schrodinger's swan

this seems like the best thing on youtube to crosslink this to...

i put a five-year listening period on my serious reviews in order to ensure that the music can sink in and be put into context. sometimes, it's a matter of convention. with something like swans, it's really necessary to make sense of it. i've been a swans fan since the late 90s, and share a certain artistic approach with them, so i'm coming into this very, very familiar with what they are and what they're aiming for. i'm extremely critical but i need to point out that gira is one of a handful of living artists that i have legitimate respect for, as an artist. i'm not ready to write a full review yet, but i think i'm ready to provide a general impression.

oddly, not many people seem to be spilling much ink on the absence of jarboe. sure, it's not like there's any real chance that she's coming back to the band. but it's sort of remarkable how totally she's been written out of the band, as though she never existed in the first place. this strikes me as indicative of most reviewers coming to the band after their breakup period looking for a seminal doom act, and sort of skipping their psychedelic 90s phase. but, see, i think there's a dominant argument that what made swans' 90s work so remarkable was the interplay between gira's dour bluntness and jarboe's lighter, more airy presentation. you could think of it as tension and release. but it's just the juxtaposition of it...

gira's tried to compensate with the use of various female vocalists, but it's clear that it's on a guest vocalist level rather than a collaborative level, meaning it just doesn't capture the juxtaposition on as organic of a level.

in a sense, maybe it's unfair to draw the comparison. everybody knows jarboe isn't in the band any more. but, if you have an understanding of what swans is, the more recent material just seems like it's missing an important ingredient.

putting that aside, one needs to review a record for what it is.

the core of this disc is as strong as anything else swans has put out, but i get the impression gira is being driven a little too strongly by expectations. i'm all for long records, but a long record is something that needs to develop out of an overriding concept or simply a lot of material. neither of these things seem to apply to this. it seems like this record is long simply for the sake of being long, and is loaded with tons of filler to get to the point of being long. i don't think we really needed nearly as much aimless jamming (and a lot of it is aimless jamming) or damo suzuki impersonations.

i'm not walking away from it with the sense of it being the kind of masterpiece that gira has previously been involved with creating. rather, i'm walking away from it thinking it's a little tedious and that large amounts of it are simply rather grating.

i don't think this record is going to hold up as well as his other major works. it might be partially as a result of trying to fit perceived expectations of an epic double record. but i think it might be a bit of pretension getting into his head.

this could have been a strong 9 if pared down a little. as it is, i have to give it a 6 or a 7.

Zack Fishley

I envy people who lived through Swans' original run and are able to see those albums as Gira's masterpieces. While I like them, I feel like albums like Soundtracks For the Blind lose focus quickly when they hit disc 2. Just not as memorable.

deathtokoalas

they're more abstract records; they explore a wider scope. memorable is a subjective thing. but, you can objectively state that they require a deeper attention span and greater focus on the actual music. i find his newest work has more aspects of his oldest work in that sense; they're great if you want to listen to one or two things for three hours. soundtracks is more variable, and so is more immersive. but, you have to be looking for that, otherwise you're going to trail off, like you said.

what i was trying to get across here is that it isn't that gira has lost a step. what's amazing is that he really hasn't. it's more that he's lost a layer of self-criticism.

i'm still fighting with the bass, but it's the last thing to do. it's actually mostly cut up, it's just about levels. and i'm nodding off so it will have to wait until i wake up...

it WILL be done tomorrow.

i'm almost done remixing my fourth symphony, which is a long time coming. i finished recording the parts in 2002 and have been messing around with it every few years since 2006, but i could never get it quite right because i didn't really have the right tools to do it. what i needed to do was separate it into parts, but what i had was a wave file that i pasted parts into rather than anything i could recreate in a traditional multitracking environment. trying to figure out where each of the parts began was very hard without being able to line the parts up...

trepanation nation (raw guitar mix) (initial upload)

around the middle of 2007, i sat down and tried to just paste some guitars over top of a half done mix i had. in the process, i created a guitar collage that i found interesting in it's own right and put aside for possible release as a remix one day. this is an entirely new mix, but it's based on that idea.

the idea was created around july 30, 2007. final mix was rendered on november 29, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/09-trepanation-nation-raw-guitar-mix

i was hoping to catch animals as leaders last night, but i ended up passing out. i'm not sure how exciting a live show it would have been. great guitarist, but it's headphone music.

i've got a new map up that organized things a little differently. as you can see, this is just loaded with guitar overdubs, a lot of them doubled or quintupled through separate effects paths. it seems like i'm hurtling towards 70 tracks. three more things to do there, down at the bottom.

