playing quietly mostly removes it, which is probably why it seems exaggerated, now. this song needs some unusually (for me) aggressive playing.

actually, fuck it.

when i say the black one (they both say epiphone on the headstock. the red is an sg copy, and has those high gain punk pickups so i keep the action low on it and the strings thin on it. the black one looks like a coronet, but it was custom built partly out of ibanez parts. it's basically a coronet neck on an ibanez body. i picked it up in a used shop. great neck, but low gain pickups - which are better for jazz. so i keep it with thick strings to get some good sustain.) is set up for jazz, my concept of jazz is kind of abstract.

i do use the black one for a lot of hybrid chord/lead work. the black one is really my main guitar. i just put it through a few pedals to get the pickups a bit more hot. i just picked it up for the first time in a few weeks and it is soooo much more smooth to play, there's no comparison...

i've thought about getting a jazzmaster. it would make it easier to get some specific sounds, although i can generally get whatever i want out of the combination of the two. they're not cheap guitars, though. and i've usually always had a few $10 guitars i keep around for beyond fucked tunings and other weirdness, although i had to destroy the last one because i got a shock out of it and i don't have one right now.

it's too late for today, i need to get ready to get to detroit. this is the first time i'm actually going to do a thing in detroit. i'm going to be walking from the tunnel up woodward to the magic stick to get boris tickets, and i don't know how long it's going to take to get back to trinosophes so i want to give myself lots of time. the show isn't until 8, but i want to be out of here by 4. and i need to eat and shower...

but i will probably at least experiment with the black one over the next few days to see if i can get the tone i want out of it.

still counting on the nut, though.

it's a tad better. i dunno.

see, it's hard for me to compare in any meaningful sense. i just sort of picked the screwdriver up and started turning without thinking it through properly. so, it seems like it's buzzier than before, but is it really? i wasn't really paying attention.

and, similarly for the action itself. it was "low". but it's not like i had it measured. is it lower now than it was?

i guess i just have to set it up the way i want it and not really worry too much.

it needs a new nut, anyways.

see, and putting the new head in is going to have a tension effect...

i think the reality is that it needs to readjust due to the combination of factors, and i'll probably be adjusting the action mildly every ten hours or so for the next week. hopefully it's enough that i can get the track out by the time i get the nut fixed.

i've pretty much ruled the truss bar out. yes, the humidity in here is up and down due to the air and the windows. but it's just one string.

i'm putting faith in swapping the nut.

then again, i raised the action slightly and will let it sit over night and see what happens tomorrow.

a small amount of buzz on this guitar is ok, because it's purely used for high gain applications. that is, this guitar is set up to sound distorted, so the buzz washes out under the fuzz. but, right now, it's just a bit too much to be useful.

gah....

i let it sit for the night to let it set and it's come back buzzing like crazy on the bottom string.

i'm not convinced it's the truss rod. it's just the one string, to begin with. and it's a little weird to think the frets just jumped up overnight sort of thing.

the fact that i can get the buzz a bit better but not gone entirely by raising the action suggests to me that it's probably the nut. and, in fact, the nut is actually even broken. but it's been broken for ten years. it's weird that it just developed the buzz now.

i can't really use the other guitar for the track because it has very thick strings and high action. the black one is for jazz and blues; the red one is for punk and metal. they're set up that way and it can't really be mixed up much.

i'm going to have to switch the nut out first. if i still can't get the action right....i'll have to fuck with the truss rod. i don't want to do that...

i wanted to get a guide track down today because i've got other stuff lined up this week. this is going to come in two mixes. the first is a raw version that is going to be exactly what the thing sounded like as i was writing and practicing it in 2001. the other is going to be a more formed version.

i'm hitting oneida tonight, and then i'll have to do laundry and groceries and shit tomorrow. saturday, i want to go down and buy some wood, and sunday and maybe into monday i'll be building shelves. getting that down would have felt good...

but, i need that low string to get the one-track version i want. i probably won't be able to get the nut in until the middle of next week.

so, i took a google walk up randolph and gratiot to trinosophes, and it just looks like downtown-anywhere to me. any downtown area is a little creepy; this doesn't seem bad. caveats and smart behaviour obviously apply, as they would in any downtown anywhere, but i'm not really worried.

google claims it's a 25 minute walk. my experience is that that usually means it's more like 15, because i'm fit and i walk fast. walking there while the sun is up isn't going to be a concern, but i am going to have to walk back around 11:00. well, i'm going to have to figure things out by experimenting, anyways. if i walk by a mugging, i may think twice about it next time.

i think by foot is actually the safest approach, given that detroit has a high incidence of car vandalism and buses really just get you stuck in a corner you can't get out of it. a brisk walker is less of a target than a bus passenger.

i'm going to go down early to pick up some tickets for boris on the 9th. i've avoided listening to the new record...

head is back on, and i can tune my g again without breaking my wrist for the first time in quite a while. yay....

no wobbling. perfect snug fit.

i should have got some strings while i was there, though. well, i almost did but it seems like d'addario changed their packages and i wasn't sure if they were the same gauge or not. strings are strings. but i'm picky about gauges...

well, that worked out well.

initially, i was faced with a wall of $50 grovers. no thanks.

the guy pulled out a $30 pair of precision tuners, but they would have required drilling new holes, and i wasn't going to do that.

the tech eventually walked by, and he went and got a single stock epiphone head for me. $5. hurray...

i am going to want to swap these out eventually, but i don't want to drill holes so it's going to be a research project to find some heads that will allow me to swap them out in the holes that are already there.

also, i just realized that the initial post could be rather badly misinterpreted.

just to update on it: i couldn't get the head to stay still, and it sort of clicked that it was physically broken. so, i unscrewed the knob to see if i could tighten something and it just completely fell apart.

cheap heads break. that one lasted fifteen years. that's actually pretty good.

and it may have had to do with the way it was tuned. i may have bent it by stringing it with a wound g. i've gone back to unwound strings on that guitar.

no.

head is fucked.

going to buy a new one. hopefully, i just can buy one...

the hazards of long nails on your picking hand, which is also usually going to be your wiping hand...

i scratched my anus.

:(

i should do a psa for kids, so they know.

"remember kids: if you play classical guitar, always wears gloves while wiping in order to avoid scratching your anus."

what else is there to do besides stick a wad of toilet paper in there? so, now i'm going to have to walk around looking like i shit my pants for the next few hours.

jokes aside, it's got me wondering if there's like an e coli risk or something. i mean, opening up a hole in your anus so bacteria can crawl into your bloodstream can't be good news. i guess i just have to hope my neutrophils are populated, armed and ready for battle!

"unfortunately, we regret to inform you that jessica has perished due to complications resulting from a mild case of accidental anal scratching."

i should publicly apologize to my neutrophils for increasing their workload. i can only imagine what they're thinking....

"dude, where'd all this e coli come from"
"the fucking idiot scratched her anus."
"how?"
"classical guitar finger nails."
"she didn't know better than to wear gloves?"
"apparently not."
"what a fucking noob."
"there's a few over there, let's go phagosome 'em."
"i'm not hungry, i just had a bunch..."
"just fucking do it."

uploading the mosh pit song to youtube

that was a very productive two weeks, the kind i'd like to see happen more often. i'm moving into december, 1996 in the alter-reality - and the end of the first demo tape. this is the last original track off of that tape; there will be one further track posted, but it's a 1998 rerecording of the version on the tape. there will be a 66 day period between the end of the first tape and the beginning of the second. i was actually grounded at the beginning of 1997, and not allowed to play guitar. so, i'll be cycling through the tracks a second time, but won't post them here over that period. that won't turn over until the end of october.

hits are up dramatically this week due to trolling weird al, so the bach song has done very well. i doubt i'll be able to sustain that kind of traffic over the next two weeks, but the curve has been generally increasing up to now so it's hard to predict. i wouldn't have predicted this kind of traffic, before.

i hope to get at least the song i've been trying to start for days done by the end of the two week period, and aspire to get up to the end of sept, 2001 permanently dealt with. we'll see how that goes.

so, this will switch over at midnight.

