basement toilet fixed, waiting on upstairs toilet

hi.

i learned a lot about plumbing from this exercise. it's not something i'd looked into before...

the eel fixed the drain. but, for future reference, this is what happened:

- your sump pump is connected to outside
- your floor drain is connected to the sanitary.
- there was a partial blockage deep in the sanitary, meaning the floor drain was emptying the basement water very slowly. this caused the sump pump to be running all the time to compensate.
- so, when it rained the basement got full of water and that water blocked the sanitary completely, causing the slow flush, sink gurgles, etc. given enough of a dry spell, it would have come down on it's own through a combination of slow floor drainage and sump pump action, but it's of course better to clear the plug.

so, the systems are not entirely separate. your pump is pumping excess water to the street, but most of the rain water is in fact flowing through the floor drain and into the sanitary, and if you were to block that off your pump probably wouldn't be able to keep up.

so, in the future, if you see a slow toilet after the rain, it means your basement is slowly flooding due to a blocked sanitary.

j

RAW SEWAGE LEAK FROM UPSTAIRS

the toilet from upstairs is leaking brown water from the ceiling in two places.

it's hard to think this is unrelated to recent concerns.

...and the sump pump is still running from thursday's mild rains...

(pause)

i noticed it stopped...

did you get my email and turn a pipe off? if not, it must be flush related because it's not constant.

uploading to spin inside dull aberrations to the scratchpad

so, i've updated the temp file with the final guitar proportions.

excluding the bass, i'm really heading into post-production with this. lots of work to do still, but it's mostly flourishes on the existing track. this is the core of the track, the way it was always meant to sound...

i'll get most of this done today. i keep saying that. but, today i really will.

http://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

it's always nice when you have your own songs stuck in your head :)

fuck. just gotta laugh.

i'm pretty sure the high pressure from the rainwater backup/clog issue burst or dislodged something in the toilet upstairs, leading to a leaky pipe. by the end of it, an upstairs toilet flush was making the dishes in my sink rattle. there was clearly a substantial force of air feeding back...

now, the fact that the snake fixed the problem isn't going to help my case. "i told you there was a clog". and i agreed there was probably a clog, but i pointed out that it wasn't the clog causing the backup, it was the rain. and, i was right. had we not got all that rain, the clog wouldn't have been a problem.....until spring. it's good it was found. but, that doesn't change the fact that i was right about the rain. had he not convinced me that the sump pump is more powerful than it is and that the systems are completely separate, i wouldn't have emailed the fire department in a desperate attempt to figure out where the rain was getting in. it makes absolute sense now, but (dammit jim!) i'm a nerd with a creative streak and an ability to think outside the box (i think i proved my worth on that basis with this), not a plumber. leave it to an artist to come up with the most ridiculous way possible to explain water seepage into the system, right?

that's not going to get through. what's going to get through is "i told you there was a clog".

so, i'm going to be told it's the seal on the toilet and they're going to replace the seal. in the end, replacing the seal might make the connection tight again, and it might fix it. but could it be a coincidence? is the leak unrelated to the backup? i can't prove it one way or the other, but i think it's at least likely that the air pressure broke something and hoping it's just the seal is pretty risky...

"a camouflaged pelican of immense girth must be transporting water from the river to the sewer."

so, i've actually spent most of the last two days doing dental work on my headphones....

some time back in the mid 80s when they were made (by dad bought these phones for himself when i was a young child. they're very old sennheisers, constructed at a level of quality that simply does not exist anymore. made in ireland. yeah, ireland. i think it's the only thing i've ever seen that was made in ireland.), they came with dust protectors on the side. but, over the years the dust protectors have faded to the point that they are now dust themselves. so, i'm trying to clean it all out with a set of tweezers. it's time consuming...

but the good news is that i've finally got the guitars mixed the way i want. i had to split it into three separate combinations over three different types of fuzz and then tweak the eq on each separately. it's a total of 8 different parts, sent and morphed differently. i wanted it to be dirty and crunchy and bassy and trebly and harmonic all at the same time, which is a lot to ask out of a couple of power chords. but....finally...

tonight, i should hopefully get done what i wanted to get done yesterday. i've decided i want a piano-sounding guitar in the middle of the track. i've always wanted one of those little stompboxes. but i'll have to see what i can pull together into terms of plugins...

i also finally found that one stupid hair i knew was in there but couldn't get out...

the sturdy design is a tragic flaw, really. i can swap out the cords, but i can't get to the drivers - which is great, except when you've got a hair in there.

i admit defeat, with tweezers. i need to find a vacuum...

so, the fire chief tells me there's no sump pump in the building.

to begin with, how would the fire chief know if there's a sump pump in the building? is there a master list of sump pumps in city records?

well, maybe there is. who knows. but, there was a tenant in the basement - the lights were often on late into the night - and there's a spout on the side of the building. clearly, there was a sump pump.

it may have been an illegal sump pump. an illegal sump pump? well, maybe there was an illegal unit in the basement. it's not uncommon, actually. but, like i'm supposed to get sad about accidentally reporting it. i need the drain fixed, bob the bourgie across the street that fucked off on his property rights responsibilities can fuck off if he doesn't like it...

i mean, if you're just going to sit there and let the drain back up into the neighbourhood's toilets, you deserve what you get.

i just realized the fire chief (yes, i cced it to the fire chief. i'll call the fucking mayor if i have to.) is going to read this and go "what is she, some kind of anarchist or something?".

ordered solutions are preferable. but if nothing happens, i WILL smash through the windows and fix it myself...

cced to pretty much the entire management of the windsor fire department:

hi.

sorry to be aggressive about this, but i know that the response rate on email communication with public employees can be a little slow due to high volume, so i'm hoping you can advise on what is actually a fairly unfortunate situation.

i'm renting an apartment at marion & cataraqui. about a month ago, there was a fire in a large property across the street (also marion & cataraqui, but technically on cataraqui). since then, the rain has been overwhelming the sanitary on the street (several houses are getting slow toilets and backups) and i'm fairly convinced the cause has to be the rainwater draining through the floor drain. the property is abandoned, and the electricity is off, so the sump pump is not working. additionally, this seems to be causing additional stress on neighbouring sump pumps.

it's unfortunate that there was a fire on the street, but there needs to be a drainage solution developed before the spring. this is a large property and it simply can't be left to drain into the sanitary like this.

i've been informed that the fire department probably turned the power off, and i certainly understand the reasons why. but, there needs to be a pump in the property, or the drain needs to be plugged, or something else - otherwise the toilets on the street are going to back up badly in the spring.

so, i really ultimately need to know who deals with this. the city? the fire department? the property owner? neighbours smashing through the windows and doing it themselves?

j

i'll smash the place up with a baseball bat, and then cram the bat right down the floor drain.

yeah? just watch me...

it'll have to overflow through the windows, out to the storm sewer.

gah...

so, a few weeks ago, a heavy rainstorm came through here and the toilet started flushing slowly. at the time, i had no idea what that meant - i didn't even know if i was on city or a septic (i'm on city). but, some back and forth with the landlord and a lot of googling have led me to believe that something is broken with the piping.

the upside is i've learned a bit about how this works. it's something i've never had to think about before. but the way it's supposed to work is that the rain water goes into the storm drain and down a separate pipe to the river, where it dumps in untreated. the toilet water goes into a separate sanitary line and out to the treatment plant. so, rainfall should never back up the toilet.

and, yet it was clear from the beginning that rainwater is in fact slowing down the toilet's drainage. it's not quite backing up. yet.

but, of course the response i'm getting is "that's impossible, it's not how the system works".

there's since been two rainfalls that have caused the toilet to slow down at levels that are proportional to the amount of rain that fell. small rainfalls mean small issue. big rainfalls mean big issue. so, we've got correlation and proportionality. the scientific method tells me we have a causal relationship, here. but science has been less powerful than faith. my scientific reasoning was met with an offer to use the landlord's plunger.

but, what the causal relationship i developed demonstrates is that there's either a break in the local line (which would be expensive for the property owner to fix) or a break on the city line. so, i asked the guy next door...

yup. he's getting backups from the rain, too.

now, i need to convince them that they need to get the city in here to fix something before the snow melts in the spring. as the relationship is proportional, things could get messy down here if nothing happens before then.

there's some construction on the main street a few blocks away to replace old sewer lines.

i'm *hoping* that what's going on is that they have the rainwater temporarily routed to the sanitary, and it will be corrected within a few weeks. but, i have no evidence of this.

