Sam Ash is thinking way outside the box.

Shaved the squirrels off my face. Will have to share the awful photos from the transitions later.

Staple actual squirrels to your face.

Oh, I'd also like to add, on the subject of Everything Breaks: when we were at the studio the other day, I was tracking vocals and the Neumann M149 went down. Almost certainly a bad tube; I had the same sounding issue with a driver tube in my ex-AC30. Fuckin' $5000 mic, yo. Everything Breaks.

Sigh. We had to use the U87. The Telefunkens were being used on a classical piano session upstairs. Tried a Sennheiser 441, which held up surprisingly well, but the M149 was the clear winner. Unfortunately by the time I'd warmed up and we'd decided not to sing the song like I do live, fucker broke. The M149 is just a better sounding mic on my voice. The 87's okay, I suppose.

I did use a Telefunken, but it was a TD25, which is worth roughly $5. That was for my "Mike Patton parts", some of which had me yelling into a toy megaphone/spring 'verb I recieved from Our Fearless Leader.

This isn't just a hangover, it's fucking military strength. And I have to drive in 10 minutes

RIP

I believe an all encompassing expression of "WTF" is in order, gentlemen. Truly, things never are as I perceive them, for the better and for the worse.

Did a show Friday and Saturday out on Fire Island, different venues. One we had to bring the PA. Fun shows except we had to ferry across, no cars on Fire Island so everything has to be on adolly, cart, hand truck. Drink of the weekend was Rocket Fuel. Done quite well in FI. Everything went very well except the Saturday night show which was a 5-9 which ened up being 530-10 and the last ferry was at 11:00, we thought there was a later one, but the owner of the place comes running out saying you guys gotta pack up the carts fast the ferry leaves in 9 minutes, we said we would have to to wait for the next one, to which he replied there is no next one..... Well long story short we did make it after pushing the dying golfcart up a hill with trailer packed with gear. Must have been a great sight.

Just got done working at my work (it's a print shop). It's hot and disgusting here in AK. I'm about to go record some rough demos with PJ, that is, if I can muster up the energy to do so.
How're ya'll doing?

damn, been a long time, good to see you stop in.

Heyo indieprog, what the word is?

Hey Chris! Word is pretty good on my end. Just returned to the states from hanging out in Germany. Playing music and the like these days. And with you?

What part of Deutschland, and how long? Did you diggit?

Myseff, i have started working a type of assembly-line-simple sort of job for a friend of mine, mainly it seems, so i can support my oldtimey-tools collecting habit. My brain has been taking an extended vacation from making very much serious noise, mainly because i realized that the degree of seriousness that i was applying to my noise process, was entirely in excess, and the noise was becoming increasingly terrible as a result. Smacked headlong into the difference between making decent sounds and making thought experiment sonic busy work, i guess. In certain things (or at the very least: at certain times) it is really helpful if you are the type of person who can avoid thinking too much, or who can turn it off as needed, or who was just never afflicted with too much thought in the first place. And i am not really that type of person.

Instead then, i have been learning what i can about the way people built things before there were very many portable building machines to help us all cheat in those processes. Just seems like an interesting thing to know about how to do, to me anyhow.

Ah, we went sort of all over in the span of six weeks. Cologne, Frankfurt, Berlin and Hamburg were the big cities we visited. Traveled by train/walking everywhere, stayed with friends of friends and people on CouchSurfing.org, and played anywhere we could- random bars, open mics, street corners, etc. We broke even for the most part of our trip (sold CD's for donation), so we had a bit of cash when we came back to Alaska. We met a tour manager from Berlin who wants to book us a proper tour for next Spring/Summer. So... that! It was a great experience. I want to go back right now.
Here's a video of us playing an impromptu set over at a place called The FreakShow in Essen-Steele. We only brought our essential gear (bass, battery powered amp, snare and cymbals), so we had to improvise a lot of the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOpzsi1nX5U

Bah! Sounds like a good time. Having an overactive brain myself, I completely understand what you're talking about; sometimes a break is just what you need for your ailments. Hope things work out better for you in the future with your noise makings. What exactly are you doing in the assembly line?

"Assembly-line-simple", more of a general flavor, than a specific thing. A flavor of "think about something else while doing something repetitive and exceptionally not-mentally-taxing, that you get paid for, for a change"

More specifically, i spend a lot of time getting in shit from print shops most likely as your own, and making them into instruction manuals and the like, mostly for a large chain that specializes in donuts and coffee type things. Just a kind of my-friend-needed-a-reliable-monkey-laborer sort of fill-in workstuff. Nothing to it. I was making enough less noise by the time that he asked me to do it, that it was a simple choice to make; it came down to needing to keep myself busy doing something, kind of.

I am not really concerned about the future production of sound; i still think in sound ways about sound things, pretty much all the damn time... It is just that i want to get back into some sort of arrangement where i enjoy doing it, more than it being the end result of being compelled by some sort of built in productivity police engine that resides in my skull, which is kind of where it wound up maybe. I think i just became too concerned with making the most of the free time that was available to me in a free-rent-and-unemployed state(the terms of which i was probably subconsciously feeling a bit guilty about accepting), and it sort of turned into a mirrorbeast of: not making any use of any time. General spacemadness.

Germany sounds like it was fun then. I loved it for the month or so i was there, though, i went as a highschoolstudent/dipshit, and have always intended to return as a (somewhat) more sensible adult who might be able to pay attention a bit better to what was/is going on around me. Do either of you speak German at all? Or was it more of a phrasebook/GoogleTranslate sort of arrangement?

I've never installed a hardwood floor before today. I did a fine job acquiring a nice bruise and blood blister on my left pinky jabbing it with a crowbar. I got a pound of sun-dried tomatoes out of the deal.

How then did it come to pass that hardwood flooring installation was in the cards today?

My dad asked me to help install the floor 'cause it's really a two-person thing. Unfortunately there's no interesting backstory.

You should have made one up?

Nah, that is pretty swell without one anyhow. Is that the nature of your pop's employment, or is it just a tool wiffin a jack-of-many-trades sort of collection of ambitious hobbyist pursuits? Or indeed, has you father merely gone crackers and started putting hardwood floors in random places?

Which makes me think, what would i really consider a random place for hardwood flooring, anyhow?

It an ungodly, hot motherfucker in Alaska. Day 3 down, lots more to go.