stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (soundblaster mix)

those numbers can get confusing as they change to accommodate new ups. i often number them myself, but i'm not totally sure how many mixes this is going to have, yet. i suppose i'll have to stop at 74 minutes.

this is an update of the primitive card mix to include the new wind section instead of the arpeggiated guitars. they're all updated now except the vst mix, which i'm going to need to do something about the drums as well, on second thought....

there may be a few more, but, as i just said, i don't know the sequence.

when i do, i'll number. and they'll post through rss....

written late 2000 & early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014. re-rendered due to shift in instrumentation on apr 27, 2014.



there may be a few more, but, as i just said, i don't know the sequence.

when i do, i'll number. and they'll post through rss....

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (original mix)

played through winamp on a sb live! and captured in a sound editor. this is what the track sounded like on playback as i was composing it. note that the background guitar parts have not yet been converted to wind instruments.

written in early 2001. rendered feb 11, 2014 from the unmodified original midi track. defined as "original" on april 27, 2014.

minor change in instrumentation to the track. i've converted some of the background, arpeggiated guitars into a small wind section consisting of clarinet and flute. i think it gives the track a bit more colour. and, i'm allowed to do this. i've seen it done. eight lines / octet (reich) is one example i know of.

but it means i'm going to re-render and re-upload each of the tracks. so, expect that in the automatic rss updates over the next few hours...

the bulk of the written guitars are percussive, and i'm going to be adding some leads over top. so, these aren't going to change. but pulling the arpeggiated parts out to wind gives it more of a minimalist sound, ala reich and glass. which is half what i was going for with the track, actually.

this is a rough outline in what i'm working through for the next little while, in cleaning up material left hanging from 2001. some of this is going to be left as is, some of it is going to be remixed and some of it is going to be (re-)recorded from scratch.

inri numbers are tentative throughout...

it's going to culminate in:

jjjjjjjjj

a) an lp of modern "chiptune" midi music, played back through vst synths. i'm not interested in the wanky, generic silliness that defines that genre. as "chiptune" this is going to be considered bloody weird. inri34.

b) uplifts of that lp to include live guitar parts. 'cause i'll never accept sampled or sequenced guitars. sorry. and also because i didn't score out a lot of the lead parts. these are the "final versions" of the pieces. inri35.

c) a series of eps that collect rough mixes, primitive card renders, midi files and other goodies for each of the tracks. inri24, 25, 27, 28, 32 & maybe 29/33.

d) j's adventures in guitarland. this is an aborted project that is already available at bandcamp as inri26.

rabit is wolf

a) a demo with 5 tracks, that include an outside vocalist. 2002. inri3x.

b) the wave, regular and sped-up (with vocals). aka symphony 3, in full. inri36.

c) multiple mixes of symphony 4. 2002. inri3x.

d) tracks eps with remixes and demos: inri29, 31, 33 and probable others.

ftaa

a) early two-track noise demo. inri30.

inri24: jan 10 - stuck in an alley
inri26: feb 10 - little suite
inri25: mar 21 - the time machine
inri26: may 08 - preludio
inri26: may 10 - guitarland
inri27: may 13: symphony sound card mix
inri28: july 15: intersection
inri3x: aug xx: trep drums
??????: sept xx: gonna kill someone
inri29: sept 7: me, myself demo version
inri29: sept 22: me, myself chip version
inri29: oct 13: me, myself temp version
inri30: nov 11: strung out
inri30: nov 11: hell, harry
inri31: nov 25: clarity incomplete. instrumental.
inri32: dec 1: choir
inri33: dec 15: #9 both versions + chiptune version

(possible additions to chiptune project:
august? 1997: confused
??: mwp, think, nope, hey, god, boogeyman
sept 06, 1997 - schizoid w/drums
oct 14, 1997 - skaters
jan 13, 1998 - wish fragment w/drums?
feb, 1998 - anticipation.
mar 17, 1998 - i did your mom w/drums
june 04, 1998 - symphony 0 next.mid
june 13, 1999 - symphony 0 next.nwc
inri34: thru - midi versions
inri35: jjjjjjjjjj - live versions. )

inri36: the wave. dec 31, 2001.

============

moving into 2002, rabit stops in it's tracks around june and both tetris and trivial group begin. the symphony-centric period also begins, meaning single tracks become relatively rare.

obligatory "influential on song of the next few days" post.

again: i'm trying to avoid linking to the old stuff, but there's really a deficit of material that draws a direct influence from the stuff i really grew up with.

this is on the fringes of my tastes, and about as heavy as i'd ever get. the thing about stuff like white zombie, ministry, melvins and some of the other stuff from the same time and place (including korn, actually) is that it was never really metal. it was punk musicians trying to be metal musicians that were trying to be punk. or something. i think that subtlety has been lost to history. but it let people that were normally into punk get into it a bit more.

i was actually listening to the remix disc, supersexy swingin' sounds, quite a bit at the time. that remains one of the most outright fucking weird pieces of music ever released. the camp appeal was a big part of this.

but those that are willing to strain their memory this far back will recall that there was a brief moment when the guitarist for white zombie had a column in guitar world. white zombie was never particularly challenging, but the guitar style (regardless of who was playing) has always been pretty creative. the guitar parts on this disc were a lot of fun to play along to. now, i was mostly learning blues at the time, which got me more interested in thayil and corgan (as periphery to the lesson material, which was hendrix, clapton, page, zappa, srv), but i've always had a taste for noise, so i took the time to explore this idea of "skronking" a little and am pretty glad i did. you can hear it from time to time, not just on this old stuff but moving forward....

(relevant tracks: mosh pit song, unintelligible, first two punk/emo/grunge/industrial/noise demos in general.)

obligatory "influential on song of the next few days" post.

again: i'm trying to avoid linking to the old stuff, but there's really a deficit of material that draws a direct influence from the stuff i really grew up with.

i'm not making a comparison. i yell at people when they do that. but you can tell i was listening to novoselic's bass playing.

this is a much more creative record than nevermind and had a much bigger influence on me. in utero > incesticide > nevermind, but none of the earliest really noisy stuff made it up to youtube, for various reasons. there's some later stuff. it's all at the bandcamp site, at the very bottom.

(relevant tracks: mosh pit song, unintelligible, first two punk/emo/grunge/industrial/noise demos in general. also, my guitar style is heavily indebted to kurt cobain's noise-first approach to the instrument; even if that influence gets lost under more direct influences from sonic youth and billy corgan that had a bigger effect on me when i was older, it was nirvana that opened my brain to the possibilities of chaining effects pedals together and feeding them through an amp.)

obligatory "influential on song of the next few days" post.

again: i'm trying to avoid linking to the old stuff, but there's really a deficit of material that draws a direct influence from the stuff i really grew up with.

i'm not making a comparison. i yell at people when they do that. but you can tell i was listening to novoselic's bass playing. the rhythm section is really the best part of the record.

(relevant tracks: mosh pit song, unintelligible, first two punk/emo/grunge/industrial/noise demos in general. also, my guitar style is heavily indebted to kurt cobain's noise-first approach to the instrument; even if that influence gets lost under more direct influences from sonic youth and billy corgan that had a bigger effect on me when i was older, it was nirvana that opened my brain to the possibilities of chaining effects pedals together and feeding them through an amp.)

obligatory "influential on song of the next few days" post.

again: i'm trying to avoid linking to the old stuff, but there's really a deficit of material that draws a direct influence from the stuff i really grew up with.

back in '94, when i was 13, this video was pretty much the coolest thing ever.