my other suspicion is connected to the house across the street. there was a fire there about a month ago, which is about when things started backing up. the property's been completely shut down. if they shut the sump pump off, the rainwater could be pooling in the basement and heading down the floor drain - which is usually connected to the sanitary. that would explain it. the problem is that it's hard to understand how that could be generating *enough* water to back shit up without there being significant blockage somewhere. but, then you need to ask the question: what else has been flowing through the floor drain since then?

i've done all i can do, though. i've proven to them that something is crossed, and it's probably a city issue. now i just have to hope they do something about it...

i'm honestly expecting a more positive response from the main property owner than the guy upstairs. i THINK i've got enough evidence to convince him. he mentioned calling the city a few emails ago, so i think he'll get it.

but i can't risk this backing up in the spring and am going to have to call the city myself if i don't get a good response.

i mean, it's crystal clear that rainwater is flooding the sanitary somewhere, even if it's not supposed to.

what was weird about the rain today, though, is that the sump pump didn't come on until like an hour after it stopped raining, indicating it's draining from somewhere - like the house across the street, maybe.

i've convinced myself it's the abandoned property next door.

so, i've sent an email off to the windsor engineering department, asking them about the sewer replacement (is the storm going through the sanitary?) and what the procedure is for dealing with an abandoned property that's not draining properly...

slow toilet drains from the rain, questions about an unmaintained property

To: engineeringdept@city.windsor.on.ca

jessica
hi....

i'm hoping this is a good email address, but maybe you could forward this somewhere more appropriate if it isn't?

i'm renting a basement apartment at cataraqui and marion and am getting a few problems and am just trying to determine the cause. my landlord claims there are separate storm and sanitary lines, and i have no reason to doubt him. his logic is that rainfall should not cause the toilet to drain slowly, and he's consequently not taking me seriously. i understand his argument and why it shouldn't happen.

however, i'm a scientifically minded person and i've been able to demonstrate the following:

1) the slow down is correlated with the rain. that is, the toilet drains slowly after a rain and drains normally once the rain has dried up. so, while a block might exist, it's not the primary cause of the slow down.

2) the amount of slow down is proportional to the amount of rain. that is, when it rains a little, it slows down a little. when it rains a lot, it slows down a lot.

despite understanding that these systems ought to be separated, my brief and aborted training as a physicist tells me that when you have things that are correlated in a proportional manner, it is very likely that there is a causal relationship between them. that is, i have a high degree of certainty that the rain is causing the toilet to drain slowly in a manner that is proportional to how much rain is falling.

while it's august right now, the proportionality has me concerned about spring runoff, which is of course substantial in canada. i have every reason to think that that a lot of snow melting could back up the toilet and cause a horrible mess.

now, i've talked to the neighbour next door and he's confirmed that he's actual dealing with back ups through the pipes, which is a worse problem than i have. he's convinced that the problem is related to sewer replacement on wyandotte down the road. this only makes sense to me if they might have put the storm through the sanitary as a temporary measure. is that something the construction team has done in the short run?

i'm leaning towards a different cause. at roughly the same time that the problem started, the house across the street experienced a significant fire. the property has been completely shut down. i suspect the sump pump is not running, the basement is flooding and it's draining into the floor, which is connected to the sanitary and this is causing the backup. the issue i'm running into in having this make sense is related to the volume of water running through the floor drain. it's a pretty big property - it was an apartment before the fire, but it would have been a five or six bedroom house some time in the middle of the last century, and it has a very big backyard. so, there's a potential for a large volume of water to be coming into the floor drain. how likely do you think it is that this could be the root of the problem? how big a problem do you think this is going to cause in the spring, if it's not addressed now? and what is the better solution for this - running a sump pump on an abandoned property, or closing the drains off? how does the city deal with something like this, if it's determined to be the cause?

city of windsor, engineering department
I would like to clear up a few points in your email.

While your landlord may be correct in that the house may be serviced by separate storm and sanitary connections (I can't confirm that), both these connections would outlet to the same combined sewer in the road. There is only one sewer Cataraqui and one on Marion, and they are both combined sewers meaning that they accept both rain water and sewage.

With respect to the Wyandotte project, there is no sewer work being undertaken as part of that project. Windsor Utilities is replacing the watermain and services and the City will reconstruct the pavement following that work. This project would have no impact on the sewers servicing your property.

You are most likely correct in that there is a correlation between rainfall and the slow running plumbing in your house. This is due to the combined nature of the sewer that services your property. During rain events, combined sewers fill with rainwater and therefore have limited capacity to accept flows from buildings.

With respect to the apartment building across the street from you, all rainfall runoff from this property would have entered the sewer system via foundation drains prior to the fire, so the fact that the basement may have flooded and the water is now entering the floor drain would change the drainage pattern very little. In fact, rainwater entering the sewers from this property would be very small in proportion to that coming from the catchbasins draining the roads in the area.

With respect to abandonment of the connections servicing the apartment building, that would be addressed when the building is demolished by the Building Department. If you have concerns regarding the state of
the building, please contact the Building Department via 311.

Hopefully, this answers some of your questions. Please contact me if you want to discuss this matter further.

Sincerely;
----------------, P.Eng.
A/Contracts Co-ordinator

further update...

jessica
we got very little rain today, and the effect was consequently much less, but still noticeable. what that demonstrates is two-fold:

1) that the slow down is proportional to the amount of rain. we now have correlation and proportionality, demonstrating causality.

2) if a very small amount has a noticeable effect, a very large amount would have a very large effect.

i don't think it's likely we're ever going to get enough rain for a big problem, and i can deal with a slow toilet, but i'm worried about run-off in the spring. the proportionality that is now demonstrated indicates that the run-off could be a gigantic problem.

none of this was happening before, so something has changed in the last month, something that needs to be determined is if other people in the neighbourhood are having the same problem or not. a back-up like this should only affect the lowest lying fixtures, so i need to find somebody else with fixtures in the basement to ask. i've identified the basement tenant next door, i'm now waiting for him to come outside for a smoke to ask him. if he's dealing with the same thing, well know it's a city problem. if he's not, i'm not sure what to say other than that something is probably busted...

(pause)

alright...

so, i talked to the tenant next door and he IS getting back-ups from the rain, meaning it's a city thing. he thinks the pipes in the area are bad and it's the construction.

at this point, i've reached what i can do: i've identified there's a problem with the city piping and reported it to the property owner.

it's now in your hands as to what to do...

(pause)

i've thought about this a bit and i think it's worth being careful about. apparently, the neighbour next door is actually getting backups, not just slow drains. i may have a block of some sort, but i'd hazard a guess that most plumbing is at least mildly blocked. what if the reason i'm NOT backing up is because there IS a block?

i think there's enough evidence at this point to conclude that rainwater is somehow getting into the city's sanitary. i think it's better to focus on that.

the landlord
THE City WILL BE HERE MONDAY DURING THE DAY TO RUN THE EEL THROUGH THE LINE:

jessica
ok.

i still don't feel that i'm getting across what the problem is.

the problem is not that the line is blocked all the time. it is not. the problem is that the line is ONLY blocked when it RAINS.

in general, i'm an advocate of ruling out possibilities. the only way to find out is to try. but i've developed what is a pretty strong causal relationship between the drain and the rain. it seems to be that it will continue to drain slowly until the sump pump turns off, then get back to normal. the sump pump continues to run 12 hours after a mild rain storm, and i need to reiterate that this seems unusual. but considering the separation, i think what the connection between your sump pump and the toilet down here is is that the water drainage in the basement across the street is going to level at about the same time the sump pump stops. that is, i think that the reason they seem connected is because the floor drain across the street should stop draining at roughly the same time that the sump pump down here stops.

i'd just request that the three of us spend a few minutes over the weekend brainstorming other ways that the rainwater might be overwhelming the sanitary on the street.

that abandoned house is the only thing i can think of that really makes sense...and it would probably be better if one of you can get a hold of him to turn the pump back on and/or plug the drain somehow, if you know him, because if i do it it's going to be through city bylaw.

ok, all that messing around is done, now - i have an answer as to how to get the sound out of cubase and into a wave file in the way i want it, and the mix is actually even almost done. so, i'm back to it tonight (and am going to need a lot of coffee to avoid passing out, because i'm at a low in the manic cycle). there'll be minor fixes, dubs and tweaks over night; hopefully, i can do the choir part tomorrow morning, and then all that will be left for the weekend is the bass and post-production. i want this done soon...

