Wednesday, May 25, 2016

24-05-2016: first alter-reality blog post, a/c nightmare, organizing too many thoughts

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

there's a post up here, now. the other profiles will take some time to catch up - first music releases in september 1996/2016. it gets the point across...

http://therealinri.blogspot.com/1996/05/really-enjoying-new-soundgarden-record.html

first alter-reality post

May 22, 1996

 

really enjoying the new soundgarden record


i guess this is my new blog. wow.

i should be asleep, but it's a saturday night and my parents don't really force me to go to sleep. well, how can they, really? they need to sleep, too. fatalism is actually pretty rational, in context - it's an unresolvable problem. and i'm a bit of a hard-headed little punk rascal.

i just find that i only need a few hours of rest, not something crazy like eight hours. who sleeps that long? wow. i'm ok with four hours, really. so, what should i do for the rest of the night, then? toss darts at the wall? count sheep? lying in bed when you're really not tired is just simply being unproductive. if i'm going to be awake anyways, i'd rather stay up and read something, or listen to some music. i guess it's a good time to do some blogging, too.

i don't have internet access in my room, though, so i need to sneak into the spare computer room when i want to use the internet at night. i do have a computer in my room, but it only has windows 3.1 on it. i need windows 95 to use internet explorer. so, i probably won't be able to do this blog every night.

i've been up all night playing civ2 and listening to this new soundgarden cassette on my walkman. i skipped the afternoon class on tuesday (computer class, and i already know it all, anyways, so it's just a waste of time) to go down to the hmv at st. laurent to pick it up. i get a free bus pass from school, so i can go wherever i want in the city whenever i want, which is actually very liberating. much easier than bicycling. there's a music world at billings, too, but it's always over priced and under stocked. the hmv at st. laurent is only a few minutes up the transitway and always has what i want.

it's a little different than superunknown, a bit poppier, but it's still pretty good. parts of it remind me a lot of the beatles, and i really like the beatles a lot. parts of it are sort of weird, and i like that, too. i always like to hear things that i haven't heard before. i think i'd like to teach myself how to play some of these songs, too, but i'm wondering if maybe they're in weird tunings. i know soundgarden likes weird tunings. my ibanez has a locking bridge so i try to avoid weird tunings. maybe, i can figure out how to play them in normal tunings, anyways. when songs are in weird tunings, it's sometimes helpful to find tabs on the internet, because then i can figure out how to play it with normal tuning. sometimes, that means transposing the song up a key or two but it's all relative so it doesn't matter.

i've been playing civ2 ever since i got home last night. dad says i'm totally addicted, but it's a video game, not a drug, so i think that's a weird thing to say. but, i do sometimes play it all night, until the sun comes up and the dogs come running in and i have to pretend i'm sleeping. i like to change the civilizations i play with so that i can learn the names of the cities in different parts of the world. tonight, i am catherine the great of russia. i always liked to learn about geography, ever since i was very small. i knew all the capital cities in the whole world, almost!

i found a tab for
burden in my hand, and it is actually in a weird tuning. i should try and convert it to normal tuning when i wake up tomorrow.

i should sneak back into my room now. shhh. 


Tuesday, May 24, 2016

23-05-2016: starts rock band. cancels tour because he has to work.

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/05/23.html

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

j reacts to the ramifications of not being conditioned properly by tv brainwashing

somebody asked me about which saturday morning cartoons i used to watch as a kid last night, and i really drew a bank.

"my parents never had cable."

and, that's true. they didn't. but it's not really the reason - i wouldn't have watched them if i had cable, anyways. see, i do think i can actually draw larger conclusions about my individuality through my disengagement with popular culture so i think this is worth a bit of a rant.

the truth is that i used to sleep in on saturday mornings. the reason is that my parents were divorced and friday night was the time i spent with my dad. he'd often keep me up until well past midnight, even when i was very young. so, i would almost always be asleep on saturday mornings until close to noon.

i guess most parents want to put their kids to bed early on friday nights, so they can get a rest from their kids. for me, it was the opposite: i wasn't allowed to go to sleep.

so, rather than watch early morning cartoons on saturday, i always watched late night movies on fridays. and, i actually remember being isolated from the other kids because of it. they'd be talking about these cartoons, and i'd have no idea what they were talking about, so i'd just end up on the outside. had they seen the new tom hanks film? the star wars trilogy? and, the answer was they hadn't - they weren't allowed to, they wouldn't want to, they weren't able to follow...

so, i found myself unable to relate to the other kids at a pretty young age.

a pattern developed as i grew older. had i seen the new sitcom? no; i was reading a book. had i seen the new action series? i still didn't have cable. had i played the new video game? i didn't have a gaming console, and i didn't really want one - i preferred my guitar.

