Tttttt

finishing stuff up. mostly just need to figure out some artwork...

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 11:08:48 -0400

finishing stuff up. mostly just need to figure out some artwork and then it’s time to put cases together.

Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 01:15:07 -0400

Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions

I set this as my ringtone like two days ago and then immediately...

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:04:06 -0400

I set this as my ringtone like two days ago and then immediately changed it back when I got woken up by a call last night and it was terrifying

tentative list of stuff I’m going to before I leave for the summer: 6/8 - Jan Jelinek &...

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:46:00 -0400

tentative list of stuff I’m going to before I leave for the summer:

6/8 - Jan Jelinek & Andrew Pekler performing Ursula Bogner’s Sonne=Blackbox
6/9 - Eric Copeland, Rain Machine, Nate Wooley/C. Spencer Yeh/Ryan Sawyer
6/11 - Tom Carter/Loren Connors, Steve Gunn/Chris Forsyth
6/16 - Olivia Tremor Control? (if I have twenty bucks to spare and still feel like going by then, I don’t know)

pretty solid but within two weeks after I leave I’m missing Sandro Perri, Graham Lambkin, Animal Hospital, Jason Lescalleet, Codeine, and a free Ghostface show. oh well. honestly I think I’m a little burnt out from going to so many shows already this year anyway.

Graham Lambkin - Jumpskins (from Salmon Run)

Wed, 30 May 2012 23:49:00 -0400

Graham Lambkin - Jumpskins (from Salmon Run)

Photo

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:48:30 -0400

squanto: Doing some spring cleaning. Get a copy of all four...

Wed, 30 May 2012 10:52:10 -0400

squanto:

Doing some spring cleaning. Get a copy of all four physical Squanto releases (2 CD-Rs and 2 tapes) plus a download code for Live at The Sealab, 10/15/2011 for $20+shipping, as opposed to the $30+shipping that it would cost to order all five of those things separately. Basically this stuff just takes up a lot of space in my room. Check out the details under the physical packages for any of the four main Squanto releases on the Squanto bandcamp page.

Right now I’m down to only 5 copies of Go Go Gadget Grass Stains, so I think I’ll keep this going until those are all gone. Grab one before they’re gone forever! I have to clear some shelf space for the upcoming NPS & Squanto album anyway. I should also add that in three weeks or so I’ll be leaving and won’t be able to ship any orders until mid-August, so if you wanted to order something then do it soon or wait two months!

On the Might of Princes - The Water Vs. The Anchor (from Where...

Tue, 29 May 2012 22:33:26 -0400

On the Might of Princes - The Water Vs. The Anchor (from Where You Are and Where You Want To Be)

jimdewitt replied to your post: it would be cool if when I posted stuff about my… i’ve been...

Tue, 29 May 2012 19:28:31 -0400

jimdewitt replied to your post: it would be cool if when I posted stuff about my…

i’ve been practicing drums to a few tracks from “on being lumpy” lately. we miss you!

I miss everyone up there too man, hopefully sometime in the fall I’ll make it up for a weekend or something. and then one of those days we’ll need to finish those songs we started last year.

it would be cool if when I posted stuff about my music it got liked and reblogged continuously by a...

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:32:42 -0400

it would be cool if when I posted stuff about my music it got liked and reblogged continuously by a bunch of strangers the same way the anime movie poster I posted two weeks ago has been. maybe I should just tag everything with “katsuhiro otomo.”

best albums I heard for the first time this week

Sun, 27 May 2012 12:46:00 -0400

Prince - Prince - the first two tracks might be two of the best Prince songs I’ve heard so far. and the rest isn’t too far behind.
Moss Icon - Complete Discography - hadn’t heard of these guys before this reissue and the press it’s been getting. Temporary Residence had a table at a record fair I went to last week though and were selling it for cheap so I grabbed it. still haven’t really gotten my head around it but it’s been sounding more impressive and more brutal with every listen, so I’m looking forward to listening to it some more. stream it on soundcloud.
Simone White - Silver Silver - beautiful murky and melancholic folky dream-folk-pop in the same vein as stuff that someone like Tara Jane O’Neil might make. late night music. also loving the way the percussion sounds so broad and hollow, wish I knew more about how it was recorded. music video.
Steven R. Smith - The Anchorite - once you’ve heard a handful of Steven R. Smith albums you probably have a pretty good idea what you’re going to hear on any of them - rough and dark Eastern European drones, doomy guitars off in the distance, generally uneasy and foreboding atmosphere, etc. nobody does it quite like him though, and the ones that stand out from the bunch though, like this one, are pretty amazing. plus the linocut print on the sleeve is hella pretty. stream it on bandcamp.
Damezumari - Hope Inscribed on Handbills 7” - been starting to go through some of the stuff I got in a trade this week. haven’t listened to most of it yet, but so far this is easily the standout. I don’t listen to much hardcore so I don’t really know what to say about this or how it would even compare to similar stuff, but I can’t get enough of it right now. much too short. stream it on bandcamp.