you're always learning things when you're recording on your own like this. i'm a guitarist, really. but i need to play the role of arranger, engineer, mixer, producer....a lot of it reduces to figuring stuff out on the fly....but once you learn it, you can keep going.

i've been having weird issues with this mix, so i've sat down over the last two days and done a very careful a/b test on the real-time v regular rendering out of cubase. this is an old version of cubase, fwiw - sx3.

my analytical understanding of the situation is that there's going to be a few trade-offs. intuitively, the regular render ought to be the superior render, because it makes the calculation more specific. however, i've studied a little bit of floating point arithmetic and i know the error can become quite substantial when you're dealing with big numbers. so, i had some concern that it may end up overloading the plugins with too much information, just producing more error. this is maybe a little counter-intuitive - you'd think the more specific you are, the better it would be, but when you get to the nitty gritty of the way matrix arithmetic works in a computer it actually works the other way around - the more specific you are, the greater the error. there's no philosophical conclusions to draw from this, it's a user error. but i'm the user, here, and need to try and understand whether i'm making that error or not. based on what i'd learned about modifying the latency, it seemed to me that the plugins i'm using are optimized in real time playback, but i wanted to be sure of it.

starting with the a/b, i could definitely tell a difference in the reverb in one of the first sections, but i intuitively realized it was probably mostly randomness in the plugin. i kept going with it and couldn't tell a difference anywhere else in the song, except that the distortion sounded a little less defined in the regular render. but, it was extremely subtle. this confused me a little.

i ended up doing a null test and it came back flat - except that reverb (and the flange over the reverb, especially). i was using that plugin elsewhere and it nulled. why didn't it null there?

a little research proved my intuition correct - most modulation and time-based effects are engineered to be random, so that each render is a little different. that means i'm going to get neurotic in mixing this thing down, surely.

i then amplified what looked like a flat signal up 48 db (which is a lot) and it came back with a lot of fuzz and a very defined difference in the fuzz on the cello. the conclusion is that the distortion is definitely rendering differently, and i was able to hear it on the a/b. but it's extremely minimal, and not likely to be noticed by anybody but the composer.

regardless, i've got enough evidence in front of me to stick with the real-time. the real-time is supposed to sound the way you're mixing it, and i think it's pretty accurate (now that it's at the right latency). asking the plugin to render offline seems to be asking it to be more specific than it was engineered to be, thereby producing error in the wavetable calculation. it's minimal, but it should be avoided on principle.

this weird fear of swallowing is back.

it has to be psychological as opposed to something like, say, ms, which i've seen various symptoms of come and go since i was a little kid. if i get a jug of juice, it goes right down. if i try and take a swig of coffee, i start blowing into the cup. so, i have to take a small sip, swallow, wait and repeat.

i'm pretty sure i'm afraid of choking myself. it goes away after a while....

update...

jessica
hi again.

the toilet did the same thing after the storm today, so it's really obvious, now.

further, i checked the back room and it seems to be flooding out of the storage area beside the laundry room, which my ears tell me is where the sump pump is.

i noticed when i went out for a smoke that it was dumping water on the front lawn at a startling rate. like, it looks like somebody left a faucet running, sort of thing.

again: i have no idea what this means, only that something is flooding and it seems to be connected to the sump pump.

(pause)

actually, the water in the basement seemed to be coming from a little hole in the foundation. but if i were to guess, i'd think the cause of it seeping through would be the massive amount of water coming out of the sump pump directly above it. i might be concerned that it's producing some water damage, but it's sort of secondary to the plumbing issue itself.

it's hard to believe it 's coming from the rain because the puddles on the rest of the street have already dried up. why is this unit getting a thousand times more water than the one next door? so, it has to be feeding back from somewhere.

i just want to be clear about the flow rate. you know the "outdoor taps" that units used to have? i haven't seen once since i was a kid, but you'd attach a hose or a sprinkler to it out of your backyard. it looks like that faucet is on FULL BLAST. and it's been running like that for an hour. there's absolutely no way it's just the rain, it didn't even rain that much, that water has a different source...

with that much water, i thought maybe it was coming from a pipe that could be turned off, but it was suggested to me that that doesn't make sense. see, maybe it doesn't. but the toilet thing doesn't seem to make sense either.

i don't know what the options on the sanitary line are, or how they could get mixed up with the storm drain, but something seems to be crossed.

so i need to ask: did the furnace guys connect any pipes together? might it have crossed something up, through back pressure?

(pause)

sorry for the long email, but, just to finish the thought, it seems like the water was coming out of the sump pump and back into the basement. so it was recycling itself, creating the impression that it was coming out at a steady flow. he put a device in that acts as an inclined plane, to get the water out from the house and each pump is consequently decreasing in volume. so, it seems like it's not backed up, after all, it's just that the ground is really saturated. it might be a good idea to try and make that permanent to prevent further water damage...

it doesn't explain the toilets, but i do think the logic extrapolates. if the water is too saturated in the front of the house, it stands to reason that the city system is possibly backed up.

i'm still a little skeptical about possible flow issues somewhere, but that's an easy line of thinking to stick with for now.

(or it could have been a coincidence that the pump started slowing when the device was installed)

the landlord
Again the pump, pumps storm water, it does not pump sewage. If the sewer, sewage line is backing up we will call the city and report this. Speak to Paul and explain what you are experiencing so that he can look for himself when it rains again. This will give him first hand knowledge of the problem when he speaks to the City.  I will speak to Paul and have him call this to the Public works. This is not are doing this will be a city correction. If you notice around our building that they have had us divert the water from the eves draughs out of the storm pipes at the side of the building. This is so the storms are not overloading, delaying the run off into the storm sewers from the road surfaces. Paul you are seeing  this e-mail, call me when you get this.

jessica
i guess that explains where the extra water is coming from. ok. i just couldn't understand why there was so much on this property, and so little elsewhere without the water backing up from somewhere. i was thinking that if a stormwater pipe had broken, it could be flooding both the sump pit and the sanitary at the same time. but if you're doing it on purpose, that explains that.

i did a bunch of googling and i'm still working with a weak understanding of toilet plumbing but i think it has to be the case that water is pooling somewhere. it might be a blockage, but if it's a blockage it would have to be somewhere that water can pool where it rains - through a manhole or something. this is then killing the air pressure on the flush. otherwise, it would be slow to drain all the time.

the other thing i was thinking was about the air vent coming up from the toilet. if something had been rerouted with the furnace, could it not possibly have a different reaction to rainwater, and conceivably produce a lack of flush pressure? but, i did an experiment early in the morning and i think i've ruled it out. what i did was let the water in the sink run and then flush. the water was flowing right out through the sink before i flushed, but as it was flushing it started to fill up a little. if i understand correctly, this rules out a vent issue by demonstrating a restriction of the flow rate.

i have to admit that i'm not entirely convinced it isn't construction. if they're temporarily down to one pipe somewhere instead of two, that could be where the water is pooling. i know everybody else in the neighbourhood would have to experience this, but how many have toilets that are low enough for it to be an issue?

i'll bring paul down here next time we get a lot of rain...

(pause)

the only other thing i can think of is that maybe one of the neighbours recently installed a sump pump to the sanitary and it's exaggerating an existing block...you're not supposed to that, but people do that...

whether it's via leak, construction, bad install or whatever else i think the flow restriction happening only when it rains, and stopping when it's dried out, demonstrates that there just has to be rainwater blocking the sanitary at some point, somewhere, somehow - even though that's not supposed to happen.

but, like i say, i'll get paul down here to see it next time it happens.

