Tonight the boys of Honest Ben Jonson took in a show, marking the first time we've all been in the same place in quite a while. The performers were those powerfully honest, yet slightly deranged retellers of recent American History, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Due to father Jason's neurotic tendencies, they only got through 6 or 7 songs, but they were good ones. Drummer Rachel was a very entertaining proto-Meg White; perhaps they should have cast her in School of Rock. Overall, about the most fun that can be had at an indie show.

The music section has been filled in with some lovely content, but more is on the way, so don't be looking at it now and then never again, or anything.

Some Japanese cartoons I've been watching, like FLCL and Read or Die, are created as serials with a predetermined and final number of episodes. After that, the idea has simply been exhausted. The story and the world are one, non-extensible entity. I think American TV, and music as well, can learn something from this. TV is an easy shot; how many shows that achieve any success end before the creators run out of ideas? I'll come to the exceptions a bit later.

As far as music goes, it is the great challenge to, with each record, explore new territory while still sounding enough like the same band that listeners have a place to start in absorbing it. More difficult yet is to choose fertile new territory, in other words to not suck. But I am amazed at the number of bands who continue to have patience for their own sound, without really trying much new, with very obvious deterioration in the quality of the work. I sometimes think some of the artists who had great beginnings followed by steady declines to mediocrity, did great early work almost by accident, and never really had the sense of what's good and bad that one assumes.

The reason we get these concepts overstaying their welcome is the business end: you've got to build the brand, and selling a new band by listing all the previous bands that had the same or similar lineup (often seen on the real indie levels, where bands don't last as long), is not a good way to accomplish that. Of course it's not just labels but bands as well, who treasure what fan base they've accumulated, and naturally fear starting all over by jumping name or style. And there will always be fans desperately wanting more, especially in cases of cult followings. But hey, sometimes the fans don't know what's good for them!

Difficult as it is, artistic integrity is vital. If the idea has been exhausted, so be it, and move on. It's harmful to disdainfully refer to bands as gimmicky or flash-in-the-pan if they respect this rule. Ideas have lifespans and theirs was short, no shame in that. It's much harder to come up with longer-lived ones.

To make this a little more constructive, I have a proposal. There can be two levels of band names: one permanent, and one that is different for each idea, or project, phase, whatever you want to call it. But this second level is still different from album titles, as there can be multiple albums under one project name (but not too many damnit!). This way you can keep the name recognition and gain the freedom to try new things that may win a new audience, and likely bring along some of the old one. And for those who don't like the new stuff, it's not that Band X started to suck, it's simply that I like their work on project A, not so much project B. This is a bit oversimplified, as new projects usually have mutated lineups and/or members of other bands, but it's a start.

Yesterday Gruff Rhys played a free solo acoustic set at Kim's on St. Marks. I have to say this, in combination with the previous night's performance at Irving Plaza with the full band, was absolute brilliance. The Irving show was the complete experience, with all the mind-blowing sounds, great videos on the projection screen, mutated arrangements, and incomprehensible stage banter. It was lacking only in songs from before the band's last two albums. Gruff made up for that and then some at Kim's, playing mostly requests in a subdued and beautiful tone. His voice, though worn by the previous night's carousing (the band's last night in the US), was ethereal and delicate as ever. Songs I am incredibly glad I got to hear include Northern Lights, Gathering Moss, Nythod Cacwn, Demons, and Fire in My Heart. For a finale he led us in a lively traditional Welsh singalong about finding sheep on the mountain.

Afterward I mentioned to Gruff that I plan to get a Welsh book this holiday season and study the language, partly to have something to say to him and partly to give myself a reason to actually do it. He gave me a brief lesson, that in pretty much any situation you can say (and I highly doubt I'm spelling this correctly) "yown." It's like everything's good, or ok, and such. Good guy, Gruff.

Have been listening to and liking "Hail to the Thief" a bit more of late, but there's something in it that really bothers me. It's whenever Thom says the name of the song, especially preceded by "it's" or "this is." Examples:

"this is the gloaming"

"it's a drunken punchup at a wedding"

"I got myxomatosis, myxomatosis, got myxomatosis..." etc.

At first it sounded on at least half the songs like he was just mumbling for a while and then saying the title. The effect is lessened as I start to hear more of the words, but I still can't shake the feeling he's actually announcing what song it is. The real problem is when the melody isn't very strong, and the words don't have any context. That's why it doesn't bother me so much on "where I end and you begin" or "scatterbrain" which is great, or, well, almost all the other songs.

Also, what's with the alternate titles? They just kinda got pasted on there. Radiohead started the whole thing (well probably not, but I'm just a kid, I don't know history) of making every aspect of the album creative, by having these words and phrases everywhere. And in the OK Computer days, it seemed like they were part of the grand message. But these, eh. In fact, what they should have done was make those alternate titles the primary ones, and put the phrase he says prominently in the song in parentheses.

One more thing...the ending of "Sit down. Stand up." It's supposed to be really crazy and out of hand, but it just isn't. And the sudden stopping thing worked very well in live performances of "Idioteque," but there are so many other things they could have done here, that would have been better. This is part of a larger theory I have that the band are sufficiently afraid of being called bombastic again that they don't try anything really crazy, or let a song take a completely unexpected twist, and their sound has gotten thin where it once was thunderous.

Whew, perhaps I should have made a category purely for complaining. But this is the last one I have in mind for a while.

Singer Miles of Beulah, tonight at Bowery Ballroom, after turning on the house lights: "Interpol don't turn on the lights, do they? They're too busy checking their crease."
So take that!

A day after I received the wonderful Omnichord, I got a kit from PAiA to make the Ring Modulator guitar pedal from the Electronic Projects for Musicians book. This will be my second attempt at effect production, after my clone of the MXR Distortion+ in 2001 for my Physics of Music class. That pedal worked the day I finished it, and then never worked again. It also featured some of the worst craftsmanship ever seen. I officially gave up on it when the leads snapped off the $3 blue LED I had gotten as a purely cosmetic luxury. I plan to put significantly more effort into this one. The Ring Modulator is an unusual effect that alienates the signal quite a bit, by summing the input frequency with a frequency produced at semi-random by a phase-locked loop...or something.