(relevant tracks: mosh pit song, first two punk/emo/grunge/industrial/noise demos in general)

obligatory "influential on song of the next few days" post.

again: i'm trying to avoid linking to the old stuff, but there's really a deficit of material that draws a direct influence from the stuff i really grew up with. so i'm going to have some fun with the silliness...

i played my stupid songs and wrote my stupid words in a basement rather than a garage. yet, that's easily glossed over. and this is really a universal teenage anthem, isn't it?

(relevant tracks: mosh pit song, unintelligible, first two punk/emo/grunge/industrial/noise demos in general)

on third thought, it's noticeably slower, and the time presented is varying wildly. my previous stable image didn't do that - it calculated it properly and just ticked down. but, vista/7 does do that. to the world's annoyance. so, i'm on the other side of some updated dll that i'd rather not be on, but the slow down is only roughly 30% (only 30%, lol, but you only notice it for big transfers), so i'm not willing to go through the headache of rolling back.

if it presents something more bothersome, sure. right now, i want to get back to recording.

shit is otherwise up, tested and working. i don't know how long this is going to take, but i'm glad to get back to actually laying down some tracks. it was ridiculous that the machine imploded the day before i was going to start actually doing some fresh recording (rather than sorting through and cleaning up old stuff).

but, i'm here. let's hope the floor doesn't cave in or something.

aaaaactually...

i was copying files as i was running my script, and it was horrific. chipset drivers were updated, but i hadn't yet ripped out 80% of the system. which is what my install script does. no exaggeration.

now that i have, copy is back to normal. what took me an hour a few minutes ago now takes 3 minutes.

this indicates to me that it's probably related to one of the many (almost all) windows services that i've actually deleted. i didn't say disable, i said delete.

it's still awful, however you look at it. there's clearly something in the os that is slowing down basic functions to absurd levels. as i pointed out in the other post, this is a widespread annoyance.

it indicates why i run my script, though

a little research seems to pinpoint the problem to a set of updates in about mid 2011, if people are curious.the way this seems to work, though, is something like this:

1) microsoft breaks something.
2) hardware companies refuse to learn how to change their drivers to fix it.
3) people get frustrated and buy new hardware that plows over what ms broke with increased speed/power.
4) profit.

the result is that increases in hardware performance are merely being used to correct windows, which gets more and more broken with each release cycle. we're constantly forced to upgrade to maintain stasis. it's like they've found a way to mimic inflationary monetary policy. let's just be happy those fucking cloud computers never caught on, or we'd be really fucked.

for now, quick fix is to put yourself behind a good router, lock your OS down the smart/hard way, don't have browsing habits that are comparable to your clueless grandmother (NO IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO RUN CUTECATS.EXE), never ever launch internet explorer (i've taken the approach of actually deleting the IE dlls altogether, which is technically illegal, but whatever) and stop updating windows...

or install linux. if you don't have expensive music hardware without linux drivers.

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

as a part of recovering from this mess (mechanical hard drive failure, followed by bad bios flash - fixed the bios, but the hard drive was not salvageable), i slipstreamed up to the latest xp updates. now, i'd normally do this by testing first, but the drive was wiped so that step got skipped.

one of the reasons i stick with xp (and will continue to more or less indefinitely) is that hard drive operations on my hardware are very slow with newer versions of windows due to a driver signing conflict that reduces to the computer industry being inept and incompetent, which is the result of capitalism. root of all problems. i ranted about this a few weeks ago.

but, what am i getting after the updates? the same fucking thing as i'd get with windows 7 or vista. it's taking an hour to copy a gb of data to an external drive, because of a bunch of stupid security bullshit. supposedly, anyways. as mentioned before, i think microsoft is just trying to coerce me to buy new hardware. it's preposterously corrupt, really.

of course, i'm not actually going to buy new hardware, i'm going to uninstall the "security updates". but because i'm slipstreaming, this is a time consuming pain in the ass.

i'm going to have to test it first before i go through the process. the thing i need to determine is if the security bullshit is getting in the way of multitasking or not. i can deal with slow copy operations for now. but i can't deal with broken multitasking...

.....running and tested....

i'm back in business.

i had to spend the last few days waiting for files to copy around all over the place. but i've now got everything filed and cleaned and reconstructed and recompiled and backed up and reburned and am just about to reinstall windows, which should launch the install script. i expect some minor issues to appear, but i also expect to actually get some tracks down within a day or two.

here i go...

i got tricked by the abridged version having more hits and coming up first. i want this here, not there.

i forgot to list this as an influence on a track of the day from a few days ago. it's sort of glaring, as the track in question is actually very much a post-punk reworking of the end riff of this. it's a simple riff, but it was always a lot of fun to play.

echoes - and the idea of the side-long track, in general - was also a big influence on the longer pieces (i call them 'symphonies', with tongue somewhat in cheek), going forwards. the merging of blues riffs into larger, quasi-symphonic and sort of electro-experimental pieces is something more specific that i do fairly often, and that stems directly to floyd.

(relevant tracks: idiotic, all symphonies)

obligatory "influential on track of the day" post.

i'm trying to avoid linking to these ancient demos from the mid 90s, recorded when i was 15 or 16 (and demoing tracks i wrote when i was 13 or 14). i mean, the stuff that's up is up because i like it. but there are objective problems with some of it (the vocals on some of it give the term lofi a whole new level of depth).

i've always loved this record and have never really understood why it tends to be separated from the other pumpkins masterpieces. i'd even go so far as to say you can't really understand siamese/pisces (which corgan should really re-release as a double record) without getting into this first. it's a pre-req.

it was the psychedelic portions on the second half of the disc that i found really imaginative. you can hear a very direct influence on the guitar playing....

(relevant tracks: the boogeyman, screwed up, wish, nope, teenage jesus, stress, others)

it's funny.

i've basically arrived where i have in life by convincing myself of the single axiom that existence is meaningless, and this makes conventionally interacting in society entirely worthless. centring your life around anything related to property, status or wealth is just throwing your life away to utilitarian/capitalist excesses. yet, even this is not rational: if the aim is maximizing pleasure in the short amount of time we have to do it, doing loads of drugs makes more sense than working in an office. rejecting hedonistic capitalism within the context of this futility of breathing leaves only the individual's whimsical fancies as remotely meaningful goals (i skipped some steps there). art for art's sake (or knowledge for knowledge's sake) is consequently the only worthwhile pursuit (any other existence would and should rationally end up with a quick suicide, as it would be the fastest way to lessen the amount of existential torture brought on equally by slavery and boredom), and capitalist society is merely an obstacle to avoid.

if mortality could be abolished (and i'm ok with existing in software), the entire calculus would change. this ought to present the individual with a hobson's choice to pursue immortality at all costs, as the worst thing that could happen would be to die trying to abolish death. unless failure is certain, of course, in which case why waste the time? unfortunately, i'm convinced that this isn't feasible in my lifetime. death remains the only concrete reality worth planning around.

so, faced with the certainty of all of this meaningless, the only thing that can actually motivate me to get out of bed and pursue these goals is the certainty that i have a finite amount of time to complete them in, bringing me back around again to where i began.

"yeah, well, i'm 30% of the way into paying off a high interest loan to get a piece of paper to allow me to pay property taxes, and that requires me to spend 75% of my time living for somebody else (and maybe more if i'm married). so, you lose at life."

it's actually not so bad for me if people actually continue to think that. i mean, there's two ways forward from where we are: full communism or state-driven social darwinism (popularly, if somewhat incorrectly, referred to as 'fascism'). we've been leaning towards the latter for decades. and, if that's the unalterable future, i can't benefit from winning the argument.

i can snicker about it on my facebook page, though.

i'll be back on this again soon, finally. aim: uplift with live guitars.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/stuck-in-the-middle-of-an-alley-closing-in-on-all-sides

script successfully reconstituted, precisely how i left it.

i need to double check a few things and do some more filing but i'll be back up tomorrow or the next day.

the point of a script rather than an image is that it's dynamic. burning a dozen discs would defeat the point. i'd might as well just ghost it if i'm going to do that.

but i'm going to have to start backing it up more regularly.