(pause)

actually, there's one more hypothesis i have. i know this is a little bit of a long shot, but the culmination of what you're telling me and what i'm reading and what i'm seeing indicates that something very strange is happening.

the house across the street had a fire last month. it seems like it's been completely shut down since. if they shut the sump pump off, the basement could be flooding in the rain, and the flooding could be finding it's way into the sanitary, slowing the drain down.

it's just a guess, but something weird like that MUST be happening. i don't known if you know those guys or could call them and ask, but i think the sump pump in that basement ought to be working, regardless, for the benefit of the rest of the neighbourhood....

another thing to take note of...

every video in the first grid, sorted by popularity, now has over 100 views.

it might seem silly to note this on first thought, but it has psychological implications for some people that won't watch something unless it has x amount of hits. now, they don't have to see any videos with two digit view counts. these kinds of people maybe aren't a natural demographic for me, but it's an additive thing...

i uploaded like 70 videos over about three months, which wasn't done with much thought about view count. but what it means is that a lot of the songs are climbing at roughly the same rate, and the rate is relatively slow compared to the overall channel rate. i mean, instead of having those 10,000 hits focused on one or two tracks, they're spread over 70. so, i wouldn't expect that number to hit 200 for at least two more months, and 300 until the end of the year. having that number go from 100 to 300 is 6000 total views, though.

i'm focusing on long term distribution potential, not short term virality, so it's a better argument for me to spread it out. but it takes time...

so, maybe not.

i left my broom to dry in the back room a few weeks ago and forgot about it. i was going to clean today, but not without a broom...

if it doesn't show up by tomorrow, i'll go buy a new broom, i guess. i mean, it's the landlord's broom. but that gives me a few hours to listen to mixes.

uploading to spin inside dull aberrations to the scratchpad

i'm going to let this simmer for a day before i get back to it, and spend tomorrow doing other things.

i feel obligated to warn you that the mix is floored with distortion ala loveless or siamese dream, but without any safety precautions that professional mixers might use to prevent hearing damage. you need a substantial amount of volume to get it to sound as i've mixed it, but please don't go overboard for now. i don't want you to damage your hearing.

as for the mix itself, i think i've finally got something close to what i want, but many tweaks are still coming.

i also still need to add some more synth, choir, bass, ebow and possibly some more strings.

http://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

the absolute best tonal combination possible would have to be chamber music for cracked out tuba and fuzz box cello.

*filed away for the future.

with guitar, of course. that goes without saying...

so, it turns out turning the latency down corrects the problem between the render and the playback on the device. this only makes sense if the render is occurring at a lower latency level than the playback. what it means is that i was rendering without full use of the plugins. but, oddly, the plugins sound better that way on playback, too. i'm kind of left to conclude that the plugins must have been engineered to work at a lower latency level, and the logic i was using (more cpu power = better quality plugins) is not correct. rather, i seem to have been sort of overloading them, asking them to calculate more accurately than they were meant to and getting a weird result out of it.

realizing this makes the process a lot easier, although i'm going to have to deal with the odd crackle and pop when i'm mixing that will go away on the render.

well, i just passed 100 tracks for this song, which isn't even seven minutes long, yet. yet because i'm going to add a little section to the end that'll take it past 7, and plausibly take the track count past 150.

so, you can imagine mixing it is time consuming. there's still a ton to do, but getting past 100 components is a good place to pause and post a temp mix, so there'll be something up before bed time.

fwiw, the vast majority is guitars, but there's also what is becoming close to a full orchestra notated out along side them all.

i'm looking for

a) somebody born sept 1, 1996 and
b) somebody born may 1, 2014

these two people would be separated by exactly the 17 years and 242 days between the reality i lived and the alter-reality i'm presenting. it would be interesting to sync them together through the music.
please let me know if you can help.

so, i've brought back my favourite roland analog synth sound for the track. it's been retired for years to overuse, but if i'm trying to get into my headspace c 2001...

ok, so i found a way to make sense of this without a conspiracy or a change in metrics or incompetence and i'll stop whining about it. i'm going to pin it on the autoplay and flashblock.

i'm clearly getting more traffic than is being recorded, but i think that must be something that was true all along and i'm only noticing it now because traffic spiked really high and then faded off a bit. if i take out that one 238 hit day as an anomaly, traffic for august is still up a bit (88 hits a day vs 86 hits a day in july). and if i take out some of the 180 hit days, it's up even more. i'm a mathematician, i know i should do that, and i'm getting ahead of myself in not doing it. jumping from 75 hits a day to 88 hits a day is actually still a big jump, once i've controlled for that.

but what that means is that i must have got something like 400 hits the day that 238 was recorded, if i'm working with a rough scaling factor of 200% on the lead track. that is, i'm thinking that roughly 40% of users are blocking autoplay in some way. on firefox, you can use flashblock. there's a similar built-in fix with both chrome and explorer, and an html5 fix if you're not using flash at all.

so, i'm no longer thinking they changed it or that i'm being throttled or anything of the sort, i'm concluding that i've been being undercounted the whole time and that the number of people using flash blocking software is highly variable. so, i can stop moaning about it, now - it's been constant the whole time, and applicable to everybody equally.

the takeaway is to encourage people to use some kind of flash-blocking software to disable the autoplay. this will help anybody with a trailer up on their page, but it will especially help musicians that have converted youtube into an advertising platform get an accurate hit count.

to be honest, i couldn't imagine trying to browse without a flash-blocker. it would drive me nuts. ads popping up, videos playing everywhere - total mayhem. if you're not using one, it will make browsing immensely more enjoyable...

it would be great if youtube would just count the autoplays, but they have a policy against embedding files. again, it's this strange cultural weirdness at youtube, concerned people are inflating their hit counts by embedding them in autoplay scripts. i don't know how paranoid that is, but it's reasonable enough, on some level.

but, there's obviously a difference between autoplaying a track on your channel and embedding it on an ad server. when somebody clicks on your channel, they're obviously interested in your videos. it clearly meets the definition of a "view", and is being discarded on a technicality. it really *should* count.

regardless, i'm still getting more views on any particular track by putting it on the front page with a big button (and because i use flashblock, i didn't even realize it was autplaying when i started doing this, i just thought it was a big button - and a big button is exactly what it is for flashblock users) than i would otherwise, so i'm still coming out ahead with this. i've considered maybe putting a single video in the top spot instead, but i can't get such a big button or that nice article like format with the writing, so it will look really goofy. now that this is more clear in my head, though, i should look at it more closely, maybe i can mess with it...

but the ideal solution would be either:

a) youtube counts the autoplays on the front page of a channel (but not the other autoplays) or
b) youtube allows the user to turn off the autoplay on their trailer.

the workaround is to use flashblock...

yeah, a single video there doesn't look good at all. i'm going to have to just eat it and hope the chorus of people pushing for the reversal of autoplay is loud enough to have an effect.

but, i was thinking it's been undercounted by a few hundred hits, most fairly recently...

it's actually probably a few thousand, going back to may.

but, it's certainly annoying, even if i'm content with it. from a musician's standpoint, a featured track is a really great feature - whether it autoplays or not. i mean, i have to think a good 80%+ of people are going to click the button if they make it to the channel. it's a giant button. people like to click giant buttons! but, instead it just plays, denying people the opportunity to make the conscious choice to purposefully view the video with intent. i mean, if they're going to be so strict about it, it's kind of dumb to deny somebody the opportunity to click the button then claim they didn't really want to watch the video. in reality, the vast majority actually probably really did want to watch the video...

now, i'd expect to see a dramatic drop in people that are interested in clicking a second video, which is what i'm seeing, absolutely. but i'd expect almost everybody legitimately wants to click the first one.

the more i think about it, i'm almost upset about it solely because it denies people the opportunity to click the button. there's a special kind of joy in clicking the button, especially one of such girth.

so, install flashblock - you'll get the button.

the flip side of it is that the whole channel marketing thing isn't really catching on. i've posted several videos with well over 100 subscribers to see basically none of them watch it. i really have no idea why they subscribed at all, but the conclusion seems to be that very few people are reading their youtube feeds. and, really, it's hard to blame them. you can check your facebook feed on the bus. you've gotta be sitting down by yourself to check your youtube feed. it's kind of destined to be a niche thing without much real value in terms of reach. i'd hazard a guess that most of the people with lots of subscribers aren't really interacting with viewers that way, it's probably more people going to the site directly to check for new videos (and partly because they don't want to wade through their feed). personally, that's how i deal with vice news. i don't check my feed for updates on the ukraine thing, i go right to the channel and look for new videos.

so, like, as somebody that's running a channel, do i really want them to subscribe? it's not my priority, in terms of trying to get across to people. the priority is getting them to listen to something as soon as they get to the page, whether that means clicking a button or having it recorded as a view or not....

but, honestly, i couldn't see why somebody doing a video blog would want you to subscribe as their top priority, either. the top priority for anybody at all should always be directing people to content while they're there, right at that point, not bookmarking the site for later. you're going to be looking at an incredibly low return rate in just about any context. you want people to engage while they're there in the moment, not at some undetermined point in the future that chances are low will even happen at all.

for a company that focuses so much on advertising, they seem to be rather dense in terms of what they're forcing their users to focus on.