My first baby, Go Go Gadget Grass Stains, turns three years old...

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:31:25 -0400

My first baby, Go Go Gadget Grass Stains, turns three years old sometime this week. I forget the exact date but it’s somewhere in the 20s in May. I don’t listen to my own stuff that much once it’s finished and out there, but I listened through this one the other day for the first time really since the summer after I finished it, and it sounds better than I remembered it sounding. I was a little quick to distance myself from it once it was finished because a lot of the lyrics were kind of silly and embarrassing and I wanted to start working on something else that took itself more seriously, but looking back I’m still really happy with the way it sounds and given what I was trying to do and what I was actually capable of I think it does a good job of sounding like what it is, if that makes any sense. It does to me.

Nobody really asked for this and I’m not sure if there’s any real need for it, but after being inspired by Nick Zammuto’s recent project of writing about every Books song I thought it might be fun to write a bit about the songs on Go Go Gadget Grass Stains while I can still remember some of it. Plus I’ve typed it all up so I guess it would be a waste not to share it at this point. (I should also add that I have only 5 copies left out of the original 50! so if you want one then you should get on that soon. you can buy one here.) Here goes:

I started recording Go Go Gadget Grass Stains during the summer before my senior year of high school, then finished it the following spring right before the end of the school year. I had been messing around with Audacity for a while making joke songs and stuff so I knew the basics of how it worked but had never tried to make anything legitimate with it. I told myself I was going to use it to record an album and that I wasn’t going to call it finished or anything until I was totally happy with it and proud of the finished thing. It was mostly to prove to myself that I was capable of starting and finishing as big an undertaking (to me) as an album.

It’s still kind of weird to me that something actually came of it because I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing and was making the songs up as I went. I would record a simple guitar part or something and then try to think of something else that would sound good on top of it or click some random things, and then just keep going until it sounded finished. The whole thing’s kind of a series of fortunate accidents. I recorded the album on a not-so-great computer next to a window in the upstairs hallway of my parents’ house, mostly in the spaces between when I got home from school and when my parents got home from work.

I decided on the name Squanto because I liked the way it sounded kind of woodsy, and that was what I was hoping my music would sound like too. It’s not a reference to the historical figure as much as it is to a really gross inside joke from when I went to camp when I was younger. Most of the material on the album comes from camp-related stuff, if it wasn’t already obvious - I went to the same overnight camp every summer from 2001 through 2007. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me and occasionally I still catch myself laughing out loud from suddenly remembering some weird hilarious thing that happened to my friends and me when we were campers.

2008 was the first year that my age group would be counselors, and I didn’t make the cut to be hired, which was pretty upsetting to me. I hadn’t spent a summer at home in as long as I could remember, and I was pretty bummed thinking about how most of my best friends would still be there having fun while I would be at home working a shitty grocery store job. While I was home though I thought it would be a good chance to start working on music. The words in the songs aren’t that important and I never really think of them as being “about” anything, but if I was going to be singing something I wanted it to be something I understood and was comfortable trying to be expressive about because it was part of who I was. I’m a terrible liar and I’m not good at being abstract, and it just happened that camp was mostly what I was thinking about so when I had to make up lyrics for songs, so that’s what usually ended up coming out.

Here’s the play-by-play:

Waiting and Waterskiing - I probably tried recording that opening thing at least three or four times and got frustrated and gave up each time before I realized Audacity could generate click tracks. The chords were stolen from this song, which I used to listen to a bunch on repeat when I was working on homework really late at night earlier in high school. The idea for the handclaps going back and forth between the channels was stolen from this song’s chorus. Most of what I do and I’m sure most of what most musicians do is just hearing things I like in other songs and trying to remake them myself. Usually it ends up sounding nothing like what you were trying to rip off and wanting to go in its own direction and you sort of have to let it go that way and eventually it ends up taking on its own voice.