...although i'm starting to wonder about maybe doubling a few more parts later in the song. we'll see how this goes....

it's almost there, really. i've just had to restart a few times, mixing different aspects in in different orders. i eventually concluded that i had to take the bass right out to mix the rest of it, after a few tries of trying to build it on the bass. the bass is important in the track, so i wanted to get the sound in first so it wouldn't cut anything else out, but i was just flooring it repeatedly. i've got almost everything else in - i now just have to set the levels on some power chords, mix the synths in and play with the bass compression until it's at the right volume. it's hard to say if it'll be done by noon or not; if it is, it'll be done today. otherwise, i need to do some real life things this afternoon and it will have to wait until tomorrow for finalization.

20,000 views

here's the final map (i think). considering this is a 25 minute track, 44 tracks is actually pretty minimal - even if the base and drum files are composed of several tracks. there's a lot of doubles, as a relic of the mixing process, so it probably balances out to around 45 as an accurate estimate. that said, i may actually end up paring it down as i mix it. but i'd need more than a 32-track board for this if i were doing it the old fashioned way...

i think this should be mixed by the time the sun comes up.

rabbit is jaguar?

wish it was a wolf....

it was a pun.

rabid is wolf.

rabit is wolf.

rabbit is wolf.

i like the monty python shot, but that would be much cooler if i could find it......

i'm not really skilled with photoshop like apps. i don't even have one installed. but i could surely figure that out.

maybe a back panel, if the disc sells any copies.

alright, i've finally got this thing lined up into components, split into very close approximations of snapshots in april, may, june and july of 2002 - as well as snapshots in 2007 and 2009. what that means is i can build up each snapshot mix by successively activating each folder.

now, i just need to mix the parts.

but i seem to have not slept well last night, so it'll be when i wake up. i think i'm only a few hours away from getting this, though.

it's probably because i spent four hours walking through london, and four hours on the bus. long day yesterday....

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

this redefined epic for me. i kind of grew up with a certain strain of prog, so the pumpkins made a lot of sense to me at the age when i was starting to feel the power of punk rock. they kind of acted as a bridge between my childhood and adolescent years, in that sense. there's still not much quite like this out there and there may never be.

(relevant files: screwed up, idiotic, first movement, too cold, to spin inside dull aberrations, others; everything, in some sense)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzZh4fdaUpk

uploading screwed up to youtube

the track switches tonight. this track will be up for four weeks, and i expect to be through a whole lot by that point.

hits were down tremendously over the period unintelligible was up, to the point that i'm barely on track for two thirds of my last month's total. will they go up now that i've mentioned it, as happened previously? i honestly can't pretend i care anymore.

we'll see in a few days, but the curve seems irreversibly broken at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSK3q-R9Y6s&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbsN9vZEYmFDghfz0V6hWbLI

that was a very long day, which required upwards of five hours of walking through some pretty nasty windchills and ran about 36 hours...