or, as i've pointed out repeatedly, lost in a corporate culture that has lost touch with reality. perhaps the company has this aloof, abstract idea of turning youtube into a subscriber-based site. but, a youtube channel is not a tv channel. a computer is not a television set. surfing habits are fundamentally, inherently different than viewing habits, because the options are unlimited and user-initiated. if you put a search box in a tv set, nobody would watch nbc or fox. so, it just doesn't reflect the reality of how anybody is going to actually interact with the content.

i guess it's a common problem in how people think, generally. people seem to want to project the reality they wish would exist, rather than analyze the reality that actually does exist and adjust themselves to it.

see, the thing is you'd *expect* an irrational creature to build a social system centered around that creature's inherent rationality - as a consequence of that inherent irrationality, which would blind it to it's own nature. if such a creature were to have the capacity to come to terms with it's inherent irrationality, it wouldn't truly be irrational. that is to say, it would be an impossibility, rather than that it would state anything about the creature's nature. a rational creature may understand it's rationality, but an irrational creature could only confuse it's irrationality for rationality. and, i may have just proven what i have suspected all these years - that i am not a member of the species i ought to be a member of.

as i've stated previously, i'm content with sharing a genus with homo sapiens (sapiens) but i need a new species categorization for myself. sorry.

actually, they say that the person that discovers the species gets to name it, so i guess that's my responsibility.

this should surprise nobody that knows me: i am hereby homo j.

i'm half-considering putting the application in to the academy, just to see what happens.

if a god actually did exist, could it even begin to understand our inherent irrationality?

or might we just perplex it to such an extreme point of confusion that it would just give up on us?

i'm kind of leaning towards the latter, really. i couldn't imagine any supremely rational being being able to get it's head around us. it would just be too much for it.

"they're pointing nuclear weapons at...don't they know what...da fuck...?"

then, we wonder why the bastard seems like such a vengeful asshole. well, shit, what other response is there?

you can only frustrate a supremely rational being so long before it gets to a breaking point and is just like "fuck it.".

so, i've been spending the last few days playing with mixes. part of the problem is that the song sounds very different out of my mixing devices (alesis mixer, pod amp simulator), out of my soundcard (m-audio audiophile) and out of my laptop (some cheap integrated hd chip). every time i change something to sound better on one, something breaks on the other. i've come to the conclusion that i'm going to need to compromise a little...

i want to put that aside for the day and get most of the parts finished.

i think it's ultimately a render issue. for some reason, the out through cubase sounds differently than the playback in real time. i mean, different hardware is going to produce different results, but the changes are largely in the guitar tone and that's beyond natural playback differences. i'm thinking it might have to do with the way it's calculating some filters. that may actually mean that the out i'm getting is the more technically accurate version, but i want it to sound the way i'm mixing it, not as some abstract ideal i can't monitor.

i had this problem once before, years ago, and fixed it by hooking an out from the mixer into the in on the soundcard and just recording it in real time. but, i'm not sure i'm going to be able to do that with this piece because of the vstis. that other track was just all wave files.

but i'm not worrying about this for today, i'm finishing the recording as much as i can. the last thing i'm going to want to add is a bass, and i need to give myself a few days for it to get the tone right. i find bass to be a very difficult instrument to record. it's partly because i don't have any di cords. although, maybe i should take the opportunity to invest in one...

it's the primary reason i use so much synth bass. luckily, it tends to fit the style i'm writing in. but this track needs a bass guitar. the core of it was actually written on a bass guitar...

i actually did a huge amount of experimenting the last time i got to a bass part, which was way back in '08. yeah. well, i haven't done a lot of recording at all since then, and the bit i've done has worked fine with synths or sequencers. i went and picked up a separate bass limiter (boss lmb-3) and compressor (digitech dual band bass compressor) in stompbox format. the compressor actually has an amp simulator in it as well, so the two of these things together are fairly versatile. iirc, i need to connect it to a noise gate, though.

anyways, i think i have what i need this time to get it pretty good directly in, but i know i'm going to need a few days to play with it, too.

i actually ended up converting an old dod fx53 into a bass distortion, too. it was a $5 pickup somewhere, and i didn't know what i was going to do with it when i got it. as a guitar distortion, it's not what i want - i like really fuzzy stompboxes that push sustain and high gain. this is a weaker distortion. but it works well with a bass for exactly that reason - it's subtle enough that it doesn't kill the note clarity.

the bass (it's a mid 80s ibanez roadstar II, black pearl burst) also has active pickups, which is hugely important for recording, and why i bought it. well, that and the neck is small, which helps with my tiny fingers. the pickups in the early roadstars were designed so they could switch between p-bass and j-bass type sounds, but this one has two low impedance active soapbars in it. they're really the bass to look for if you want a playable, versatile and relatively cheap bass, although that factor may have boosted their price a little over the last decade.

actually, i have a mild hypothesis with this and it flips it around.

perhaps they're only counting featured track (they call it a "trailer" and promote it as "increasing subscribers", but subscribers are useless because nobody reads their feed - it's a featured track) plays if the user does run an adblock or flashblock type program. that way, the user is physically initiating the play.

that would explain why i'm only getting 30-50% of the actual hits - the rest of it is autoplaying. you can't turn the autoplay off, unfortunately.

therefore, you should install adblock.

although, i just tested one of the tracks under 300 with an embed (meaning i'm not signed in through it) and it didn't increment immediately like it ought to, indicating there's something deeper happening.

you'll see me on the street corner in five years yelling:

"i got 100,000 views but they didn't count them!"

while people toss quarters at me and tell me to shut up.

but, seriously. there's something really seriously wrong with the counter. i haven't seen hits on hardly anything in three or four days, but i know i'm getting upwards of a hundred visitors a day. it's not adding up...

if i were to get conspiratorial, i wouldn't blame it on my politics. there's no logical connection between my hit count and my rambling. that is, decreasing my hit count isn't going to stop me from rambling, and it has nothing to do with the reach of the videos i'm rambling on. if somebody is trying to shut me up by cutting out my hit count, they're completely incompetent.

if i was to get conspiratorial, it would have more to do with the fact that i'm NOT buying hits or paying for advertising. i have a hypothesis that it's ultimately google that's selling the hits, not some script kiddies. being able to generate traffic without buying into their system (via buying ads or buying hits) threatens their business model. i may have been flagged when i crossed some threshold, like 10,000 hits, maybe. i wouldn't put it above them.

but i can't shake occam's razor, and it's just that the counters are programmed badly. no matter how enticing the second conspiratorial option is, and no matter how much the circumstantial evidence leans that way, incompetence is simply a simpler explanation.

as mentioned, i can't let that get to me, no matter how irritating it is. i know i'm generating traffic. there's nothing for sale on youtube - that traffic needs to be routed to bandcamp for me to get anywhere with it. there's no chance i'm going to force somebody to watch an ad to listen to the song; the whole point is *i'm* advertising something, i don't want to give somebody else the space, that would defeat the purpose. and, i'm not going to generate this kind of traffic much of anywhere else. if they're going to throttle me, it just means it'll take longer to get to where i need the hit counts to be to generate that distribution interest. but, my argument relies on the hits eventually adding up, anyways. requiring six months rather than three is relatively irrelevant - i need total hits. so, i just need to forget about it and be patient....

i just hope it *is* incompetence - because if it's not, it still is.

and that's far more frightening than a bunch of bad programming.

as i mentioned before, though, i'm going to be pissed if i get a negative growth curve from july to august as a result of this, considering i know that i'm generating increased traffic. i had a nice curve going on there.

and, what if it's a ploy? a sales trick? see, i bet google has an army of psychiatrists working for them...

what if they key on users that are generating hits, then take those hits away in the hopes that it will coerce them into buying advertising? what if they even inflate the hit counts with the desire of building a sort of addiction to the metrics? the first hit's free, then we start charging.

i've been clear in the past that i can't buy advertising. the music is far too abstract. i mean, i probably wouldn't anyways - i'm both remarkably cheap and far too idealistic. but, i know it's not going to work. what i'm doing is far more effective.

but, that's kind of the point. i'm breaking their system...

see, i might be breaking their system, but it's not the case that just anybody could do this. i don't really pose them a threat.

first of all, this is a full time job. the sheer amount of posting i'm doing is not really feasible for most people. second, it requires some serious talent, which in this case reduces to intelligence. i'm a realist, and it's the truth of it - you need a brain to troll like this. it's an art. so, if you put those two things together, you're looking at a pay rate considerably over minimum wage and a difficult and expensive recruiting process attached to it. nike or coca cola or whatever can't just hire some high school kids to do this. they'd really have to headhunt.

it's consequently not feasible to adopt as a model. could some other individuals pull it off? sure. and you can't stop them, either. but i'm not a threat to ad revenue.

so, like, back off.

but, on a larger scale, i think the world needs to get ready for something: the trolls will inherit the earth. in the last generation, it was the nerds. everybody hated them and looked down on them, but they became the most successful gen xers. in the future, expect the trolls to overcome.

wait for it.

in that sense, maybe i'm blazing a path....