At work I was whining about how much cast aluminum boxes for pedal projects tend to cost ($15-20 for one big enough to fit a non-professionally made project into), and my boss suggested carving something out of foam and covering it with fiberglass, which he can provide the materials for. I was intrigued by this, since a fiberglass case would undoubtedly look really cool and unique. Later I got an idea to make one in a shape inspired by Gehry's architecture. The advantage of the foam, after all, is that it's very easy to work with. I'll probably regret it if I come up with a really complex shape, since fiberglass requires an ungodly amount of sanding even when the shape isn't an 8-dimensional Gehry madness.

Once again I've noticed that despite my intentions, it inevitably takes some external stimulus for me to restart the songwriting process. In the past it's been upcoming open mic nights, which I always want to write a brand new song for. In this case it's the presence of a new potential collaborator.

So this will be a rambling presentation of my recent thoughts about writing music, in the form of a bunch of paragraphs on different topics with likely little logical flow between them. The overarching theme is what kind of music I should make, and problems encountered in the process of making it. I don't intend this to be egotistical, although it will probably sound that way much of the time. It's just an attempt to get these thoughts out of my head by putting them down here.

Firstly, I realize it may seem silly to worry so much about the music I make being 'good' in some imaginary objective way, and other people liking it. Making music is enjoyable for me, so who cares if it also pleases others? This is perfectly valid, but the fact is I've passed that point--though I still enjoy the process, I want other people to enjoy the result of it. So, you have to accept that as a premise. Also this question will come back later.

A weakness of mine is the inability to listen to very good music without becoming temporarily convinced that I should make music in the same style, that this is really the way to go. It's almost a kind of temporary insanity from some enyzme entering my brain. Even though generally speaking I hold originality as very important (well, at least intended originality...of sorts), I can't help but think this (whatever I'm listening to) is really the ultimate, really the thing to do. The effect lasts even longer when I go to a concert--in those cases it can last for days. This is why two summers ago I, for the most part, stopped listening to modern music and only listened to WQXR, the classical radio station of the Times. I may do something similar now. In the past couple of days, as I've worked a lot on some new songs, I've had a few songs stuck in my head and unduly influencing me: "Keep the Dream Alive" by John Vanderslice, "Alcohol" by Saturday Looks Good To Me, and one I don't know the name of by the Microphones. It's insidious what these songs are doing to me.

Lyrics are really goddamn hard to do well. Even a lot of the bands I like, I think their lyrics could be better sometimes. Most of these lyrics are probably being written by people who are musicians first and lyricists second, so the main priority is getting the line to fit into the beat and get on to the next chorus, and sometimes that results in slightly awkward or not very substantive, or cliched lyrics. Notable exceptions off the top of my head are David Berman of Silver Jews, and Elliott Smith. I always try to police my lyrics and make sure each line is actually saying something new, so I don't end up with a whole song whose meaning could have been said in two lines. I also try to change things up with interesting words, the way any writer does. Recently I've been noticing how difficult it is to use polysyllabic words in rhymes, and trying to do that more. But often the result of those processes seems pretentious, and too literary and stiff and unnatural. So, I don't know. The other way to go is absurdist, which is fun sometimes but also hard to do well.

When I hear about extremely prolific artists, I'm always impressed, even though I know quality is more important than quantity. Unless you can really churn it out according to a formula, you've got to have a lot of ideas in you head, and the ability to follow through enough on them, to put out a few hundred songs. Also there's something attractive about doing it that way, because it's dangerous to spend a lot of time and effort on one song, and then present that to the world for opinions, and be crushed if it's not liked, and have nothing else to offer. It's like putting all one's eggs in the same basket. If you have a lot of songs you don't have to be as emotionally invested in each one.

One of the reasons I think an artist's early work is often considered among their best, is that during that period, the artist was making the music for themselves, and not worrying about whether people would like it. There's a certain purity to it, because it was exactly the music the artist wanted to make. Once the music is receiving enough attention that the artist is aware of it on a daily basis, it's psychologically very difficult, unless you are Radiohead, not to be affected by it and desire to give the people what they want (or what you think they want). I realize the irony that I'm already worrying so much about this when I'm supposed to be in the stage where I don't care. And it's true, such overthinking is probably a mistake. But, I simply can't help it.

I've long debated with myself over whether to make music that's more toward the pop, or the experimental end of such a spectrum. The same thing happens as I talked about 4 paragraphs ago: whatever the last CD I listened to, that's what I want to do, but in this more general sense. The good thing about pop is that it sounds nice, it's clear that I'm trying to please people. I'm not being pretentious, not trying to fool anyone. The bad thing about it is that every time I wrote a pop song in college and then played it at an open mic night, I would realize I sounded just like everyone else, and no one liked it much because it was obvious to them too. The good thing about experimental is that you are different, you're potentially doing something exciting and fresh. And people still enjoy it, though perhaps in a different way from pop. I see people enjoying it all the time at shows, and I'm one of them. The bad thing about it is that sometimes it is pretentious and cold. Some people don't want to realize that experimental music is just as hard to do well as pop--they figure as long as they stay away from pop, they're good. They also use the frequent lack of lyrics and familiar melodic structures to make music that's devoid of emotion, because emotion, like going pop, is a sign of weakness and desperation to be liked. There's also the danger of pretending too well that you don't care what other people think, and forgetting that people have to relate to the music somehow.

Now, why can't we have it both ways? That's really what's going on in the 'experimental' music I like anyway. When I finally did an experimental song that had pop elements at an open mic night, people loved it, and it was the beginning of a very good time. Some would say I still haven't surpassed that song. So yeah, I think that is probably the way to aim. When I do pure pop, it's not good like the indie pop that I like, it's stupid and mainstream-sounding. But I don't think I have the strength of will to be completely obnoxiously experimental and eschew the familiar.

