a bit.

anyways, once the rest of the guys showed up for practice, we did a few live takes of anal fixation, and overdubbed the vocals on top, with everyone doing the chorus part. it sounds pretty raw, but is full of energy. gonna have jimo help mix it, i think his ears are maybe less damaged than mine, and he's got a good sense of tone and how things should sound and fit in a the mix. we also attempted to record our band version of fem politique, but i don't think any of us were too happy with what we got. it wasn't bad, but there were some minor mistakes. it might still be usable though. recording five people at once live in a small room was definitely a first, and it's really not a technique that i see us doing too terribly often. really only for the songs that seem well suited for more of a live type feel. anyways, hopefully we'll get that song mixed and posted up on the myspace within a week or so. it's ridiculously short, at under 1:15. i suppose we should do more minute long songs! maybe that'll be my new thing, ha!

the retox show

2008-07-17T18:59:00.000-07:00

well, we'll probably never play there again. four bands, no turnout. it was pretty ridiculous and pathetic. at least we brought our own booze to drink in the van this time, rather than give the damned bar all our money. they made us go last, so that all the people wouldn't theoretically leave for the out of town bands, ha! i was like, ok, but we'll be drunk, ha!

mountain animal hospital from santa cruz played first. they were really cool, like a mix of mew, sigor ros, and a little bit of the mars volta (but in a good way). they all had a mountain of pedals and the singer sang really high with lots of reverb all castrato like. plus they're drummer was really fucking good.

martyrs of the apollo guild from seattle played second. they were about what i expected. everyone liked the cute girl on keyboards. i think they'd have a lot of potential if their songs were half as long and consisted of more than one riff or groove. i left to go drink after two tunes.

light leaks actually did get people to come, about 5 or 6, ha! that's 4 or 5 better than us. they were really good, a couple of our guys had a little crush on their drummer. anyways, i'm biased, i think they're a really good band and i like their angry style of guitar rock.

so we played last, and we weren't too hammered. some of the other bands had already taken off, so whatever. we played decently for the most part. we did fem politique, inspire, busriding, popstar (jimo ran to the bathroom), birthday suit, anal fixation. and then we were gonna stop, but the four people in the audience were like, play some more, so we let corey go get a drink and played the gwen stefani cover and charisma. and they were like play one more, so we attempted to do i don't love you anymore, and it totally fell apart after the first verse. it was pretty annoying, so i was like, that's it, fuck this shit, let's get the fuck out of this dingy ass basement bullshit. the joke was that we were having band practice at the retox, ironically enough, last night at band practice, about the same amount of people stopped by to hang out as those who sat through our performance on monday night. anyway, regardless, no one in the group seemed too bummed out about the show. we just came to the conclusion that we probably shouldm't play on monday nights where we are expected to do all the promotion for two out of town bands, and where we didn't do shit to promote, cuz we were too elated over having actually played in front of people the week before, so like fuck it. it's not like the bar didn't make money off of the 15 people in the bands that played, so like whatever.

anyway, got one more day of black metal record, then we start recording stuff on sunday. gonna try to do a couple of tunes mostly live in the studio. and now my buddy charlie of two star spark has asked that i record his band a demo with their new bass player, so i'll probably start on that next week and hopefully hammer that out over 2 or 3 days.

repot on the transam show

2008-07-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

it went really really well. we played: fem politique, birthday suit, inspire, charisma, busriding, what you waiting for (the gwen stefani cover, ha!), and anal fixation. we were pretty damn solid for the first five tunes, a little shaky on the cover, and finished loud and quickly on the last tune. billy and george, the guys running the party were really cool, and the drag performance by kegel kater (i think that's how it's spelled...) was really amazing and disturbing performance of terminal hiv set to a horrible killer song. it was pretty fucking hilarious, though i think jerry was a little spooked with his recent drama at home. anyway, we all pretty much proceeded to blow the $200 we earned at the damn bar after our drink tickets ran out, but hey whatever. it was a rather light turnout for the party, i guess they were competing with another event, but a lot of our friends came out (although about a dozen of them were on the list, ha!), and i left out a big stack of cds that mostly disappeared. at the end of the show i was like, hey if you took a cd, cool, if you got ten bucks to spare, even better. i think around $40 was collected, so that all went in the bank for the next cd. anyway, it was all a good time, i don't think anyone got laid, haha, but aside from a little crying and hugging at like six in the morning (not me, my bitter heart don't make no tears anymore), it was probably our best sounding and most consistent show so far. and jimo was definetly the missing piece in our gang. we got our next show a week from right now - next monday - over at the retox lounge. i doubt anyone will show up, but it should be alright. we'll be playing with three other bands, so we just gotta get a couple more songs together and just bash through our set again.

i got about maybe 4 or 5 days left of recording on nick's black metal record, so i'm gonna try and just bang that out as quickly as possible over the next week and a half, cuz i'm ready to start recording our new record. gonna try and drag tommi down to the studio friday during the day and hopefully band out the drums for one or two of the new tunes and pretty much take it from there.

this saturday

2008-06-30T21:18:00.000-07:00

ok, so like this saturday we're doing the transam party, and we're desperately trying to get our shit together. we tried to practice yesterday after gay pride, but it was a drunken disaster, so we ended up going back out and drinking some more. we were downing beer the whole day. well really all three days. i even managed to keep up with the shenangins. me and jimo did get together and practice down at the studio saturday afternoon for a good three hours or so, and we're gonna get together again tomorrow night, so we might not be totally doomed. the real wild card is gonna be getting corey on board for the cover song. anyway, the plan is to rehearse as much as possible between now and saturday and then not get too drunk and blow it when it comes time to actually play, ha! and then we gotta keep pulling our shit together for the show july 14th at the retox. no resting on our laurels, that's for damn sure.

practice practice practice

2008-06-26T20:28:00.000-07:00

so we are desperately trying to get our shit together for the july 5th show at transam, and the july 14th show at retox lounge. me and jimo have been getting together and working on tunes and stuff, and we had a good long rehearsal last night (sans corey - who had to work), and i think we've pretty much got it figured out as to what we're gonna play at the Transam gig. i figure we only really got about a half an hour to play, so we really only need about 7 songs to do, but jimo is such a quick learner and incredible creative force, it's really awesome having him in the band, we might have more stuff ready. the two of us are singing together on some tunes, and we're throwing charisma back into the set. i'm really excited to bring in some of the songs from his catalog into our repetoir too. and we've started with this really amazing cover that he has posted on one of his myspace pages. all i have to say is that it's pretty funny that a gwen stefani cover has me WAY more excited than a devo or t.rex cover, haha. but i think what i like best is that we're finally doing a cover that sounds different from the original and more infused with whatever our collective sound is. i mean, jerry still has to figure out what to do exactly, and coreycakes wasn't around last night, but me and jimo and tommi got our shit locked down tight on the arrangement. it's gonna fucking murder them faggots next week. at least, i hope - if we don't blow it, ha!

so we got a 5th

2008-06-23T20:12:00.000-07:00

so there are 5 of us now, and we're like five times louder, fuckin' a. this kid JIMO has done been co-opted into the band as our new guitarist and vocalist and whatever else he wants to do. he's really cool. tommi met him at the bar on castro about a month ago, and then he came to our summer party a couple weeks back, and then he ended up at band practice last sunday, and we're all like join the fucking band already. i had heard some of the songs he had recorded, and they were really fucking cool. i mean, when i met at our party, i was like within five minutes, do you wanna join my stupid band? he's that cool. anyway, somehow he decided, sure why not? so yay! it seems like his two main influences are post punk DC dischord indie rock and singer songwriter folk, and he has a fabolous voice. so we got together last friday and hammered out a song together. i'm really excited, hopefully doesn't quit, haha!