I was never that big on the lyrics in this one so I had two different melodies going at the same time with different words to make them harder to hear. I also really liked how that sort of thing sounded when The Halo Benders did it. One set of lyrics is about waiting tables in the dining hall, and the other is about wanting to waterski but not being in a high enough level of swim classes. Both are about camp, of course. The melody came to me while I was half asleep one morning in the back of a driver’s ed car. I still really like the last minute and a half or so of the song - after I did the first part of it I wanted to add more so I took a random sample from part of it, slowed it down a bunch, and looped it. That’s the weird rumbling sound under the guitars.

The Desert of Lies - In the summer of 2007 my friends and I were counselors in training, and the CIT program at our camp (it’s a Jewish camp) involved a month-long trip to Israel. Part of that trip was a four day hike through part of the Negev desert. Our tour guides had really thick Israeli accents, and when they told us that the desert was full of flies we thought it sounded like they said it was full of lies. So “the Desert of Lies” became kind of a big inside joke for the whole hike. We talked about how we would have to hike through the lies to get to the Fountain of Truth, where we would be able to cleanse ourselves in the honest waters. I also made a full noise album about it before this one, which you can listen to here. The noises toward the end are from trucks driving by the house. I had the window open and I was using a pretty sensitive stereo mic, and once I realized it was picking that stuff up I decided to let it keep going for a bit after whatever track I was recording to see if it picked up anything worthwhile. I thought it sounded cool so I kept it in.

A Squash Surprise - This one comes from the same gross inside joke as Squanto. I came up with the little riff thing and liked it but didn’t know what to do with it other than a short little instrumental thing, and that was the first name I thought of. The beats are kind of a weird juxtaposition but I thought it worked well. That part of it came from this weird old shareware sequencing program I had called Hammerhead. It was super limited and came with a bunch of preloaded sounds but you could only export the whole beat so I think I just had to bounce out a few different beats for this one and then line them up in Audacity so I could fade out part of it but not the kick drum or whatever it is.

Aaron - The opening part of this comes from a melody I heard a bunch of old men singing in a synagogue in Tsfat when we were in Israel. They were having a rowdy Friday night service and dancing and singing, it was packed in there. I just liked the way it sounded. The drums come from a recording I made of a friend playing bongos on a handheld tape recorder at school one day. I think the chime-sounding things were just from one of those sound generators in Audacity. The rest is me singing or clapping or rubbing a credit card on the desk. I arranged it all by hand because that was all I knew how to at that point. Looking back I’m pretty amazed that I actually had the patience to do that.

Aaron was the boys’ head counselor at camp one summer. He was a total piece of shit creeper (protip: telling teenage campers on the first night of camp about how you lost your virginity in a hot tub is not the way to make them think you’re cool) and everyone was openly disrespectful to his authority. One day our bunk was pretty clean and he gave us a 2 out of 10 on inspection so we just kind of went nuts and started blasting obnoxious music and tearing everything down and running around outside the bunk until he came over and yelled at us.

I always meant to add more vocals to the second part but I guess I forgot to. When I play this song live I do it pretty differently now with different lyrics about sneaking out to watch the sun rise and thinking about things changing, you can watch/hear it here if you want.

Late October 2006, On a Bench in the Park on Merrick Ave. - The low buzz is the sound of feedback from my computer speakers into the microphone I was using. I liked it and the way it pulsed so I recorded a few minutes of it to see what I could do over it. I recorded the vocals one day when I was home from school with a cold and had to edit out a spot where you could hear me blowing my nose. You can hear the congestion on some of the higher notes. In mid-2006, when I was 15, I started going out with a girl for the first time. There’s one corner on one of the main streets in our town that has a few trees and bushes and a few stone benches in a circle. We used to go there to sit and talk for hours at a time until it got too dark and cold and we had to go home, but would try to keep each other warm for as long as possible to delay that.