The mildly functional endpoint of this is that I'd like to start putting up some recordings of the new songs I've been doing, and perhaps soliciting feedback and ideas about them, with regard to the issues I've been talking about, in some nice web-based way. Probably the easiest form for this to take would be a sort of music blog, with songs as entries. So, perhaps that will happen soon. I don't have any recordings yet, but am developing a decent catalogue of 2/3, 1/2, and 1/5-finished songs.

Keep the dream alive.

What the last entry was really driving at, is that I need a place to play and record music, unencumbered by concerns of loudness, and if possible also by the hour of the day. I've thought heavily about it, and there are two possibilities, each with their pros and cons and neocons and libcons.

Possibility the first: install acoustic insulation in my own room so as not to bother the neighbours. At minimum, I think this would involve some kind of absorbent riser for the drums and amplifiers, and a whole lot of material on the walls and ceiling, and over the windows, and probably something on the door as well if I want to play when the beast is around. A couple of practicality cons are that it would be quite expensive (you can't believe how much people will charge for foam...it's foam!) unless I can be very resourceful, and be a labor and time consuming installation process. The other matter is that, certain higher powers willing (in this case the NIH and NSF), this won't actually be my room for more than a few months longer. While I could take steps to ensure that the materials would be largely reusable, it would still be a pain to transfer them to new quarters. At the same time, the biggest pro is that this is my room; all the stuff I need is here, and I'm not 'on the clock' paying for it. The other sub-possibility is to simply wait to do this until I am at a new residence; one which if I have my way won't require as much acoustic treatment to start with. But the time frame for such a move is completely uncertain, so this might end up being a 7 month gap until I can play music for real.

Possibility the second: either rent a practise room on a monthly basis, or by the hour for actual practise times. The first sub-possibility is pretty much right out financially, unless I could find about 20 people willing to share the cost, which is roughly double the number of people I know at all. By the hour is the cheapest possibility of all, and most places have a drum set and amps there for use. But I still have a lot of instruments I'd have to carry there each time. Then there's the fact that in this arrangement we would be on the clock, and might be on the verge of coming up with a great idea just as the hour ends. The other side of this is that a practise room has no distractions, unlike my room which is a veritable feast of them. Finally, if I wanted to do any recording in a practise room I'd probably have to re-acquire a 4-track, and then that would be more stuff to bring each time.

Why did I have to do music anyway? Couldn't I have been a writer? Writing requires so much less overhead. Also, by way of explanation, I have indeed for the past few years evaded this problem by using computerized drums. But I decided recently I would not do this anymore, unless for aesthetic reasons. It's just not right, it needs to sound real.

As part of my Japanese study I've been watching the Japanese TV shows shown on the international channel on Sundays. Recently they started showing another pop music show, "PopJapan.tv," in addition to "Hey!Hey!Hey! Music Champ," much to my delight.

Needless to say most of the music shown on both of these shows is pretty crappy, although the novelty of it being Japanese and often ridiculous in one way or another keeps me entertained. But one artist who has been featured on both shows caught my eye. Her name is Tommy February⁶. After catching her last week on PopJapan.tv, I realized that she is the coolest. Consider the facts:

-Her name has an exponent in it.

-She dresses like a White Stripe crossed with a schoolgirl (see picture).

-She sings into a microphone that's full of candy.
Corollary: She has a song called "Candy Pop In Love"

-She has a full-time backing cheerleader section that appears in all of her videos.

-She has an alter-ego named Tommy Heavenly⁶.

-In at least two of her videos she interrupts her dancing and singing to drink from a flask for some reason.

-She used to be in a band called the Brilliant Green (BuriGuri), which besides being one of the only non-unintentionally funny Japanese band names I've heard, rhymes with FuriKuri.

But there's something strange going on. Despite her apparent pop superstar status, information on the web about her is rather scarce, consisting mostly of an interview and several generic lyrics sites. More bizarrely, the best picture I could find of her from the official Sony Records site was this one:

Also strange, the episode of PopJapan.tv that I saw her video on seemed to be from around May of last year, and it turns out that the show is owned by...Sony Records. Is it all a big scam engineered to make her popular? Probably it partly is, but it seems like the whole thing is too disorganized to be a successful scam.

For some reason, although her music is straight up J Pop with lots of 80s synths and beats, and her alter-ego's music is pseudo-hard rock, I find it fascinating. The melodies aren't bad, and she actually does a decent job of the weaving together of English and Japanese lyrics, a staple of every single Japanese pop song. It almost seems that she 'gets it' and has a larger sense of the style as something not to be taken seriously. For her most over-the-top and intricate song check out "Love is Forever."

Spent this weekend recording up at Z's house, somewhere in New York that is not the city. This means new recordings fairly soon, the first that are not being produced for a video game in about 10 months. This is the first time I've enjoyed the combination of being able to use real drums, a good-sounding room to record in, and being able to take my time with the process. In high school I had the first and third. In most of college I had the second and third. During the two all-nighters in my dorm's music practise room when I recorded "Sleepynotes," I had the first and second. Since college ended I've had only the third, and that just wouldn't do anymore. Having someone else there to provide a break from my own mind and musical tendencies (and several songs of his own) is something I've mostly done without before. Very excited about the results of these sessions, although what exactly will happen to the songs once they are done is uncertain as always. To make the transition to something like a real band, we need what has always eluded me--a drummer who can really play our songs properly, and is not myself.

We took a break from recording to spend an evening with a couple who seemed to show the only signs of life in the area, and how lively they were. The way they talked recalled the dialogue of a certain kind of movie--fast-paced, constantly telling bits and pieces of stories with no context nor explanation given to the audience. Somewhere in there, there was a bit I understood about a student who, asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, wrote that he felt he couldn't possibly know yet, and received a failing grade on the assignment. When they recited their phone number and started with 5, I for a moment expected them to continue "5-5-5..." The movielike atmosphere was only enhanced when we went to a bizarre hotel and cabaret, then left after two songs when we were asked to pay the $15 admission despite the lack of seating available and our drink orders. On the way out, we stocked up on the foyer's supply of candies that looked like peppermints but were actually fruit-flavoured, a wonderful surprise.