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

back when i was a silly kid, i wrote some silly punk songs for other silly kids to be silly kids while listening to them. the tendency dried up when i hit my mid-teens and became sullen and withdrawn and totally into imaginary guitar solos, but there's a handful of these scattered in the old stuff.

this wears it's influences pretty obviously: it's something like nirvana doing a goofy cover of "march of the pigs", with some white zombie skronking mixed in. despite that, i've pulled it out as a highlight because it captures a sort of youthful irreverence. that, and it's pretty catchy.

the track was obviously sped up for effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_Fz2NQrGgE&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbslW9qCBKT_nEcwUt1DY0aN

tomorrow, i'm going to finally start building the rest of the furniture i need in this place: several large bookshelves and a few tables. i simply can't find anything i could substitute in the way i want it on kijiji.

i've been waiting for a year to do this, so i'm a little excited about it. i've got a lot of measuring to do...

i was initially counting on a small but regular sum coming from my stepmother to deal with the extra furniture. well, i say that without a lot of seriousness. it was something my father had indicated was important to him, and there was a verbal agreement reached on his instigation, but i really knew better than to take it seriously. he'd indicated to me a few times that she wasn't listening to him and his wishes weren't likely to be carried out, and i knew it was more than the morphine talking. he tried, but the truth is he knew as well as i did that she wasn’t going to honour anything she didn't sign and she wasn't going to sign anything...

i probably wouldn't have moved here in the first place if i was taking that seriously. i think i *did* think she'd give it a few months, at least. either way, it never materialized.

so, then i was waiting for the tax return to come in. but they're splitting it up on a monthly basis. so, instead of getting $650 in one chunk that i could spend on furniture amongst other things, i get bit a more than $50 a month, starting last month. which means i'd have to go to the hardware store and buy some wood every month for the next three or four months, or save it up until next spring. annoying...

it turns out the landlord doesn't want to pay me interest on my rent deposit, so he's giving it back to me this month. that is, i don't pay rent this month. he knows i'm not going anywhere, so the last month scenario is pretty unlikely. and, he's not going to immediately evict me for missing a month, either. three, probably...

so, that gives me some extra disposable income, and the cash i need to get the stuff built.

i actually don't have a clue what this is going to cost. i'm just going to measure what i need and go down and find out. but i figure there's not more than $20 worth of wood in any single thing i want to build, so i'm guessing $150 absolute max and probably something more like $75. the question is going to arise as to how much is going to end up as waste. but i'll figure out something to do with any extra pieces i get.

i'm also going to have to get a drill. i could screw through particle board, but i can't screw through heavier wood. and i'm mostly going to be making the stuff ikea style, which means drilling holes into the wood and then screwing it together with dowels and stuff.

i mean, i don't otherwise know how to make furniture. shelves are pretty intuitive; the key is just making sure everything's orthogonal. i've put together enough ikea stuff, though, that i can reverse engineer the idea and apply it to the rest of it.

that was time consuming and frustrating but i'm satisfied. and it needed it, anyways.

the heads should be fine for a while, but i need to prioritize it because the g is really, really bad..

i know better than to fuck with my action.

but i fucked with my action.

i'm going to have to replace the heads on this thing eventually. it'll be good for the instrument; they're stock epiphone heads and they don't hold a tuning well. for now, i actually had to reseat the g head to get the thing up past an f. but it took me a while to figure out what the problem was...

...and i fucked with my action instead.

so, that's what i've accomplished today. fixing the action.

well, i guess i've added a few parts to the song, too, while i've been at it.

it doesn't help that i'm picky about action and was haphazard about fucking with it. brain freeze.

scare on the tuning head. well, i guess it's good to adjust your action once in a while anyways....

and, the other fun part of punk guitar playing: changing broken guitar strings.

you don't do that nearly as often playing jazz and blues. in truth, i actually like my strings just a tad bit rusty, so it's a piss-off but it happens....

actually, i need the g about an eighth down, too, so it's tune with the b.

i suspect this tuning may be used in some melodic hardcore, actually. it's very brian baker.

actually, nevermind. i just realized the dissonance i'm looking for is actually relative and relies on the b string being roughly an eighth tone flat. leaving the low e string at roughly a quarter tone flat allows the entire song to be played on one guitar. so, that's the tuning, if anybody is keeping track.

(note that the terminology refers to a whole tone. so, when i say an eighth tone flat i mean 1/4 of the way from b to b flat and when i say a quarter tone flat i mean 1/2 the way from e to eb.)

yeah. i'm just going to tune by ear to separately produce each section, and glue it all together. it'll sound "out of tune" to some people, but the physics are a little too complex to make such a simplistic statement - it's going to be staggered by quartertones and eighthtones throughout, but that's only "out of tune" relative to the obsolete theory that is still entrenched in western academic thought. it's going to be pretty much impossible to reproduce live without multiple guitarists and a set of techs with perfect pitch, but so be it. it's not in the plans, anyways.

so, this is going to be rather tonally complex. good luck transcribing it....

there's only one popular rock band that i'm aware of that made excellent use of microtones in an otherwise tonal context: alice in chains. you can hear it in more avant stuff like swans or sonic youth, but it's not in the same pop context.

specifically, it's the vocal harmonies, which were often just off. again: people think it sounds out of tune and either like it because of that or cringe because of that. tbh, i don't think either staley or cantrell really realized what they were doing, for the precise reason that their new singer hits the notes perfectly. that is, william duvall is a more proficient singer, but, by being a more technically perfect singer, he loses the aspect of the band that initially made them so interesting. i kind of wish some music theory guru would sit cantrell down and explain it to him, but it's also not the same thing to train somebody to pick up a level of chemistry that came through intuition.

i *do* think staley had an intuition for hitting the notes in between, though. like, when staley and cantrell harmonized, staley would often be off by a microtone and would consistently hit the point out of tune because it sounded more "right" to him. in order for that to work the way it does, he has to be accidentally producing perfect overtones. that's why what they had was so special: he was intuitively producing something that exists outside of western music theory, without really realizing he was doing it.

this isn't going to sound like an alice in chains song, but that's the only popular rock band i'm aware of that played with these ideas within the context of popular rock music, accidentally or not.

yeah, this is what i was worried about: i've seen a few baby roaches (a few mm in length) this morning. the eggs must have been underneath the counter or something - somewhere i can't get to. but they're all dead. the residues seem to have got 'em.

they usually hatch in the fall, so this is actually a bit early. maybe it's the weather. the fucking polar vortex is back and it's getting us some cool nights in the low teens.

the fact that i'm not seeing any adults suggests to me that any oothecae that were left have been stranded, in terms of a nesting population. and the fact that they're coming out for food and getting poisoned suggests that they have to. something i noticed before the centipedes left is that they were moving back to the kitchen, indicating they sensed food (ie roaches) there. a few of them were also killed by the poison (although i've seen several in the back room so the population there is doing fine).

if anything, the early hatch is probably beneficial to me as it gets rid of them while the residues are still there. i think i'm still winning. i was never certain if they were coming in from out of the apartment or coming up from under the floors; i was fairly sure of the former, but it meant i had to stop them before they started leaving eggs under the cabinets. i do think they were mostly coming in from outside, but i didn't get to them before at least a few eggs got laid.

now, i simply don't know how many eggs are under there....and have to hope the poison holds out long enough to get them before they breed another time....

if i start noticing a larger population, the next step will be finding out what hole in the floor they're coming up and steel wooling it.

i can't hope to bait them because the truth is that the whole neighbourhood is infested. they'll come back. i just have to block entry.

i'm not happy about spraying again, either. the pesticide i'm using is supposed to have extremely low mammal toxicity, i did the research and it's supposed to be safe for humans in non-ridiculous direct dosages (meaning don't drink it), but i'm a little concerned that it might have something to do with my sore neck.

my arm works again. yay!

i'm remembering now why i cut the song up, and specifically ejected the raunchy riff at the end that next levels it. i was hoping to play the thing live with that singer friend of mine....