Sammy Wouldn’t Get Out of the Boat (So It Sank) - One of the guys in our age group was named Sammy and he was pretty huge, and also pretty lazy and belligerent a lot of the time. Once a few of us went out in a canoe with him and it capsized, and he refused to get out so it just sort of sat there under the water until we dragged them both in. The rhythm is a bunch of random snaps and clicks that I recorded and loaded into Hammerhead. It had a cool feature where you could stretch a sample out to the length of the whole measure, and if you did it with the right samples it gave them this cool granular sound so I messed around with that a bit. I could be wrong but I think it’s the same rhythm in both halves of the song, but the first half has the samples stretched out. The weird reverb right before the shift comes from playing the song through my speakers as I was recording more stuff on top of it, and then redoing that a bunch of times.

The Brown Beast - This was just a pleasant guitar doodle that I wasn’t really sure what to do with. The first voice recording is from the same day I had my tape recorder in school to record the drums that I ended up sampling in “Aaron,” and it’s my friend joking around about another friend of ours. I liked how the music made what he was saying sound weirdly pensive and melancholic, even though it was pretty goofy. The second voice sample is from me just pointing it at this kid who didn’t really like me in the cafeteria, probably either that same day or not too long afterwards.

The Golden Gun - The title here also comes from the same gross inside joke as “Squanto” and “A Squash Surprise.” Looking back it’s kind of weird how all three of the instrumental tracks on the album have two-word alliterative names. I didn’t try to do that. The rhythm came mostly from a recording of the sound of turning my keyboard on and off while it was plugged into my dad’s old amp with the reverb turned up. Also in there are some samples of me making “ch” noises, snapping my fingers, and rubbing a credit card on my desk. I wish I had made this into a longer song because I love the way it ended up sounding. When I play live now I make up for that I guess by mixing this and “Field of Glass” into one song.

Gumballs/The Fountain of Truth - Holy shit this one took foorrrrreeeevvvverrrrr. The main guitar thing in the first part came from trying to figure out how to play this song, which I couldn’t do since I’m not very good at guitar, but I ended up figuring out some other little thing that I sort of liked so I used it here. The rhythm was mostly stuff generated in Audacity that I ran through a bunch of effects and then cut up and arranged by hand. The other things that come in a bit later are mostly just me tapping on my desk with the sensitive mic underneath, then with the stereo tracks separated and moved apart a tiny bit to make them sound spaced out the way they do. I think I did that on “The Desert of Lies” too.

The second guitar part was something I had made up a few years ago and just been fond of. It’s also on The Desert of Lies (the album), although it’s super distorted and mixed in with a bunch of other things too so it’s not all that recognizable. Again, the lyrics are about something that happened at camp once. One of the kids in our bunk used to bring a big tub of gumballs to camp every summer and he would just sit on his bed and eat them like Skittles or something. One day a bunch of us started asking him for gumballs and he reacted by throwing them at us, which quickly escalated into a gumball war. We all ended up covered in little round welts. It happened a few times, actually. Also on The Desert of Lies there’s a recording of one of the gumball fights partway through the first track. I used to bring a minidisc recorder to camp and record a lot of conversations and other stuff I thought I might want to revisit later. I still have a drawer full of minidiscs that I’ve been meaning to go through and dump on my computer before they rot, if they haven’t already. There’s probably some really great stuff to sample in there.

I really wanted to have some sort of big explosive ending thing so I brought my minidisc recorder to school one day and went to the practice rooms during lunch to record myself playing drums along with what I had so far on my mp3 player. It was a pain to put together and sync up, and I spent forever trying to mix it to get it to sound as loud as I wanted it to and to decide how I wanted it to end (I have another version saved somewhere I think where it just gets louder and louder until the whole thing clips into oblivion but it sounded pretty bad). I’m not sure why I thought putting that cheesy reverb on the drums was a good idea but whatever, I was probably just sick of laboring over it.

The last section of the track reuses “The Fountain of Truth” from The Desert of Lies. I thought it made a fitting ending, something for the album to slowly trail away with. The idea was for the vocals from the last repetition of the lyrics to slide into the same chord pattern and then the song itself fades in from underneath. “The Fountain of Truth” was my first attempt at making “real” music when I made The Desert of Lies, which was essentially a joke of a noise album, and I really liked it so I wanted to put it someplace where it would actually get listened to also.

