Rolling Blackouts

Past releases by "The Go! Team" have left me slightly flat...I love their "drum corps and skipping song" aesthetic, but the intense tinniness of their albums -- possibly an attempt to recreate the nostalgic 70s sounds of listening to music on transistor radios -- quickly leads to ear fatigue.

Their upcoming album ("Rolling Blackouts") sounds like it's going to be GREAT, though! More variety, same good stuff, perhaps a little less treble:

Three Arrivals, Always in the Morning #1

Every weekday we'd drive to the parking lot of the obscure company and stand on the pvement, eating take-out breakfasts and making awkward conversation in the cold. The sun would come up and melt the frost in the wasteland of scrub and river around and below. When conversation faltered I'd watch that big empty space while we shivered and waited for Oscar to come out of his office.

Oscar relished our days together because we were young idealists and he was a wise, no-nonsense populist with extreme ideas. He'd bring us fresh coffee and reveal inklings of a generalized xenophobic hated. When he'd finished venting and the sun was up we'd drive our rickety vans a hundred kilometres, avoiding the weigh station with a long detour through undeveloped hills and farms, returning to the highway just in time to rendezvous again at the bankrupt company building.

The building was the only one in sight, otherwise just cars and trees and a lone microwave tower that I never got to visit. Oscar would unlock the front gate and then lock it again behind us, and for the rest of the day we'd be imprisoned, doing something that was probably illegal, protected only by our presumed innocence and the big steel fences.

Oscar gave us clipboards, then he'd disappear to prepare the vans and do his own mysterious paperwork. We, the employees randomly drawn from a temporary student labour force, picked an area within the building and systematically dismantled it. In the garage where the gardening tools for the bankrupt company were stored, we'd disregard safety regulations and hang from high shelves, dropping picks and shovels into the hands of fellow workers who would load them into Oscars' trucks.

Oscar was not innocent, he was informed and guilty and cheerful about his job. He told us to remove everything but the paint on the fresh new walls. In the bathrooms we'd unscrew soap dispensers and lighting fixtures and toilet paper rolls. In the meeting rooms we'd take down corkboards and put all the push-pins into the drawers of desks that we'd also move downstairs, out the door, into the vans. Then we'd go back up and remove the carpets, piece by piece.

One day, while we were on our lunch break, a black car arrived and a man in a suit approached the fence. He tried to give us a piece of paper. "Just take it and hand it to your supervisor," he kept saying, pushing the rolled-up paper through the fence, and the three of us stood back, afraid he'd grab us and take us to jail. We said no, no, no. Oscar had told us never to take papers from anybody. The man smiled at us and drove away, and when Oscar heard about it he was proud.

We drove the vans back the same way we'd come, even more careful to avoid the government weigh stations. The vans were old and not meant to hold a company's entire assets. They were sluggish and creaking and they rode low to the road with wide gaps in their carriages, and it was a relief to return to our starting point and unload the contents into storage sheds.

Desks, tools, carpets, fax machines, and paper documetation...everything was pushed into the sheds and locked up, hidden away from everybody who wanted it. Oscar was very happy at the end of every day, standing under a sky that had become warm and lazy, watching us spray water into the vans that leaked rusty mud out of every crevice. Every day he'd say "See you tomorrow, kids!" until the last day, when we were finished, and we handed in our clipboards and he said "You never did any of this." We forgot everything we'd done, like he'd cast a magic spell.

The Strangeness of Muffet

I live with a delightfully strange cat. People have asked me how Muffet and I have been getting along, and the best short answer I can give is "delightfully strange."

The long answer is that she's incredibly annoying and funny. If she were slightly more annoying or slightly less funny she'd be unbearable, but even when she's going completely bonkers -- ricocheting off walls five feet in the air, for instance, while emitting a constant babble of shrieks and growls -- she is still entirely lovable. And sometimes she knows to leave well enough alone (though rarely).

She's too curious and active. She needs to explore everything, and if she can't climb inside something she needs to either push it or break it. Socks must be removed from sock drawers and shower curtains must come crashing down, usually at 3am. She must also be allowed a certain time on my shoulders, a game which we call "hunchcat" and which sometimes ends with her biting my neck.