so we were originally supposed to be playing at the RETOX lounge this wednesday, but then we disappeared from their calendar, and i emailed them and was like what's up, and didn't hear back from them, so i was like, fuck it, we're not playing that show then. we just got jimo in the band and he needs to learn the set and we got a way more high profile show coming up on july 5th at this transam event. anyway, i finally hear back from the retox guy today, and he's like, oh yeah, oops, i "accidently" deleted you from the calendar, yes come play on wednesday. so i'm like, yo dude, we just got a new guy in the band, haven't promoted the show for shit cuz we thought we were off of it, so like we'd rather not play. supposedly we're going to be playing there on monday july 14th, so i was like, hey, you got 3 bands already for wednesday, so unless yr really counting on us, we'd rather bow out and get our shit together and come do it next month. supposedly, we're getting to pick or help book the other bands for that july show which we're doing with a touring band from seattle called Martyrs of the Apollo Guild. so my goal is to get some other bands to play with us where we can all collectively get a decent turnout, like when we've played el rio, and not like when we played Kimos. speaking of kimos, the sound guy recorded the show off the board and sent me a recording of it. ironically, it's all mostly bass and vocals (with some drums), highlighting the two members of the band who happened to have colds. it sounds pretty fucking horrible. lots of flubbed bass notes and off-key vocals. i'm confident it sounded relatively decent from the audience, but this recording - ain't no one gonna ever NEVER hear, haha. anyway, aside from the distraction of gay pride this weekend (which i'm disapointed we're not performing at in some fashion), we're gonna be getting our shit together so as to totally level the ear drums of all the kids at the TRANSAM party on july 5th. that shit is a really big deal, and i'm really excited that we're playing it, and hopefully we won't blow it too badly, ha! fortunately we got corey planning to get pretty naked, and a cute new guitarist, so yay!

finally, things are going well recording nick's black metal album. we have guitars now finished for 4 out of 7 tracks (bass and drums are all done), leaving just vocals, synth, and any post production effects to be added. it's not seeming like it will be too difficult to mix. the drums are bright and clear, the bass real low, and the guitar tinny and razor sharp. i actually feel like the guitars are a bit too trebly, but nick says he wants it to sound sonically similiar to black flag and greg ginn. regardless, the guitar playing really sounds fantastic and the musical arrangements and songwriting with the guitars and bass is very very strong with some excellent melodic and dissonant interplay between the instruments. i really think that all them black metal poseurs on internet message boards will really like this record (if they ever get a chance to hear it).

post mortem on the june 10th show at Kimos

2008-06-12T20:08:00.001-07:00

ok, so Kimos was a fucking rad place to play. wish more people had been there tho, ha! the sound guy was really really good, and the guy who booked us, chad, was super nice. the first band was the girl with violent arms, and that was just one guy. but he was really really good, i totally enjoyed his set of bass and vocals and drum machine with keyboards and lots of loops. metroid from southern california were second, and they were as i predicted. radio rock or something. they played with precision. i kept hearing keyboard, yet there was no keyboard on stage, and it seemed like the bass player wasn't actually playing about half the time. plus they a big fat guy sitting on stage holding a shot of liquor hollering backing vocals. later on, after our set, apparently he puked all over tommi's arm at the bar. douchbag. before we played, the bass player and his afro came over to talk to me and a very sick corey about how to properly pronounce our band name. corey explained that it's like, you say, "part gay", parae! i was like say it a la espanol! and he was like are you guys gay? and corey was like, i'm straight, but the other guys are, yeah? and then after an momentary awkward pause he was like, oh we're all gay, hahaha. douchebag.

so we played. cheryl brougth me some colored lights to put on my fingers that she got at a party store in the mission. me and jerry split the four pack. fucking brillant, really! i put them on my right hand, so my strumming was like lightning bitches! we played: fem politique, persona, inspire, popstar, busriding, you don't love me anymore, don't you wanna play with me, fear of death, birthday suit, anal fixation. i only fucked up during the first verse of popstar of all things. tommi felt that the drumming was too slow on many of the songs, but while we were loose and full of energy, i thought we had hard shit locked down pretty tight. especially with corey being super lethargic from being hella sick, and myself having had a runny nose all day trying to recover from a cold. we some issues with the keyboard amp. i guess we gotta upgrade jerry pretty soon, not sure how i'm gonna finance that, been buggin him to save up some money instead of buy $80 import cds and such! as has become the pattern, yet again we lost something at this show. this time, instead of equipment, it was an article of clothing belong to tommi. yes, some asshole stole tommi's perfectly fitting jacket (the kid has long alien arms). and in the jacket was tommi's id, bank card, and money. it was really fucking lame. and we got into a huge fight at the end of the night that involved my hot dog getting doused with whiskey because i didn't wanna hear it anymore. fucking girls. oh well, the show was cool, cuz we won over a random ass 80 year old man. he was like, i just turned 80, and you kids were awesome, all full of energy and such. that made my day! i gave him a cd, he was really genuine and nice, so i guess we must have been doing something right!

anyway, our next show is in just under two weeks at the Retox lounge over in the dogpatch neighborhood by potrero hill. not sure if we'll be able to coerce anymore people into coming out. but i guess the new plan is PROPS PROPS PROPS. gonna go hit the party store for more low-tech pyro, haha. and hopefully this time corey will be well enough to sport those tight red short shorts he promised he'd wear before he got all sick and shit. i'm trying to finish the words for a song idea i've had gestating for like two fucking years, so tomorrow's my day off, and i'm not recording with nick, so hopefully i can not get distracted and get all my shit together proper.

general retardedness

2008-06-05T22:49:00.000-07:00

so there was this big ol fucking misunderstanding drama thing between us and the guy who organized the Magnet show, all due to a stupid Yelp review tommi posted. it was so fucking dumb that i'm not gonna go into it at this point, cuz apologizes have been made, bridges mended, and whatever, fuck it, moving on! so unless it gets stupider, we're gonna leave at that.

and on that not, last night while getting ready to record some guitar tracks with nick, my fucking two month old b52 amp totally fucking died! our theory is that i blew a fuse. basically i was fucking with the line out while the damn thing was turned on, not sure how or while this would fuck it up, but basically a horrible noise started generating on the distortion channels, so i turned it off and then on, and then when it came back on both of the overdrive channels made barely any volume and sound at all. strangely, the clean channel still worked fine. so we tried out the orange boss distortion pedal on it, and while it was someone decent, we decided that the overall sound was too thin and wasn't as heavy as what we were getting from the solid state setting on my amp - before it completely crapped out. basically, i had remembered something about how bob mould would record his guitar back in the husker du days with a mic on the cab and a line out going direct, so i was like, let's give it a shot. anyway, the line out on the amp was really fucking noisy and was giving off an awful hum, which in trying to deduce the cause (which was the amp, not the pedal, not the cord, probably not the xlr to 1/4" converter), the amp just fucking died. so, i took it today during one of my worst days ever at catering hell to a guy over in oakland (powerage). hopefully he can figure my shit out and get it fixed. i mean, the fucking thing is still under warrenty (and the reverb is hella busted) but to get it fixed under warrenty i have the pay for shipping the 62 pound fucker to fresno of santa monica or wherever, and that really ain't happening. i figure i might as well find someone in the area that can work on it and maybe possibly even mod it up into something better. and we were actually getting a fucking sick metal sound out of the damn thing, i don't know what nick did to turn the nobs, but it was sounding really fucking good, better than i ever tried to get it to go, i gotta get him to show me how to get the razor sharp metal sound, cuz the best i was getting was a sludgy grunge sound out the damn thing. anyway, i hope this shit works out, cuz i've got $1200 in credit card debt on the damn thing. and i probably won't have it back for our show on tuesday, which sucks, cuz i don't know what i'm gonna do necessarily for a back up, but i'm thinking i may use my PA mixer and attach it to my cab, hopefully that might work out...we'll see!

anyway, i have no idea how to get anyone to come out to the show on tuesday night. it will probably be an empty room. and i have no idea how to entertain them, cuz being a competent band with semi-original musical ideas just isn't enough. guess we gotta try and win over the local drunks and bartenders, or something...we're so doomed, haha.