...but the low e is tuned to a microtone between e and eb.

yeah. that's weird. i know. but it sounds awesome when i get the tuning right. i happen to have been playing an out of tune guitar the last few days that was pretty close to the detune i need, so it didn't click until i tried to tune it and it all came flooding back.

the problem is it's hard to get it right and it has to be done by ear. i was thinking it wasn't worth the risk of fucking up the tuning on an acoustic that doesn't stay in tune anyways, because if it goes flat it's really dreadful and if it goes sharp it's just boneheaded. i can't really measure it on a tuner so i don't know what the exact ratio is. but it's got this really raw, slightly atonal sound to it when it hits the sweet spot....

it doesn't matter, now. i'm not playing this live, so i'm going to get it down the way it's supposed to sound and then walk away from it. but playing with the tuning heads to get the right tone isn't exactly the most fun thing to do.

this is a screen shot of a word document dated sept 30, 1997. it's rough notes for the track "too cold", which would not be finished until early 1999. g7 means guitar 7. yeah, i've always used a lot of guitar overdubs.

radiohead fans may get a laugh out of it.

yeah. the pain in my hand has gone away, thankfully. my neck hurts a little (which is why i think "pinched nerve") still, though, so i'm going to wait until midnight.

i seem to have pulled some kind of muscle in my arm from playing punk chords at full speed yesterday.

i'm far too frail.

i think it's a pinched nerve. it's not really stopping me from playing, but i'm going to rest it another 12 hours or so to avoid aggravating it.

the centipedes have migrated out and into the storage area, indicating there is no longer any food for them in the apartment.

i am very close to declaring a final victory.

i actually somehow managed 250 hits yesterday. that's a lot of hits. i've been trolling weird al...

i'm sort of skeptical. i think maybe youtube might have given me back the hits they stole. i'll find out when the stats update. a few hours...

i'm not naive. i know people don't sell records over youtube or bandcamp. i'm really surprised bandcamp is still running, actually.

i think i'm hoping that if i can generate enough traffic it may generate enough interest to get a distribution deal in place.

i knew this was going to be a long process when i decided on it, but it seems to be working. that's growth month over month since i put the youtube site up at the beginning of the year. keep in mind that there's another week in july, so the curve will be up by the end of the month. i'm projecting a nice growth rate that is leveling off around 1.2.

i don't know how long i'll be able to maintain that growth rate. but, if it continues a few more months i can start expecting over 100 hits a day. if it continues to this time next year, i can expect closer to 200 hits a day. that's a lot of hits, and i'm skeptical myself, but the approach i'm using is additive so it's not out of the question.

see, here's the thing: i understand that youtube hits are not a measure of legitimate interest but a measure of marketing reach. people with a million youtube hits don't have a million fans, they have a million-hit marketing apparatus behind them. i'm an independent artist, so i'm mostly relying on trolling youtube to generate hits.

it's actually a win-win because i produce the kinds of comments that people like: smart and provocative. they generate responses and keep people engaged.

but, it's a numbers game - especially with the nature of the sound. get as many hits as i can and hope a few are interested, sort of thing.

i've had a few videos go down, but most of the comments will remain in place permanently. well, all of the comments will remain in place so long as the videos are up. so, the more comments i produce, the more hits i generate. or, so goes the logic. the growth can't be permanent. but, looking at the growth that i'm getting, i have every reason to think the bar is potentially set quite high.

and that's what i wanted. i'm mostly marketing my oldest stuff right now because i'm still "only" generating about 70 hits a day. it'll be another three months before i even get to my second demo, and then another seven after that before i get to what i'd consider more substantial recordings.
if the growth rate keeps up, i could be generating upwards of 200 hits a day *when i start promoting my more meaningful work*.

the idea was to emulate the kind of marketing that used to exist in the 80s, before everything got bought out. word of mouth growth, slowly, over time. one of the great things about this, and one of the reasons the 80s produced such a wealth of substantial underground music, is that it allows the artists to evolve as they're generating an audience. by slowly building up to my more mature works, i'm also emulating that artistic evolution.

i guess this post is bragging that my evil plan is actually working. i'm a bit of a bond villain...

that actually came back very fast.

geez, i'm really working my hands out this summer. that's ok, i obviously need it.

i'm three different types of guitarist. i did take some classical lessons, and there's a lot of stuff in my discography that is either performed on a nylon guitar with fingers or creatively utilizes chord shapes that are common in classical music but are not often found in blues-based music (pro-tip: that's actually how john lennon got his idiosyncratic guitar sound: he used classical chords in blues music. fucking honkies, right? well, it was ukelele chords. same thing. and, it's sort of what sonic youth did, too, in a round about way, by using weird tunings.). and, my lead playing is very blues-based.

but, my songwriting is very punk rock. almost everything i've ever listened to is some kind of punk rock, and almost everything i've ever written on a guitar is some kind of punk rock.

i used to spend hours thrashing along to bad religion and offspring records. people have this dumb idea of punk rock as being easy to play on guitar, because they associate showmanship with musicianship. it always has been a smokescreen. johnny ramone was moving his right hand every bit as quickly as van halen was, it's just that he was playing very fast chords instead of very fast notes. if you break it down to the physics of it, it's really no less difficult to do. we just have this very silly perception of the whole thing.

i haven't played chords that fast in quite a while, and the song absolutely requires them. i'm going to drive my neighbours nuts practicing it....

that's actually something you're going to notice in the next batch of material. the work i did with the singer in 01 and 02 was much more song oriented, which brought my punk guitar roots out. there's a lot of really unusual syncopation going on.

it actually used to drive him nuts, because it would throw him off on the timing. i can do all kinds of weird things and get back to the one, because i'm a musician, and musicians can do that. he didn't have any musical background, so what he really needed was some kind of a click track to stay in time (we never used them, though, i'd just cut his vocals up afterwards).

actually, i just listened to the three guitar tracks i saved and let me just say that the samples will be....minimal. i don't know what i was thinking working with that guy in the first place. sounds like he's been playing for two weeks. i'm not sure there's a point in bothering.

but, i'm glad i have what i'm going to call my angularity back. you don't really lose the dexterity. you could pick up a van halen piece after not playing for five years and get it back in a few hours. it's more the mental aspect of the instrument that fades a little. meaning, it would be hard to write a king crimson song after a long period of guitar inactivity (although less difficult to play one, if you can remember it).

it explains why players like billy corgan go through these long periods that make it sound like they've lost it. people blame the lack of acid. i just think he stopped playing his instrument, and lost his proficiency.

when you reduce your guitar to a tool that you only pick up when you want to gain something from it, that's when you lose it. your guitar's gotta be your friend if you want to get anything out of it.

with corgan, i think if somebody could convince him to sit in his room and rebuild that relationship...

there's bits and pieces of it here and there in his later work, like he rediscovers it for a week and then gets bored of it again. he seems to have gone years without really seriously playing. a guy like that is looking for something that doesn't exist. his head's out of it, in the clouds, looking for meaning.

i want to avoid saying he grew out of it or something, because one does not outgrow the guitar. one may trick themselves into thinking there's more to life, but that's indicative of a lack of maturity, not a sign of it. it's a shame.

other people that have to work for a living lose the time they need. that's been more my problem. but i'm glad i'm out of that loop.

ok, so i'm going to get started on this....

lol.

i've remarkably managed to remember the initial song. so, this doesn't have to be a reinterpretation...

it is going to need massive overdubs, though. i drastically reworked this for a reason. and i guess the drill guitars are more ministry than tool, but what the hey....

ok, so, as i've alluded to, i've reached a pause. there will be further jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj material to complete the one or two volume (not sure yet) cd (which will then comprise my fifth "proper record" in this sea of extended conceptual eps), but i really wanted to focus on going through sequentially so i'm going to go through sequentially. i've completed up to the end of june, 2001. the next jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj piece won't work it's way in until september, as a polished version of the first rabit is wolf track which had this weird sequencer part that freaked everybody out. so, i'll take that sequencer part out and blow it up into it's own thing. but that leaves a few months of stuff, which consists primarily of a rather detailed drum pattern that never found a home and an array of guitar parts that i didn't write and wouldn't claim as my own but would feel ok about raiding as a sample source in a creative, interpretive way.

i've been considering doing something with those riffs for a while, anyways. they're not the greatest on their own, but they had some potential - it's raw material that isn't really good, but is more than interesting enough to work with in warping it into something completely different. see, the project never created anything. that just doesn't sit with me. if i can get it all into a cohesive statement, it accomplishes a lot of things all at once.

the song this drum pattern was written for has a long, convoluted history. it was written as a short radio friendly five minute track (heavily tool influenced) over the summer of 2001 for inclusion into this radio rock project that spawned rabit is wolf, then became a rabit is wolf song, then went through several revisions before it became this sprawling 25 minute mess that i call my fourth symphony, the trepanation nation. this fourth symphony is probably going to need a double disc to house all of the versions. and i'm a little cautious about creating yet another one.

but the drum sequence was completely ignored in the process of the track changing from one nature to another, and i'm listening to it now and thinking i need to do something with it. it's complicated by the fact that i remember reordering the riffs, but don't remember the order they were in. i have a vague concept, but...

so, i'm going to reinterpret this somehow. how, i don't know yet. it's going to be something like the trepanation nation, but not quite. and i'm going to see what i can do about sampling those riffs in.

so, this is going to be a little different, and it could be a while before it works itself out.

to be clear: the intent with this thing was for it to be marketable. i've got spatterings of riffy stuff around, but it tends to get abstract. i'm going to try to avoid that with this. think soundgarden, tool....

just to keep you up to date on what i'm doing

i don't suppose you care, but i think i have a moral if not a legal responsibility to inform you of what i'm doing. the plan is pretty much set. it'll take a few weeks at least to complete what i've set out.

i've now run through the material for the first half of 2001. i think it's interesting, but it's not really related. you can explore the page if you want. it's arranged chronologically moving down, meaning the oldest stuff is at the bottom.