 ....but this is too specialized to replace traditional advertising, and it's not what consumers want, either. it may generate traffic, but it would hurt sales, for most companies.

i mean, the crux of what i'm doing is three-fold :

1) piss people off. then they have to listen - and in an agitated state, where they're likely to respond. companies won't want to do this, obviously.
2) say something controversial that pisses off most people but is exactly what somebody else wants to say and is afraid to say because it will piss off most people. that works for obscure artists that are going to build fan bases off the solidarity, but it's almost always a bad idea for a company to take a stand like this.
3) provoke thought. which is again counter-intuitive for selling a product, but good for distributing art.

so, even if the odd company can find a trolling genius, and is willing to pay her, what she can actually do for the company is quite limited. and consumers will quickly grow tired of it.

there's also a saturation point inherent to the process of trolling that trolls need to be wary of. i can troll at will right now because nobody knows who i am. even a company that might be willing to be antagonistic with it's product, like sony or nintendo, can't do that. if the logo is visible, it's just an ad. if it isn't, it's deceptive - and will backfire.

so, you have to go back to the determined individual. with enough time and hard work some other person with the smarts could do this, maybe better than me. but we're rare. 1 in some big number, anyways.

....and not a threat.

i don't like that i'm constantly bitching about youtube metrics, either, but i wish they'd be more clear in documenting rejected hits. i ultimately remain convinced that their algorithms are broken, but i'm wondering if i'm being throttled in some way.

i've had 94 hits a day - exactly - for almost a week, now. that's one less than 95. or < 95.

i mean, i watched the hit count rocket to 301 from 133 over about 36 hours, from thursday night to friday afternoon. i was averaging close to five hits an hour - just on the track on the front page. that's quite a few hits when you think about it, about one every 12 minutes.

the number on the top track clearly increased by well over a hundred hits over the course of thursday. yet, only 40 of those were counted.

so, what was the problem with the other 60-80 hits, exactly? wrong country of origin? did they not watch long enough? were they using a proxy? tor? adblock?

the counter increased by close to 120. i could see up to a quarter of those (30) being bad hits. but 50-67% of them? it just strikes me as unlikely, and i again have to conclude bad programming....

the flip side of this is that it seems like i'm getting 250-300% more traffic than is being recorded, based on what i observed yesterday and how much of it youtube actually picked up. so, that's positive.

i guess that whatever's broken for me must be broken for everybody else, too.

in the end, the basic relationship of more hits ----> more views remains in tact.

but the numbers are not remotely accurate....

i just wish more of those hits were translating to bandcamp views, because that's the actual point of the exercise. well, sort of. if i end up with a youtube profile with 500,000 hits a year or two from now, i'm thinking that should generate distribution requests. but it would help a lot if i could say "x people actually bought something", and x>0.

it's going to be another full year before i can say "look, my introductory demos generated 20,000 hits, why don't we talk about distributing some of the newer stuff?" and that's really just about all that youtube has the potential to be useful for. for an established artist, it's absolutely useless...

i mean, i wouldn't even consider burning copies of these first two demos. they're only available as mp3 downloads for $6 (the first is a double) and $3, respectively. but i couldn't imagine anybody buying them unless they're fans of the later stuff. they're not very good, really.

what i'm trying to do is demonstrate i can build an audience. it's the whole emulating a natural process of the past thing...

that's why everything's ready to print.

(or in the process of being ready to print)

which reminds me: i'm expecting a nasty surprise in the mail soon, and should make some calls on monday.

uploading nothing to say to youtube

so, i decided to throw this up after all. it's the last track on the second demo tape (1997), cut up mildly.

it's just that most of the material from the second tape is going to link to redone versions. there were previously 6 tracks up, 3 of which were reversions. this at least takes it up over 50%, putting a bigger emphasis on the tape itself.

there's also a little bit of foreshadowing in terms of genre. most of the stuff i was doing at the time of the first tape (96) could be roughly categorized as 90s emo. this is a little revisionist, in that i didn't know what emo was, but if you listen to 90s emo (i'm talking about the post-hardcore genre) the reality is that it's really mostly footnotes on nirvana, anyways, and that's largely what i was doing. i actually think the bulk of it stands up relatively well in comparison to most 90s emo, which isn't known for it's high level of quality. these early tapes are a little proggier and a little more abstract than the norm; i was a better guitarist, basically, so i had the ability to delve deeper into grunge guitar playing and pull out more technical influences. there's also a more developed industrial aspect, coming mostly from nin. but, it's been an interesting experience realizing that i was connecting to some kind of zeitgeist in my basement by myself without having any remote awareness of it - as was probably the case with the other kids (maybe roughly five years older than i was) doing roughly the same thing i was. so, i can look back at the first tape and, despite having reservations as to the total quality of the material, realize i was legitimately on the forefront of something.

the second tape was a little more expansive in terms of sound, tilting a little more towards the electronic. i didn't have a computer yet, but i started sneaking into my sister's room when she wasn't there to use her keyboard a bit more regularly (there's some minimal keyboard on the first tape). doing so gave me a bit more flexibility in terms of writing and allowed me to explore a few different genres. there's some foreshadowing of the kind of post-rock that exploded about '98 in screwed up (97). i'm also reaching towards the post-punk revival rather substantially.

but the interesting thing about this particular track is that it's _very_ mid 00s indie rock - think man man or maybe xiu xiu as the artier expanses of something that's seen countless mostly forgotten purveyors over the last ten years. i was thinking in terms of modernizing some kind of billy joel or elton john track, which is probably exactly what man man was thinking a few years later. well, man man has major beefheart tendencies, too, and i wasn't quite into that yet. my dad was pushing it, but beefheart took me a bit more maturity to get my head around.

so, i feel i should post this for that reason, as well: this is something that sounds very much like a lot of 00s indie rock, and it's certainly the most "indie rock" thing i've ever done, but it was recorded back in early '97.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ37S6tpDJ4

well, that and i like the guitar solo :)

townies. ugh.

i expected those, though. it's a miracle it took this long, really. best to avoid them....

"you know, you should open up the advertising a little bit so people know the shows are going on."

"but it's a tight knit scene."

"that's why you should open up the advertising, so people outside the scene know what's going on."

"if you want to join the scene, you should come down. it's very tight knit."

"but, that's why you should open it up and make it less exclusive."

"but, it's a very tight-knit scene."

ugh...

fuck tight knit scenes, i want radical inclusion.

somebody shows up and offers suggestions on ways to open it, and all they get is a lot of attitude and an almost violent desire to maintain a small, incestual clique-y group. that's not something i want anything to do with. it's radical inclusion, or fuck off.

i mean, the bottom line is i haven't seen much of anything that's interesting in terms of local music over the year i've been here. it's all very generic and boring takes on different styles of punk, or equally boring folk music. my conclusion is that there's really not very much interesting music happening in the area at all.

but there's a specific bar that doesn't have a show calendar online. now, i really have little reason to think the bar is booking anything that's worth going to. i think the reverse logic is pretty applicable - if anybody worth watching was playing the bar, the bar would be updating it's listings. but, i'm the type of person that wants to know what's going on at all the bars i can get to, anyways, just in case there's that one rare act that seems interesting....

having idiosyncratic tastes requires this kind of meticulousness.

you wouldn't think a suggestion for a bar owner to update a web page would set off such a defensive reaction, but that it did says a lot about the area and the people that inhabit it. it demonstrates a very clique-y mentality that is suspicious of outsiders and wants to "vet" people before they're allowed to integrate.

going to a bar to watch a show doesn't imply a desire to join a club. and i definitely have zero desire to join a club....

this is why i prefer big cities to small towns. when i go out somewhere, i don't want to meet up with a group of people that i know, i want to fade into the crowd. i don't want everybody to know my name; i don't want *anybody* to know my name! i cherish that level of anonymity.

so, detroit's a good fit for me. windsor, less so...

in the end, if the local bands in the area just want to play to the same group of friends every show then that's their choice. i'll go hang out in detroit and watch some more interesting acts in the process...