i've argued in the past that you could probably convert me into a normal dipshit by sitting me down and making me watch every episode of friends for a month, clockwork orange style. the reason is that the reason i'm not a normal dipshit is that i didn't watch every episode of friends. or any episode of friends. i don't know which one i am; i'm not even entirely sure which is which.

what that means is that i never got all the subtle capitalist brainwashing that they cram into television, and i've consequently never really had to reverse it. so, all the left-wing music and political commentary came at me as a tabula rasa; i didn't form myself by reacting against the status quo so much as i formed myself by not knowing what the status quo even was.

there's a lesson for parents. if you keep your kids off tv, they may end up with a higher kind of pure intelligence. but, the functional outcome of this may just end up being a life time of alienation and an inherent inability to understand how to conform.

forced brainwashing aside, i think i'm too far gone. i'm half way to my grave. i'm not worth the energy. and i kind of like myself who i am, anyways. but, in hindsight, i realize the longterm social disadvantages of not being able to relate to the people around me when i was very little and am aware that i'd be very different today had i actually watched those saturday cartoons like the other kids.

Monday, May 23, 2016

22-05-2016: baby labour & blessed at phog in windsor (and primary rants)

show footage:
baby labour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzOmLQGDptI
blessed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTt0ZeuSAZw

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/05/22.html

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

season 7 (cropped)


season 7


exploring southwest detroit in the day and the night (to see chelsea wolfe)

stoked by fears of not getting in to see the show due to it selling out, whether conspiratorially worked up by the bar owners or not, i convinced myself of the need to transit to the show relatively early so that i could stop by a record shop on the way there. this, it seems, is somewhat of a useful trick to be put aside for reuse. but, it left me with the need to walk a good distance through an unknown part of detroit (in somewhat girly attire) and arrive at the venue at least an hour before doors.

the walk in was actually a lot less creepy than anticipated. it was ultimately just a fear of the unknown, but i need to assert myself - some apprehension is intelligent when walking through detroit alone. the thing is that huge amounts of the city are virtually empty, so there is literally nobody that is going to hear you yell. yes - nobody will hear your cries. let's not sing this song. see, i've mused before that this implies that wild animals are a more pressing concern than desperate people, but it remains true that the city is a kind of a predator's twisted wet dream, and this simply can't be forgotten. i will not apologize for being careful about where i'm walking and when and fuck you for criticizing me for it.

but, the truth is that the walk up bagley was of minimal concern. it seems that the area directly surrounding the railroad tracks has been left for dead. the abandoned twenty story office buildings would no doubt be useful to the homeless folk huddled around them, even as mere shelter from the rain, but there are barbed wire fences to prevent use. again: i found myself more frightened of the possibility that i was walking through coyote territory, and i truly probably was. but, this took up no more than a few blocks of a half hour walk, which was mostly through a pleasant commercial district populated by ethnic mexican businesses.

i got there eventually and tried to chill in the dog park across the way, hoping i'd bump into somebody with my favourite thing, but instead i found myself looking over my shoulder at pit bulls and dobermans left off their leash to sneak up upon me with intent. first i escaped the coyotes, and now this. is detroit run by shape-shifting canids? well, if the lizard people are truly so ubiquitous, they'd have to have evolved thermoregulation at some point, right? it might explain some things you could never get your head around. nor did i see a bar up the strip that i'd feel safe in, although there were plenty of ice cream stores. and, so, i ended up parked in the front of the venue for upwards of an hour and felt myself start to get slightly cold.

--

i found myself in the smoking section for most of the next two hours, floating from a to b and not really saying much of any value to anyone. but, i did eventually find what i wanted before the show started, and i have to acknowledge that it was more essential than i expected.

--

i had heard some chelsea wolfe years earlier; apokalypsis was in rotation for a little while over 2011 or 2012. i'm going to throw out a comparison i haven't seen before: it reminded me a little of jar of flies period alice in chains, but with a kind of impressionist swirl to it. then, i seem to have forgotten about her. it was less about rejection and more just about overlooking it. this is a thing that does happen when you're a music nerd, and there is really simply no way to avoid it without solving for the very hard problem of mortality.

so, when i saw she was playing here, my mind floated back to memories of that record. the next step was to explore some new material; i both found it surprising and interesting. i had picked up somewhere that she had swung a little more goth, but i wasn't expecting as strong of an embrace of electronics. it was compelling, though - i am a fan of the style from multiple different angles. i mean, i grew up listening to stuff like curve and garbage, not to mention skinny puppy and nine inch nails. while i didn't get a chance to really absorb the disc, i heard more than enough to convince me to attend in the handful of times that i streamed it leading up to the show.

i was surprised a second time by the set, which seemed to meet me halfway by pulling in quite a bit of a heavy grunge aesthetic. it was a return to alice in chains, but the heavy side. a bit of soundgarden, even; there's some swans in there, too. pj harvey. it’s all 90s. the press is going to want to name drop witch whatever, black this and doom that. but, i'm an old grunge kid. i knew what i was listening to. and i rather enjoyed it...