...but i got my prescription, in the end.

that's one of two medical issues i needed dealt with. now, i need to figure out how to get the odsp renewed for at least another year.

i have my doctor's appointment in london in a few hours and i'm incredibly nervous about it. the first time, i figured it was just a formality. this time, i'm really apprehensive...

of course, i've been thinking about it a lot. at the end of the day, regardless of the outcome, the decision i made is not reversible. denying me hormones isn't going to coerce me to change my name back. it's not going to make me more interested in living a male gender role. it's not going to change how i present myself, how i dress, how i identify or how i behave. it's just going to put me in the awkward position of needing to explain that the health system is denying me treatment when i show up to a job interview in a skirt.

so, i'm hoping it turns out well. but i've kind of put it aside. it's not the chemicals that define who i am, and not taking the chemicals isn't going to change who i am, either.

i do hope i can at least convince him to keep me on the androgen blockers. i hate masturbating, and i'm very happy that i haven't had to in well over a year. i don't want to go back to having to deal with that, it's such a waste of fucking time...

what i really aim for, i think, is total sexlessness. just the abolition of sexuality. i like the fact that the feminizing hormones make me a little prettier when i want to be, but it's really the testosterone blockers that are giving me what i really want.

i spent 25 some odd years realizing i'm not very good at being a dude, and don't have any interest in being one, either. that's not just going to change overnight…

and the reality is that i will eventually get access to hormones, even if it takes a few weeks to figure out how.

ok. i've got the thing set up to remix it - i can do this. i may have to split the drums up, but it's otherwise pretty clean. you can barely tell on an a/b, and i'm going to be putting it through a mastering transform, anyway, so it just has to be close. bonus: i can resync that classical guitar part.

that's it for the night, and probably until wednesday afternoon....

it's almost a total reconstruction, afterall.

the parts i can't recreate are the drum soundscape (it's the reverb) and the time modded guitar effect that defines the second half of the track. i mean, i can do it in theory. and i may end up trying. but trying to get the exact point where i split it and the exact length i stretched it to is a fool's errand. if i feel forced to do that, i'm going to get a different shape in the second half of the song. i can say i've decided that the production is more important, but i want it to be a last resort.

i should be able to just cut the track at about the six minute point.

it's a slow fade in at that point. so it's easy to splice. i can then master that section a little differently.

so, it's coming together. again: i'm not doing this a fifth time, so i'm not fucking around with it this time.

ok, it's the first few minutes that are pissing me off.

and i can probably reconstruct the first few minutes. it just means cross fading the end.

which is easy to do anyways.

i need to go to london (ontario) tomorrow, so i won't be working on this much longer tonight. but i think i've got a successful tactic, here.

realistic assessment: i think i can make it better. i have to resign myself to the reality that i can't make it perfect. i guess every serious composer has a piece that somehow got away from them. maybe this is it for me.

one thing i want to try is to run the drums and bass separately through a mastering shape, then kill the high end, then mix it with the same file that's had the low end cut (and just has the cymbals and snare reverbs on the top). that could conceivably separate the tracks. but i sort of already know that it's going to sound messy. have to try it though...

these are the kinds of hacks that i'm stuck with, though.

one thing i'll state clearly: in the end it'll be close to what i want, and i'll fuck with it until it is.

ugh.

running this through mastering software really pulls the parts of the mix out that i want pulled out, which are mostly on the bottom end, but it also introduces a large amount of noise into the track. the noise is at the same frequency level as the cymbals, and is the result of not cleaning the parts up well before i mixed them together in the wave editor (a lot of it is tape hiss). trying to mix the bottom over the track is just making it muddy - what i want is a clean signal on the bottom mastered separately from the top. the only way i could get around the problem is to rebuild the track from scratch - which is essentially impossible. there's all kinds of reverb settings and time manipulations that i could approximate but could never recreate. rebuilding the track is necessarily going to create a new song, which i don't want to do - i already did that a few months ago.

everything i'm doing right now is final. i don't want to come back at this in another five years and decide it still doesn't sound the way i want it to.

so, i'm going to have to do many, many experiments. and this is likely consequently going to take a lot longer than i planned it to take...

i've already learned the lessons and applied them, but i'm still stuck with the consequences.

there's really nothing else like this (excluding the earliest demos, which i can write off as early demos). it's not just the last time i'm mixing this track, it's also the last time i'm going to be dealing with this problem.

the day i saw you cry (instrumental version)

ok, here it is one more time.

i'm confident this is really done this time. i think i should have the mix up to date to july, 2002 before the sun comes up, but i'm not uploading that version. the final production decisions may take a little longer. but i'm still convinced that this gets done by the end of the day.