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

obligatory "influential on the track of the week" post.

i'd graduated to bigger epics by this point, and this was a track that knocked me over. there's a lot to get lost in, here, and i did. you can hear some structural similarities.

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus, all symphonies)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwMkSvKoeUo

there's a three minute drum introduction to this on the cd that is really key.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZq_ropDPsU

obligatory "influential on the track of the week" post.

the drum machine - and the guitar work, as well. kids nowadays are going to hear the mars volta in it, but in/casino/out hadn't even been released yet. i could cite santana, but i'd be lying. it was i mother earth....

the live version of this on earth, sky, and everything in between is also killer.

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus, to spin inside dull aberrations, various tracks in the guitar solo playlist)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGlQHpnvMc

deathtokoalas
obligatory "influential on the track of the week" post.

i'm pulling out the record symbolically - it was a culmination of enossification as applied to bowie, u2, his solo work and elsewhere that was on my mind when i was making the end section. but, it was equally a result of the keyboard patch, which has this kind of pitch-based echo that gets just a bit dissonant with polyphony. what i remember thinking was "this sounds like eno", rather than "i want this to sound like eno".

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus, book it!, missed connection, all symphonies, others)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5VIJor61uM

beneath the remains

don't bring up u2, even eno couldn't make u2 sound good, i doubt nigel goodrich could make u2 sound good

deathtokoalas

i'd argue that eno's best work was probably with u2, but it's secondary to the point - u2 was how i, personally, interacted with eno first and what generated interest in looking through his other work. i probably would have eventually found him through either bowie or fripp, but that isn't how it happened...

for example, i have very fond memories of sitting in a dark room very late at night around the age of 12 or 13 when i was supposed to be sleeping and just getting absolutely lost in the swirling synths of zooropa through a pair of sennheisers.

his (pop) work with bowie and talking heads and others tended to sound very clinical - like he was just pulling something out of his ass to cash a pay check. i'm not sure why he seemed to gel so well with u2, but it's the most organic and bluntly real pop work that he did outside of his own releases.

beneath the remains

he helped them a little bit with those synths but still just the name u2 is disgusting, he couldn't cover up bonos voice or those shitty guitars

you were only 12 but you should try to strike any and all u2 from your memory

deathtokoalas

again: the edge is a very interesting, underrated guitarist and bono did have quite a few interesting things to say before his record company sold him to apple.

"beneath the remains" is a name that suggests that you're currently probably not much older than 12, and don't really know what u2 was before the year 2000. i'd suggest you check out some of the records u2 released before pop. you probably want to avoid rattle and hum. otherwise, most of it is quite interesting political rock music, with thought-provoking themes and excellent production.

beneath the remains

i am 38, beneath the remains is a record from the 80s

this is a list of about 50 of the best 150 albums ever made https://rateyourmusic.com/list/okrainbows/my_list_of_albums/

u2 is horrible

deathtokoalas

never did like sepultra. "beneath the remains" sounds like the name of a current emo band.

if you take the thrash/metal out, i'd argue you mostly have a list of notable records, although it's in a rather contentious ordering.

it doesn't change the importance of relevance of u2's early work. i'm sorry you don't hear it, but i'll note that you don't have much of the other things that serious u2 fans would rank highly (joy division, rem) in there, either, so it's perhaps outside of your sphere of interest.

i will say that it's a little confusing that you can be a big radiohead fan and not get u2, though, considering that radiohead has essentially based their entire career on stealing ideas from u2.

beneath the remains

u2 looks up to radiohead just like paul mccartney does and elton john does and every other popular band and the thought that radiohead based their career on u2 is retarded, they haven't sounded anything like u2 since 1996

so funny, u2 would be scared to play a show with radiohead

deathtokoalas

hrmmn. so, you mean that it's just a coincidence that they followed their stadium rock breakthrough (bends/fire) with a sombre pop record dominated by synthesizers (joshua/okc) and a "groundbreaking" techno-rock record with mocking political themes (kid/achtung) connected to a side two of outtakes (amnesiac/zooropa)?

the major difference between u2 and radiohead is that u2 deserves the critical acclaim for being innovative and radiohead doesn't.

beneath the remains

that is funny, radiohead is 100 times more critically acclaimed yet it is not enough, they are the most remixed band ever, 1000s of musicians from every genre look at them as gods, fkn rappers sample them and they sample anything and everything yorke does on his own, they are the most studied band 

paul mccartney has been trying to get yorke in teh studio for almost a decade, radiohead is god on earth

deathtokoalas

it is, indeed, rather unfortunate that music journalists of a certain age are so ignorant as to not realize that radiohead has largely operated on borrowed ideas throughout their career and assign them credit for innovation, rather than accuse them of plagiarism. even creep was plagiarized from an old hollies song...

history tends to right itself in these cases, but sometimes you have to give it a generation or two to get it right.

in the end, u2 will be remembered as some idealistic kids that put up a hell of a fight, but lost their way in the end - and released a string of paradigm-shifting albums in the process. as far as the rock era is concerned (and let's go ahead and say it - that is roughly 1963-1999), there are two bands of singular importance - the beatles and u2.

radiohead will be remembered as cynical ripoff artists that squeezed every dime out of the industry that they could in a consciously engineered path for world domination, and ultimately created little of any real lasting artistic value that hadn't already been done.

Matthew D

Beatles, yes. U2? Really?

deathtokoalas

i don't know your age. if you're under a certain cut-off point, you've never experienced a time when u2 were actually a really unique, forward thinking experimental rock act. and i get the backlash. but if you're over a certain cut-off point, you realize that the decline has actually been painful to watch, and really sort of depressing.

if john lennon had lived as long as bono, would he have gotten to the same point of self-parody and hypocrisy?

the music press often likes to pretend the influence is from joy division, and sometimes from the cure, but the reality is that the entire indie rock culture from about 1997 is absolutely reliant on u2. everybody sounds like u2. their influence and importance on the culture we live in is immeasurable.

the only band of almost comparable importance to u2 this side of punk rock is sonic youth.

put another way, think this through: if bono had died in the 90s, he'd most likely be remembered the way lennon is.

nadia mccall

When people say ripoff they really should give some examples since so much music is derivative often without the artists fully realizing this themselves. All art rips off to an extent. Also in what way was U2 "experimental?" I do love some U2 songs but not sure how they were, just curious. I remember hearing they started out as a religious band (reminds me of Creed, UGH) but went more mainstream for whatever reason. I actually do like some U2 stuff a lot and hadn't realized how great Eno was til recently. Finally, NO while good come on, Radiohead is not "godlike" and this is just insulting to the greatest artists ever, like Mozart, and really music is the god while then you have the truly great like Mozart. Radiohead? good but come on....I'm sure Yorke himself would find that annoying.

deathtokoalas

the string of records from unforgettable fire to pop utilized a number of unusual production approaches. it's not experimental in a music composition sense, but nothing really sounded like unforgettable fire before it and it dramatically changed the way that pop music is produced. every time you hear a rising synth part in a pop song, that's u2 - or eno via u2. the production remained cutting edge through this period.

i don't think u2 were ever a religious band, and i don't think bono is really a person of faith. his vocals are often about questioning faith, but they're never about accepting it. it's more in the tradition of somebody that has lost faith. it's more nine inch nails than creed.

what's happened is that bono said a few vague things and the christian community has jumped all over it, in order to co-opt it. they accidentally on purpose misinterpreted it, and they yelled loud enough that it stuck. christians like to claim everybody as their own. they see it as a convincing argument - "this icon is a christian, so you should be a christian, too".

but, bono's religious convictions are on the order of:

i would break bread and wine, if there was a church i could receive in

it's full of sarcasm, skepticism and doubt.

the actual dominant theme explored in the music is a criticism of hypercapitalism, and it's actually incredibly relevant when parked right at the end of history like it was.