i found myself remembering some of the older tracks, too, which was nice.

the show was strong enough that i'm going to no doubt find myself exploring her last two records more carefully and in the process i may find that i was mentally overcompensating for the electronics at the expense of the guitars - that they were there all along, and i just didn't hear them. but, my immediate impression was that the show was brutal in a way that the record isn't and that may be a little surprising to some. it's ultimately just a mixing decision to make sure the guitars are loud enough and dirty enough to make the output fundamentally guitar-oriented, rather than fundamentally electronic. it's just not what i picked out when i was listening beforehand, rightly or wrongly.

so, i'm torn between suggesting that the live show is an improvement in sound over the record and wondering how i would have reacted to a more electronic set.

but, i will say that if you like the head cave then this is a good one.


here is a full set:


the walk back was a little bit scary, but i need to put it in the perspective of being unfamiliar with the walk. it was again the coyote patch that bothered me most, although it seemed at a few points that slow moving cars with their lights off were trailing me through the abandoned streets, with unknown motives and for unknown lengths. people wanted me to stop to talk to them; i didn't really want to do that. and, etc. but, i ultimately made it home without incident.

my apprehension about repeating that exact route is grounded, but i'm going to need to experiment to determine something more optimal. detours. bus schedules, maybe. or perhaps even just getting used to it....

here is the vlog for the day:


http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/05/19.html

Sunday, May 22, 2016

21-05-2016: organizing media release dates for the alter-reality

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

lastly, there will be a youtube account, but it will only post *samples* of songs rather than entire songs. i'm looking at one minute samples of pretty much every song. i will want to use this profile as a commenting perch, of course. i was going to re-use the dtk profile, but i've decided not to. see, what i've learned is that posting full tracks to youtube makes people think the music is free, and it simply can't be. the point is to push people to bandcamp. fuck streaming. i'll post it when i set it up tomorrow; i'm uploading right now and can't log out. but, this profile won't start working until september, either.

for right now, it's just the blogspot site that will be working.

i'm hitting a math rock show tomorrow night, but i'll be home relatively early and should be able to start realigning the three facebook pages with the period one disc and getting back to finalizing the inri material for good.
this is going to be the new facebook page, because people don't exist outside of facebook, so you need it, even if you hate it. but, it's just going to list links to bandcamp as they come up. all the actual writing will be at the blogspot page. it's really just an obligation.

https://www.facebook.com/inri-1719120681676528
this is going to be the new bandcamp space, which will build itself up from 1996-1999, starting in september 2016. so, it's going to take the full four years to get through this material. but, inri is just period one. i will start a new bandcamp page for deny everything (period 2.1) in the year 2020.

http://jnrj.bandcamp.com/
it turns out that blogger is giving me everything that i want, for now, in a fairly simple interface. all i wanted was a simple journal-style page without heavy scripting and with an rss feed. but, i was hoping i could find a site like this - livejournal or tumblr or something - that gives me what i want because it allows me to post in real time.

i do think that i'll eventually move this to an appspot site, but what that means is that i'll need to upload the whole site every time i make a post. the reality is that it's going to be a while before the site gets more complex, anyways, so this just makes more sense for the moment. i *did* try livejournal, but it looks like it wants to charge me, and i'm not paying. google is always good for free stuff, anyways. in time, i should be able to just copy and paste this page over. really.

so, this is the blog space for the alter-reality. facebook is just a shitty interface, so i'm trying to avoid it - and, actually, get the remaining data that's here off of it. that's going to mean wiping this page down to a cv-type skeleton. the blogspot page will be the most comprehensive thing to follow, the meta level page, where all the links to bandcamp and other comments will come up.

http://therealinri.blogspot.ca/
there's a lot of stuff on that record that doesn't sound much like soundgarden, but is actually extremely well put together. the record continues to get flak for being "unfocused", but that's always missed the point - the late 90s were really a final renaissance of expansive art rock, and the record really fits in perfectly along with other period classics like mcis, aenima and ok computer. i'd argue it's highly underrated, and arguably even their best record. the psychedelic sound that dominates the disc was picked up by cameron & shepherd in the wellwater conspiracy, which seems to suggest that it was actually the rhythm section that had taken over the band in it's twilight phase.

anyways. i'll get to this. but this is another underappreciated track from that disc that i used to listen to quite a bit.

i pull a pretty heavy ty cobb in the climax to the first section of this track:

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/to-spin-inside-dull-aberrations-2
if you're too young to know what i'm talking about:

my records going back to 1996 are not perfect, but, then again, i've been over this before: who has digital records from 1996? the oldest cd list i can find is from 2002. there are records in archives somewhere that are older than this...if i can find them...