* * *

I finally finished my Ring Modulator pedal. I had planned a series of photos showing the construction, but they got erased in a not-properly-ejecting-the-device accident. Then I lost momentum and stopped working on it for a few weeks. Amazingly, it's actually still not finished--I await a closed-circuit stereo jack for the expression pedal that will control the frequency knob when plugged in, and a 3PDT switch to allow the presence of an LED without sacrificing true bypass. But, for visual purposes:

It is definitely the kind of pedal that one must build a song around, rather than apply as an enhancement to an existing song, due to its atonal and abrasive sounds. But for those purposes, it will do just fine.

I've long felt somewhat ashamed of this. But I find myself more inspired, or at least more healthily inspired, by very well-done writing about very good music than by the music itself. As I've said before, when I listen to very good music, I think I know what's good about it, and inevitably decide temporarily that I should be doing that. I rationalize it by thinking that really, I've been trying to do that all along, I've just drifted off course. But my assessment of what makes it so good is always too shallow, and I realize in the end that taking what others have done will never produce a good result--it has to be completely my idea.

Certain writing does a much better job of explaining what's really so good about this music. It's usually too general to even enable me to rip it off; instead I form my own ideas about how to create the same effects that are talked about. And I know some will scoff at this, but the main source of such writing for me thus far has been Pitchfork Media, linked at left. They may be snobs, and take full advantage of their position outside the mainstream to pan things mercilessly, but when they really like something the writers are able to express it in words a hundred times better than I ever could. My reviews of just about anything artistic are infamous among...well, me and a couple of other people.

It's hard to illustrate this with short quotes, so check out the first two paragraphs of the review of The Microphones' "The Glow, Pt. 2":

"It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years and years with I Love Yous and You Are So Beautifuls, the most direct way of expressing images of love and beauty have pretty much lost all impact. Melodic tricks can wear thin just as easily. Hooks are all well and good, but when you've seen a hook enough times, you know not to bite.

"Perhaps the problem is that most pop music doesn't put enough faith in the listener. Everything must be laid out in the most obvious of terms, and eventually, that obviousness obscures whatever the music originally intended to convey. If you want to invoke the quiet beauty of the ocean, for example, you can write a pop song that says, "Hey, the ocean is really beautiful," or you can try to come up with a sonic approximation of that beauty."

This may seem pretty obvious, but it's an incredibly valuable thing to realize, and most songwriters out there are completely oblivious to it. When you feel strongly enough about something to write a song, you often have the urge to just come out and say it, and not risk obscuring things and keeping your message from the listener.

The first paragraph of the review of the re-release of Olivia Tremor Control's "Dusk At Cubist Castle" sort of captures the same idea from the other side (actually it is by the same reviewer, so perhaps it's really his style that I like):

"The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation. Though the implementation of unexpected song structures and ostensibly experimental sounds can make music quite a bit more interesting, it can also render it sterile, flat and emotionless. In many cases, the finest pop songs are those that transcend their form entirely-- songs so instinctually graceful that listening to them feels like a creative act in and of itself. Indeed, the best pop songs are often the most difficult to discuss rationally, those indispensable not for their formal inventiveness but for their ability to tap directly into the intangible realm of human memory and emotion."

This, I have to say, is a more difficult thing to really get a grasp on, but it's just as important. When I reread it I realized I hadn't totally gotten it yet, because when writing and recording recently I was still congratulating myself whenever I broke a formal rule of pop music, and criticizing whenever I wasn't breaking them. This is still a different matter from trying to break as many rules as possible at the same time, which can have even worse results, but it's still not the right way to make good music. The battle for me always seems to be convincing myself deeply enough that there is no scientific formula for good music.

So, I've had this Marshall Valvestate amp since sometime in high school, probably around '98 or so. Some time in late 2001 or early 2002, it developed a strange problem. While playing, the sound would sometimes become suddenly softer and fuzzier, and not the good kind of fuzzy. This would happen maybe every 20 minutes or so, sometimes more. The cure was always a mild kick or tap, but it would come back again. The only thing I could think of to do was replace its lone tube, a 12AX7, but that did not help. At some point someone suggested to me that it could be a worn out capacitor, and that launched a whole investigation into multimeters, which culminated in buying a pretty nice one and then reaching new levels of laziness by refusing to even open up the battery compartment (it required a screwdriver, you see) for many many months.

Recently I decided to renew my efforts, as I'm hoping to start putting on musical performances soon and will need as many amps as I can get. My current technical advisor (my boss) was very skeptical about the burned out capacitor theory, and I hoped he was right, because it turns out one cannot test for a dried out capacitor merely by measuring its capacitance. Instead one must measure something called Effective Series Resistance, which is actually even more complicated than it sounds. One measures it by buying a tool which costs from approximately $100-$200. One can also, according to one web page, roughly replicate what the expensive meters do by pumping a square wave through the cap and examining the output for slopes that are too steep or shallow in the cycle of charging and discharging. This did not sound like something I would be particularly fit to carry out, and the number of capacitors in the amp's circuitry was also a bit daunting.

My technical advisor suggested it was probably just the same thing that is the problem 99% of the time, a connection. This was also slightly intimidating, because there are a lot more connections in there than capacitors, and I had already jiggled all the ones that seemed most in danger of coming loose. A picture for reference:

But I went back to it, and jiggled some more. And sure enough, there it was.

When I pushed this ceramic resistor forward, bad. When I pulled it back, good. Why? Because one of its two contacts (impossible to photograph well enough to see) had no solder at all on it. Nice job, Marshall Quality Control.

Last night I attended a concert with my cousin Jerome, an accomplished musician and friend whom I hadn't seen in quite a while. The bill was the Secret Machines, The Double, and the Plate Tectonics.