report on may 31st show at magnet

2008-06-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

it was retarded. so we find out late in the afternoon the day of that there's no PA at the Magnet place, cuz jon sugar, the guy organizing the event, didn't do shit to acquire one. so i was like, JC, let's use your PA speakers, and my PA mixer. too bad they weren't terrible compatible. i mean we were running hella late and didn't show up til 7pm which was when the event was supposed to start, cuz it took longer to coordinate getting JC's PA and shit and the load out of my equipment. plus i got off work late too at 5:30pm. not that we had any idea that there was a time limit as to how long all three performers had to perform. 3 bands and 2 and half hours? how fucktarded is that? not realistic at all. so it took me about 40 minutes to get the sound up and running for JC's Violent Vickie performance, and even then, it sounded shitty. i did not need the added stress of having to be make-shift sound guy. so halfway thru her set i cut out to the parking lot where corey and his friends were shotgunning cans of miller lite. never in my life did miller lite in a aluminum can taste so god damned good, cuz by that point i was fucking over it. anyway, i assumed we were gonna go third instead of 2nd, cuz the other band had there drums set up, so i was like, whatever, fuck this i'm gonna relax. but then jerry comes at me and is like, they want us to go on now. and i'm like, oh shit, ok, whatever. but then it's like, where's tommi? oh, still at the house getting dressed up! so i'm like calling tommi and my roommates trying to get word that we need our drummer down here setting up the drums, stat! so tommi finally, after about 20 minutes later, runs down and we start setting up, and jon sugar is like, ok, so you guys got a half hour, and the next band has a half hour. and i'm like, what about set up time dude? we need at least 15 more minutes to set up our shit. now i guess i should talk about the crowd at this point. the crowd was pretty geriatric. now i don't want to be a bitch, cuz everyone was polite, but the energy inside that room was weird. it was basically this guy jon and his movie going friends supporting him on his attempt to put on a rock show somewhere where a rock show should never happen, because the space is ill-equiped, in that it is not equiped at all. so along with his friends staring at us from the corner seated in chairs like little penguins, there was the staff of the community center, and the other band hogfather and corey's cadre of friends, and a crazy homeless dude. we weren't getting paid, cuz this was a free event. but was it a fundraiser, or a benefit, or anything at all? what the fuck is GAWK (gay artists writers kollective) in the first place? it was retarded. i mean a forum for performers i guess is great, but no real planning went into this as far as i could tell. so we played six songs. cuz i'm fucking polite and i was like, dude, i know we're running short on time and i don't want to cut into the last band (who got to play for 40 minutes anyways - so much for being nice!) basically, we played - fem politique, persona, inspire, busriding, anal fixation, and birthday suit. i mean, after four songs, he was like ok, one more, and i was like fuck that, here's two short ones. so i went thru all this stress and effort to play for 18 minutes to a mute and unreceptive crowd of whackos and a homeless dude, wtf? i took two days off from the jazz club so that we could adequately get our shit together, which we very much did, as we fucking played very very well. i mean the only point to doing it was that i think it gave us all more confidence and experience with playing in front of people, especially since our first couple of shows together were kinda rocky. so we all know now that we can fucking kill as long as we're solid on the song and can hear each other, so that's the only good thing out of the whole fiasco. hogfather we're cool, they were more fun and accessable and visually entertaining to watch and did a pillow fight thing that i missed cuz i went to go get the van so that we could load out as fast as possible. one of their guys expressed reservations about having to follow us, so that was a nice complement i guess, haha. anyway, the whole ordeal was really draining, and then today i'm still getting these ass-backward emails from jon sugar, where he CC's people in on conversations that he's having with other people, and basically he backhandedly complements us, or disses us, i'm not sure, and says, "oh well Parae was better that the first time i saw them," and that was it. i mean, i'm not sure what he was trying to accomplish. i wouldn't say it's was a mistake to play his event, i just wish it hadn't of been so disorganized to the point where i had to carry most of the impact. so whatever, fuck it. oh yeah, corey unveiled his surprise - he dressed up like a fucking cowboy, haha. as long as he rocks a yellow bandanna around his neck, i'm happy, it's the cutest thing, ahaha. and he had a big fake mustache and everything.

as for this blog, i'm going to try to keep the shit talking to a minimum. i had a post up from about a month ago (since deleted) that was very inappropriate and unprofession and passive aggressive and it came back and bit me in the ass and i feel like a total asshole about it. so while having a band is really difficult sometimes, i'm very thankful to have tommi and corey and jerry doing this with me and hopefully we can attain something worthwhile with it as the entire music industry implodes, cuz i hate my jobs.

learning new songs

2008-05-22T22:35:00.000-07:00

so we're working on adding some more songs to our set, more songs from the damned cd, that is. jerry ended up getting hella stoned and listening to the cd after our disasterous point arena show and decided it was pretty really good or something, and has been taking the time to learn some of the songs of it. he says he likes hack a lot, which is a good song, i like that one alright, haha. so we're working that one out. we're also working on bitterlust, which it really surprises me that people respond to. i mean, it's such a schizophrenic suite, not really a pop song or anything, it's just this collection of six or seven short bits strung together that after a few years i managed to make work as a recording, at least relatively well. anyway, the guys have learned about half of it, and it sounds fucking amazing. i mean, i'm really shocked at how good it sounds, but it's like this huge psychedelics blue and purple behemoth of color and sound, so yeah. it's always been one that tommi has enjoyed playing, cuz it's so varied, but it sounds so huge now with corey and jerry, so that's pretty cool. we're taking it at a one section per practice learning thing, cuz each part is completely different from the other.

we all decided that we have to rework age of irony. i'm still convinced that it's a great song, but our current arrangement just hasn't been working. basically, corey and i have agreed that we should be playing the same thing, cuz that's boring. so i gotta work out a new guitar part for the verses, and i can hear it in my head, i just need to make the time to work it out. that way corey will be free to play the riff but then also fuck it up in a fittingly fashion. then i want tommi to pursue more of a blast beat type of thing, which is of course influenced from nick's black metal project, but this is the song for it. then i've kinda change the chorus guitar part to almost this reggae sounding riff thing that sounds a bit like the clash for part of it. anyway, i think once we get the arrangement right, corey won't hate it anymore. the song is important to me too, cuz tommi kinda accidently wrote the music, which is a first!

then i got this song that i haven't really introduced to the guys yet, cuz i haven't made the time to finish the words or the synth bass riffs, but it's called the dichotomy, and it's all fucked up. i guess i see it as more of a electro hip-hop type thing, i just have no idea what corey is gonna do on it, or even how it's gonna sound with the four of us. i but i think if i come into it with a clear structure of the words and the riffs, the four of us can work something really good out that will probably be totally unexpected.

anyway, we're playing saturday the 31st at MAGNET in the castro. it's free and it's all ages, so come if you care! then we're playing on june 10th at kimo's with some band from down south called Metroid, and who the hell knows else. and then on the 25th we're at the retox with a instrumental guitar and drum duo from portland and a rock and roll band from berkeley!

no time

2008-05-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

to do anything at all really. i've been working way too much, and it sucks. the only good aspect is that i'll be able to pay off some of the stuff i've bought recently a little sooner than i thought. but still, i have very little free time to just lay about, and everything i do is very compartamentalized at this point. my cute little whiney bass player has a hard time comprehending this sometimes. anyway, i spent my one day off yesterday recording all day, doing drums with nick for his evil black metal record. he insisted on smoking weed before hand, and surprisingly, it may have helped him drum better. although he's been practicing a bit more intensly lately, sooo...that probably played a part in it going smoother too. but regardless, he's getting a bit better at that damn double bass drum, that's for sure. we managed to lay down tracks for almost all of two songs, just ran out of time and steam right at the end. there was one part where he was kind of unsure of what to do and i suggested straight disco, unfortunately he foolishly vetoed that request. i mean, shouldn't every black metal album have at least one 30 second disco beat break? i mean, c'mon! anyway, i guess i had a little bit more input that i've had previously as to some of the drum arrangements, which was pretty cool. one of the songs we were working on was one of the ones that stands out to me. it's weird that right now only a couple of his tunes have parts that stand out to me, whereas there are a couple of songs that i have absolutely no recollection of at all in any way. which is not to knock 'em, just nothing about the scratch guitar or drums has a hook that grabs me. i guess this particular one is a bit more melodic than some of the others. i'd like to encourage him to develop his melodic/dissonant arrangements a little bit more, but i'm still not even sure what he's got in mind. but i guess he's got a pretty clear vision of what he wants. either way, i've warned him that i will mock him endlessly if his lyrics suck, haha. anyway, at this point we've got just over one song left to record drums for, so thank fucking goodness for that!

