Doing things since 1977
… break it. Then fix it again, then screw around with it some more until it breaks again, then start from scratch.
So I’ve been rebuilding my website, and I think it’s looking pretty spiffy now. Still needs some customisation vis-a-vis graphics, but the basic structure, theme, widgets and such are generally in place. In fact I’m mainly typing this post to test something, and if it works, then I’ll sigh a mighty sigh of relief. Here goes nothing 
Busy times at casa de Nick!
I’ve been meaning to pitch a few more magazine articles, and finally did so over the last week or two. And much to my delight Sound on Sound are willing to have me again So I’ll be researching and writing that one for the next little while.
Music is coming along nicely – we’ve had a few in-person T3E get togethers since the last update, and broke the back of a couple of our more troublesome compositions. I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to see the finish line on the horizon, although it’s very much shrouded in mist and we’ll probably encounter a roadblock or two along the way. And with that, I retire this metaphor.
I’ve also got another little morsel of entrepreneurialism that I’m toying with, but I’m not going to jinx it by actually talking about it in any detail. Suffice it to say that it involves samplers, and going “laaaa” into a Sennheiser MD421 about four thousand times.
Procrastination can be fun, but I think I’m going to do it later.
Oh yeah, did you see what I just did?
Sigh…
So I spent the better part of Sunday sorting out my extensive back-catalogue of noodlings and half-finished compositions. And there’s a lot of good to be found there. I also got some T3E work done, so for any band-mates who might be reading this and gearing up to crack the whip, there’s no need
But yes – potential-filled noodlings. What they really need is to be finished and released into the wild. I’ve left them in limbo, waiting to be completed for some nebulous future project, but it’s the strangest thing – I think the weight of the unfinished work has actually served as an impediment to generating new stuff. I tend to find myself scratching around looking at the raw material I’ve already got, trying to cobble it together into some sort of cohesive whole, and that’s not a mindset that’s conducive to new ideas.
Does that make sense?
So for better or worse, I’m going to work through them and finish them. One after the other, using whatever ideas come to mind at the time. Not too heavy on the self-censoring, on deciding that that doesn’t sound like “me”. Patently it does sound like me, as I just wrote it, so I’m going to let it be what it wants to be. Song done – out you go – next!
I’ll be setting up a new url and all the usual social networking detritus for this deluge of material, just incase anyone’s interested enough to want to hear it (or even – hope against hope – pay me some money for it). More news on that one soon. In the meantime though, here are a couple of tantalisingly brief soundclips from Sunday’s excursion into sound.
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I visited my friendly neighborhood musculoskeletal specialist yesterday evening (happy birthday me!) to find out why I’ve been all achy-breaky of lately.
Apparently I have an extra sort of half-disc, where the below-the disc part tried to grow another one while I was cooking.1 Not at all related to the discomfort (which is just the regular old untreated strain from years ago which slowly compounds) but as the doctor said, “you’re more interesting than you thought”.
And I already thought I was fairly interesting…
In other news, we’ve been window-shopping at some slightly more rural-y houses the last few days. It’s always been the 3-5 year plan to move on to somewhere with at least an acre or so (look at me with my anachronistic measurements of area), but a few little cul-de-sac related goings on have got us considering bringing the plan forward a tad. Just tyre-kicking at this stage, but with an open mind toward stepping it up. My garage-studio conversion has never really hit its stride, and a couple of the places we’re considering have nice out-buildings, so that could be a plus
1. I’m using “cooking” here as a euphemism for growing in the womb. My spine didn’t just decide to whip up some extra parts while I was making tortillas or something…
Another online collab (I’ve got a couple more on the way as well), this time composed by the irrepressible David Wozmak. I’ll also give Don Nafe a shout-out for wrangling parts from multiple continents together into a cohesive rubato-styled performance that sounds like it could all have been in the same room. Oh, and Oberlehrer (whose real name I don’t actually know!) if only for the amazing second-verse piano. Oh, and the bass is amazing… and Mudcat on the guitar… and… and… and…
Sidenote trivia – these are my scratch vocals, recorded to an early piano track only, through a PG58 into an Mbox2 Mini. It was always intended that I’d re-sing them once the final(ish) accompaniment was compiled, but I had a cold, so that version was not quite as good.