Plate Tectonics were an odd little band. There was a drummer, keyboardist, bassist, and singer. The drummer may as well have been the only one in the band. He played extremely complex rhythms in time signatures I don't even want to think about, with excellent energy. His playing alone was enough to at least hold my attention, and it was also just about the only thing I could hear. The keyboardist might have been playing a different concert entirely; she mostly looked bemused and played very simplistic lines, usually just shifting between two or three simple chords. The singer mostly, well, entirely, chirped and shouted nonsensically. The bassist, we agreed, was just weird. He was one of those antisocial bassists who spends the entire set with his back to the crowd. His bass lines pretty much ignored the complex drumming by ony lasting for about half of each measure; to take a cynical view, I think it's quite possible no one other than the drummer had any more understanding than I did of his rhythms. They did have some reasonably complex arrangements to their songs, but the bassist seemed to be the only one really affected by the changes. Then, between every few songs, the bassist would scream "FUCK!" Only he'd have his back to the crowd, so it took a while for us to even realize who kept doing it.

The Double were very good, and I bought their CD, which is the first one I've ever owned that has unique hand-painted cover art. Between every song their keyboardist would keep his sounds going and play around with them on his analog synths until the next song started. He had a MoogerFooger.

The Secret Machines put everyone else to shame in terms of showmanship. About five minutes before they came on, a fog machine laid down a nice thick layer. They had three handmade-looking lights, one directly behind each member's stage position, and all the other lights were turned off for most of their set. This made for incredibly dramatic sights, especially when the drummer would swing his arms and appear to be shifting the entire venue. The guitarist and keyboardist appeard mostly as silhouettes. Their music might be described by supporters as a harder-rocking Interpol, and by detractors as a harder-rocking Coldplay. The music was very stately and booming, with lots of arpeggio delayed guitar. The drum rhythms and the melodies were both quite basic. The vocals were definitely a strong point, very breathy and smooth, and skillful harmonies. At first it was impressive, but as the set wore on and it became clear that this was the deal, that no more ideas were going to be presented, it got rather repetitive.

The real treasure of the night was undoubtedly the guy setting next to us, in Northsix's strange rock bleachers. During TSM's set, he went back and forth between cheering on the band like some kind of coach or motivational speaker, and trying to explain to his lady friend why exactly they were so good. "When the drummer makes those rhythms, kish kish kish kish....Aw man!" "You see that thing he's doing there, that's it, right there!" "[to his lady friend] Well, I think we got our money's worth!" (the show was $10). But his greatest quote of the night by far came between two songs, when he felt compelled to shout "That is how you do it. That is how you rock. THAT IS HOW YOU DO IT!"

On the way out we struck up a conversation with a drunk couple and compared our thoughts on the evening. The girl said I reminded her of someone on tv, but she couldn't think of whom. The guy supplied the answer, Superboy from Smallville. I pretended I had seen the show.

Finally I've recorded some new songs. These were written and recorded by me with much appreciated help on both fronts from Zach Stern. They are up on the music page; here are direct links for the lazy or spastic.

1. my god I just realized
2. zooming in
3. seeing ourselves
4. the thieves rush in
5. there is no girl

please do leave comments on this entry. thanks for listening!

Two nights ago I saw another show at Northsix. In order the bands were the High Water Marks, Apollo Sunshine, and the Apples In Stereo.

The High Water Marks' drummer was a dead ringer for Everclear's Art Alexakis, but my photos of them turned out terribly.

Apollo Sunshine's drummer bore a passing resemblance to Noah Wyle, and my pictures of them turned out okay.

The Apples' drummer looked like no one so much as Hilarie Sydney, who she happens to be, and my pictures of them turned out quite well.

I mistook Apollo Sunshine for the Sunshine Fix before the show, and I think Apollo Sunshine wins for having the sunniest band name ever. They appeared to be a young band, and they were very, very good. They had more instruments than I've ever seen from a band of their ilk (4 guys, and young). The singer played a couple of keyboards, a bass, a ukelele, and a double-necked guitar/bass combo; the guitarist also played slide guitar and had a uke of his own; the drummer had a pretty standard setup, and then they had a guy who played a huge vibraphone and had a bunch of percussion odds and ends. But more importantly, they used all of these instruments extremely effectively, even when switching between them in the middle of a song. Their stage presence owed a significant debt to that of the Flaming Lips--they extended the strobe-light-around-the-neck thing to have three members of the band wearing them, plus a camera being projected onto a big screen was put right in front of another one, for a whole lotta strobin'. They also used the camera and projector for some crazy video feedback effects. Their music was not devoid of that influence, but it was good enough that it did not really matter. They had the earnest, surreal storytelling lyrics. Most of the songs shifted wildly in every respect, and the melodies were very complex yet powerful. Unfortunately their vibraphonist was a bit underappreciated, because he just couldn't compete in volume with the drums and the fuzz bass. The guitarist was a bit of a showoff, but it can be forgiven. Incredible potential for these guys.

The Apples in Stereo played a spartan show in just about every way. The stage was lit no more brightly than the audience. No fancy gizmos or stage props for them. They flatly denied requests, even from members of the opening bands. To my delight, they played "Seems So," saying that they had gotten really sick of it for a while but now they liked it again. At one point a guy requested the song "Allright/Not Quite," to which Robert Schneider cheerfully responded "that's right, we're not going to play it." This exchange was repeated about 3 times, until the fan gave up.

Here's one picture of Apollo Sunshine:

and one of the Apples:

My only complaint: when will sound engineers figure out the technology necessary to have someone other than the "lead singer" of a band sing a song on their own? Every time a band tries this, the occasional singer's voice ends up totally buried. Do the engineers just sit back and take a nap once the set starts? Lazy bastards.