1) as far as cynicide material is concerned, i have an aborted drum sequence for the song that you know as "the day you saw me cry" and a bunch of rough demos from jon. i was considering raiding jon's guitar parts and cutting them up into samples, but i don't hear much of interest. i may still do this. but, i'm going to be completing that song the way it was initially written as a heavy radio rock tune that's somewhere between tool and white zombie. that will be here:
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/to-spin-inside-dull-aberrations

as far as the actual rabit material is concerned, i'm splitting it into five conceptual chunks.

1) the first few tracks all have a post-punk vibe. i'll be uploading this in the form of a single for "me, myself..." that will include multiple mixes of the track (including an instrumental one) and a completed version of the joy division cover (i'm going to go to town with some screwy drum overdubs, and some weird synth work. it'll sound weird. it has to.). i'm undecided on "we're gonna kill someone tonight".
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/me-myself

2) the next couple of tracks have a sort of goth undertone. that includes an instrumental version of clarity, a few takes of #9 and the short version of the wave with the vocals that i couldn't get my processor at the time to process (it's no problem, now). that will come up as a single for clarity:
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/clarity

3) i'm going to upload the instrumental version of the wave. i've been referring to this lately as my third symphony.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-wave

4) the existing rabit demo, unaltered
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/rabit-is-wolf

5) a "live disc" containing the various acoustic versions that exist and were planned to be performed. me, myself. day. 9:46. psi. jumped up and down. i think there's a few more. obviously, i won't upload it unless it sounds "proper". there's a few things that i may redo the guitar parts on.

also,

a) i have many, many versions of the song you know as "day". they will be compiled into a comprehensive remix ep. the vocal mix will be included there.

b) a few of these tracks are going to end up on a double-lp chiptune project i'm putting together. like, the sequencer at the beginning of "me, myself" as well as a version of #9.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/thru

i believe that's comprehensive. 9:46, time and psi will not have instrumental versions, as they are pop tunes that require vocals.

if you have any questions, comments or concerns please bring them to me. in the end, my answer to these concerns is going to be to go fully instrumental on the tracks, if i have to. but i'm concerned about the integrity of the tracks first and foremost. and you know i'm very reasonable about shit.

j

publishing the intersection of two identical particles moving in completely opposite directions (inri047)

ok...

so, to understand this piece, it's necessary to go back to 1998.

i was working out primitive sequencer parts for the first inri demo and it just sort of crossed my mind that there was really nothing stopping me from composing symphonies except for a lot of music theory. well, if i could write electronic music without training, why couldn't i write symphonies without training? i mean, the score writing program exists in front of me. it was just a question of experimenting with it. i could do it myself...

...but i actually already had a pretty hefty disdain for music theory by the age of 17. i'd managed to come across a music history textbook that traced the deconstruction of western theory from beethoven through to schoenberg and this, combined with my experiences as a guitarist, was enough to prevent me from taking it seriously. the perception i had was of modern composers viewing music theory sort of like how biologists viewed creationism. i use that analogy fairly frequently. it just didn't strike me as relevant.

now, i've softened a bit over time to a view that music theory is best understood in terms of the underlying physics. this renders the theory useless, but upholds the basic relationships between tones as physical, mathematical realities. the thing is the next step of abstraction is understanding that these mathematical objects can be arranged and analyzed in any arbitrary way, and the conventional theory really *is* a fallacy akin to creationism. so, i still hold to the general thesis. this is actually the first serious example of me putting that disdain for the idea that music should have a theory into real action. i remain adamantly of the view that art is not a realm where theories should exist or be viewed with anything other than scorn. theories are rigid, formal things; art is informal, chaotic.

so, it's 1998. i have a scorewriter and a very basic soundcard and i want to bullshit a symphony out of it. i did this by composing a single brief melody by randomly mashing notes into a scorewriter. i then took that melody and pasted it over top of itself at differing speeds (64th, 32nd, 16th, 8th, quarter, half, whole notes). i then took that, cut it off near the end of the half notes and pasted it over itself, backwards.

that might sound like it's going to sound awful, but it actually sounds quite lovely. one could analyze it quite easily, but it's creation is beyond the realm of any rules of construction.

which is where art belongs.

...excepting the algorithm i used, of course. i suppose it's more reich than schoenberg, but kind of more xenakis than either.

the initial version ended up subsumed underneath a messy noise collage that i created independently and have lost the source material for. that messy noise collage was eliminated from the track for the 1999 version, which was reconstructed by reproducing the algorithm. these are tracks 19 and 20 on this systematic exploration of the theme.

in 2001, i ran the midi file through my soundblaster live!, which as primitive as it is, has a much nicer wavetable in it than the primitive soundcard i used in 1998 and 1999 (i don't remember what it was). this is track 21. i also slowed it down by about 20 bpm and allowed the full file to "intersect", which let it breathe more. i've previously not done anything with this mix other than append it to some mix cds. the guitars on the soundblaster are notoriously bad, so there wasn't a lot to do with it....

why? well, i was writing a lot with scorewriters at the time and was just experimenting with the old file, really. but i was also finishing up what would be the only year i would spend in the math-physics department, and thought it sounded like i would imagine intersecting particles *should* sound like. i was generally interested in finding ways to combine science with music then - an interest that is present in older tracks as well and that has stuck with me. i may explore these themes further in time. one of the ideas i really wanted to accomplish was a physical modelling of the universe, to actually simulate the music of the spheres, as pythagoras imagined it. i think i underestimated the complexity of such a task....

of course, i never expected the music of the spheres to be tonal. and i wouldn't expect the sound of particles intersecting to be musical, either. but, we can take some artistic license. if intersecting particles are to make a sound, it OUGHT to be something like this!

now, the place to work out the actual intersection is rather arbitrary. i had initially cut off the entire section of pure whole notes, back in '98. what i wanted to do in '01 was create a sequence where it's cut off incrementally, creating shorter and shorter pieces. i didn't actually do that then, but i have now.

as for the piece, i haven't changed it much. i've doubled the guitar with a pizzicato string section, and put it through a better guitar synthesizer (and amp simulator, and effects). the sound fonts are otherwise identical, just updated mildly to a better synthesizer.

i've included the midi files of the original composition, if you'd like to mess with it on your own.

written june, 1998. reimagined june, 2001. slightly rearranged and re-rendered at the end of july, 2014. the renders here are from june 1998, june 1999, june 2001 and july 2014. as always, please headphones.

credits:
j - programming, digital effects & treatments, digital wave editing, composition.

the rendered electronic orchestras variously include piano, electric guitar, orchestra hit, synth pads, pizzicato strings and pc card.

released june 18, 2001

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-intersection-of-two-identical-particles-moving-in-completely-opposite-directions

the second phase is now entirely completed.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3JSjmqp0cbtYmywctLw8KaXgXG3A2ZOF

nexus card arrived in the mail today.

first show over will be the seminal kraut-noise act, oneida.

i'm learning that detroit has a show i'd spend $10 on pretty much every day. i don't have $10 to spend every day. if i were to somehow find a job, i'd not be able to go to a lot of the shows, so it's a catch-22. worse, it costs $9 (maybe $7, i'll find out) in tolls to get back and forth. that's going to mean i'm going to not buy very much beer when i'm over. going across 4 or 5 times a month (which is roughly the current plan) is going to add up to substantial border tolls, unfortunately. i mean, the cost of a $5 show is actually $15. that's a big difference. i can't resolve that, i just have to eat it.

so, that means i'm going to be picky. but, the flip side is that i have a huge array of options. as i'll be keeping a close eye on things, i'll also point out here shows that i nearly attended but didn't. unfortunately, these are probably going to be a lot of the up and coming acts i'd otherwise take a chance on. and i will miss some things in person.

for the next few months, i have an increased amount of disposable income. i will be over quite often.

oneida is a good first show. first update on the first of august.

trolling weird al

deathtokoalas
i refuse to follow the rules that exist in conventional english grammar regarding its/it's, as it demonstrates rather clearly how grammar is in fact a form of mind control. it clearly follows that weird al is an nwo pawn, btw.

but, let us analyze this carefully. we have three things to take into account.