I FOUND MY SCRIPT

it was hiding in a virtual machine...

that makes life soooooooooo much easier....

it's even fairly recent. sept, 2013.

last place i looked...

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

this i something else i was listening to huge amounts of in 99/00 and had a huge influence on me, insofar as the idea of merging guitars with electronic music is concerned. it's a shame that the live dynamics are a bit weak...

(relevant track: book it!, entropy, ignorance is bliss, curious george, gravity's rainbow, a commercial break, all symphonies, all tetris material)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

this was in the changer most of the fall of '99 and had a big influence on what i was doing for the next little while. it's partly the synth tones, and partly the atmosphere...

outstanding record, btw. i can't count how many nights it was coming through the speakers around 3:00 am. perfectly atmospheric. i just wish i hadn't lost my certificate of provenance...

(relevant track: book it!, entropy, gravity's rainbow, ignorance is bliss, curious george, rabit is wolf, all symphonies after 1)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

i actually wrote the guitar riff to book it! by jamming over this while it was going on loop, creating a sort of tangerine dream effect. it's something i do quite often for fun over all kinds of electronic music. sometimes, it releases emotion...sometimes it creates songs....

(relevant track: book it!)

might i dare?

i don't claim much influence from the beatles, despite the absurd amount of time i've spent listening to them. it was just always so clearly before my time. i mean, i listen to the beatles the same way i listen to debussy. it's music from a past era....

here, though, the ending chord is sort of an obvious nod.

(relevant track: book it)

deathtokoalas
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

this is a sort of a landmark of electronic music that all the kids should know about and that was a big influence on me around the turn of the century.

well, the story is that my dad bought a record player some time in mid 99. my step-mother thought it looked ghetto (she didn't want people to think we were that far behind the times) and wouldn't let him set it up in the living room. he wasn't happy about that for a long time, but the record player ended up in my bedroom (along with his drum kit, i might add). she was half-right: he never used the kit or the record player and was never going to, he was just being silly. but i did...

thankfully, he knew what he was doing regarding which records to pick up. oldfield. floyd. jarre. tangerine dream. heavy string and analog synth driven stuff where the harmonic distortion really justifies the older technology.

so, i went on a 70s synth kick that summer.

(relevant track: missed connection, book it!, all symphonies)

Since1987

wtf?!?!?!?!?!?

deathtokoalas

i'm not entirely sure exactly why you're so surprised.

daniel payne

Well it is one of those universal tracks i remember Dj-ing one night on the Decks playing oxygene IV  at 45 instead 33 But worked on the dance floor 

But strangely worked on the dancefloor Btw it was accident that it got played at the wrong speed 

nick ashmore

are you for real mate (Dj-ing) lol where and what have you really done that was yours. do you produced

deathtokoalas

indeed. we should all stop dancing to our favourite songs at bars because it threatens nick's perception of his penis size.

it's really the bar owner you need to blame, you know. could he not have found a nice bluegrass ensemble, so we could all marvel at their musicality while not getting smashed and singing along to bon jovi?

nick ashmore

that's fair i did not read what daniel said right in the first place. I thought he was saying the song was crap. and i bet a koala would kick you arse lol :)

geoff hill

Ohh so true

brianboru62

You should listen to Tangerine Dreams Halcyon more often in one ear and lip up fatty by Bad Manners in the other ear a trip in a trip

ubiquitous saturnine pics to lure one into a false sense of 'being there' stuck in the Jarre

lorne mcneil

well said/ it was a land mark in synthistsers /faze varience ,and imagination :)

Warris

im a bit jealous, i would love to have a record player so i could buy vinyl my favorite artists make :)

Luis Alberto Deveaux

Ferry good:-)

Scott Mantooth

one of the many amazing albums i have of this artist...was thought to be really weird in high school (decades ago) since i loved classical and music like this...of course Vangelis, Tomita, and Kitaro were also fairly included in that select group 

deathtokoalas

i find the more explicitly "new age" stuff tends to kind of drift off into a sort of aimless ambience, whereas the prog stuff (like elp) tends to get aimless in the opposite direction. what i like about the stuff i cited (tangerine dream is an exception, as their discography is spotty) is that it hit a good middle ground in integrating the synth aesthetics into more developed writing styles. you get those awesome synth sounds and developed musical structure, rather than one or the other. put another way, i think i can't really get into stuff like vangelis for the same reason that i can't really get into rossini.

i know a lot of it was not well received at the time by "serious music critics" who largely interpreted it as pop music masquerading as classical music, but i think they really missed the point. what is currently called the classical (or neo-classical) music of this period is really pretty boring because it tries to stop the development of music about the year 1850. i mean, maybe the stuff is a little harder to play. but it exists in a vacuum. it's not trying to create a 20th century artform, so much as it's rejecting the industrial revolution.

i think that future generations will reject the critics of the period, and conclude that the actual "classical music" of the mid-to-late 20th century was being created by a motley collection of jazz fusion, minimalist, post-punk, experimental, industrial, electronic and progressive rock musicians. this is the serious music of the era. the neo-classical stuff is not.

yup. i just booted into windows, and i'm happy about it. another save for the bus pirate.

now i need to figure out how i'm going to reconstruct it. i should be back up and recording by the end of the weekend.

I FIXED MY MOTHERBOARD.

IT BEEPS! YAY!

so, i had the cables connected wrong. derp.

not my fault, though! the manual was wrong!

it's flashing right now, i'll know in a few minutes...

it's telling me it can't identify the bios chip, but that doesn't really add up.

well, the device seems to work. but this isn't designed to run on windows, really, and i'm going to have to boot to linux to even begin to troubleshoot it.

bus pirate came in today. just about to unpack it...

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

well, it's a remix of it. there's a long story at the bandcamp page. short story: i know the track has a highly personal aspect to it and i'm sort of missing the point, but, after five years (which saw me go from pre-teen to young adult), i was expecting something a bit more substantial than a few power chords and some reverb floating around in the back, idiosyncratic verses or not. i'm not falling into the "writing for me" fallacy - i know it's absurd - but all the delays and marketing and projections of genius made it...

...anti-climactic. to put it lightly.

but i was encouraged by people at alt.music.nin to remix it, and consequently took the position that the best thing to do would be to approach it's flaws, as i saw them. i didn't really want to reinterpret it outside of the context of the full record (which actually hadn't been released yet); rather, i wanted to exaggerate it to what i felt it could have been. so, it's the same basic concept, it's just taken to a greater extreme....