Did I mention the fighting? We're always fighting. When she rolls onto her back, that means she wants to mutilate my right hand. I am a bad parent because I do not let her win, and at the end of it all I clutch my bleeding wrist and she looks at me with hatred in her eyes, huffing peevishly.

So yes, she's annoying and requires constant maintenance and she will destroy things if I don't pay attention to her. But I love her to death, and she puts on a convincing charade of loving me. At the roller derby last weekend I sat next to a woman who had to entertain her precocious eight-year-old daughter, and I saw an uncanny reflection of my own behaviour: the coaxing, the distracting, the humouring, the happiness, and the unfeigned tolerance and love.

SIDENOTE: A few months ago she managed to climb the bookcase where I keep her treats, and by the time I caught her she'd eaten half of a full bag. I put the treats in an even higher and more inaccessible spot, and the next day she'd managed to eat the other half. She expanded into a very fat cat shortly afterward and it's been a struggle to maintain her new diet, but let's just say she doesn't get treats anymore and that my shoulders have needed to become a lot stronger.

"Sandbar" by Pico & Alvarado

Feeling like my musical development was stagnating, I asked Kevin Cogliano to let me remix some guitar tracks he was working on. I added keyboards and drums to his bass and guitar, then he sent more guitar tracks my way, and before we knew it we had "Sandbar." Kevin and I kicked around band names before we decided on "Pico & Alvarado." I am Pico, and here is our first song.



This was, by far, the most complicated piece of music I've ever worked on. This partly because of the changes that the song goes through, but also because I overdid the "wall of sound" by a factor of ten; many of the subtleties are not apparent in the final mix, and many of them could have been accomplished without duplicating tracks quite so much. See below for the final project (excluding auxiliary sends and buses without automation).

Care to know more? Well, the bass is reminiscent of New Order partly because that's how Kevin plays it, but also due to the Logic Pro Bass Amp plugin set to Top Class DI Mid, and also due to the "Guitar Dream" setting in CamelPhat.

There are four drum tracks, each with multiple outputs for individual treatment. The electronic-type drums are thanks to Toontrack's "Electronic" EZDrummer plugin, and the acoustic drums are from Toontrack's default settings. Both of those were sent to my DOD delay processor for additional weirdness, and some additional "sub" kicks were added with iZotrope's iDrum when necessary.

The guitars! Kevin sent me a whole bunch of guitar tracks...rhythmic pieces, hooky stuff, accents, etc. The hardest part was making sure they all stood out in the mix, and I thank Roey Izhaki's book "Mixing Audio" for panning, reverb, and EQ guidance. The "crunchy" guitars during the "harsh" section use CamelPhat's "Gtr American" setting for added presence. I love all things Camel Audio. I use their plugins in every single project.

The keyboards! Some of them are patches from my ESQ-1 synth, including the primary marimba sound (which is complimented by a Korg M1 Le patch and one of Logic's EXS24 harps). The "sample and hold" synth from the intro is Logic's ES1, and the choppy keys are from the free TAL U-NO-62 Juno-emulation plugin. The angelic keys that end the song are from Camel Audio's brilliant "Alchemy" sampler/synth, Logic's "Strings" plugin, and a bit of bassiness thanks to Logic's ES M soft synth.

The samples? Besides the recurring "brrrr" sound (which I snagged from EZDrummer), there are some crowd noises and quotations from the "Gimme Shelter" documentary...I initially just wanted Grace Slick saying "Easy...easy" to follow the "harsh" section, but I couldn't isolate her voice without making it sound weird. Instead, the "yahoo!" crowd noises found their way in, as well as a brief snippet of a Hell's Angel about to make a speech. Happy accidents!

Add to it all some guitar pedal "wash" effects provided by Kevin, some mixing advice from Vanilla, some Lexicon reverb, and the removal of a whole bunch of extra sounds that didn't need to be there, and "Sandbar" was born!

Then it needed to be MASTERED...which is a story I'll tell some other day. You'll also get to hear about the "video mix" and maybe even see the video (if I ever get around to finishing it). In the meantime you can just enjoy the photograph, which Patrick took with his Holga camera and kindly allowed us to use.

Welcome Back!

Things have changed here!

For regular readers of the blog, the first thing you'll notice is that I'm posting under my real name; after years of humming and hawing I have decided to put Muffy St. Bernard to rest, at least temporarily. There are a lot of reasons for this (and I've discussed many of them before) but the upshot is that I can redirect my energies: instead of spending time, energy, and money (not to mention razors) on doing drag, I can focus more on making music instead.