some thoughts on CA legalizing gay marriage

2008-05-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

basically, for all the people out there on the wrong side of the issue, because it's shouldn't even be an issue, i say - HA! na na na na na naaaa, another score for us, the good guys, in your stupid fucking culture war. y'all better pray a little harder for the rapture now =P

report on the show may 8th

2008-05-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

so we played at the Stud last thursday night. it went pretty well, for all intents and purposes. sound was an issue again, in that i was too fucking loud. basically, i fucked up, in that i was kinda insecure in our ability to play good, so kinda subsconsiously i cranked my guitar up so that if jerry or corey fucked up, they'd just be drowned out. a dumbass thing to do, cuz they were fine. people were like, oh everything sounded good once we stuck our fingers in our ears. i dunno, i guess i just haven't quite figured out how to deal with my new amp properly yet. plus, everything sounds to quite when i have earplugs in. plus, i like loud guitars! and i think the three of else all sort of end up kind of competing with each other, not to be the loudest overall, but to be loud at our own comfort level...which is way too loud for a small club. plus, when tommi can't even hear the drums, it's not really a good situation. so i think we gotta learn to play quieter and balance things out better. but overall it was a good experience, we didn't fuck anything up, other than being too loud. i thought it was kind of low energy overall, but it seemed like some people enjoyed it. we even sold a couple cds! shocker! and i gave some away too with our fancy new stickers.

anyway, the first band was the switch, who i guess one of their members flaked out at the last minute, but then instead of the two remaining people performing, it was just one guy. it was actually really good too, jerry totally dug them, i'd definitely like to see them play again with their full line up. after that we played. we were supposed to go last, but after coreycakes had some issue with his ID and the bartender, we worked it out so that we went second. we played:

birthday suit
inspire
popstar, for sure
busriding
don't you wanna play with me
persona
oh tyler
fem politique
anal fixation

anyway, as i said, we didn't really fuck anything up too badly, so yeah. after us was pink swastika, they were pretty cool, even though drummer expressed to me that he had some misgivings about playing after us. but naa, they were actually way cool. i caught about half of their set and then retired to the van out front where everybody was drinking beers inside. yay, catering party van! anyway, my friend qi kang was a big help the whole night as he kinda got drafted into being our roadie. he was actually a total sweetheart and a good sport about everything. he even handed me my guitar and then took it right from me right after we finished - now that was some rockstar treatment right there, haha! we did lose all of drumsticks somehow though, sux.

our next show is may 31st, so we're gonna keep working on new songs, corey even wrote some lyrics to something we kinda jammed out a week or so ago, and it's good to have the little bastard back.

other than that, i've been recording drums for nick's black metal album. everything is going smoothly other than he decided that it would be acceptable to cheat and record the double bass parts separately, and lo be it for me to be a purist and deny him the use of double bass just because it's really really hard to play them while hitting things very fast and such with your hands at the same time. anyway, the drums are sounding really good, i think we're building a really solid foundation for all the evil black metal goodness to slurry up on top. the new laptop computer kicks ass too, yay! we'll probably start recording our new record in a few weeks once nick's project is a little further along and we've got our new songs tightened up a bit more.

shows!

2008-04-29T22:45:00.001-07:00

ok, so our next show is now Thursday May 8th @ the stud here in san francisco. i think we're playing with a band called the Switch, and probably another band, not sure yet. also, we just got offered a slot playing at Kimos on June 10th, which should be pretty cool. if it confirms, we'll be playing with a band from montreal called Bad Flirt - checked them out on the myspace, they seem pretty cool. so anyway, we're gonna have to be rehearsing a shit load!

we've got stickers!!

2008-04-28T22:40:00.000-07:00

took damn long enough to get the fuckers. didn't actually think that STICKERGUY would actually take 8 weeks to turn them around. oh well, they look simple, clean and nice! you get some at one of our upcoming shows, or from the merch page, which in fact gets very little (i.e. none) use.

speaking of shows, we are now scheduled to play our next show on MAY 10th at the STUD, one of my favorite gaybot bars here in SF. this kid walter who jerry knows has asked us to play because for some reason he has been convinced by our music and cd that we are in fact, pretty cool. little does he know...ha! we're excited, and the plan is to stick to songs that we can play.

coreycakes wants to do a joy division cover now, which is cool, and he wants to sing it, which is also cool, we're just not a cover band. for me, it's really hard to do other peoples songs cuz it makes me feel like we're karaoke, especially since we haven't put much of any kind of original spin on the covers that we have done. like i have a couple of covers that i would be up for doing, like something by scott walker, poperratic, or sonic youth, but none of that is a priority or anything...well the poperratic song is something i would maybe like to put on the next record if we get to it. anyway, yeah, i'm not really feeling the covers, i'm more into writing our own stuff together, but whatever.

speaking of sonic youth, we've been having an argument lately as to the greatest band of all time, with corey and jerry insisting that the title is held the beatles. i disagree. whoever said "sonic youth are my beatles," i concur. so boo! paul mccartney, ha!

got my new laptop

2008-04-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

today, and it's pretty freakin' cool! these macs sure have evolved a bit in the six years since i got my last one. so yea! now we can start recording the new record soon.

jazz club show go bye bye

2008-04-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

ok, so we were gonna have a big staff party on this coming monday to celebrated the closing of the club and our future being unemployed. HOWEVER, being that the business has actually finally been sold, and all of the staff are going to be kept on and May is being booked with shows, Kim (the soon to be former owner) has commandeered our staff party and turned it into her very own going away party. how totally fucking awesome! ya see, it was my idea that at our staff party we could invite OUR friends and have a show with OUR non-jazz oriented bands. but now you see, Kim went and invited all of her friends and it has turned into what will most likely be a drunken jazz jam session. neato, really. basically all the staff bands dropped out or couldn't do it, so i was like, well fuck it, we're not gonna do it either and be the only one to impose our arty punk bullshit on Kim's going away party. on the bright side, i am no longer losing a quarter of my income. on the not so bright side, i'll still be working 50+ hours a week. so much for spending more time working on writing music and trying to get better at guitar. or working out. or learning spanish. but i'll be able to pay off my laptop that is coming day now, and that big fucking amp i bought that totally messed up my ears at our show last saturday, so uh...yay.

as of right now, our next show is May 31st at the Magnet community center in the middle of the big gay Castro. Coreycakes was raising a fit about playing gay oriented shows, and i tried to stress to him that while we ARE NOT A GAY BAND, we are not going to let the fact of the current lineup being 3/4 queer preclude us from persuing the one facet that might give us an in to an opportunity where people might pay attention to us. i mean, we are competing with 500-1000 bay area bands for attention, so fuck it.

fiasco! - report on the show from 4/19

2008-04-21T19:15:00.001-07:00

omg, so like we went to point arena to play a show and it was a pain in the ass and i thought we kinda sucked. first off, the van rental place (who i deal with all the time thru my work) completely fucked me. i had requested a reservation for a big econoline 8 passenger van three weeks ago, but the reservation never got entered into their system. so i got stuck with a fucking minivan, which was a real bitch to deal with. it was damn near impossible to load everything in, and was super uncomfortable. plus on the way back, everything feel over not five minutes out of town, so we had to stop by the highway and spend 20 minutes pulling everything out and reloading it all back in.