(relevant track: the day inri messed the world up)

so, i don't know if my mail person was trying to do me a favour or trying to piss me off and i'm consequently torn as to how to react. the package got here, but through a difficult route - and unsigned, when i was supposed to sign. that works out to my benefit, but it's more future packages i'm concerned about.

right now, i'm almost afraid to open it.

i'm going to probably walk down to the post office and ask them if they can automatically hold items to this address. there's no way anybody can contact me down here without prior consent, which is on purpose and not going to change. i'd rather they hold items there to begin with, and just send me an email to get me to pick it up. it removes a set of hands from the chain.

so, here's the story...

first, the crux of this is that i've made myself difficult to contact on purpose for many years - as long as i've lived on my own, basically. people coming to my old apartment would complain i was unlisted and they had to use their cell, but this was no accident. what a lot of them didn't realize was that i wasn't just unlisted; the buzzer actually wasn't set up. there was literally no way for anybody to contact me from the intercom.

and who uses the intercom? jehovah's witnesses. rogers. vacuum cleaner salespeople. mary kay. politicians. kids with fundraisers. people i don't want to talk to...

there's no intercom here. yet, when i moved down here, i took the doorbell out. it's for the same reasons: i do not want random people to be able to bother me.

you can agree with me by emulating me. it might get rid of some of the door-to-door type if more people adopted this method.

pretty much the one casualty of this is the mail dude, who drops off packages from time to time. yet, it's generally far too infrequently for it to justify being annoyed by children and religious idiots. i'm perfectly happy with going down to the post office and getting it myself. as mentioned, that prevents the unnecessary risk stemming from the mail dude handling it.

however, i happened to encounter him on my front step a few weeks ago and he wasn't very happy with my attitude. he asked if there was another bell to ring, because mine didn't work - i had to tell him i don't want it to work. so, he asked me for a phone number. right, like i want to give a random stranger my phone number (and i actually don't have one, anyways). i told him i'd rather he just leave the slip in the box. he was both confused and upset...

see, the mail people in canada are coming up against some possible extreme layoffs. looking at the government's plan, it almost seems like a scheme to make the mailboxes smaller and force more expensive courier options; what they're doing isn't going to eliminate carriers, it's just going to make the process more expensive. private carriers win, everybody else loses. no surprises, here - it's been the trajectory of government for decades.

however, i happen to be the type of ("real") anarchist that is opposed to frivolous work, and i'm not sure how anybody could argue that delivering mail is less frivolous than working a cash register. it's a job i don't think should exist; it squanders resources i think could be better applied elsewhere. if i can walk to the post office, why can't everybody else? so, i wouldn't be particularly upset about layoffs, and am not particularly empathetic to this guy's snarky reaction to my request to leave it in the box.

the key question: did he pick up that i didn't care about his job?

i had a package arrive this morning that required a signature. strangely, it ended up down the street, left without a signature. i only know this because of the kindness of the neighbour who brought it to me, and was able to contact me by knocking on my landlord's door.

on first glance, it seems obvious that the mail dude is being an ass, here.

however, given that he knew i don't answer the door, he may have thought he was saving me a trip.

i actually don't appreciate that. but i'd rather talk it through than write him up. well, unless he's looking for severance, i guess. but i can't reasonably make any of these assumptions.

so, i think the best thing to do is determine if i can get the post office to hold items and email me for pickup when they come in.

the device is apparently undamaged. and, in truth, with the way it was packaged, it would have been hard to damage it.

oddly, the canada post tracking site continues to state that the item is "out for delivery". i'm going to let this run through the system and see what happens. if it works properly, i should get a refund. and maybe i deserve one. i'll give it a few days....

the most important thing i learned from....decades....in school is the following:

if you're going to go to school with the purpose of doing something competitive with it (be that in employment or in academia), you have no option but to pick something you love to do. things may have been different in the past when the field was narrower, but nowadays living in north america means you're competing against two thirds of the planet for just about anything, and if you're not loving it then somebody else is going to mop the floor with you.

you might have a greater pure aptitude in the topic and in general. you might have higher test scores. you might be a harder worker, even. yet, if you're doing it for labour then the blunt reality is that you have no chance against the thousands of other people that do it for *fun*.

it's actually sort of an anarchist's ideal: the only kind of vocation any of us have any real chance in any more is what we'd love to be doing, anyways. the problem is that so few of us were raised with that mindset. we were told to do something we don't love because it is marketable (only to be outcompeted by somebody that loves it), or even to do something we loathe because it's profitable (only to run into the same problem). while that's happening, we're wasting developing skills doing things we enjoy, and getting behind those that figured this out.

if there are changes to immigration, or drastic improvements in living standard elsewhere, maybe it will once again make sense to tell your young, operatic nephew they'd be better off as a dentist. but, as it is, there's no deficit of kids that knew they wanted to be dentists when they were three years old and have spent their whole lives preparing, and the reality is that your nephew doesn't stand a fucking chance against them - he's really better off exploring his vocal chords.

i think that's a mass shift in social mindset that we need to have.

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

there's some really interesting sampling on this disc.

(relevant track: liquify, symphony 5)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

bass/drums in the instrumental section.

(relevant track: liquify)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

out of the hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of records i've consumed in my life, very few are in the same category as this one. it's a song structuring influence on this particular track, especially in the instrumental second half of the track.

(relevant track: liquify, the day inri messed the world up, all symphonies, more)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

the melody is borrowed. it's tongue-in-cheek. i do this often.

(relevant track: liquify)

deathtokoalas
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

you can hear it in the short section that features piano mashing and feeding back guitars.

(relevant track: liquify, first movement, others)

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
the song structuring is early queen, the atmosphere is david bowie (c. aladin sane) and the pick harmonics are all eddie van halen. also, the solo is vintage king crimson. you can maybe pull something post-punk out of the vocals....

like, honestly: if you like that layered guitar sound on mellon collie (which is what makes this track), go pick up the first three queen discs.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
the pumpkins were a punk band at their core, but this particular track is a fine piece of mid 70s glam metal, mixed with a bit of progressive rock.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
if forced to pick between grunge and punk, it's more like grunge than it is like punk, but there's a number of stylistic qualities associated with grunge that it doesn't have. the guitar tone is very bright, caused by rolling up the treble - grunge is generally associated with an exaggerated low end. nor do the vocals work well in a grunge context.

“alternative rock" has never been a real genre, and to the extent that it was it applied more to stuff like rem (which corgan certainly dabbled heavily in). the pumpkins fit well into "alternative culture" for a while, but they were generally not considered to fit into that aesthetic in the 90s. they were usually cut out into psychedelic pop or progressive rock, and viewed as more of a 60s/70s retro act.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
it's really not, though. you'd really never hear any grunge bands or personalities talk like that. politically, it was mostly a left-liberal movement with an undercurrent of christian morality (in the love your brother sense, not the kill the gays sense). corgan's always been somewhat of a hippie.

there was a strain of that kind of misanthropist thinking in some of the alternative culture of the early 90s, but it came more out of goth and industrial subculture. it's something you'd hear from trent reznor or nivek ogre, not kurt cobain or mark arm.

it's maybe a bit emo, though, which is another thing the pumpkins dabbled in.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
the pumpkins fit into a lot of overlapping genres, but there was never anything "independent" about them. this is big budget stadium rock in any era.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
people are assholes. it'd be nice if we could just set them all on fire, but there's laws and stuff.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
it's not because you hurt my feelings, it's because your views deserve to be incinerated along with everybody who shares them.

beyond there being laws against setting assholes on fire, the historical record is also clear: oppressing assholes just makes them come back stronger. look at russia. they tried to ban the christians, and a hundred years later the country is teetering on the edge of a fundamentalist state.

so, we have to argue with assholes, somehow. educate them? maybe their kids, but not too harshly, or they'll kneejerk.

really, i think it's better to just resign ourselves to the reality that assholes will always exist and there's nothing to be done about it.

(deleted post)

deathtokoalas
there's a little button on the thread that says "disable replies".

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

there's a more in depth explanation at my bandcamp site. but, over that summer, i was sorting through some old guitar magazines and came across a version of most of this worked out in tab. i had very fast fingers back then; i picked it up pretty quickly. so, it worked it's way into the track for that reason...

(relevant track: liquify, first movement, others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

raided for samples...

