Tuesday, October 21, 2014

it looks like i've got six months left to live. that might change, but it's how i'm going to be acting for the foreseeable future. so, i need to pick up the pace.

i'm not going to compromise on the product, i'm just going to stop focusing on promotion. it will be a roughly weekly ritual from this point until i figure out how much longer i've really got.
so, they decided to make the forms due on my birthday. aren't they sweet....

if i wait until the very last minute, i should hopefully get another month or two while it's being processed.

i then get a three month grace period from the time a decision is made to figure something out.

i can also appeal. so, i could stretch this out to close to a year.

i'm thinking i should go in to see my worker within a few days to ask if she has any recs for doctors, because it's what it comes down to. all i've had here so far is grief (excluding that one er doctor). i'm actually even considering hitching back to ottawa to go back to the same doctor that signed off on me initially.

kind of cold to hitch, though.

no, really. there's inevitably sleeping outside involved.

i'm obviously crazy. you only need to follow my facebook feed for a few days to get that. but i come off as rather deceptively sane, both on paper and in person. this is why i wanted to get some serious shrink time in. my insanity may not be obvious in a ten minute conversation, which is how these things seem to work, but you can't miss it after you've known me for a few weeks.

like, i was so sane on first impression that the shrink i went to wouldn't even talk to me. if you've been following this for any length of time, you realize how surreal that is.

i suppose i can try another shrink, but....

i think the best diagnosis is just "mad".

"she's a mad hatter" kind of thing.

i'm calmed down, now. my threats aren't idle but i'm relaxed. i wish i didn't buy those cigarettes...

she's in tuesday mornings...

guess i'll have to wait until next week. gives me time to think...

i'm just going to have to level with them.

i needed the doctor to play along, but what got me a huge slice of empathy from ontario works was a letter i wrote them where i just explained the reality of my existence in the most cold, dour way possible.

the truth is nothing has changed. i didn't choose to exist in this society, and i would have decided pretty squarely against it if i had the opportunity to make the choice. but, i'm here, and this is the only way i'm going to exist with any contentment. i can at least state that i've been considerate enough not to breed. signing me off into misery (which i will not accept. i will choose death.) isn't making anything better for anybody.

in the end, i have to convince them to choose compassion over calvinism.

90% of that is going to be determined by who i end up talking to....

clarity (final album mix)

i need to point out that *this* is really going to be the final cynicide/rabit release, that takes the best material out of the period and puts it together into a single record. go ahead and listen to the first two tracks. it's already epic. an elephant in the womb, indeed....

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/clarity-2

publishing clarity (inri054)

the core loops involved in clarity were initially created in the late summer of 2001, with the intent of being the opening sequence in a new inri project (with the long kicked-around working title of 'trinri'). while i had fairly firmly put the inri moniker down around my 19th birthday (late 1999), i was also coming out of a lengthy "serious music" phase and was getting a desire to write in a more structured, synth-pop type direction, as i had for years previously. this urge was happening about the same as i was being coerced into starting a rock band with some high school acquaintances.

around october, i started working on a separate noise project that was meant to splice harsh electronic noise with anarchist politics. this produced two tracks at the time, which are now available as a short single as inri032. at the time, it wasn't clear to me where those ideas would lead.

by november it was clear that the rock band wasn't happening, but it turned out the singer had tastes that correlated reasonably well with what i was thinking about creating for the trinri project. these two projects consequently merged into rabit is wolf, and the material i was kicking around for use in trinri ended up becoming the core of what rabit is wolf became.

as i was recording parts for clarity, i ended up reusing ideas from the noise project. i further reused those ideas in constructing a 2004 noise collage for inclusion on the record that finally came out of the noise project. both noise collages are present in order to comprehensively explore the ideas existing within clarity.

zen was recorded with sean over december, 2001. i have chosen not to complete a version of the wave (inri034) that was also being discussed at the time, but would have fit into this release well, conceptually.

clarity was completed (with vocals) over january, 2002. the nature of rabit (along with the songs i had written for it) took a sharp turn towards folk almost immediately. this collection is consequently quite different than the official rabit demo, which is much more song-oriented. over the years, i've always wanted to have a rabit release that was darker, noisier and more chaotic and am glad to have it in the form of this ep-single, which could be viewed as a secondary demo. put another way, this is the comprehensive representation of the second (electro/noise/industrial) incarnation of rabit is wolf.

however, there are two factors complicating clarity as a solely rabit is wolf production. the first is that sean was never really happy with the result - a shame as i consider his vocal performance and lyrics to be the best of the songs we did together. the second is that i always felt the track was "mine" and should have had an instrumental mix. that is, i've always regretted not saving an instrumental mix.

for these reasons, i've revisited the track as an instrumental and left two snapshots - 11/2001 and 01/2002. this second snapshot (which is to be considered a final mix) will also appear on my upcoming 6th record, dated to the end of 2002.

recorded in late 2001 and early 2002. track 6 was constructed in may, 2004 out of files recorded 1999-2001. tracks 1-4 were reconstructed over october, 2014. final mixes were finished on october 18, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitars (electric, acoustic, nylon), mandolin, sequencers, synthesizers, drum & melodic programming, electric air reed organ, digital piano, flute, drum kit, sampling, digital and analog effects processing, digital wave editing, sound design (loops, granular synthesis, noise generators), production

sean - vocals/lyrics (3,5), harmonica (4,5)

released february 1, 2002

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/clarity

i've listened to and tweaked around with the eq and compression on clarity all day, and i'm just about to leave it as it is. every time i change something, it becomes something i'm not used to hearing. i operate pretty strongly on intuition. that is, i tend to just fuck with it until it sounds "right". what i'm realizing is that what sounds "right" is the way it sounded 12 years ago, due to listening to it that way so many times. i guess this is a thing that happens, and that we all do it to our own music and the music of others - through repeated listening, the imperfections on the track become a part of the track, to the point that it can't exist without them. i'd bet this frustrates the fuck out of paul mccartney....

even the piano part. it's sloppy. i think i was drunk. i wanted it to have that suave, amateurish new wave bash to it (it's a stylistic trait of mine, through a lot of my recordings), but it came out weirdly meek sounding. like i wanted to smash the keyboard but was drunk. which i think is literally true...

i can't replace it, though. i've mentally cycled through a number of more sophisticated parts, and they all convert the track into something it may have once become but hasn't been since it was created. i've thought about rebashing a little harder, but it's the same fundamental concern.

so, the 2002 instrumental mix is going to be the final mix on this. predictable posting flurry is coming...