anyway, we get to point arena and load into the oddfellows lodge, and it turns out that the other band that was supposed to be playing...wasn't. so it was just us. our five friends. tommi's mom and her husband. and four oddfellows dudes. turns out that the big festival was going on across the street at the movie theater with four bands. turns out that was were all the people were at. but anyway, we had a good attitude about it all, everyone was being super nice and totally mellow, so it was like, ok, we'll hit sometime after 9:30pm and hopefully draw some people from the bar across the street.

so we've all had a couple of beers and are feel good and we start our set after a brief and silly Q&A session. and it we start off pretty damn good. i mean we're way too loud, but whatever, we're a loud band (and i need to wear earplugs even when we play live, my left ear got slammed and the ringing is only now starting to let up, sux). so we play:

birthday suit
inspire
popstar
mongoloid (fuckin' devo cover)

and then we go into our new only a week and a half old song called busriding, and it completely fucking falls apart. jerry goes into the chorus too soon. i'm completely thrown off and i'm like fuck, let's stop this is a disaster, and people have started to migrate over and are actually dancing, and we totally just blew it, fuck! but corey is like, we're not stopping, fuck you, we're not stopping the damn song. so somehow we pull it together and go into the 2nd verse. somehow admist forgotten and improvised lyrics and shitty guitar playing we stumble to the end, and i'm totally embarassed. anyways. we bash throw the rest of our set (or least the songs we're good at, ha!):

persona
fear of death
fem politique
anal fixation

and then they're like play more, please play more, so we're like uh, ok. so we go into age of irony, which we used to be able play. not so much anymore. apparently if i forgo the guitar and decide to just holler the words without any advance notice to other bandmembers, this can be very confusing, but you see, i was already having trouble on even remembering the damn words for this one, cuz i can never remember the damn words to this song, cuz there's a lot of 'em! so jerry goes into the chorus early, again, and i look at corey, and he's like, we're not fucking stopping, so we bash through, and in the end it sound totally fucking shitty. so we're gonna have to rearrange that tune, cuz we're all kinda bored with it right now and kinda suck at playing it.

so at this point corey storms offstage and heads off to smoke out with our friends, but oddfellows guy is like, please keep playing. so i'm like ok guys, let's play you don't love me anymore and oh tyler, cuz we don't need corey for those tunes. so we go into you don't love me anymore, and it's sounding good, and then, you may notice a pattern here, jerry goes into the 2nd part of it early. at least this time it doesn't catch me off guard and we're able to just keep going and finish the song pretty decently. then we do oh tyler, although in leu of tyler, we go oh corey! and i'm like singing, don't quit our band, haha. so after that i'm like hey tommi, you wanna do charisma, and tommi's like, fuck no. so exeunt stage!

so whatever, i'm like, that was shitty, but whatever, it's over i just wanna get drunk, but no! oddfellows guy is like, please play more, whatever you want, i'll hook you up, we'll pay you even! and i'm like, well maybe. anyway, after a short break, we go back on stage and play mongoloid again, and then do the t.rex cover. and then corey is like, let's play anal fixation with me on the drums (sans tommi, who was totally over it by this point). so after sucking through that, i try to escape the stage, and corey's brother tofer comes up to play guitar, and it turns into a retarded jam session. tony even comes up to play the drums for a bit. anyway, oddfellows guy is like, just play your whole set again, please! but i'm like we're all pretty drunk and stoned, i don't think so. at this point, i go up replace tony on the drums and whack at 'em for a bit, which is fun, but pointless. anyway, we all eventually end up back onstage and start our set again. we bash through birthday suit, and then a guy in the audience (cuz there are up to 20 people at various points) starts clammoring for us to play inspire, so we're like fuck it, ok. so we're playing inspire at it's pretty decent...until the end, cuz we're too damn loud...we'll mainly my guitar is too damn loud and my ears are so fucked that i can't hear my drummer to well, all i can tell is that everything seems to be slowing down, but i just can't quite make out the snare drum. hmmm, always a bad sign. anyway, we somehow end somewhat defeated, and once again tommi is like, i've had enough, and jerry follows suit. but corey is like, i wanna play drums still! so he gets back there and i'm like, ok gimme a beat, and i proceed to play hack, and pretty decently at that. corey is able to kinda intuitively figure out what to do (cuz we hadn't ever done anything of this sort before), and it ends up sounding pretty damn good. so after that, i'm like fuck it, i'm done, and so is corey, cuz he and tofer decide to go across the street to the real rock show and hunt for girls over there.

anyway, the oddfellows guys are like stoked on us enough to wanna have us back to a real event on the fourth of july with three other bands for the city's centennial celebration, so we're like, ok why not?! corey and tofer end up having an adventure out to a log cabin which involves some sexy times with some girl, and then get a ride back into town with some random dude that smokes them out, so yeah. like overall, i was pretty unhappy with how the show went down and the position that we were put in. first off it was foolish to try to play songs that we didn't have solid. lesson learned. but then to have pressure to keep playing even when we didn't have material that was together, that was frustrating, especially since we kinda suck once we're all wasted. like i wish we were good enough of musicians to be able to play super good when we're drunk, but we are so not. my goal with playing a show is to play our set, fucking not suck, and in general to be fucking tight and awesome and then be fucking done. we were not any of those things consistently last saturday. but i did sell a cd to a really cool girl named i think natalie. so that i guess made it worth it. i mean, it did seem like a few people there genuinely liked our tunes, and supposedly the cd has been getting some airplay on a local radio station, so that's all really pretty astonishing, so yeah, i guess we'll be back, haha.

thursday nite update

2008-04-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

ok, so like i'm at the damn jazz club. i took a vicoden earlier, it's pretty cool. vicoden and champagne is called a trophy wife and that's what i am, haha. anyway, so this damn jazz club is closing down, do to the fact that the owners got divorced and are desperately trying to sell the business before their lease is up at the end of this month. so in honor of the fucked situation that it is (for me, losing a quarter of my monthly income, haha, free time here i come!) us employees are gonna have a fucking party with a god damn open bar, fuck yeah. and we're gonna play, as are the bands of some of the other staff peoples! so mark yr calendars: Monday, April 28th - 256 columbus ave, san francisco. we're gonna be drunk, it's gonna be rad.

so like on sunday jerry and corey found a cool synth patch on the nord and we jokingly were like, ok that's our new techno song. so i spent tuesday night working on lyrics based on one of jerry's blog entrees. and then last night after corey flaked out on practice (cuz he's a bastard), me and jerry and tommi worked out a tune in like five minutes. it's totally perfect and nearly fully formed. like totally simply and melodious. the melody is fuckin' pretty as fuck, the lyrics need a little work, and it's gonna take some more work to make the bass fit and have corey not pout at playing something dancey or techno-y, but i reckon we got another hit single, oh yeah.

anyway, we got our Point Arena show coming up in like about a week or so, that's pretty exciting. we don't really know who we're playing with, or if anyone will actually be there. but whatever, it's gonna be a nice little out of town adventure, haha.

anyway, come see us play, and get drunk, it'll be cool. and go download poperratic's new record called the big hush at her website. it's got some really good stuff on it, and it's not as murky as some of the production was on her vagus cd. there definitely are a solid 5-6 awesome songs that sound just right on it with just guitar and voice, and the third track is really really amazing, i forget what it's called. really, with the right production and backing band, she could make a totally flawless perfect pop record. i actually haven't heard from jaye in quite a bit, not sure if my emails are bouncing to her junk folder or she decided that i'm lamerz, but whatever, haha.