(relevant track: liquify)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

(relevant tracks: liquify (first section), all symphonies.)

wooo!

2014/04/14 23:36 MISSISSAUGA Item processed

so, i'm thinking tomorrow or the next day.

meaning that i may not end up getting any work done on this old laptop, after all. but it's now fully loaded.

including this neat, fairly new little trick regarding playing direct into midi. always wanted something like that...

(i knew this was going to happen, btw. lol.)

actually, i took advantage of the snow by going for a long, brisk walk. 'twas nice.

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

the assignment topic reminded me of this song, and i conceptually had it in mind for the 'global warming' section - although it sounds nothing like it.

(relevant tracks: symphony 0, swim, teenage jesus, liquify, first movement, others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

an aesthetic influence, mostly...i could pull a lot of things out, but i specifically remember listening to large amounts of this record...

(relevant tracks: symphony 0, happiness is a harsh gun, weed in the yard, medicated to the one i love, others )

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

an aesthetic influence, mostly...i could pull a lot of things out for that, but i specifically remember listening to large amounts of this record...

(relevant tracks: bach goes loopy, symphony 0, pop music, missed connection, jesus gets fucked on robitussin, tribute, others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post...

i could pick a few different things, but i think this goofy parody of the drums of war is the closest to what i was thinking.

(relevant tracks: symphony 0, war)

it's past my bedtime (you can laugh. i'm ridiculous.) but i think i can declare victory with this ad-hoc setup. it's ad-hoc, mind you. but it should be functional.

i had to go up to cubase 5. iirc, i didn't do that in the first place because it wasn't playing nicely with my interface. i'll have to see if this version is better. no dongle emulator running in the background. that's definitely nice...

i also went up to guitar rig 5. i'm picky with tone. so, i'll call it an experiment for now.

i was hoping i could use the soundcard in the laptop for playback, but it's turned out to be useless. i had to get asio4all for cubase to even recognize it, but it's not actually working. it's probably a minor fix, but looking at the difference in specs is embarrassing to the hd chip. i'm way better off just headphoning directly out of the pod, even if it's a little awkward, cord-wise.

besides that, the bare minimum (pod drivers, cubase, guitar rig, cool edit) installed properly. and that's all i want running for now. i'll take more things in as i need them (i do use izotope as an effect processor, and there's a few secret plugins i won't mention), but this is meant to be a minimal environment.

if i were to play this live, i'd need a second usb to 1/8th inch out. that hdmi out isn't connecting to cubase. then again, i'd need to move to sonar to route the signal from the usb in, through guitar rig and back out again to the mixer, anyways.

it's not a worthwhile thought right now....

....and the pod provides the option of a clean or wet send in the drivers (as well as to turn the amp sim off and on). i knew that, but it's been a while since i've used it...

it took a lot of wasted time waiting for things to copy around all over the place, but i've managed to get my medium old laptop back up (not the really old one that can barely hit google; this is about ten years old, and fully useable for just about anything). the hard drive has been causing me problems since last summer, but it turns out the black screen was actually the result of not activating windows (i forgot i had installed it)...

the drive isn't really to be trusted anymore, though, so i need to be working off a usb key. i wanted to work off an external drive, but windows 7 just flat wouldn't read it. works fine in xp. vista too, even. not 7. there's all kinds of dumb info online about the drive being "incompatible with windows 7", like it broke plug and play compatibility through usb or something. it's a glorified fucking thumb drive. it should read on everything.

but i suspect it's the same basic problem i spoke of earlier, with changes to the way the os reads drivers. i'm not privy to background info on 7 like i am on vista, but talk about arrogance. they get all kinds of complaints on this, and rather than fix it they make it worse.

unless, of course, somebody figured out you could sell more drives by forcing people to upgrade their hardware with their os...

i repeat: perfectly functioning drive on xp, vista. brick on 7. official reason: "incompatible". most likely technical reason: the 7 kernel considers it a "security threat". actual driver: hardware sales.

anyways, i wanted to back up to that drive, so i put vista back on and copied the shit over, and then put 7 back on. it will read fine in xp when my bios comes back. but in order to get it from my new laptop (also running 7) to the old one, i had to use my mp3 drive...

so, it now exists in five places. that's more than sufficiently safe.

anyways, the thumb key is more than enough space for one song at a time for a few weeks until things resolve themselves back to stability.

the thing is that i bought this laptop refurbished to use for school in the short run and turn into an effects rack long term. the hope was also to turn it into somewhat of a live out. i mean, it's hard to lull a tank of a pc out and about. the signal was supposed to dual out of the laptop and the pod into a stereo receiver and play through a set of celestions, which i had interpreted as a sort of modern, technology-friendly update to the classic marshall sound. i mean, trying to run this stuff through amps creates garbage. it has to be through clean signals...but getting as close to the original path as possible struck me as worthwhile.....

it's not quite to that point. well, i never finished the symphony i wanted to perform, anyways. but, it is going to end up with cubase, guitar rig and pod software - along with other guitar effects, which will turn it into a backup guitar studio.

i cannot hook it up to a firewire interface and consequently cannot connect it to the mixer or any of the things into the mixer. nor does it have a midi in/out. so, my options are limited...this is temporary....

....but it will get me back to work while i'm waiting.

there are cheap usb soundcards nowadays. it's not really necessary. but if that bios doesn't flash...

actually, something else i won't be able to do (i don't think) is drive the signal. i'll have to check. the question is if the usb sound card out on the pod takes a dry or wet signal in.

if it does, i have no real complaints regarding guitar tone. i'll just have to wait until the mixer comes back up to tweak it.

if not, i'll have to see how it sounds, but i'm not compromising my tone, either....

unfortunately, it makes sense to me to think that the usb out is just a signal from the unit - meaning it won't matter what i put in front of the thing, it won't pick it up.

hopefully, it surprises me, but it doesn't really make sense to me to think it can do that.

i use it largely for amp sims. i use guitar rig for post-processing. well, it's what each is made for. the problem with the amp sims is they need some fire to reverse that dead, digital sound. i guess if i was doing that corporate emo hair metal thing it would be fine, but i'm not; i find i need to drive it with a tube pre-amp to be useable, and i need to drive *that* with some boxes to get the most of it.

i didn't think that through.

i'll find out in a few hours.

i'm actually able to recreate fuzz-->tube-->amp fairly well with that setup, and without getting evicted.

this is where my obligatory "influenced by song of the day" post belongs.

it's maybe not entirely obvious, but i was listening to a lot of this record at the time. it's in the structure and atmosphere, if not the genre or writing.

(relevant track: inverted, symphony 3)

this is where my obligatory "influenced by song of the day" post belongs.

the track was a remix, but you can't really tell that now. it was sort of a sarcastic joke aimed at the remixee.