“The Fountain of Truth” was also supposed to be a cover of sorts, of “Sunsesame” by Caribou, one of my favorite songs ever. One of the things they had us do on the trip to Israel that I mentioned earlier was a fake army training thing, where they had us pretend we were in the Israeli army for 24 hours and do all this basic training stuff that they do. I’m not the most physically fit person in the world so it was kind of hugely difficult for me. Uniforms and boots, all that. The whole thing culminated in them waking us up at 3am to scream at us and give us these stretchers with nearly 200 pounds of weight that we had to carry in small groups while we ran 2 kilometers and back on a beach with really soft sand that your feet really sank into. It was one of the most difficult and excruciating things I’ve ever done and the whole time I had that song stuck in my head. It gave me something to pace myself against and as cheesy as it sounds it kept me going. I wanted to make my own version of it regardless, and it made sense to have it as something that was supposed to represent rebirth and renewal, even if it was mostly as a joke.

—-

That’s about all I can think of. Thanks for reading! Hope it wasn’t too boring and didn’t ruin any of the music for you. If you have any questions about any of it, or anything else really, feel free to ask me.

some awesome loot from a trade with Rok Lok Records.

Fri, 25 May 2012 15:39:43 -0400

some awesome loot from a trade with Rok Lok Records.

shmemson: Day Bidet why is this only the first time something...

Wed, 23 May 2012 22:31:00 -0400

shmemson:

Day Bidet

why is this only the first time something from wet hot american summer has shown up in my dashboard

usually I don’t reblog these things but I’ll make an exception for the best movie ever

Simone White - In the Water Where the City Ends (from Silver...

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:47:48 -0400

Simone White - In the Water Where the City Ends (from Silver Silver)

Keith Fullerton WhitmanSonic Circuits | 09.22.2010Silver...

Tue, 22 May 2012 18:41:56 -0400

Keith Fullerton Whitman
Sonic Circuits | 09.22.2010
Silver Spring, MD

looking through the pictures I had saved on the computer I used...

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:02:14 -0400

looking through the pictures I had saved on the computer I used in high school trying to find some old things and I came across this photo I forgot about. this was one of the mountains they woke us up at 3 or so in the morning to climb when I went to israel in 2007. I don’t remember which one it was, the whole month was kind of a blur. saw a whole lot of pretty sunrises though.

makemeachevy: the promise ring I was there >B]

Mon, 21 May 2012 01:09:00 -0400

makemeachevy:

the promise ring

I was there >B]

Buildings and Mountains - Rust (Part I) (from Summer Gut String)

Sun, 20 May 2012 12:49:00 -0400

Buildings and Mountains - Rust (Part I) (from Summer Gut String)

best albums I heard for the first time this week

Sun, 20 May 2012 12:48:06 -0400

Buildings and Mountains - Summer Gut String - awesome and rough-as-hell experimental stuff from upstate NY. teeters back and forth between abrasive noise and hypnotic grooves. stream it in full or download it on bandcamp, or watch videos for every track on vimeo.
Prince - Controversy - fell a bit behind on my goal to make my way through Prince’s discography this year but I’ve got a bunch of his albums on the way from the library so hopefully I’ll be able to get back on track. I’ve heard pretty much everything he touched up through the ’80s is golden, and so far nothing I’ve heard seems to indicate otherwise.
You Won’t - Skeptic Goodbye - contagiously catchy sunny folk-pop, with just enough energy and roughness at the edges to save it from swerving into twee territory. will probably get a solid amount of play these next few months. stream it in full or download it on bandcamp.
Ellie Goulding - Lights - I don’t know, my friend played a track from this on turntable.fm the other day and for some reason it just really clicked with me. not sure if I’m super late on this or if it was ever even big or anything but honestly I don’t care too much and that feels pretty good. I’m sure there’s a ton of great pop music that I miss out on just because I don’t watch a lot of tv or listen to a lot of radio or go out much so it’s pretty rare that I’ll hear music without having gone out of my way to hear it, and I just never really think to look into a lot of this stuff or feel like I’m in the mood for it. anyway I like this a bunch.
James Blackshaw - Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death - really surprised at how much I’m enjoying this since I thought All Is Falling was a bit of a snoozefest. the only tracks I’m not too big on are the two piano-led ones, but the guitar work on this album is much more focused and substantial. enjoyed getting to know it during a few evening walks this week.