gonna start recording nick's black metal record this weekend, and i got my new laptop coming any day now, thanks to mis padres! oh oh oh, and i went i made a big purchase with my new %0.0 apr green wamu credit card on sunday. i bought a B52 at100 tube amp half stack at the god damn guitar center, which was a pretty infuriating process that is actually still on-going. anyways, i'm not totally sure that i'm gonna keep the damn thing. it's loud as fuck, and the clean channel is brillantly bright and crstal sounding, like it's totally tits. but the distortion channels are pretty lacking. like, kids online are saying that you can totally play metal with the overdrive channels, but uh, i dunno think so. they are way not saturated enougth. maybe 70s or 80s metal, but not the metal sludgey messy hyper distortion i require. so i've gone and bought some new tubes, cuz kids online say to replace the tubes and everything will sound much better. so credit card again, i got new expensive ass tubes coming tomorrow. i'm not confident that i will still have the mega distortion i'll need, but i guess i can always get more death by audio pedals, or save up for something by metasonix, cuz their shit is sick. anyway, i'm gonna try to make the thing work for me, but i also think that the reverb thing in it is shot or poorly wired, cuz it barely makes any reverb at all even when turned up all the way. although, i wouldn't mind getting one of those electro harmonix holiest grails at some point too, haha. all this crap on my wish list, and i'm losing one of my jobs, great...anyways, things are good!

cravedog revisited

2008-04-05T22:22:00.000-07:00

so like after being a bit unhappy with the print job on the cds and not getting any response back from Cravedog CD Manufacturing, well about a month later i posted a review on Yelp.

then on march 27, i arrive home after working a 14 hour double to find this in my inbox:

Man, that is one lame-ass post you posted about us on Yelp. I called you
back twice trying to get in touch with you about your issues and I never
heard back from YOU. What a horrible way to air your grievances.

I think I offered you an absolute ton of time answering your questions
throughout the whole process and to slam me/us now is pretty disappointing.
In fact, I gave you more time than about 95% of our clients because this
seemed to be your first project and I honestly wanted this to be a good
experience for you. I believe I was very patient and as helpful as I could
have been. Try and get that kind of service from Discmakers or Oasis. Not
only would you have paid more for your overall package, you would have had
to pay for your graphic design advice from them. We gave this to you for
free.

I'm sorry if you're crap at Photoshop. Our designer did catch some serious
mistakes and you should thank him for that instead of berating him/us in
public. From what I understand, if he didn't catch the mistakes you made
with your original design it would have looked a LOT worse that it does now.
This is a courtesy service we offer to our clients. We do the best we can,
but CANNOT be held accountable for the mistakes of our clients. Doesn't
that make good business sense? It's just not logical to think that we would
guarantee a bad design that our client is ultimately responsible for.
That’s the reason people hire professional designers - to prevent mistakes.

Basically you pay for what you get Eric. We usually charge for that kind of
service ($75/hour), but we try our best to look out for our clients
regardless of their ability to pay for that service or hire their own
professional designers, but at the end of the day it's up to you, the
client, to approve your final artwork. We gave you every opportunity to do
that. Please don't blame us for your mistake or oversight. If you had
hired us to do your graphic design and for some odd reason this mistake
still found its way on to your final print, we would have re-run the project
for you at no cost with no questions asked.

Regarding the proofs - we don't offer proofs, because they don't really show
what the final product will look like 100%. You need a good graphic
designer to create the artwork so that you know exactly what you're getting
in the end. What you see on a computer screen is not always what you're
going to get back. I believe our designer suggested that you utilize a
different design program to design your artwork so as to avoid mistakes like
this, which would have probably prevented the error you speak of. It looks
like you chose to ignore his advice there.

On top of the above, yes it did take me a week to call you the first time
you called - my wife and I just had our first child and you see I've been a
little tied up. I was also out sick for a few days around then as well.
We're all human and we've all got our own issues. You could have called our
designer if you were intent on getting to the bottom of your problem. That
seems to be where most of your complaints lie anyway, right? Was it more
important to try and discredit us in public or get to the bottom of your
issues so that you didn't make the same mistake again? I guess I already
know the answer to that.

This is all a bit disappointing Eric. You see, the CD manufacturing biz is
experiencing some tough times at the moment if you hadn't noticed. Posts
like these are bad for our business. Posts like that are bad for anyone's
business. We work really, really hard here and we try our very best to be
fair in all that we do. We treat all of our clients like they're our
friends because we know what it's like out there in the big bad world of
corporate America. If you wanted corporate American service, you probably
should have gone to Discmakers. They would have taken your money and had a
good laugh about it all. We're not laughing here - that's not who we are.
We feel horrible that you are not happy with your experience with us. Had
you and I had a chance to talk or if you had bothered to call us back again,
you would have found that regardless of whose fault this was, we probably
would have offered you some kind of discount on this project or a credit
towards a re-order or your next project. Unfortunately you have left us in
a less than giving mood. I guess that's what "petty and negative" energy
will get you in the end.

I read some of your other Yelp posts and they're all pretty negative - you
seem to try and drag a lot of other businesses down with you too, which I
guess I just don't agree with. They all seem like small businesses that are
just trying to carve out their own living I might add. What's that old
adage? "If you can't say anything nice...." I'm a big believer in that and
I'm a big believer in Karma. Maybe if you focused on the good positive
energy out there, good things would start to happen for you instead of the
bad energy that seems to be following you around. Keep the faith, man. Not
everyone is out to get you or do you a disservice.

I wish this all would have ended better for both of us. Good luck to you
with your CD. We do, in all honesty, wish you lots of luck with it.

All the best,
Michael

so i had gone and had a drink, and with a little bit of help from jessica, this is the response i composed:

Hi Michael,

So it takes a review on Yelp to actually get you to respond and contact me with my issues with how the print job on my CD came out! Like, wow. You never responded to my email until now. You called me ONCE. I called you back, left a message, NEVER heard from you again. Whatever, dude. Y'all need to be up front if what you do is out source the print job and the replication job and are essentially a middle man. Don't throw promises at me about how you would have potentially made it up to me with credits for a re-order or towards my next project. That rings so hollow. So terribly terribly hollow coming months after the fact and only because I posted a negative review on Yelp. I am very thankful that Matt caught some of my problems with the layout - that was awesome and great. I am so very thankful that the print job didn't come out more fucked up. But you all should have given me the option of a hard copy proof from whoever the hell you outsourced the print job. I mean, I was already spending a shit load of money, I would have dropped an extra $100-200 on hard copy proof, especially to avoid the conversation we are now having. But as I recall, that just wasn't possible - lamerz!

So, um, congratulations on the birth of your child. That's not relevant to our business. If you were unavailable to respond to my concerns, someone else from Cravedog could have made an effort to reach me. It seems pretty obvious to me what is happening here. You failed to ensure customer satisfaction, got a negative Yelp review, your boss is probably pretty pissed, and so you spout off this epic and immature email to me about how I'm negative and petty. I mean, c'mon dude! I paid you guys $2300, wasn't completely happy, aired it out pretty neutrally in a accepted public forum, and here you are shitting on me. Fuck you!

Y'all were recommend to me by the guy that mastered my CD. He did a great job. I hold no grievance towards him. Fortunately now, when someone is considering your company for their business, they can go on Yelp and hear about what happened to me and take that into accordance with their decision. You come at me for being a negative bitch in my reviews, y'all could have given me much more for the money I spent. I demand perfection and I insist on excellence. To say that you couldn't offer proofs cuz they wouldn't show what they would like is a bullshit argument through and through. I have friends in the printing industry, friends who have made CDs before, and now after this experience I have learned that what you have offered me is substandard. A hard copy proof is industry standard. I had Discmakers emailing me everyday begging me for their business, so much that I had to tell them to leave me alone, cuz I wanted to go with a smaller company. Yet while I thought I was dealing with a company from Portland Oregon, my CDs shipped from Terre Haute Indiana.

I understand, you're bummed, you got a negative Yelp review. I tried to be even-handed and fair. And this is what it took to even get you to respond to my concerns of over two months ago. Pathetic. But this is not the end of the world. So all I ask is that you lease return my Masters. And please give me the contact information for the Manufacturing facility that pressed my discs, should I require additional runs. You could have handled this better and your email response in a more mature way. Grow up. I admitted to my mistakes and accept them. You, and Cravedog failed me.