--

the recording of this track over the spring of 2002 seems to have occurred in spurts, likely based around gaps in my school schedule. the drums in the first part of the track were sculpted together on the night/morning of march 7/8, which would have been a little after the track took it's initial folk punk form and centred on it existing in that way. the drums were sculpted from a mix of the initial drum machine part, real time ry30 square pushing, washes of digital noise and short, sculpted samples of greg playing in real time. the track seems to have been shaped into what it is during the week of april 15-22, a little after it was expanded by playing it as a classical piece, with the addition of multiple guitar and synth overdubs and all kinds of digital wave shaping through notch filters and time manipulation. i must have had that week off for exam related purposes; i probably had late exams that year. incomplete versions of the track exist that seem to have been burned around april 25, which are what the live version with sean would have been based upon.

the next spurt in recording was to add bass parts over the weekend of may 17-19. further drum and guitar parts were also added at this time.

i was experimenting with sequencing a rabit is wolf demo throughout may and ended up with two cd-r snapshots of the track at this point. these are the only instrumental versions from the period. unfortunately, the more complete version cannot be ripped from the cd properly - it was burned in three sections and normalized, which created volume gaps. it also has roughly 0.050 second null spots at the beginning and end of the three tracks, making it impossible to paste together properly. so, i've reconstructed a very close approximation of a late may mix out of a good sounding april mix. i've then used that mix to reconstruct a final instrumental version.

i was growing very insular during the period this was recorded, which was partially out of a decision to force myself to go straight edge in preparation for transgendered hormone therapy, which i was set to begin at the start of may. the bulk of the track was recorded before i went on hormone therapy. it may in some way reflect a sense of resigned preparation for a difficult process. but, it really comes more out of the isolation i had forced upon myself.

my parents were coming out of a difficult financial situation due partly to their own mismanagement and partly to my father coming out of a period of unemployment. he was completing a course in management over the period, which put me in the weird position of having to do his statistics homework for him. i was a second year honours math student at the time, so his basic stats assignments were not very challenging for me; conversely, he wasn't interested in the topic. i should probably have a diploma in business stats from the university of manitoba along with my math degree from carleton. but, who's counting, really? my math degree never got me anywhere in life (i haven't aspired to use it for anything....), but his management course opened up doors for him that have aided me. so, it worked out....

what this meant was that i found myself living in a split duplex around the beginning of 2002. for many years previously, i had lived in various basements and more or less had those basements to myself, merely having to tolerate the odd laundry run. the split duplex put me in the rather normal situation of having a bedroom upstairs, the privilege of having a studio downstairs and the inconvenience of having to follow scheduling rules. as i'd been so used to having total freedom in my scheduling for so long, i was unable to adjust to this.

if i were to come up and down the stairs in the middle of the night, i would wake my labrador retrievers up (who just wanted to come say hi) and that would wake up my parents. this was consequently forbidden. to get around this, i started sleeping in the afternoon, so i could go downstairs in the evening and not come back up until the morning. this left me without human contact for days or even weeks at a time. on long days, i would sleep on the carpeted floor of the studio. some days, i simply wouldn't sleep at all.

what you're hearing here is in many ways the culmination of this lack of human contact, complete abstinence from drugs and sleep deprivation - all in the context of the stress from simultaneously completing two university programs and preparing for a dramatic life shift. while the music was recorded in spurts, those spurts were emotional stress outlets. while parts of this may sound like my sanity was fragile while it was being created, the process of recording them is probably the only thing that allowed me to maintain it.

the final mix for this track was completed on nov 24, 2014, to mimic the version that existed immediately before vocals were added.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/05-the-day-i-saw-you-cry-instrumental-version

i missed a classical guitar part last night. i was wondering about it when i was mixing it, because the file was dated to after the cutoff but seemed to already exist in the mix. i'm sort of remembering that what i did was cut the file up to create a manual delay effect. so, i need to do get that back in there and upload the initial instrumental a third time.

it's a subtle effect, and you'd probably miss it if you weren't listening for it.

i missed it myself...