(relevant track: inverted)

i just took a hot shower. it seems to have warmed up the whole apartment. let's see how long it lasts.

of course, it warmed me up too!

but the heat went up a few tenths of a degree and turned itself off. that's measurable.

if i'm understanding what's happening properly, the air should suck that extra heat and moisture up and out. eventually...

yeah. heat's back on, and that cold, dry air is back. hour, tops.

i can't really complain about the air upstairs today. it's almost 30 outside, with the humidex. and, yes, we have a humidex, which is weird this time of year, even if not coming out of a brutal winter. so, it's reasonable to have the air on.

but maybe not so high. it's more than a bit odd to have it be 25 degrees outside and have my heaters (set to 21) on. not a bit, but half-blast. that's independent corroboration, really. what it demonstrates is that the air conditioning is making the basement colder than room temperature. otherwise, the heat wouldn't be kicking in. but what's worthwhile is that that's an objective standard - lower than 21 is lower than normal, and justification to push back.

it's partly because it's early in the year, though. i remember the thermostat reading 26 when i moved in. it'll warm up over the summer. for now, i've just got the windows open.
see, even if it does warm up, though, that doesn't mean i'm going to want to keep the windows closed. it's not just the temperature, it's also the air quality. air conditioning makes the air so unnaturally dry. i really prefer that hot, moist natural summer air. a natural breeze is infinitely superior to a machine vortex (on a different floor at that).

but i'm a little worried about how that's actually going to work. it's going to rain sometimes. i'm in a basement (also note - i haven't seen any ants since the first week i moved in, but an open window is an invitation), so i'm going to have to close it sometimes. if i keep the window open and let the breeze run through, is that going to put the air upstairs on higher power? i mean, that it's working at all down here suggests it's sucking up air through the floor. is it just going to turn itself up higher to suck more? if it does, it could just make it worse in the end, especially in rain situations.

on that note, my best tactic may be to try and crash it. that happens, right? it overheats, or something? if i just blare all the heat i can muster, i could conceivably overdrive it...

i'm not really considering that right now, it's just an idea. a last resort. i get that the guy upstairs would be in considerable discomfort if i were to crash his air (he's a big guy). right now, it's just a combination of unusual factors. i'm going to assume things will right themselves as the basement slowly warms up.

there's probably some kind of equilibrium point, where very small amounts of heat will warm it up a little bit, a little more may actually make it colder in here, and large amounts will overpower. i'd probably have to get that information empirically.

today's obligatory "influence on track of the day" post...

the track was always sort of a joke, but i was definitely trying to emulate coil.

(relevant: medicated to the one i love, jesus gets fucked on robitussin, symphony 1, spontaneous combustion, others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

this record (and it's other version, which is a bit more experimental) had a ridiculous amount of talented people involved in creating it and the result is very much the sum of it's parts. i can't say i ever came close to emulating this monstrous masterpiece, but the aesthetic on the song of the day is ultimately derived from this source (as well as halo 9).

(relevant tracks: medicated to the one i love, jesus gets fucked on robitussin, symphony 1, curious george, others)

and, this is where i put my obligatory influenced by post for the day, due to the track being a remix of this one. it was done for a fan comp on the glu list way back in the day and meant to take the track in a more experimental direction.

i got a very terse email from david reilly a few weeks or months later:

"i am aware of what you did to my song."

i'm not sure if we all got that kind of personal response or not. to a point, i can understand his revulsion. despite the nature of the backwards section, evocative or not, this is a pretty personal track, and i went to town with it in ways that i can understand a negative reaction to.

that's partly why i speak of the track, today, as influenced by this one, rather than a remix of it. and, that's actually closer to the truth. it's really barely recognizable.

but, fans of 90s nin remixes and/or the weirder reaches of experimental trip-hop might get something out of it.

as for the track itself, i found something strangely subversive about it. there's about twenty minutes of a minimal bass beats that follows the version on record, climaxing in a wash of noise. i don't really understand addiction, but the picture he paints (especially in the context of the full track, and the state of mind that the ambient bass section represents) is pretty distressing and hard not to react to.

(relevant track: medicated to the one i love)

just read the cubase manual looking for something about where data is stored (confirming what i've deduced as inescapable, really), and i'm not finding what i looked for, but i did just learn this for the first time.

this would have been useful to me a few weeks ago when i was trying to run 30 vst instruments hooked to separate midi files simultaneously. i ended up pulling the latency down to something ridiculous, and because there weren't any waves running it was a fine workaround, but had i just done this i wouldn't have had to go through the process of mixing out all the midi tracks separately and then cutting out all the silent parts......

all these years, and i had no idea. i will make generous use of this in the future.

Elliott Jang
Beethoven is a distant 2nd to Mozart in regards to composing

Alex Prendergast
Whew! Thank goodness that's settled!

Patera Milenko
No, you can't really compare the two. They are both brilliant beyond time.

deathtokoalas
bah. beethoven was a creative genius. mozart just knew how to follow all the stupid rules. the result is that beethoven has aged splendidly, while mozart just comes off as a conforming tool.

to put it another way: mozart is merely a period composer. beethoven is truly timeless.

MrEitinha
"You're a Mozart fan!" - Norman Stansfield

toni8675
Any simple comparison between the two of them is just plain childish. Mozart died way younger (and when he died, he already started composing more mature, experimented with chromatic harmony beyond others of his time, and added serious ployphony to his last symphonies), Beethoven lost his hearing, not to mention the 14 years between their births... No one knows how many more things Mozart would have accomplished had he lived as much as Beethoven. There are simply too many variables, that's why you just can't really compare the two of them...

deathtokoalas
it's a very easy comparison: beethoven is exciting, mozart is boring. i see no reason to think mozart would have gained a deeper sense of artistry had he lived longer. what he lacked wasn't age, but emotional attachment to his writing.

toni8675
If the requiem, symphony no. 40, the piano concerto no. 23 (adagio) etc. lack emotional attachment, then I'm curious what's your definition of attachement...

deathtokoalas
well, the comparison is to beethoven; pick something, little of what he did was schmaltzy (with the exception of this piece). but rachmaninov is the apex, specifically his 2nd and 3rd concertos.

almost all of mozart's pieces sound like solutions to engineering problems, those ones included. perfect? sure: perfectly trite.

i was able to reconstruct and authoritatively back up my archival material a lot easier than i thought i would be able to. the only thing i've lost of any consequence is a couple of backing files for 'ignorance is bliss'. i can live with that.

now that i'm a little more focused as to what i'm looking for, i'm going to do one more data recovery scan through the other two physical disks to see if i can salvage anything. i'm not overly confident.

as for the script? i did this once before and concluded the data was garbled, but if i can reconstruct the directory structure and file names of the script, and get a bit lucky in pulling out a few text fragments, i should be able to rebuild the script with minimal effort - even if it takes a few days to write it all out and do some virtual testing. well, shit, it could be a month before the bus pirate gets here, anyways.

i'm going to move some things around with the expectation of getting used to living with three discs for the time being. i'm not sure i could even buy a 250 gb sata II drive new anywhere (and second hand hard drives are a dumb idea). so i'm going to end up upgrading.

when i do, i'll move the music files to the new drive. they're both the most important and need the most space. that'll leave me with two 250s i can boot into 32 and 64 bit, respectively, and one to use for various types of backup.

for right now, though, i don't have the appetite to set up a 64 bit system. but i might end up at least nliting it, depending on how much time i end up waiting for, and how successfully i can salvage the other laptop.

as the problem with the other laptop is the hard drive (there's a pattern here; i'm tempted to go to ssd, i'll have to check prices), what i'll have to do is work off an external. then again, it hasn't actually died yet. in the long run, that's another component i'll have to replace, but it's not a priority.

so, i'm chugging away at this. i can't provide an eta for getting back to what i was doing, but i can at least report having a few ideas.

cmd files may technically be programs, but people interact with them like text. they're more like modern-day scripts, really.

in trying to salvage old files off my working drives (to replace the files on the trashed one), i've noticed that i'm often able to pull text files up that have been deleted for up to five years but i can't pull off cmd files that were deleted last month. it doesn't seem to be dependent on size. i'm led to conclude that ntfs is filing cmd files as programs and they're getting easily corrupted as binary.

but they're not really programs. they're certainly not binary they're text...

i realize that there may be some security issues with treating scripts as text files. but how serious an obstacle is this nowadays really? i mean, if you can launch notepad remotely, you're pretty much in control, are you not? even so, wouldn't it make more sense to block at the kernel than the file system? even backup drives crash. rather, this strikes me as an ancient windows artifact from the early 90s or the late 80s when cmd files really were programs and that should be updated for modern usage. i can't be the first person that's run into this.

i don't know enough about other file systems to comment.