-Eric

and thusly they responded:

Dear Eric,

We'll return your masters, but if you want a reorder you would need to go
through Cravedog. We don't outsource our work. I'll arrange for everything
to be returned to you now.

Michael

Boosh! you know i have to question whether they can claim exclusivity to the glass master, which i paid for, and that they out-sourced the job to. i haven't yet tried to contact the company that actually did the replicating in terre haute, cuz it ain't like these damn things are selling like hot-cakes or anything. anyways, i guess the lesson really is, be extra careful when doing yr artwork, and choose a company to do your job that has better customer service. cuz if they had really given a shit about making it up to me, they would have contacted me immediately and we could have worked this shit out amicably.

jazz club go bye bye, and we have shows!

2008-03-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

so the jazz club is going out of business at the end of april unless the remaining owner somehow gets her shit together, which is highly unlikely. i could seriously write a book about the four years i've been here and watched this place been so mismanaged and poorly run. it's really astonishing to see two people fuck up a cash cow and steal so fragrantly from their own business. it's totally retarded and they deserve to lose it. unfortunately for me, i'll be out the extra $600-700 a month i make by still working at the dump part time. oh well, i guess i'll manage.

as for shows, we got some coming up! we're playing April 19th in a tiny little town called Point Arena that's 3 hours north of SF. it's at the Oddfellows Lodge there and it has something to do with the town's one hundred year anniversary. tommi's mom and her husband connected us to the people setting it up, so it's gonna be an adventure, that's for sure. there is one other band on the bill as far i know now, and that's about all i know, other than we're gonna be playing sometime after 9pm. unfortunately this is on the same night that Dylan of Raencloud asked us to play a show with them at John Patrick's Pub in Alameda. i have to admit i had little desire to return that dump, but it would have been good practice, and would be cool to see Raencloud with their new lineup and play with them again. anyways, the next show i got scheduled after that is May 29th at MAGNET in the castro. it's some kind of benefit for something called GAWK Pride. apparently Violent Vickie saw the same ad on craigslist, so haha! anyways, we're excited, it's a free all ages thing, so some kids who haven't been able to come out and see us before cuz they were under 21 can come out this time without having to finangle fake IDs. we're hoping to set something up in Santa Cruz and the East Bay soon, so hopefully all this crap will just keep moving along!

booooooooooooorrrrrrrrreeeeddddddoooommms!!!!!!

2008-03-24T20:52:00.000-07:00

so me and tommi and jerry all went and saw the boredoms play at the fillmore last tuesday. it was my 4th time seeing them, and it was definitely the longest and most varied set i had seen them play. jerry's mind was approriately blown, i believe. we really should have dragged corey out, cuz even though it's like a totally different language of music than the power pop he is accustomed to, i think they would have won him over. as it was, it was pretty fucking cool! saw a bunch of friends there that i hadn't seen in awhile, so that was really cool. the show was an exhausting two and a half hours with two encores, and this time it was more than just one hour long tune with maybe 4 or 5 variations. they actually have varied songs that they're doing using all kinds of of conventional and unconvential sound making devices, be it a monolithic 7 headed electric green guitar played with drumsticks, to that pad thing that manipulates sound via a screen that you muck about with your hands (i should get one of those!) eye had cast on his leg, so his jumping about and hollering was augmented by a crippled hobble, but that didn't seem to impede him at all. and yoshimi had bass pedals and a keyboard too. it was pretty fucking rad, and their younger drummer that they had is a total skinny little babe. but then again, i got thing for hot and skinny drummers.

so we've been working hard practicing and shit. really getting these new songs going. corey is totally ready to record. he called me up today and was like, can we record the new song so i can play it for my dad when i go to montana next monday? and i was like, uh, fuck no? and he's like, but it's my favorite song now, and i want something to play for my dad! and i'm like, well, it's sounding good, but jerry doesn't have his part worked out and i don't have finished lyrics, and he's like, well jerry doesn't need to be on it, and i'm like, whatever bucko. so i'm like trying to tell him that we're not gonna record anything until we are absolutely ready, AND i get my new fucking laptop computer. and he's like really wanting to have something to share with his dad to make him proud or something, cuz he hasn't seen him in awhile or something, and i'm like, well, we gots the youtube videos dude. and he's like, oh i dunno if i wanna show him that, cuz then i guess his dad will see that he's in a band with three total gay-bots, hahaha, cuz i guess that could be an issue or some shit. but anyways, we ain't recording until we're ready, cuz otherwise it'll be substandard, and i ain't about to make no substandard shit, czu we be committed to excellance, or something, hahaha. i relayed all this to tommi, and tommi was like, oh hell no, we ain't recording yet, i ain't got my drum part perfect yet on that new song. anyways, when that damn song is ready to go, it's gonna sound fucking wicked or something. i'm still sticking with the plan of starting in may, but right now i'm just trying to figure out how to finance the purchase of the computer with the savings i have and my damn credit cards (i got a new one coming with zero apr until january '09), but we're still talking about up to $3500 that i'm gonna be dropping on this including RAM and updating to the latest software of digital performer and shit. i just wanna be damn ready that when it comes time to record we're totally fucking tight and prepared, cuz it's always a million times easier and quicker to record and mix when you actually know what the fuck yr doing. the record is gonna be tight and under 45 minutes, and hopefully on plastic and vinyl by october of this fucking year. and then i wanna do another one six monthes after that. at least, that's my goddamn plan. i mean, it's not like the four of us our incapable of coming up with an adequate quantity of song. whether they be songs that anyone wants to hear, well whatever...

more new songs

2008-03-17T20:07:00.001-07:00

cuz we need 'em. last week, corey was like, we should do a glitter glam song. and i was like, like what do you mean. and he was like, just listen to a lot of t-rex, it'll come to you. so i was like, ok, let's get together and do this together. and then, i ended up writing the song without him, after coming with ideas and shit for riffs and stuff all in my head last thursday. of course it's all a total rip off of the t-rex cover we already did, kinda haha. so we gave it a try last night, and the guys were like, what are the words about? and i was like all casually, oh it's like all the weird sex shit the boys in my neighborhood did when we were like little kids. and corey was like, god damnit, not another gay song. and now i'm like, damn i feel bad, i've ruined his excitement over doing a glitter glam song. but i was like, well it's not really gay song, cuz as far as i know, none of the little bastards it's about are gay, it's just a song about the weird sex stuff little kids sometimes do, you know, before they hit puberty or whatever. anyways, so i guess i should make the lyrics a bit more ambiguous or discreet or something, i dunno, some weird shit went down in my neighborhood back then...probably gonna get in trouble for writing a song about, haha.

corey has a song that he's been working on, i think it's really good, but he doesn't have lyrics yet, or at least he has yet to be forthcoming with them, but we gave it a go last night so that i could come up a bass line, cuz he's gonna play guitar on it.

jerry has words for a song and a rhythmic idea, it's something he originally wrote for his old band, but they never developed or played it. it has something to do with menstration as a metaphor for something or other. i'm trying to work with lyrics to turn it into something i'll feel comfortable doing, not sure how to approach the menstration angle? how about bleeding out my ass...hemmoroids?

tommi wants to write a song, music and lyrics altogether, so i keep saying, then sit down and do it!

i'm trying to turn this one song we got that i wrote into something that doesn't bore me. it's getting there, but i gotta work on the words, cuz they just ain't good enough, at all. i'm at work right now, so maybe i'll just get drunk and see if i can come up with anything usable. it's supposed to be about religious persecution or something. but it's hard to approach this kind of subject matter without sounding like a complete pious retard.

it seems like learning and arranging songs with group has become a bit of chore, i dunno, just been kinda tough lately. but after a couple weeks it seems like the tunes really start together. i just hope no one is getting discouraged by having to do the work.

anyways, i'm still saving up for a new computer (laptop that is!) and i don't seem to be getting any closer to having the money for it. i mean, i could just use a credit card and get it now, but i don't wanna deal with interest and debt, i'd rather just have the fucking money. but i keep having to pay bills bills bills! sux. oh well, me and tommi got to see some good friends of ours yesterday, at our homegirl brooke's birthday party. she was in the band for a couple of months on keyboards back in early 2004, before she got pregnant. her little daughter is SO cute, it's sickening, big ol' smile and shit. anyways, we got to hang with emily (jane white) and gillian of the gibbs for a while, it was really good to see them. hopefully we can do some shows together soon! emily's great, we played with her about a year and a half ago to less than ten people out in alameda, and the gibbs are totally super fun, i can't wait for their record to come out.

videos are up!