Hence the new title of the blog: "Lemurian Congress." Ten years of "UPhold" were enough, and the name change signifies a somewhat more polished direction. I've been collaborating with other musicians recently and we're doing some great stuff...stay tuned for samples.

Third: less New Yorker articles. For whatever reason I don't find myself reading the back issues at the moment. Hopefully my own original writing will be a suitable replacement.

I hope you'll stick around and that you'll find the blog as interesting and diverse as it always was. So welcome back!

Creepy Pedro Reviews "Infest Wisely"

The best science fiction films show us the world as it may someday be: the boinking of "A Clockwork Orange," the tasty vittles of the "Soylent Green," the drab and dusty coattails and derbies of "Michael Palin's Brazil."

This new film, "Infest Wisely," presents the most frightening future of all, where an influence has caused appalling actors mumble improvised lines in a world that not even the writer has explored. This future will be captured on film by a cameraperson who does not understand the verb "to film" and it will be edited with the only tool available in the future: The Lazybones Splicer with Snooze Attachment, 2050.

In the future, I imagine, this film will be shown to colonists on Jupiter when all the other films have been stolen by displaced Jovian natives, and the colonists will admit that even considering their immense hardships living inside titanium exoskeletons on a deadly gas planet they have yet to see something so awful as that. Perhaps, they hope, the next movie from Earth will star Terri Garr, and to forget their troubles they will write deceptively cheerful letters to their girlfriends in their private outerspace journals.

Creepy Pedro Reviews "Dillinger is Dead"

Italy is the strangest movie I have ever seen.

Creepy Pedro Reviews "Austin Powers"

The rumours are true: Mike Meyers can do no wrong!

This is not because he hasn't tried. Before he starts working on any movie he wonders "How can I make this go wrong?" and then he says "I know, I'll make these jokes not funny! My jokes will require too long to happen!" But somehow when the camera is on him we laugh at his cute ways, and when he is ad libbing the libs he ads are funny, and the movie is another big hit no matter what Mike Meyers intended to do. Ka-ching! He buys another expensive thing for his enjoyment!

Like Eddie Murphy, maybe he thinks that if he plays all the parts in the movie he will have a greater influence to mess it up. This would be a good plan, except that when he finds himself in his makeup chair he is suddenly a different person, a cute ad-libbing character who does not want to do wrong. And the audience agrees with this performance! We laugh! Unlike the way we respond to Eddie Murphy!

"Austin Powers" is a good example of a movie where several characters may or may not be Mike Meyers. If you are a film critic like me then you often wonder "Is this Mike Meyers on the screen, and is he doing anything wrong?" You ponder this for only five minutes before you are laughing uncontrollably, and you think to yourself "These are things about sex that I never knew!" and eventually, when the time comes to write your review, you can only say "Funny man!" You might also say "Excellent lighting and an obscure geopolitical subtext!" because you are a film critic after all.

I disparage the sexy females in the "Austin Powers" movies because they are not Mike Meyers, they are not as funny. Meyers has been called a "Woman's Writer" because he writes meaningful parts for women, and when he sees them with their breasts and hips he shouts "Oh, HORNY, baby!" And God help us, we laugh!

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "It Rolls On" by Morris Bishop

A poem for the uneasy modern, from the November 1, 1930 issue of The New Yorker.

This is the time of wonder, it is written;
Man has undone the ultimate mysteries.
(We turn from the Chrysler Tower to watch a kitten,
Turn to a dead fish from Isocrates;

Drinkers on five-day boats are gladly smitten
Unconscious on the subjugated seas;
Einstein is even more dull than Bulwer-Lytton;
You cannot smoke on the Los Angeles.)

Science no longer knows the verb-form "can't,"
Fresh meat will soon be shipped by radio;
Scholars are harnessing the urgent ant
And making monstrous bastard fruits to grow,
Building machines for things I do not want,
Discovering truths I do not care to know.

You can find out more about Morris Bishop and his elf-loathing here.

How Long Can Marriage Last...In a Cocktail Setting?

I love the qualification in the Mark Hellinger endorsement: one of the best novels IN ITS CLASS. Just so we're not confusing it with Dostoyevsky or anything.