1) contractions. it's can clearly be used as a contraction for "it is". no argument.
2) plural. generally, when used without an apostrophe, an s at the end of a word means that the idea expressed is one of plurality.
3) possessive. generally, we use apostrophes to indicate possessives.

it follows that, to be consistent across the language, its should mean plural and it's should be used for both the contraction and the possessive. yet, for absolutely no discernible reason other than the arbitrary dictate of some centralized grammar authority somewhere, this convention is shattered for it's/its. i don't know the history, but it almost certainly reduces to somebody's arbitrary opinion on the matter.

i reject all of this as inconsistent with the principles of natural justice, which demand that laws be on a firm, rational basis rather than at the arbitrary dictate of some authoritarian body. with enough push back, we can take back our language as a democratic, dynamic entity and have this changed to something more rational.

so, please join in me in ignoring the irrationality of this particular rule of modern english - and any others you may find.

Luke
What do you have against koalas?

deathtokoalas
it's the cuteness. puts me into a rage just thinking about it...

Mario
whether or not you're being a troll, you make a rather interesting claim. You must be the life of the party, too. Haha take care.

deathtokoalas
well, in some sense, i'm drawing from orwell. but, you don't really need to draw on fiction. you can look at the development of french. the history of repression that has gone into french is very deep and well documented. most people that today speak "proper french" previously spoke a different dialect of latin, such as occitan. these dialects have been viciously repressed through forced schooling in a manner that is every bit as heavy-handed as the forced anglicization of natives in australia and canada. the development of france as a nation-state is inherently connected to the standardization of french as a language.

if you analyze french, you'll immediately realize how ridiculously constructed it is. the gendering is really quite ridiculous, and consider how much deference it provides to authority (specifying between the tu and the vous seems entirely arbitrary, until you realize it's meant to enforce a hierarchy).

linguists will tell you that language is really at the core of how we think. how many philosophical debates reduce to the meaning of a term? and, there's good reason for this, as it's at the core of how we grasp concepts. if the centralized grammar authorities (dare i say grammar nazis) can get you to think in a way that upholds hierarchy and defers you to authority, they're a good ways towards getting you to behave in the way they want.

it's/its may be trivial in that context, and english is not nearly as controlled as french is. but, it's a good place to start in deconstructing the conditioning and questioning the ideas underlying the grammatical rules.

a better example in english is capitalization.

stop and think about what they teach kids in schools. whenever you capitalize a proper name, you're enforcing a hierarchical relationship between people. when a child writes "the president", it's marked as incorrect. it must be The President. for the rest of your life, you will write The President, The Prime Minister, The CEO, etc.

this is so engrained it's not even thought about. but it's a means of enforcing a social order.

Mario Venegas
holy shit. I wish I had that much time on my hands. Well, TIL. Thanks for that wall of awesome information. That's pretty rad stuff. What do you do for a living, if I may ask? You seem very knowledgeable. I apologize in advance, English isn't my first language.

deathtokoalas
let's just say i'm a musician. you can hear my music by clicking my name.

lsm234
You rage against the machine, bro!

deathtokoalas
i'd advise building parallel structures, instead. far more productive.

(evil laugh)

J.D.
Look out we have a rebel here! Mwahaha that was a fragment! that will show the establishment!

deathtokoalas
nonono, rebels necessarily acknowledge the existence of the state and flail hopelessly against it. post-leftists are trying not to do that any more, because there's a recognition that it's just a waste of time. it's a bit elitist, but it's really more realistic. one of the problems is that we don't breed in the first place, so this whole idea of building for future generations is really just empty liberal rhetoric. the focus needs to be on the now. and that's actually getting back to roots; it's a forgotten central aspect of marxism that workers can only live for the present if they stop living for the afterlife. so, the new anti-establishmentarianism rejects rebellion in favour of creative building. there's not much hope that it's going to create systemic change, but it at least allows us to get a feeling of freedom while we're actually still alive. leave the rebellion for the terrorists. gimme an art commune in the mountains, and put your guns away...

Amy 
I think you lost 80% of your audience when you started using multi-syllabic words. Great diatribe, though :)

Chris
Have you heard of Weird Al's parody of "Royals" by Lorde called "Foil". He actually talks about the illuminati and consperacies and what not. Weird Al is not a mastermind of evil, he is a mastermind of parody. And I started to listen to your so called "music" before I had to turn in off because of the LITERAL irritaion it brings to my brain. If you want to become a successful muscian, try less scratching on the chalkboard and more actual musical instruments, like say a piano. I would abadon your music career and go into writing. You are obviusly a better writer than a muscian.

deathtokoalas
there's plenty of pianos in there, but i'm actually a guitarist. there's a few poems, too. i mean, there's 70 some songs up. try the "recent" playlist a few lines down.

that song i have up is a bit of a joke, but it's necessary for another week because i'm putting the songs up in the same order and length as i wrote them, meaning they'll consistently be staggered by about 18.5 years. i'll have you know i was 15 when i jammed that out in 1996. it was my first demo tape....

....and if you appreciate it for what it is, it pulls it off well. but it's not for everyone, admittedly.

Monotremata
the subterranean tremor that being currently engineered is language mash-up : spanglish, frenglish, sprench, germalian, bulgarese, etc. Cityspeak and Newspeak will merge with these into an 'idiomatic singularity' - the corridors of power speaking in code, separating the rulers from the ruled. Doubleplusgut! \m/

rejectfairytales
While I share your view that there is much in thoughtlessly  spoken language that ought to be opposed I think you've made a poor choice in railing against non-use of the apostrophe in this case. If anything I think we should use apostrophes less. I agree with the trend toward using a lone s or es for plurals, eliminating nonstandard plurals eg: plural of squid should be squids not squid ; plural of octopus should be octopuses not octipodes. Just this would make English a lot simpler, which I think is important because as +jnrclerk  points out, language is NOT the be all and end all. Meaning is so much more important so the more we can eliminate arbitrary rules the better.

In terms of improving society I think encouraging brevity would be the best cause. Just think of all the empty verbiage floating around especially in legislative documents, legal documents, and the procedural documents of many companies. I find that most people who use too many words have a similar thing to hide - they are talking bullshit! Of course that isn't always the case but it often is. Leave the koalas alone - I'm just sayin!

deathtokoalas
yeah, the meaning > procedure thing is really the crux of a lot of my grammar anti-authoritarianism. language is spoken first and foremost. writing is important, it's importance cannot be understated, but the purpose of writing something down is to get a meaning across.

i've put it down to focus purely on recording right now, but i've been reading a bit of archaic political literature lately by the likes of richard price and thomas hobbes (the aim is to get in between the historical debate over the french revolution that happened between thomas paine and edmund burke). it's impossible not to notice that the spelling and grammar used in texts before 1900, and especially before 1800, is dramatically different than spelling and grammar used today. yet, when i'm having trouble following something, it has more to do with attitudes that have changed than the difference in writing conventions. that's to say nothing of shakespeare or chaucer who were legitimately writing in a different language. yet, if you let a grammar authoritarian loose on these texts, the result would be ugly. with hobbes, it's just missing the point that language is constantly evolving; with shakespeare, it actually diminishes the artistic expression.

and, it's worthwhile to wonder what somebody will think of reading this very youtube comment in the year 2200, if youtube is still online that far into the future. i'd normally say something like "if we avoid blowing ourselves up", but i suspect that if we do blow ourselves up the internet will keep running without us for quite some time into the future. web pages written in archaic language could be an interesting phenomenon in the not so distant future.

somebody pointed out that this whole thread is sort of funny because my grammar is actually almost spotless. well, most of the rules make sense. i want to go back to the idea of reason being the guiding force, rather than convention. language will shift, but reason will stay mostly static. if we focus on reason rather than convention, we will provide future generations the ability to disassemble our archaic writing; if we focus on convention over reason, we run the risk of becoming incoherent to future audiences.

akkinex
It's is the conjugated form of both 'it is' and 'it has.' FYI

Oh, and this might help to explain why the apostrophe for the possessive 'its' was dropped a couple hundred years ago. From http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp

From what we understand, the possessive was also written it’s until a couple of hundred years ago. While we don’t know for certain, it is possible that the apostrophe was dropped in order to parallel possessive personal pronouns like hers, theirs, yours, ours, etc.”

deathtokoalas
hrmmmn. thanks for that.

i've deleted about a dozen posts explaining that the rule applies because "it" is a  "personal pronoun". the people posting thought they were smart, but it's actually a really dumb response that i didn't want to get into. i didn't know that it's was an Officially Correct possessive in the past; in light of that information, your post has made me reconsider.

rather than focus on pronouns, let's look at a concept called a "possessive determiner". consider the following:

this is our house / the house is ours.
that is their house / the house is theirs.
this is your house / the house is yours.
that is her house / the house is hers.
this is it's house / the house is it's.