2008-03-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

ok, i got videos up of most of the show on youtube. you can see them here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/diseriq

of the video, age of irony got cut off during the recording cuz i guess the camera battery died and andrei and tony had to switch it out. anyways, i uploaded everything else onto youtube except for our performances of on the hill and you don't love me anymore, cuz they were newer to our set and came off kind of weak. otherwise, everything sounds pretty good from my stand point, although i get a bit off key during fear of death, and i think i'm over projecting a bit too much in general...need to work on that! as for the sound, well the fucking bass is like omnipotent, and keyboards are totally drowned out. corey thinks he needs to get new speakers to make his bass louder, but clearly, it is more than loud enough on its own for a small club! anyway, we'll get the balance better next time. i think we all just need to work at being able to control our individual volumes, like knowing when to be louder and in the foreground as the lead, and when to be more subtle and in the background providing support. which is tough when you're working with loud electric instruments, but we'll get it together, i'm sure.

report on the show last night

2008-03-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

success! it went really really well. turnout was good. still didn't sell a single damn cd. oh the $3000 folly. but i thought we played really really well and didn't really fuck up to badly. a couple of the new songs were a big rough, and the t-rex cover had a botched beginning that was too fast, so we had to start over, which irritated corey, but i was dude, it's not like the cover was ever gonna sound tight. besides i liked it better all trashy and garage rock like. anyways, we played:

birthday suit
inspire
fem politique
popstar, for sure
oh tyler
persona
on the hill
solid gold easy action (t-rex)
age of irony
you don't love me anymore
fear of death
anal fixation

as far as the sound, i'm told that the bass was a bit too loud, and the keyboards too soft. but i thought we had a fat wall of sound regardless! we got video of about 95% of the show, so my plan is to transfer and edit all of that tomorrow and get it up to youtube and onto dvds asap.

like cramming for a big test

2008-03-03T23:30:00.000-08:00

that's what practice feels like, cuz we ain't altogether ready. i guess we'll probably end up cutting some songs if they haven't come together by thursday, but that'd be a shame, i suppose. oh well. gonna be rehearsing all this week. it really is a challenge to pull together a full set with two guys who have only been in the band for three months, but hopefully we can pull it off without too many tunes being absolute trainwrecks!

i updated the MEDIA section today. now with more obvious direct links to our youtube page, and a flickr page i created for hosting photos and shit. kinda neat!

you better come out to our show!

2008-02-28T20:52:00.001-08:00

cuz watching the clips on youtube just won't be the same. it's gonna be awesome, everybody is on board, and we should have are shit together. and if not, it'll at least be hella entertaining to watch us crash and burn! corey and jerry are the bestest! cuz even though having a band can be a bit of a pain in the ass, it's better than having no band at all. i dunno how we ever managed to play show with just the two us. our shit is gonna be so fucking loud!

trying to pull it all together

2008-02-26T22:36:00.001-08:00

so as to not suck.

so here we are again making a last mad dash towards a show, and like are we like totally ready? well i dunno. our last practice was a disaster, but i guess disasters happen sometimes. had to cut one of the new songs, cuz it just isn't working at all for me, and everytime we play it corey looks hella bored on bass, so there just isn't enougth time to ret-con it. so all the songs are gonna be in 4/4. and a bunch are in the key of A, which is really weird. there are a couple in E too. but 4 songs in A seems like a lot or something. i probably shouldn't pay so much attention to those kinds of things. i think we have the potential to put on a good show, and it sounds like some kids are actually gonna show up, so i'd hate to fuck up too badly. i suppose as long as no one gets too nervous or shit. anyways, we still got some songs to get down, and corey picked a t.rex song to cover, so we gotta make that not sound like karaoke.

myspace whore

2008-02-23T22:52:00.000-08:00

so i've finally given in and decided to whore the band out on myspace by adding and adding and adding "friends". i had really resisted this for a long time, cuz it's just really so lame, but i've come to the conclusion that i'm gonna need to be a bit more ruthless in fighting to get whoever to pay attention to this music thing. and i guess it seems to work for some people on occasion. i suppose that if 10,000 people get added and at the very least one person bites and likes whatever we're doing, then that makes it worth it or something. but for now, i suppose i'll limit the whoring to profiles that are friends with band members. if anything, this project gives the appearance that we might not be total nobodies, and as everybody know, appearances are everything. to bad our cd artwork is fucked up. check out my review of cravedog on yelp!

update from jazz hell

2008-02-19T21:04:00.001-08:00

ok, here we are again, at the jazz club, bored as hell, working a double. omg, got 2+ hours to go before i'm free to go home and do it all over again tomorrow, fucking lamerz. at least the music isn't total shite tonight, just kinda innoculous and wanky, whatever. anyways, let's see, we've moved just about 40 of the cds out of the house into the wide world, of which we have sold a grand total of one. it's fucking rad. i mean, whatever. anyway, we got our show coming up, that's exciting, just trying to get everyone on board with a set together, bass boy had a taco bell vomiting episode last sunday, so he uh, missed out. how any vegeterian can eat 3/4 of a taco bell buritto before realizing it has meat in it is kinda beyond me, so yeah. anyway, like we got seven songs we can play real pretty decently, and i would like to have 12, so that's 5 practices left to pull that together, but i think we can do it and not suck too hard.

we might have a show get confirmed in april, hopefully we'll find out soon. need to make more of an effort to book stuff later on too. daydreaming about doing a guerilla tour in july, would probably involve a fair amount of credit card debt, not sure where or who we'd play to outside of seattle, nyc, la, and a hippie commune in tenneesee.

i was sick for the past few days. fuck being sick. watched lots of movies, best one was me and tommi watched the warriors last night which we had never seen before, and it was pretty fucking awesome.

promotional tactics

2008-02-12T21:10:00.000-08:00

like how the fuck? i don't even know. is there a hand book? maybe if we were any good it would help, right? so like whatever, we're playing a show. trying to get some more set up. how to get press when no one gives a shit, an unique and common delimma. perhaps the next record should be all about that! like failure on an entirely different level of meta-ness. anyway, whatever.

i keep having to remind our bass player that we are not a gay band. i think he's secretly become embarassed by us. i'm not sure. he's really great, except for when he's drunk, then he's kind of a pain in the ass, but in a cute way.

jerry is really hungry, hungry for some kind of way out, much as i am, but probably more so. i'll be really bummed if everyone decides to give up after a couple more months. i think the show will go well, even thought we really only have at the moment seven songs that we can play. i'm trying to write new material, but i don't really have a whole lot of time and inspiration. things seem to just come a lot slower to me these days, it's annoying. jerry has a backlog of songs that we could do, but is somewhat reluctant to share them. corey says he has stuff, but he's not ready to share them, or he's embarassed or something. both of them have come at me with like a song each, and i'm like ok, let's work on them, but so far we haven't really given it to much of a push. i guess i better give 'em a kick in the ass, cuz they're good songs, and a bit different from something that i would write on my own, which is a good thing, cuz i'm all about diversification. i just seem to be hitting some kind of obsessive writers block, cuz i was trying to come up with stuff the past couple of days, and i feel like the pieces are there, but i can't fit them together or envision who the arrangements should sound. and them i'm like stressing on what the sound of the band is gonna sound like, like is it too similar to other things, or is it not creative enough, stupid shit like that. i guess i gotta just delegate and go with it, or something, and hope that things turn out ok. i just feel like we're not spending enough time working and playing, but i don't think anyone wants to do three days a week.