When I sing something to myself, of course I can't sing the note of the guitar line or the harmony at the same time as the melody. But somehow it seems like I'm always 'thinking' that part, even if I'm not 'hearing' it. Sometimes there's a song where a part will be repeated, but with a different backing part. Sloan has a couple of very effective moments like this on their new one, in which the chorus gets short-circuited by being resolved a line early. When I sing these to myself, I find that sometimes I can't very well control which backing part I'm 'thinking.' I'll plan on it being one part, but then I get there and...somehow, it just ends up being the other. At first it seemed like maybe it was that one part was just easier to imagine. But in a past instance of this I noted that it switched after a while; first I could only do one part, then at some point the other became much easier.

When I recently started singing these Sloan songs to myself I started to realize how strange this all was. How do I know what backing part I did if I'm not really hearing it at all? I wonder which parts of my brain are able to think about a frequency so abstractly. Then I wondered what it would be like if the melody itself were being processed on that same level. So I tried to hear that in my head without moving anything in my mouth or throat the way I would if I were actually singing it. I found this rather difficult. Often I could not restrain the slightest moves in my mouth toward forming the words in the lyrics, and in my throat shaping my vocal cords to make the frequencies in the melody. When I was able to do it, it took quite a bit of concentration to feel like I was keeping the right melody going, and it always seemed somehow distant. The difficulty of thinking about the backing part seemed about the same though. This whole layer of thinking notes without hearing them must be a way that we get around the brain's lack of polyphony with a sort of lo-fi representation. Or, considering that we can hear chords just fine, is the brain polyphonic and is it our vocal mechanism that's not up to the task?

A few weeks ago, decided to check out the open mic scene at Keenan's Piano Lounge, just down Broadway. As expected, it was sparse, with fewer people there for the music than for the drinking, and no piano that I could see. But this had its good and bad points. It was rough playing with people talking loudly, but this made it good performing experience, and the polite tension of many open mics was nicely absent. I also can't complain about being able to play 15 minutes after walking in and do up to 5 songs. I only had three, two brand new ones, as is my custom, and Sloan's "Lines You Amend." My final original achieved an enthusiastic response from the girl who had played before me, and as she was leaving she told me about a "really good" open mic on Sundays at a place on Avenue C. I was encouraged by this and figured I'd follow the white rabbit to success.

I showed up to the place on Avenue C that Sunday with another new song and my guitar looking like this:

I probably should have heeded the omens when several times that day I stepped out into suddenly pouring rain that stopped as I was going inside, only to start up again upon my exit. The water leaked through my gig bag and wreaked some havoc on my decorations, and I had to hastily repair them at the venue. I got there halfway through the 4 hour event and signed up. H and Mr. former XS were already there. The music was considerably less adventurous than I had been hoping, and though I worried about the increasing volume of XS's derisive comments, my id felt some satisfaction that they were being said by someone. Then again, the sleepy country stuff being played by many performers was a fine contrast to what I had prepared, and that's always a good thing.

As time wore on we all grew weary, especially so when they had their 'featured performer,' a half-hour set in the middle of the open mic that is not announced as anything special. I was also confused at the parade of names that seemed to bear almost no correspondence at all to the signup list. As it got dangerously near the end of the event, a guy who was obviously a veteran started talking to someone else behind us about the MC. He said he tended to favor nice-looking girls when choosing the playing order. I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise, but I think if anywhere, at the open mic level we should be able to avoid this. The veteran's comment seemed to be verified when a girl whose name I had seen directly after mine on the list got called up. The veteran also spent some time hassling the MC into letting him get a set in. He eventually relented, and at that point, at right about the time the open mic was supposed to end, the MC came up to me to tell me he had no time for me. He was purposeful in not apologizing, but recommended I come early next time and let him know I'd been here, and he'd get me in. The strange thing was that the entire time he talked, he was counting a wad of money, holding it inches from my face. For a moment I must admit I entertained the bizarre thought that he was going to pay me for my trouble. Well thanks for the advice, I thought, but I'll go back to Keenan's.

After another week I realized it wasn't the look of my guitar I had gotten tired of but the sound. It was always one strum after another at these things, to the point where the mere sight of a guitar coming out caused me to sort of tune out and give up hope of hearing anything truly new. I figured the other patrons at Keenan's just might be having similar feelings. So this past Monday, I got out my old friend the 7 Dollar Keyboard, which I've had since high school and the Honest Ben Jonson days. It's about 16 inches wide and has a few tiny octaves, 8 sounds, some drum beats, and a microphone input. I've recorded with it a few times and slammed it into other instruments many times during performances. It still works, but its internal speaker seems to be blown, and its tuning sometimes changes erratically. It also makes a random sound every time you turn it on, which is awesome. I wrote two nice and simple songs on it and brought it in, by far the easiest performance transportation experience I've ever made for myself. Orville Davis, the MC at Keenan's who is a real cowboy and sings some nice country songs, was baffled when he saw it. I ended up following a Navy man reading poems so the contrast from the acoustic guitars was a bit dulled, but I think the weirdness of the songs made up for that. Peter's review:

"It was really good man. But I think you lost just about EVERYONE in here."

Two new songs as performed on the $7 keyboard, recorded on GarageBand after going back and forth several times and finally deciding I should give it a chance. It's okay for jotting down ideas. Some of the simplifications really seem like too much. Most people have operated a Graphic EQ on a stereo, I'd think they could do the same in this program. Instead we get a list of choices of EQ and reverb combinations with meaningless names like "LA Rock," which apparently is the genre these songs belong to!

1. flicker

2. is there a good way to say

Another new song, performed at Keenan's a couple times so far:

1. Connotations

What I like about it is the transitions. Usually my transitions are about as seamless as a quilt.

The CMJ Fest is coming to town next week, and I was rather amazed at the sheer number of acts performing. I think it's supposed to be an honor to appear in this festival, but with this many bands it's hard to think of it that way. How to stand out (the eternal question) with hundreds of acts all in the same four days?

After perusing the list I started to see some rather unfortunate similarities in some band names, that probably would never be noticed outside a gathering this large. It became almost like seeing a list of every possible band name ever conceived. With that in mind, I prepared this list of my ideal CMJ showcases. These are all real names of acts, all but a few of whom I've never heard.