(it may be a cat, for example)

in each case, the first phrase is using what you may mistake as a pronoun as a "possessive determiner". the second phrase is the possessive pronoun. the s in each case is not due to possession, but due to it being a pronoun rather than an adjective.

wikipedia (i don't have time to go to the library, sorry) lists possessive determiners in english as:

1) my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose
2) the saxon genitives formed from other nouns, pronouns and noun phrases (one's, everybody's, Mary's, a boy's, the man we saw yesterday's).

you can clearly see from this that its is used in exactly the same way as a general noun possessive is. yet, it inconceivably isn't written that way.

ok.

i had to triple check that and rewrote it a few times, not being somebody that cares a lot about grammar. the only reason my grammar doesn't suck is because i spent my entire childhood in my room reading and i picked it all up through intuition. it's just about what looks right.

but i'm done now. the personal pronoun thing is not correct. so, please stop posting it. i will block you!

John
The current iteration of it's versus its has a very simple explanation to it: The form it's is always a replacement for either it is, or it has. Perhaps this is the whole point. If we used the apostrophe in possessive situations, wouldn't that remove the need for its to exist? That would also mean that it's would not always be a contraction of it is or it has. That could be the very reason for this rule, to keep the two meanings visually, and identifiably separate. For the record, I have no idea how many times I confused myself trying to write this comment. I sincerely hope that this is an acceptable means of emphasis, or at least acceptable in the absence of access to italics? Knowing my luck though, my grammatical discussion is grammatically incorrect somewhere. Blimey, I should have ceased this comment sooner.

Oh come on! Why did that have to be a short cut for strikethrough?! -_-

deathtokoalas
you can get italics by surrounding the word with _. you can bold by surrounding the word with *.

_ italic _ . without the spaces: italic.

i've always understood the difference as being an attempt to separate the meanings in the way you've provided. but, there's virtually no chance anybody is going to get confused. with all the homonyms out there, confusing the contraction with the possessive should be the least of anybody's concerns...

Unofficial winner
It makes us look professional.

deathtokoalas
please. most professionals can barely spell their own names.

it makes you look like a social outcast, or an english professor that can't find a real job.

i was in school a long time. math. physics. programming. law. music. a few other things. i'll admit it was very surprising to me the first time i realized the guy in front of me, who has a phd in an incredibly abstract topic and dozens of published papers, was not able to get his homophones straight. it was just like...

"did he just write there on the board when he meant their? i thought this was a university. give me my money back..."

....but it's so overwhelmingly common in the university classroom that you eventually get used to it.

professionals are interested in the thing(s) that they're studying. you'll run across the odd one that is particular about the grammar, but for the most part they simply don't care.

you've just been lied to by your high school teachers. the truth is nobody cares about your grammar or is going to judge you based on it.

it's not the only thing they lied to you about, either.

"i know she just built a usable prototype for a quantum computer, but she didn't capitalize her proper place names, so how can we hire her?"

it doesn't happen.

people will judge you on your work.

ok, i've got the shape of this done. i didn't do much besides update the guitar font and splice it with a pizzicato string patch, which actually creates a bit of a sitar-sounding effect. but, the sound font update overall is really much better.

i've got it rendered at 8 speeds and will have to pick one. i may upload them all together, which will produce the effect of a single 46 minute track, but i need to determine if this is actually interesting or just pointless. and, i'll do that after i get a few hours of sleep....

this will almost certainly be done for tomorrow.

publishing the symphony of psilocybin induced madness (inri046)

so, that means i need to record here that today is the day that inri027 was compiled as a four track ep.

==

the core of this was written in my parent's basement in the spring of 2001. planning on going to a rave that weekend, i had previously purchased a large amount of drugs; i was, however, forced to stay in due to having a calculus test that sunday (the rave was out of town). well, my parents were gone for the weekend, most of my friends were out of town and i had a massive stash of drugs...

it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.

around 2006 or so, i took a course in electronic music design that had a recorded component and pulled the score off of my hard drive with the intent of finally recording it properly. the dx7 i had available to me greatly improved the synth patches, enough that i'm willing to let the track rest that way.

i've included midi files of the original composition, if you'd like to mess with it on your own.

i consider this my second symphony.

written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march.  as always, please use headphones.

credits:

j - electric guitars, programming, digital effects & treatments, composition, production.

the rendered electronic orchestras variously include synthesizers, clavinet, kalimba, nylon guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, piano, banjo, electronic drums, pc card, violin, cello, bamboo flute, flute, viola, soprano saxophone, tuba, trumpet, organ and music box.

released may 15, 2001

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness

on third thought, i'm probably going to eliminate thru. it hasn't worked out as substantially as i was thinking.

in which case, everything will end up on jjjjjjjjjj, the 2006 version remains authoritative and the long version exists only as cut.

about the only reason i can justify having thru right now is as a sort of a second side. i'll have to see how much material gets generated in the end.

actually, i'm not going to do that, either.

the 5:31 "cut early mix" is about 20 minutes in it's full render. it's kind of unnecessary to have both the 20 and 5:30 version, and i actually like the 5:31 version better. what happens over that last 15 minutes is that the thing slowly unravels. the 5:31 cut-off is optimized to exclude empty space.

i'm going to wait to see how much space is left for thru, and if i have an extra 15 minutes i'll render it and fade it out. but i actually don't expect that. so, i'm going to stop inri027 right there. if i do the fade out for thru, it won't appear on the single.

hey, it's 48 minutes. that's a hefty ep as it is.

yeah, you know, i can't improve on this, really.

the score is for a lot of guitars, a lot of synths, pc card percussion, pc card bass, very electronic sounding drums and something that could be called an orchestra. if i was to redo this, i'd be copying over the previously recorded guitar parts, dumping the percussion and bass out through the old soundblaster (as i did before) and mapping the orchestra to synth patches. so, the only difference would be in the patches, and the piece is saturated enough that nobody will tell the difference.

so, that would be a waste of time, that i'm not going to bother with.

2006 version stands.

i *am* going to create a long render of a very early mix that i found, and it won't take long to get that up.

and that will be the quick conclusion to inri027.

that means the symphony will not appear on thru, but i think i'm going to need the space anyways (because there's going to be an extra choral piece, and a weird punked-up beethoven thing). so that will likely work out.

or i might use the early mix instead. we'll see how that works out.

so, i've already explored this composition in much more depth; i just pulled these four mixes off my hard drive - and that is the totality of inri027.

1) carleton mix, for music 3604 (2006). includes ambient guitar into/outro, entirely live guitars and the symphony partly played through a dx7 and partly through the soundblaster.

written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march. this version was finalized on march 30, 2006.



2) divine amoebas mix. in 2004, i lifted the piano part to form the end of an anti-war protest piece i was putting together. it's slowed down to half speed and combined with an 808 going haywire, beethoven samples and backwards guitars.

piano part written in early 2001. this construction is from january, 2004.



4) alt mix. this is also from 2001, but it's a bit mysterious. i don't have a date, just an mp3 from 2007. i'll have to briefly explain.

this is a process piece, like most of the things i worked out through 2001. i initially composed it to repeat in patterns of 9, where each pattern had an extra bar of silence at the end of it. this created a twenty minute piece that spiralled down into nothingness, and became rather sparse at the end. for the final, published version i ended up modifying the patterns of 9 to decrease as the length of the pattern increases. so, if the initial section that repeats in a pattern of 9 had 8 bars of rest then the next pattern with 12 bars of rest would repeat in patterns of 8, and so on down to 3. this had the effect of shortening up the piece by about 50%. beyond that, i then added a piano part and a ridiculous crescendo.

so, this early mix is the initial cycling of 9s across the score. i don't remember why i cut it to 5:30 back in 2007, but i do think it's the perfect cut off point and will stick to it.

written early 2001. this render is from july, 2007.



5) initial soundcard mix. as with all the pieces from 2001 that i'm finishing, this was written in a scorewriter and monitored using the ol' soundblaster. i've got these mixes up because it's interesting to hear what this actually sounded like as i was composing it.

written early 2001. this render is actually from may 13, 2001.
 

that's almost an hour of difficult listening. good luck...