but, here is what i can reconstruct.

now, note that this is going to necessarily be mildly revisionist, in the sense that i didn't buy every cd on the day it came out. some of it, i know i did - like the i mother earth disc, or the nin disc. but i didn't get into stuff like labradford or tortoise until 98 or 99. i can remember exactly when i got into labradford - i saw them open for gybe! on the slow riot tour, which was the spring of '99. tortoise is a little more blurry. i remember getting standards on the release date.

the point is that this is going to have to be approximate, whether i like it or not. although, there is a possibility that it could get very, very accurate starting about mid '97, if i can get to those archives.

i don't get online until mid '97 or so, and there's going to be a big gap over that period. i'm comfortable waiting until i get there before i start looking for usenet and listserv archives.

but, we can see where i'm going with this quite clearly. my first post is going to no doubt be about enjoying the new soundgarden record, down on the upside.

hard-headed, fuck you all.
just add it all
to the hot rod death toll.

that mandolin solo, though.

the page will be up soonish.

download  microscopic  1996  ep  jan 9, 1996
radiohead  street spirit  1996  single  jan 22, 1996
limblifter llimblifter  1996  lp  jan 23, 1996
stabbing westward  wither, blister, burn + peel  1996  lp  jan 23rd
the smashing pumpkins  1979  1996  ep  jan 26th
tortoise  millions now living will never die  1996  lp  jan 30
econoline crush  affliction  1996  lp  feb 20
skinny puppy  brap  1996  2xlp  feb 27
the process  1996  lp
charlie's family  1996  lp
gravity kills  gravity kills  1996  lp  mar 5
the smashing pumpkins  1979 mixes  1996  ep  mar 12th
stp  tiny music  1996  ep  mar 26
the tea party  alhambra  1996  ep  mar ?
the smashing pumpkins  tonight, tonight  1996  ep  apr 15
man or astroman?  experiment zero  1996  lp  april 16th
the smashing pumpkins  zero  1996  ep  apr 23
download  sidewinder  1996  ep  april 30, 1996
soundgarden  down on the upside  1996  lp  may 21

***********

download  the eyes of stanley pain  1996  lp  may 28th
nine inch nails  quake soundtrack  1996  lp  june 22
kmfdm  xtort  1996  lp  june 25th
sponge  wax ecstatic  1996  lp  july 2nd
i mother earth  scenery and fish  1996  lp  july 9th
ost  escape from l.a.  1996  lp  july 15
alice in chians  unplugged  1996  lp  july 30
various (charity)  sweet relief ii  1996  lp  aug 6
rhcp  coffee shop  1995  single  aug 12
white zombie  supersexy swingin' sounds  1996  lp  aug 15th
foetus  boil  1996  lp  aug 20
pearl jam  no code  1996  lp  aug 27th
rem  e-bow the letter  1996  ep  aug 27th
rem  new adventures in hifi  1996  lp  sept 9
the smashing pumpkins live at the corel centre in ottawa  sept 13
tool  aenima  1996  lp  sept 17
moby  animal rights  1996  lp  sept 23rd
weezer  pinkerton  1996  lp  sept 24
the tear garden  to be an angel blind, the crippled soul divide  1996  lp  oct 1
garbage  milk  1996  single  oct 7
korn  life is peachy  1996  lp  oct 15th
swans  soundtracks for the blind  1996  2xlp  oct 22
bjork  possibly maybe  1996  single  oct 28
garbage  #1 crush  1996  single  oct 29
aphex twin  rdj album  1996  lp  nov 4
james gorner / billy corgan  ransom  1996  lp  nov 5
the smashing pumpkins  33  1996  ep  nov 11
bowery electric  beat  1996  lp  nov 12
labradford  labradford  1996  lp  nov 12th
barenaked ladies  rock spectacle  1996  ep  nov 19, 1996
bush  razorblade suitcase  1996  lp  nov 19, 1996
our lady peace  superman's dead  1996  single  dec 16, 1996
the offspring  all i want  1996  single  dec 31, 1996

Saturday, May 21, 2016

20-05-2016: consolidating archives (and ranting...)

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

Friday, May 20, 2016

i'm still running late on everything, but i should legitimately start building the alter-reality (as in, creating new profiles) either tonight or tomorrow.

i just need to reiterate: i can see the alter-reality, but the alter-reality cannot see me. and, i will be absolutely ruthless in mass blocking anybody that tries to fuck with this.

that said, there will not be large-scale interaction with the alter-reality, either, like there was previously. i'm spinning this off and letting it float on it's own. so, if you're interested in this, please follow it on it's own terms.

it is currently may 20, 1996 in the alter-reality. serious posting will start by july 1, 1996 - at the latest. the alter-reality will have it's own bandcamp, youtube, facebook and appspot spaces. it is those links that will be posted here by the end of the weekend, probably.