The Bloody Showcase
The Blood Arm
Blood On The Wall
Blood Red Sun
Bloodthirsty Lovers
Internal Bleeding

The Indices Showcase
Frontier Index
Misery Index

The Panther Showcase
Junior Panthers
Panthers
Perfect Panther

The Abbreviated Showcase
IQU
PS
QPE
RJD2
S
XO
ZS
zZz
ZZZZ

The Repetitive Showcase
Action Action
Bang! Bang!
Beep Beep
Controller.Controller
Man Man
Medium Medium
Mirror Mirror
Chin Up Chin Up
[Update: somehow I missed "Temper Temper". We'll squeeze them in.]
Transistor Transistor
The Double

finally, The Obvious Indie Rock Reference Showcase
Army Of Me
another appearance by Junior Panthers
Painting Soldiers
Surferosa

And I have to mention my favorite band name on the list, ONE OF THE LOUDEST TRAGEDIES EVER HEARD.

After I made fun of CMJ, Scott won four passes to it and very kindly offered me one. Although I tried to see even more, I was pretty happy to see 5 shows in 4 days, breaking my previous record of 4 in 4. I took some pictures. Click for larger versions.

NIGHT 1

THE HIDDEN CAMERAS On All Music Guide it was said that this large group of queer-political kids from Montreal were known for outrageous shows involving up to 30 dancers, strippers and musicians. All I saw were about 7 fully dressed musicians. This disappointed me. They were still fun, but at times I could not help but think of them as a lesser Belle and Sebastian with an unconvincing singer. They also overused the idea of the xylophone following the vocal melody.

THE FRENCH KICKS These guys had solid songs and certainly looked the part, but I'm sad to report the singer is suffering from a severe case of Julian-itis. Sometimes he would pause and simply stare out at the crowd as if he were looking in the mirror, and clearly thinking 'Holy fuck I'm good looking!' (and I don't mean addressing the band Holy Fuck).

THE DECEMBERISTS I was looking forward to finally hearing these guys after several attempts at downloading their songs, then forgetting I had done so and being left with not-easily-identifiable files that contained only the song name. So I knew their song titles very well, just not the actual music. To me, they were just too similar to bands like Beulah and Apples in Stereo, both of whom I've already worn myself out on. I don't need another Beulah. I think I've finally tired of indie pop. Sorry.

After five songs I made my first attempt at a mid-evening crossover by heading over to the Mercury Lounge where Lou Barlow was playing. There was a frozen line of about 15 badge holders, another line of people wanting to pay to get in, and a good deal of complaining to the attendant CMJ rep by people who had paid hundreds of dollars to be shut out. I decided to stick around for the hell of it, and eventually so many people in front of me gave up that I was third in line. At the moment that Lou Barlow finished his set, another CMJ guy came out and asked the bouncer to let in the first 6 of us. That was okay, because still to play was...

THE ARCADE FIRE Another Montreal band, these guys have huge buzz around them, and people seemed just as excited about them as Lou Barlow, who one guy in line had called "The [something]est man in the world." If only I had heard what that something was. The 6 of them who were not the drummer all lined up in a row at the beginning. As reported in the Times (yes, it's already over), the frontman said "Alright, we're the flavor of the month, let's go" to a lot of tension-relieving laughter. A guitar started strumming a deceptively simple rhythm on one chord. Then another guy started ferociously pounding a drum slung over his shoulder and a tambourine in alternation. Then everything came in at once, all 6 of them singing a chant-like melody, with open throats and huge intensity. It completely blew me away and exceeded all my expectations. The rest of the set did not disappoint; their onstage energy far surpassed that of any other band I saw in the festival. When Win Butler told the story of having driven down from Montreal that day and losing their piano out the back of their UHaul van, I was even more impressed with the whole thing, having experienced the counterproductive turmoil that can go along with preparing for even a routine show.
It's hard not to wonder where these guys will go from here. It seems like, perhaps thanks to Pitchfork, the phenomenon of one-hit wonders has come to indie music. There seem to be a lot of bands who hit it relatively big with what's seen as a masterful debut (or second album with a debut that went unnoticed), and then gradually fade in quality. Often it's made to seem that the one album was really their statement as a band, and after that they either didn't change enough or changed too much in the wrong way. But referring to my 'lifespan of ideas' entry, maybe this isn't such a bad thing. The failure to repeat a feat of genius doesn't necessarily make that initial hype unjustified.

NIGHT 2

LES SANS CULOTTES Notice I haven't yet broken the streak of seeing all 'the' bands. But I'm only accomplishing that by not discussing MORNINGWOOD, who opened for Les Sans Culottes, and about whom I have nothing to say. Actually that's not really true, but I don't have any good pictures of them. Les Sans Culottes beat out the all the Montrealites by actually being from France, and the lead singer had the most stereotypical French voice I've ever heard. "ONH HONH HOOONH!" They were good, but the social upheaval content I thought I'd read about long ago was either absent or overly subtle.

After that we elected to skip out on seeing Apollo Sunshine to try to catch Ted Leo at the Knit. Unfortunately we were shut out, as they appeared to make the decision right at the moment of our arrival not to let anyone else in. This was actually quite heartbreaking, as I could hear Ted singing the very song of his that I had been singing in my head on the way over. So Scott, Tom and I drowned our sorrows in debauchery at our Virgin Records-sponsored room in the Hudson Hotel.

Tomorrow (I hope), the Hudson and the second half of the festival.

So after failing to see Ted Leo we headed back to the Hudson Hotel, where hotel rooms awaited us as a result of Scott's contest win. We doubted it would be a great place to hang out, but we had to at least see it. On the way in we could tell it was a pretty happening place, with people dancing and um, neon yellow-green walls. The concierge informed us that there would be a delay getting into our room, because a woman had complained about her room and was being transferred to another one, and the hotel was otherwise completely full. So we would get the complained-about room in a few minutes. While passing the time by picking up some snacks and booze we couldn't help wondering, what was it that our room's temporary tenant had found so untenable?