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

the topic matter is considerably less intense, but i borrowed the drum loop (figuratively, not sampled) for the song of the day ("too cold").

(relevant tracks: too cold, ignorance is bliss)

uploading the souls that create to youtube

just put this up..

so, i'm going through some old files and decided to put this up...

the backstory is connected to a covers compilation put together by cleopatra records called "hymns of the warlock", as well as a remix compilation put together by nettwerk records called "remix dystemper". this compilation was put together between the releases of those two compilations.

the easiest thing to say is simply that there were always two different types of skinny puppy fans, related to a now historical split in electronic music between those who preferred "ebm" (that is electronic booty/body music) and "idm" (intelligent dance music). ebm is only reasonably listened to in clubs because it's simplistic and repetitive; idm is the kind of thing you put on when you're doing homework or reading a book. the separation has been much maligned, but it is intuitively obvious that there are some types of electronic music that do not have much depth (and yet are fun to dance to) and some types of electronic music with dozens of layers to disentangle (and may be less danceable), so i see little point in getting silly about it. skinny puppy existed in a middle point; they always had the ability to attract both audiences because their music was both highly danceable and yet also in an art rock and political/punk rock tradition. this is not unique within electronic music, but it *is* rare. they're not considered to be the high point of electronic art music in the modern era for no reason.

throughout the 90s, skinny puppy fans connected with each other and discussed various topics over the epilogue internet mailing list. within this list, there was much derision directed at the cleopatra compilation due to it's over-representation of the ebm side of the band's sound. the more musically inclined members of the list claimed they could put together a better record, were challenged to do so and eventually did.

i was a fairly recent addition to the list and volunteered for distribution for the sole reason that i had the tools to do so (cd burners were still relatively rare in 1998). the cover art was put together by other members of the list and sent to me for reproduction.

while i would argue that the disc more accurately represents the experimental aspect of the band than either of the officially released compilations did, i listen to it now and wish i would have been more selective. the reality is that i didn't really have the standing necessary in the list (you have to have an understanding of 90s internet communications to get that, i guess) to act as a filter on material coming in. nor did i receive enough material to have the luxury of cutting tracks. there's some interesting remixes/reconstructions, but some of it is very blatantly the work of amateur musicians. i should also point out that i considered some of those amateur musicians to be my friends.

it's up here, as is, for listening ears. should either of the kevins express an opposition to this (i doubt that, but i am not able to tap into their consciousnesses from a distance), they own it and get to make the choices.

tracklisting:

1) the intonarumori project: rain (souless mix)
*2) dmt: blackout
3) animoid row: jahya (meld)
4) livesidog: smothered hope
5) pool-a: downlode
6) krewl: meat flavour
7) inri: hexonxonx (featuring ogrebot)
8) j deell: 200 years
9) triptamine: circustance (vitriol remix)
10) amputate: shore lined poison (deformed)
11) lunar caustic: worlock
12) dmso : anger (adrenergic brap)
13) jesus h. christ: assimilate (ambient mix)
14) lichaem: who's laughing now? (offended)
15) j deell: basement
*16) dj billpheus and oscar the grouch (with special guest vocals by the infinite hheathen): love

* - features bill van roy, later briefly of download

also, i got a copyright notice on this. that's reasonable - some of the remixes differ only mildly from the originals. when i initially put it together, i was selling it roughly at cost (i set up a flat rate, meaning i was at a gain or a loss depending on shipping in a way that mostly washed out. i got some complaints from people that didn't understand shipping rates from canada to the us, but the reality is that it balanced out to something like $50 over a few hundred shipped discs. that just means my estimate of a good flat rate was accurate.) but it hasn't been for sale in 15 years. i don't and never did claim any exclusive rights over distribution (i actually emailed the tracks to some people), it was just something the fan community wanted amongst itself and i volunteered to do because i could and most others couldn't.

the point is i can't control the ads if they appear (i can't tell, i run adblock). i'm guessing nettwerk controls most of this. i don't know what lingering relationship, if any, exists between that label and the remaining members of the band.

yeah. the spindle motor was broken

i'm a dumb chimp with any kind of tool. taking a pair of vice grips to it pretty much destroyed the platter.

but i couldn't fix that in a freezer, anyways. and the idea that i was going to pay $600 or more for recovery is flat out laughable.

this is precisely why i can't hold a job :)

it took no more than fifteen seconds for me to irreversibly damage the drive. and i'd be no less patient with your face, or a power plant.

or care more than i do about the drive.

so be happy i realize that.

that's going to cost me several months.

there was no answer....

i was hoping i could get the drive spinning by unjamming it, but it was clear within seconds that the motor was burnt. the drive was burning up. zero movement.

to replace the motor would mean removing the platters. i neither have the tools nor the co-ordination to carry out something like that. so, removing the platters means trashing the drive. simple as that.

i panicked and twisted hard with the vice grips, hoping a harsh tug would pull it free (but knowing the motor was burnt). i'm clumsy; it shot out of my hands, and pushed the heads deep into the platters, as well as taking a chunk out of the top platter itself.

which was foreseeable the second i grabbed the vice grips. i mean, i knew. but i also knew it was dead.

my only hope at the point was to just tear it apart trying to get the motor to spin. nope. dead.

i know it wasn't electrical because i swapped the boards out. plus, the heat indicates the electricity was getting there.

lost: install scripts going back 5 years, the musical work i'd done over the last six months.

the motor in this unit is actually connected directly to the board. it would have been a (de)soldering job.

the musical work was mostly compiling and remastering. i have the final files, and the source files. what i lost was the intermediate work, which is unfortunate but not catastrophic.

i could theoretically reconstruct the script from my old pc, which has a more stripped down version of it. i don't know if i'll bother.

now that the drive is officially kaput, i'm going to start the process of reconstructing what i had compiled - which was a total of three isos i had put aside to burn at a later date.

right now, i should try to sleep.

seeming as it's a cover of this track, i have no option but to post my obligatory "influential on song of the day" post right here.

it's not firewire, but hdmi. *grumbles*. screwed...

...except...

....i could in theory work out the crux of what i was working on by installing the pod drivers direct through usb.

and on that note, i've wanted to set up my other (half broken) laptop as a real-time sound processing device for a while. guitars, mostly, of course - but drums, too. see, the hard drive comes up and down. i was going to wait until i could replace it....

i also wanted to dual-boot it. that's something to keep me occupied as i'm waiting...

i'm just finding the idea of blowing this time reading to be depressing. i jumped through hoops to set this up. i'm pissed off that i'm dealing with broken hardware, and depressed that it's my own stupidity at the root of it.

the problem with the hard disk, btw, is physical. and the way the heads are aligned in the model is really tricky. i don't want to open this up, but i'm going to have to. however, i'm also only going to touch it under the precise circumstance that the arm is unaligned. anything else, and i'm screwing it back up and throwing it in the freezer, because it's pretty much hopelessly broken.

i didn't realize that my bus pirate was being shipped from asia. i'm pretty sure that the website was registered to chicago. i would have picked somewhere closer, if i realized that.

as far as i can tell, it's sitting in a boat off the coast of singapore, waiting to be filled up with mail.
and it could be there for weeks...

so, i'm considering converting the laptop, which is what i'll have to do if the bus pirate doesn't work anyways. i'm going to do some reading and decide in a few days.

i don't see any rational reason that this couldn't handle a firewire device. i just really don't like the idea of mixing with a laptop sound card. ugh...

but, at least if i get the tracks down, i can remix it later.