3) is a forthcoming vst mix. i'm not sure if i'm going to try and reintegrate the guitars from the carleton mix into the new vst mix or leave it as is as the final render.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness

there's a bit of a quandry with this track, because a good chunk of the character of it is dependent on the pc card. i mean, it was actually written around the old technology. hrmmn.

i'm going to end up doing some kind of card combination.

the symphony of psilocybin induced madness (final mix)

the core of this was written in my parent's basement in the spring of 2001. planning on going to a rave that weekend, i had previously purchased a large amount of drugs; i was, however, forced to stay in due to having a calculus test that sunday (the rave was out of town). well, my parents were gone for the weekend, most of my friends were out of town and i had a massive stash of drugs...

it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.

around 2006 or so, i took a course in electronic music design that had a recorded component and pulled the score off of my hard drive with the intent of finally recording it properly. the dx7 i had available to me greatly improved the synth patches.

written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march.

well, i'm not sure i hear the occitan or medieval influence in the tune, but i do like the idea of mixing renaissance music with techno.

i happen to have just completed a track that mixes (english) renaissance guitar (lute) music with warp records style drum 'n' bass:

maybe there's a trend developing there.

publishing the time machine (inri044)

and there it is. inri025.

inri026 is the adventures in guitarland, already completed.

inri027 is my symphony of psilocybin induced madness and is actually finished in it's fully complete form with live guitars. i'm going to construct a vst mix out of it, which will make this a little different than the other tracks as the synths in the full section are from the dx7 in the closet in the music department at carleton university. but, i shouldn't have to actually play any parts, so it should be relatively fast to run through.

===

regarding this piece, my memory is blurry; yet, i have a vivid recollection of playing parts of it for my guitar teacher on a sunny day, where there was still snow on the ground. it's funny how we remember seemingly irrelevant details, but i guess the atmosphere of the performance is important because the performance is. that would date it to roughly march, 2001.

i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it (a specific c# cannot be hit on a standard classical). yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.

to further complicate things, i've long wanted to turn the piece into a jazzy idm romp. it has a kind of a jingly feel to it that belongs in the warp records sphere.

so, what is this? a classical guitar piece? a jazzy piano piece? a techno tune? all of the above! as with other pieces from this period, this is presented here in multiple formats: several rendered midi tracks, live guitar versions, a vst version and a "full band" version.

i have included the original midi file (and sheet music in pdf) as a bonus item in the download, if you want to play with it on your own.

conceptually, the time machine aspect referred simply to the slowed down guitar chords at the beginning of the song. if you play it a certain way, it sounds like time is collapsing in on itself. or, so i thought, anyways. the various versions i have created here have made an attempt to take that idea to it's logical conclusion. it's a mix of the vision i had at the time and a bit of hindsight.

written early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. rendered, arranged and performed over june and july, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:

j - electric guitar, programming, digital effects & treatments, digital wave editing, loops, production, composition.

the various rendered electronic orchestras include acoustic bass, synth bass, electric bass, brass, orchestra hit, drum machine, electronic drum kit, nylon guitar, electric guitar, synthesizers, synthesizer effects, music box, piano, bells and mellotron.

released march 21, 2001

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-time-machine

the time machine (ambient mix)

this slowed down ambient version is the final piece of inri025, which is now complete.

written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further remixed over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 21, 2014.

the time machine (electric guitar mix)

the track was originally written for classical guitar, and then switched over to piano because there is a high c# that cannot be reached on very many classical guitars. however, the c# can be reached on an electric, so i've chosen to play it that way instead.

played straight through at a steady 180 bpm, the track is rather boring, so i've interpreted it a little differently for playing purposes. i suppose this is the final interpretation of the track as a solo piece.

written in early 2001. reinterpreted in july, 2014; this version of the track was completed on july 21st, 2014 and adjusted for volume on may 27th, 2015.

change of plans.

i'm not going to play this piece 6 times. the reason is that it's really not that interesting to listen to as a solo piece. played at 360, it's robotic (strike 2). i actually can't play it on a classical at all without ruining the best part of it (strike a third). and it's not interesting enough to film myself playing (strike two more).

i will interpret it as a live guitar piece once and only once, on solo electric, and move on to some more interesting interpretations. i do still want to fuck with the score rather considerably.

so, that will be up here soon.

i'm glad i'm finally awake. i passed out thursday afternoon when i got back from detroit and slept pretty much all of friday, saturday, sunday. it was a compound burnout, the type that is inevitable after so many weeks of 30 hour days. when these burnouts hit, the tiredness is just relentless...

for example: i was able to make it to get groceries on saturday morning, but i was so tired and void of energy that i could barely lift my school bag full of groceries. that's the same school bag of groceries that i normally fill and carry on my back without any effort whatsoever.

i don't think i've been awake more than four hours at a time since. but it's weird because you don't sleep long periods when you burn out like this, either. it's three hours awake, four hours asleep, 2 hours awake, 3 hours asleep, etc.

i'm alert now, though. thankfully. and hopefully for the next 30 hours...

again, i don't know why those 131 people are subscribed.

the next thing up will be an "expressive" electric version of the track. this should be up quickly.

i'm going to record myself playing it live, too - probably tomorrow afternoon, as that will make some noise. i'm dying my hair tonight, as well.

the time machine (final mixes)

1) so, i've completed (yet) another track.

a reminder: what i'm doing right now is sorting through a number of scores (these are literally written pieces of music) that i wrote out over 2001 and never got around to converting into listenable music. they've been sitting around, for the most part, because i was hoping i could actually get real life orchestras to play these pieces. delusions of grandeur...

the technology is now accessible and pliable enough that you don't really need real musicians to play a score anymore. i've played most of the guitar sections, but i have to admit that the vst-based samplers that are out there now are quite phenomenal. i actually had to come to the hard realization with this track that i couldn't play the nylon guitar part better than the sequencer, and i was just going to introduce noise to the track by mic-ing myself. now, the nylon guitar part in this piece is very metered - there is no expression in the arpeggiation and the notes need to be directly on the beats. so, on one hand it's not surprising that a machine is able to be a robot better than a person. regardless, as a musician, it's a disturbing feeling to come to terms with.

i retain the right to add my wanky guitar part at the very end, but i don't think it's going to happen. it's better without it.

written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014.  



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTXTBZcQK

2) so, this is the final version of this track, with live guitars throughout. i've cut off the end section and placed it in a separate track; the full version in one piece can be found on the single's associated record, jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj.

written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 11th, but picked up the end swell on july 19th when it was separated from the full mix.



3) i've added an ambient section to the piece, as i always meant to. the thematic idea behind the time machine actually just comes out of the introductory guitar part, but it was supposed to be further interpreted through a sound collage that creates the impression of floating through space.

written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 19th. 

yeah, this is probably coming to a close without those guitar theatrics, after all.

i'm torn between stopping and noodling over the end part and leaning very heavily towards stopping.

it's just that i want to maintain the sombre, reflective quality of the section as an end to the piece, and ultimately a transition into the next track. it does get a little more busy at the end as it fades out, but all i'm going to accomplish by putting an electric guitar in there is to saturate the track.

i haven't decided entirely. i'm going to make some spaghetti and come back. but i think this version is done...

what i did instead is run a guitar through a synthesizer, and then shift it over a few octaves. that makes it sound a little like a trumpet.

i have the cockroach specimen you requested

hi.

i got the roach you asked for. i'll be out tomorrow morning for groceries, but should otherwise be home almost all of the upcoming week.

a few notes.

1) that's the first roach i've seen since the first week of june, and it's also the first roach i've killed on the side of the apartment closest to the door. it was actually right outside the door, in the hallway, and scattered when i turned on the light. so, it got stomped on. that felt good.

2) it is indeed an oriental roach, which is determined primarily by it's dark colour.

3) oriental roaches are seasonal. it's been cool overnight this week. they tend to come inside in the fall. so, i was expecting them and hoping this would be a good test if my barriers were working.

4) the fact that it was stumbling around in the hallway far from a water source does suggest as much, although it also suggests that it may have been scattered in an unexpected direction from it's entry path in the back area by the residual sprays. i'll monitor the situation further, but if i continue to see roaches scattering around on the outside of the apartment, i'm going to request that the back room gets inspected for holes and has steel wool or whatever else put in to patch them up. i can help with looking for holes. the thing is that i can block the holes in the apartment, but i can't block the doorways, so if they're going to be coming in through there then the basement entry points need to also be addressed.

5) for now, i'm cautiously concluding that i've blocked this space off, but that it's only a partial barrier. further, there's really no way for me to guess where it actually came from, so no further leads on holes to patch.