When we got in, that question became more a game of guessing which of many possible features of the room had driven her out. For example, was it simply the size, suitable perhaps for interrogations or small animals (or interrogations of small animals)? The window alone provided two alternate hypotheses: there was its tendency to, rather than sliding upward, fall inward. Or it might have been the view, which was of a gigantic ventilation duct approximately 4 feet away, surrounded by other strange apparatus on a small roof area so dystopian that to even photograph it seemed unwise. Then there was the bathroom, with a glass wall creating the potential for some embarrassing incidents. On the other hand, its fixtures were almost as nifty as they were ridiculous. I guess we'll just never know.

(A coworker informed me that in fact this hotel was designed by a famous guy named Ian Schrager and I'm just helplessly unhip. But after this experience, I think the point of it all is that you spend as little time in the room as possible, even as you pay dearly for it.)

NIGHT 3

BRENDAN BENSON I met up with Jonah for this show at a new venue called Crash Mansion, which has the dubious honor of being the first rock venue I've ever seen with a bathroom attendant. The sound guys had their own separate room in the back, looking as if they were in a recording studio. The show did sound good, but Jonah and I were in agreement that Brendan was very much off his game. He barely sang the songs, employing perhaps a whole half-octave of vocal range. The band members had to keep looking at each other to signal when the song ended, revealing that they hadn't been at this together for very long. Afterward we headed over to the Knitting Factory again, this time to be shut out of Q and Not U. When will I learn?

NIGHT 4

ASOBI SEKSU The final night of the music marathon, rather like the whole thing, was surprisingly sparse in really good bands. This show at Rothko was actually the most enticing one out of the 41 going on. Asobi Seksu were enjoyable but definitely not reaching their full potential. They need to find some new ways of employing their walls of guitar noise, less bound by pop song structures. And the singer's voice wasn't blending smoothly with the instruments. In fact the vocals were something of a consistent disappointment throughout the festival. In the past I've defended the indie phenomenon that most anyone can be a singer if they believe in what they're singing. But right now that doesn't seem to be working out too well.

Thanks to Scott for the badge and to Ethel for the camera loaner.

Continuing with "The Japan Journals 1947-2004," I start to wonder if I should be recording more of the events of my life, but don't want to turn this into a simple journal, and am far too lazy to start up a separate journal, having enough trouble keeping this up as it is. Herein, a dump of the past couple weeks, hopefully not too tedious.

First, is it just me or are there some annoyingly widespread trends in movie titles? I'll accept Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, but then you've got After the Sunset, Before Night Falls, Between Sunset and the Dusk Before Sunrise, After the time Before the Sun...I'm also bothered by the temporal proximity of "Beyond the Sea" and "The Sea Inside," both terrible titles in their own right. I'm ready to blame Javier Bardem for all this.

The newly incarnated "the zero effect" played its first shows on the 15th, 16th, and 21st of this month. It was Zach's idea to use that name again, and I won't be defending its merits in any more arguments. We decided that to make the process of starting to perform easier on us, we would not go the route of a venue. Instead we played in my living room. This gave us the chance to do a lot of preparation of the space ahead of time, and hook up as many devices as we wanted without worrying about other bands and time slots. It also ensured that only friends and friends of friends would see the show, but for our debut, that seemed an acceptable limitation. At some point I came up with the conceit that this would be the first in a series of shows in places other than usual music venues, and that we'd ask people who saw the shows to come up with other ideas for future shows, for example in places where they live or work or otherwise frequent and have access to. We ended up with a couple of ideas but not quite what I had hoped for, so if any readers have anything, please leave a comment. We'll play just about anywhere.

Anyway, this show we called "darkroom," and we made the living room very very dark by using fabric to close it off from all light sources. Then we made some DIY spotlights with very focused beams and some blue and red gels, to show only on our faces when we played. We did 12 songs, with 5 of them serving more as interludes, chances for us to do more experimental stuff and give people's minds a break from the somewhat dense content of the songs. I printed up programs giving the song titles and information about the concert series thing, on fancy textured art paper, though I was advised that no one could read them in the darkness. Our 3rd member, Shayna, didn't have much time to practice for this show, so we sort of exploited that by having her make a dramatic entrance halfway through and then play on the last 4 songs. The entrance consisted of her being secreted away in the adjacent bedroom until the appointed time, when she started pounding her floor tom and then marched slowly into the living room with it. The other 'special' thing we did was an interlude called "the conversation," which I don't want to give away entirely because we may want to do it again, but if you're familar with the source of the title you can probably guess at the general nature of it.

The intended effect of the darkness and everything else was both to confuse people and to force them to focus on the sound at the exclusion of any other sensory input (except taste, for the jerks who were munching on tortilla chips). But as we should have expected, many had no trouble figuring out and even anticipating our subterfuges, while others were confused in ways we couldn't possibly have planned. Some people had little idea who was in the band afterward. Others had trouble telling whether some of the interludes were produced intentionally or were merely the sound of our equipment malfunctioning and me trying to fix it. One person whom I hadn't met before simply stared at me blankly for a good 15 minutes while I chatted with a coworker, seeming to want to say "What...what?!?!"

At the end of it all I was pretty exhausted, physically, mentally and musically (I got some food poisoning the night before the last show and was up the entire night vomiting and locked in a loop of thought, but that's another story). I'm proud to say that this was probably the best show I've ever done with a band in terms of pure quality of performance, though it was by no shortcut, only an extended period of writing and rehearsing that we may not be able to repeat. If anyone wants mp3s let me know.

The zero effect have started new recording sessions.

Tonight I finally got around to experimenting with a technique I read about in Tape Op of producing sound by connecting effects pedals in a loop. There's no musical input here, you just connect them together and work off the transients that are created and then fed back, amplified and effected in various ways, and twiddle the knobs and select sets of effects to change the sound.

1. effect loop feedback sounds 1.mp3 (my harmonist pedal pulls a self-indulgent solo for a couple minutes)