Matthew D

I am old enough... Unfortunately!

there are some sufficiently cracked out horns, wish i would have remembered this last week...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir5lap-oJu4

the other thing i wanted to mention (but forgot to) is that i'm getting substantial traffic at my youtube channel lately (https://www.youtube.com/user/deathtokoalas/featured) from trolling everything i possibly can; i haven't uploaded any rabit yet because i want to remaster most of it and maybe convert some if it to instrumental, but when i do upload vocal tracks (probably psi, me myself, time & 9:46) in the next few weeks it will be on the front page and the hit count should quickly grow to at least a few hundred, and *will* continue to grow over time, probably into the mid thousands. so, quite a few people are going to hear it.

j

aha!

i turned the master down at some point to make some more space, and it had an effect on the eq at the master stage. putting it back to where it was has reclaimed the "bite" on the guitars, although it's going to require some mild remixing....

loose end

hi.

as i mentioned previously, i'm currently completing a track that was meant to be a cynicide song and releasing it under that name (that would be here: http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/to-spin-inside-dull-aberrations).

this particular track was written with the assumption that jon & i would switch instruments if it was ever performed, just simply because it's my song and i'd have to play it myself to get it right. but it was meant to have vocals. and, in fact, it turned into the song you know as "day i saw you cry", although i further morphed into it what i now call my fourth symphony.

so, i feel the need to provide you with the opportunity to provide vocals, if you want. it was written with that aim. if you were to do so, i'd center that single around the vocal version and place the instrumental version on the disc i'm working towards. most of the music i was writing in '01 before cynicide & rabit was written out in scores and put aside because i didn't have the resources to get the instrumentation to do it properly. but the technology has now improved to the point that i can use computers to render the tracks realistically, so i'm finally finishing it.

i continually have rough mixes up here:
http://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

the track is in process, but it's easy to get the idea, if you want to provide vocals. i'd just ask that you send them back completely isolated so that i can mix them in the way i want to.

the only boundary i'd provide you with is the section between where the sole bass drum comes in up until the third "salsa-jangle part", which i think should be obvious if you listen to it. that's roughly 1:55 - 3:30. the boundary on that part is that i'm going to put in some vocal harmonizing that is roughly similar to the tremolo'd guitar part. there's going to be synths and strings through there as well, so any vocals over that section should be relatively toned down.

the other request is to try and get your head into the space you were in in 2001, if you're going to do it, both in terms of singing style and vocal content.

no pressure. and the opportunity won't be present for future tracks. it's just a chance, for me, to finish something the way it was intended.

j

soundcheck

sept 16, 2001.

no further comment.

i'm pretty sure this is my final take on this.

a lot of the problems i'm having in sequencing this ultimately have to do with me adding several minutes of updated takes on very old material. i initially thought it would make sense to add them to the end of the disc as a sort of bonus to it, but that was under the assumption i'd have more than enough space. then, i was considering expanding it to a double to make room for those tracks. it's silly to extend that for these tracks.

further, if i place it between the first ftaa single and the clarity single i think it represents an actual end of the concept. the early rabit is wolf material starts in september, but it wasn't yet clear if it was really a band or if i really wanted to use the material i was writing for it. mmattittwagi came out of a jam session. clarity was something i was in the process of writing for my own material (i was actually thinking of a trinri, again) but worked into rabit on request. time existed, but it was in a different state and was meant for cynicide. actually, that reminds me - i should check to see if there's a mix of it. there weren't any songs really written *for* rabit until 2002. so, parking this in december and allowing it to close the thought makes quite a bit more sense.

i'm also thinking i should work the track i'm working on into this, as it now fits the theme of orchestrated music.

so, that leaves me with an 8 track record.

- stuck (done)
- time machine (done)
- symphony of madness (done)
- intersection (done)
- spin (process)
- mmattittwagi (next) <---needs to be rethought.
- choir (next next) <----probably merely rendered
- #9 (last) <-------needs to be rethought

that will be around 80 minutes.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

i was wondering if i should put a rough mix of me, myself... on the cynicide disc but the chronology doesn't make it make sense. jon has a guitar part on some versions, but he ultimately rejected the track so it doesn't make sense to do that.

so, the next single after spin...is me, myself. then the ftaa disc. then i'll have to finish the last two orchestral tracks.

some alternate takes of #9 will appear on a single for clarity, which i half want to include a version for the orchestral disc, but can't, conceptually, because it isn't.

i'm going to want to put early mixes as the lead singles for clarity and me, myself.. as i did with the deny everything material. for me, myself ... it's because i added a guitar part in may, 2002. for clarity, it's because i want an instrumental version out there.

i don't understand the tricks my ears are playing on me regarding this treble knob.

either the volume out seems to be very sensitive (you'd expect that on a tube amp in real time, but not on a digital amp playing a recording of a guitar recorded through an amp emulator.....?), or maybe the pot is dirty or.....?

?

whatever. i've got the sweet spot back, and it's flat like it should be.

i'm getting a pizza, because i've been very good about not getting pizza for a long time, but i should seriously be back at it by sunrise at the latest.

uploading teenage jesus to youtube

so, the final track of my first inri casette demo will come up in about 24 hours, although i'm posting the reconstructed version. i don't want multiple versions of the same track on youtube, it's just silly.

as with much of the stuff on the first demo tape, the pieces for this track go back to about 1994 or so, but it was first conceived of as a connected suite when i first put it together at the end of 1996. i never really promoted it that way until earlier in the year, but the idea was there from the first recording. the second recording was done mostly in the very beginning of 1998, but it was put aside until the end of 1998 and finished completely in the first few months of 1999.

i've explained a bit about it on the youtube page, and copied it after the line of equal signs.

this one will only be up ten days this time around, to finish the recording for christmas, 1996. it's not merely symbolic - the dates i've picked are rough, but i do consciously remember finishing the tape up on christmas eve (and being yelled at to come up to eat). i'll have to post the demo here on the 24th, but there's then a 66 day period where i was grounded (starting after new year's, my parents weren't that sadistic) before i started demo tape 2, and i'll have to pause to reflect that. i won't be posting youtube updates here over that period, but i'll be cycling the first demo tape in 6 day cycles (there's 11 components, total - including 3 in boogeyman and 2 in this track).

this version of the track has a noise intro and a synth ending that was added, but it's otherwise similar to the demo tape version that is up on youtube. the differences are that the drums in this version are sequenced, there's some added synth (i didn't have a synth in 1996) and the vocals are a bit different.

i got slowed down by a number of irritating things over the last two weeks and didn't hit my target. i do expect to be done the song i'm doing within the next 10 days.

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

this is the final section of the last proper inri demo, which was written as somewhat of a suite, but only in a fleeting moment, and then forgotten. it's a sort of sardonic take on the jesus story, in that it follows a persecuted person through a suicide and a resurrection, with tongue in cheek commentary.

initially, it was a song suite about being young and not listened to, culminating in a rather dramatic overreaction - that i ridiculed as counter-productive, partly by reference to kurt cobain, whose suicide is an event that hangs over the childhood of my generation. people that were adults at the time might want to think of it in the same way that they interpreted watching kennedy get his brains blown out on live tv. as i grew up (stated loosely - i was still 17/18, here), i realized this is a general condition of society that is not limited to young people. so, i generalized it to reflect the illusion of what we call "democracy", and gave it an exaggerated persecution complex. the cynicism was targeted at the clinton administration, but in a broader sense i'm sort of ridiculing the rather cartoonish perception of generation x as this kind of raelian mass of fatalist children....

the vocals seem dead, and may confuse people looking at this as 90s punk (which is retroactively defined by it's screamy vocals). at the time, i considered screaming to be sort of contrived and passe. the recitation is a very considered reaction to something i interpreted as largely cartoonish. i mean, i was still influenced by the screamy stuff i grew up with, but it wasn't a characteristic of much of anything i was attracted to after about '97 or so.

the initial, somewhat abridged version was initially the end of my first inri cassette demo, which you can get to by clicking through the links.

i've pulled back from insisting on recited vocals in order to minimize that contrivedness, but the truth is that the vast majority of music released after about '97 that has screamed vocals very much *is* contrived. time has only cemented my rejection of falsely emotionalized vocals in punk-derived genres.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt7AWQ7QiOE

gah....

so, the funny sound wasn't my ears from the boris concert, it was because i had the treble up all the way on my receiver. sound goes out through the computer into a jvc amp and out the headphone jack.

i don't know how long it's been like that. i know i remember playing with the treble for time machine, and i suspect it got stuck there.

so, i need to review some stuff. for the new track, i'm going to need to boost the treble on the way out and re-up. i'm not sure how many of the recent tracks i've done where that might be a continuing issue, but i may need to re-up some more of them as well....