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

bass influence, on the track, especially in the bridge.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

i think it's a shame that corgan never fully explored his cyber-metal. i mean, there's some material out there, but he never did an opus and sort of ended up getting upstaged on it by bands like boris.

this was about as metal as i ever really got or ever wanted to get (not due to lack of looking, it's just that the genre becomes self-parody at nearly the moment it amps itself - through the course of my life, and since the 80s at least, it's been virtually impossible to do metal without sounding like an idiot), and informed my punchier outbursts on the track in question. i specifically remember thinking to myself "i want it to hit as hard as xyu". :).

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), liquify, first movement)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

guitars, and song structures. i haven't analyzed it, but this sets itself apart from a lot of fuzzy riff music by the fact that it's written in a weird modal key (rather than just building itself up on boring old fifths. those iommi riffs are fun, but they're fucking dead on any level of musicality. this isn't.). love the unexpected intervals that show up in the lead part near the end, but it's the way the riffs shift through the chorus underneath the fuzz like some kind of demented cello that really captured my attention and my imagination...

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

guitars, and song structures. this is one of corgan's guitar masterpieces and one of the corgan tracks that i took the time to teach myself how to play. during this brief period over '98, i was actually trying to keep the excessive soloing down, but the bridge in this track, specifically, was important in the writing of viewless.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

song structuring. also, the jazz chords he's using (not just here but throughout the record).

again: i loved this record as a compromise between heavy riffage and melodic content. regardless of your views of his later work, you can't take this raw pop-punk classic away from the guy.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

anybody else pick up the similarity between this track and sdre's "8"?

i loved this disc - great compromise between the heavy and the melodic. it's truly a shame what's become of dave grohl, but it's not fair to take this first disc away from him.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

it's always weird for me to cite sdre as an influence, given how oblivious i was to what they supposedly represented (i remain convinced that the history written around the band is mostly bullshit) and the reality that i only ever really liked lp2. but, i did love that record for a few years and do still come back to it

...and i did rip the riff to 8 off pretty blatantly in my tune viewless, which was first demoed in late '96.

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post. i used to listen to this on repeat for hours...

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (epilag), jesus gets fucked on robitussin, others)

(i think this was a link to nurse with wound's spooky loop, from the foxtrot comp for jhon balance, which does not appear to be available on youtube)

Shawn Murphy
at first i thought his was new Offspring. They have similar sound.

Skylineblue
I don't think they sound similar at all, I hate The Offspring yet I love Rise Against.

alwayssum41
"I hate the Offspring" omfg, go listen to "Smash", or "Ignition", or "Ixnay" albums u_u

dinkum83
I hate them to except for no brakes.. they sound NOTHING alike..

alwayssum41
Nothing alike ? Seriously ? And you're taking for example a song from Americana ? Rofl... As I said before go take a serious look at their first albums... 

deathtokoalas
the vocalists sound similar, and the woahing is very characteristic.

in a certain, sense, though, every punk band from california since 1978 has sounded broadly similar. this does very much sound like the offspring trying to sound like bad religion.

i don't normally find myself agreeing with sum41 fans, but smash isn't just a punk classic but a general rock music classic. ixnay is kind of mixed, but the jerden-driven jane's addiction phase was definitely more interesting than anything they've done since. i've tried to listen to a few of their later records repeatedly, and the biggest problem isn't that they started working in poppier aspects (i could actually deal with that just fine if it were a bit more tasteful; soundgarden's later work is very different but just as interesting as their early work) but that they just started recycling their own songs. i mean, how many times have they redone dirty magic? there was a punkier one (i think it was splinter) that i gave a really close listen to and it's...it's just subpar by any way of measuring it. it's a shame.

but i really just wanted to add that their first record, the self-titled one from the 80s, is a really good listen as well. "kill the president", "tehran", etc.

also, if you like ignition, please check out the damned's classic "smash it up".

alwayssum41
They've redone "Dirty Magic" just once. The original was on Ignition and they've made it again on Days Go By, 'cause it was Ignition's 20th anniversary. I'm not into their new stuff so much even if "DGB" clearly deserve to be listen compare to "R&F/R&G".. And yeah, the self-titled one and Ignition are totally insane albums. Not to mention "Smash" is completely insane too, even if it was their first record on major label.

deathtokoalas
smash was on epitaph - it was actually the best selling independent record ever for a long time (might still be, i don't know). but i meant that they used the chord progression for dirty magic on three or four albums straight. i'd have to look it up to be more specific...

i actually did a cover of dirty magic myself, back in the fall of '98. it draws a little on their sense of humour.

i remember downloading americana and being borderline heartbroken, lol. haven't paid much attention since.

alwayssum41
Sad, since i consider Conspiracy of One a great album as well (the last one with Ron Welty.. :'( ) And yup Smash was on Epitaph, like Ignition was. I just meant this was the first album being able to be this big 'cause of Epitaph's "explosion" (Hope you got me, I'm french and it's hard to explains my feelings in english). Just noticed the "i don't normally find myself agreeing with sum41 fans", ahah I don't get why, they're so great :)

Shawn Murphy
Well. I believe the singers sound similar. The guitar is a more complex than the typical Offspring song but the rhythm guitar is using a simple power chord arrangement like a typical offspring song. I would consider them the same genre.

deathtokoalas
i suppose the complexity in the offspring's guitar work has taken a nose dive since about '97. it's weird to hear somebody say that, though, because one of the things that initially separated the offspring from most of their peers (bad religion notably excepting) was more elaborate, noticeably thrash-influenced guitar work. noodles used to be an interesting player. now that you mention it, that might be the biggest factor in the offspring going substantially downhill.

there are a few breaks that sound a lot like early green day, especially in the open bass notes. and there's a certain melodramatic poppiness that ultimately stems from bon jovi (people get upset when i point out bon jovi's massive influence on modern punk, but it's true). but it really sounds the most like mid 90s bad religion...

...as mentioned, though, all the so-cal punk bands sound very similar (i know they're not from there, but they sure sound like they are). it's never really made a lot of sense to accuse one of ripping the other off. the thing is that this kind of punk is like a type of modern folk: yeah, folk only produced a handful of original compositions, but they kept being redone with different lyrics. that's really what it's about.

it's the same thing with this. there's not a lot of point in questioning it's musical originality. what do people think of what he's talking about? i do get it, though. i have nothing bad to say about their messaging, but, personally, i'd like these guys a lot better if they were a tad less arena rock. i just can't get my fists pumping like that...

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

yeah, i got into the process through nine inch nails. well, i was born ten years too late. sorry....

this was novel and exciting to me about late '97 and early '98, and you can certainly hear it.

(relevant tracks: idiotic, others)

obligatory influential post.
 

joy division was more a late 90s thing for me. up until that point, i'd heard bits and pieces, but it was one of the many "before my time" things. about mid-98, i was listening to a lot of adore-period pumpkins bootlegs (that much maligned record was better in bootleg form), and corgan was routinely doing a cover of "transmission" (edit: there is a corgan version of isolation under the name starchildren. that was a long time ago...). that convinced me to pick up still second-hand, and i was hooked...

i'd argue this is a more engaging listen than either of their official records. joy division was at it's best when it was existing in that space between punk and goth. there's this sort of malevolence in his voice...

(relevant track: idiotic, too cold, drive, teenage jesus, others)

obligatory influential post.

i connected with this some time in the early 90s, between achtung baby and zooropa. i was young - around ten. but it was this, rather than war or boy, that introduced me to early u2.

(relevant track: idiotic)