(pause)

i'm sorry, i just want to clarify that when i say

"back room gets inspected for holes"

i mean inspected by you or i or paul or whatever. i'm NOT requesting an exterminator.

those guys tell you lies half the time, anyways. they want to be able to come back repeatedly, otherwise they're out of a job.

j

suicide is ALWAYS a conscious decision. take a step back away from your self-important worldview and ask yourself: is your perception of somebody else's life more valuable than the person that owns it?

whether the attempt is through overdosing on pills, cutting wrists or anything else, i would consider STOPPING a suicide attempt to be a FUNDAMENTAL INFRINGEMENT OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, and anybody that gets in between somebody and their INHERENT RIGHT to kill themselves should be kicked in the forehead, tarred and feathered and forced to walk through the city with a sign that says "I PREVENTED SOMEBODY FROM CARRYING THROUGH WITH THEIR RIGHT TO DIE.".

if you see somebody trying to die, you should not interfere. life is not sacred. god does not exist. you are in control. don't deify the state in response. deify yourself.

well, that was indeed a kafkaesque mess but i got my expedited border clearance. hey, all those years of avoiding a criminal record came in handy. i'm squeaky clean. i get to use the special line...

but, that doesn't mean this wasn't a pain in the ass. i've ranted about this here quite a bit over the last year. it's only fitting that the last section of it was off the wall ridiculous...

getting across the actual border was not a problem. i just showed them my letter, and he let me through. but, he chuckled and wished me luck. he knew what was coming...

the walk up fort street at around 7 am was purposefully brisk; i was admittedly a little uncomfortable. but, the more i walked, the more it just reminded me of montreal. yes: detroit is full of decaying bridges, falling apart buildings, abandoned industrial centres, smoldering sewers and people sleeping on the street. but, i didn't feel threatened so much as i felt a level of empathy. how'd it get that bad, anyways?

the other thing that made me relax a little was a friendly retriever that ran over across a field to say good morning. it's funny how goldens are basically the universal stress reliever.

it was about twenty minutes to the bridge, which is a short walk for me.

once i got there, though, i wasn't sure how to proceed. i tried going under the bridge first. this is the first point that the smog got to me: i nearly heaved, and had to sit down. first attempt at directions was a hotel that looked like something out of a stephen king movie...

"do you know if i can get in some kind of plaza around the bridge?"
"no."
"does that pay phone work?"
*laughs* "no."
"do you know if there's a phone around here?"
"there's no gas stations for a good ways in either direction."
"well, thanks, then."

so, i went back under the bridge again...

there was a side street running along the complex (and it was a complex. it looked like a prison.) that i decided to take a walk up, and it took me into a nicer street full of very old churches and quaint, if dilapidated houses. three houses in a row had angry, barking, unchained rottweilers that could have easily hopped their four foot tall enclosures should they have decided to. it's a problem in windsor, too. cheaper than a security system, i guess.

and apparently very necessary.

i bumped into a border cop on his way to work and flagged him down...

"how do i get in here?"
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"well, why do you want to get into here?"
"i have a nexus interview."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
"so i can get across the border. i'm from canada..."
"you're from canada? how did you get across the border?"
"the tunnel."
"and how did you get here?"
"i walked."

*awkward pause*

"well, you can't get in here without a car. you're going to have to call a cab."

ok, so here's the thing: i can see the enrollment centre through the fence. it's a few hundred yards, at most. and, yet i need to call a cab to transport me those few hundred yards? yes, i do: this is what the cop is trying to tell me. but, i'm not about to call a cab, so i keep walking.

eventually, i get to a cross street with a big sign

MICHIGAN WELCOME CENTER* --->

*note yankee spelling.

well, that sounds like a good thing to try.

hours:
9 am - 4 pm

it's like 7:30...

so, i look up the road and notice it runs into customs. i'm thinking "maybe there's a phone in there". customer service is closed, and there's no barriers so i just keep walking, until a border cop yells at me:

"WOAH. WOAH. YOU CAN'T BE IN HERE. WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?"

well, i'm looking for a phone. is there one in that building?

"PLEASE STEP TO THE SIDE AND EMPTY YOUR POCKETS."

ok.

so, i pull out some pieces of paper, keys, a few dollars...

"who do you want to phone?"
"i'm trying to get in contact with the nexus office."
"how did you get in here?"
"i just walked in. there's no barriers or anything."
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
"well, i'm from canada and..."
"you're from canada? how did you get across the border without a car?"
"i took the tunnel."
"what? how did you get here?"
"i walked"

*awkward pause*

another officer walks over....

"this person just strolled in here, can you believe that."
"where are you going?"
"i'm looking for nexus."
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"

i laughed out loud at this point.

"because i'm from canada and..."
"wait. how did you get across the border?"
"i took the tunnel."
"and they let you in without documents?"
"well, i have this nexus document. i'm here for a defined purpose."
"pfft. anybody could print that off. do you have any drugs on you?"
"what? no..."
"yeah. right. step into the office, please"

so, i walk into the office...

he takes my id and starts running it through the system, asks me all kinds of absurd questions, accuses me repeatedly of living in collingwood and having a record of escaping the custody of an officer, visibly shatters a blood vessel in his forehead when i provide "jessica" as an alternate name and eventually gives up.

"go back to the michigan welcome center and call a cab from there."

again with the cab. they were really serious about this.

i did walk back to the welcome center, but i was planning on calling the enrollment centre, not the cab. it's now barely 8:00, so i have an hour to wait, and wait an hour i did.

the cop drives by about 8:30...

"listen, i knew this was going to be a problem, but i'm pretty sure the person i initially talked to said they'd give me a lift. the thing is i think they meant from canada, and i couldn't get a hold of anybody to provide instructions, so here i am."

he seems to have softened up a bit, after realizing i'm both harmless and frustrated. the absurdity of the situation actually seems to have become clear to him. but...

"i'd drive you down there myself, but then i have to pat you down, which means i need a female officer present and there aren't any."
"i can't waive that?"

(i don't care what gender my doctor is, and i don't care what gender the cop patting me down is)

"no. plus, i'd have to do all kinds of paperwork, and i just don't want to."

ah, yes. a lazy cop. gee, whudda thunk that possible, huh?

"but, i'll call you a cab if you want."

there's no irony in any of this.

i refuse the offer, and suggest i'll call the place when the welcome center opens.

this is where i got a break, and i have to say it's every bit as surreal as the rest of this. the place opens at 9:00, i use the bathroom, and then ask if there's a pay phone...

there isn't, but he offers the office phone, depending on who i'm calling.

i'm calling nexus, because i'm on foot and need to find out how i'm going to get in there.

apparently, this kind fellow has been working at the michigan welcome center for years and years, and given out instructions on how to get into the nexus office hundreds of times, but has never been in there himself. he's been wondering the whole time if his directions are even accurate, and he wants to know what it looks like inside the complex.

so, he offers to drive me in.

and i graciously accept.

he takes me back along the side street i came in at, past the entrance the first border cop went in, back under the bridge and around through a gated area. i am now finally at the nexus enrollment area. i thank the kind fellow and that is that.

but, the border guards are concerned about how i'm going to exit the complex.

"i guess i'll call a cab."

nobody else got the sarcasm. i was actually planning on asking somebody for a lift to the other side of the fence.

so, the interview goes well. the interviewer was a little older, and i seemed to convince him i'm a good kid. which is what i needed to do.

i got the marijuana question, i was honest, and he overlooked it. they can be very strict about that. but, the thing should get here in 7-10 days.

at the end of it, he asks me if i have a phone. i don't carry a phone. so, he picks up the phone and starts dialing the number for a cab for me...

"listen. if you call me a cab, i'm just going to ask that they drop me on the other side of the fence and walk back to the tunnel. so, why don't you just let me ask somebody for a lift out?"

and, finally, i got some fucking logic from somebody.

"no. we'll just escort you out."

a few minutes later, a truck pulls up with a border cop in it.

"are you here to escort me out?"
"yes."

so, i reach for the door....

"no. i'm not driving you. you're going to walk."

at first, he tries to lead me to the exit to the ambassador bridge.

"canada is that way, but where's your car?"
"i don't have a car."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"

i was on the brink of being a smartass, but managed to restrain myself.

"so i can get across under the tunnel. i just need to get to fort street."
"well, how are you going to get over the bridge?"
"no, i want to walk to the tunnel."
"walk...to...the....tunnel?"

at this point, i understand that every single one of the awkward pauses was shock that i'd walk that far. remarkable.

"yeah."
"well, follow the truck around the building and meet me at the crossing."

i did this, and we walked to the gate that first border cop went through. then i was out the side street and back up fort towards the tunnel...

without having to call a cab.

this is your tax dollars at work protecting you from terrorism.