Join
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I was privileged to be the vocalist for this online collaboration a couple of years ago. The song was written by the immensely talented Steve McAllister, whose blog I have just hyperlinked for your browsing pleasure.
Paper Heart
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Hey hey… apparently I’m about to be released again. Venezuelan progsters Echoes were kind enough to invite me to contribute some melodies & a vocal performance to a song on their CD. Well it’s all done, it’s called Nature|Existence, and it’s about to come out come out on ProgRock Records.
You can hear it in glorious bit-decimated, dynamics-less myspace-o-vision, and then pre-order the CD from PRR, or buy the download in OGG or FLAC format from Mindawn and have it right now! NOW, I tell you! What black-magic technological madness is this?!
I’m getting a free copy apparently, which will be nice. But if I wasn’t, I’d totally buy one. I might even buy one anyway, I’m crazy and edgy like that.
Not quite this crazy, mind you...
I’m just having a listen again, and I must say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I wasn’t so much at the time, it was a fairly twisty time signature and I felt like I was having trouble getting the lyrics to sit, but with the advantage of some perspective (I would estimate that I recorded this close to 2 years ago) I think it’s not too bad. Hurrah!
I’d like to dedicate the adlib at 3:59 to Andy Kuntz of Vanden Plas – a band so self confident that they named themselves after a 19th century coachbuilding company.
This totally says "prog rock" to me.
Clare & I jetted off to Melbourne this weekend to see the delightful miss Kate Miller-Heidke play at the Forum. It was a lot better than I expected. I knew she was talented and had a great band, plus I’m automatically predisposed to like anyone who sings a song called “ducks don’t need satellites”, but I didn’t realise quite how seasoned the whole group were as performers and entertainers. A pleasant surprise, and at only $50 for the ticket, a very reasonably priced one (plane trip notwithstanding).
Line-up wise, it was a pretty standard rock-show. Drums, bass, two guitars, piano, every one but the drummer sang, and not a hint of a backing track so far as I could tell. Stylistically, it was harder to pin down. I suppose you could broadly describe it as “pop”, but only if you’re comfortable with that definition encompassing liberal doses of operatic singing and shades of live theatre alongside moments of head banging, all executed with a healthy sense of humour, but not the the extent of undermining its sincerity.
OK, so I sound a bit like that old advertisement with the art critics (“an existentialist hurdy gurdy spinning around and around in a double negative reinversion”) but my point is that it wasn’t trying to be anything in particular. It was just being – very convincingly and unabashedly – itself.
I was struck by the contrast with some of the lyrics and music I’ve been trying to write lately, and realising how contrived I’m driving myself to be. Philosophical and overly wordy, and “deep and sensitive”, and it’s all just, frankly, a bit pants. Earnest and insightful lyrics are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all too easy to pick a topic which has the patina of “meaningfulness” (politics, war, addiction, mental illness) and then find yourself writing unbelievably trite, sophomoric, codpiece wearing “one foot on the foldback wedge” lyrics about it. Do I really have to rail on in painfully forced verse about the estranging denouement that our reliance on media and technology are conveying us toward, when I could just say “ducks don’t need satellites”? It’s the same message, but that song is pretty, whimsical, and makes me smile a little bit, at the same time as gently suggesting that it’s possible to be content without the trappings of modern life. Yeah yeah, ducks are silly and boring and not worthy metaphors for our lofty subject matters, but… you know what… arseholes to all that. I think I’d rather aim to be authentic – perhaps even insightful – about the mundane, than to end up like this guy:
"Hey guys, I think I just figured out a rhyme for 'disaffectation'. Can you get me a pen?"
I certainly don’t mean to say that weighty lyrics are always bad, or that irreverent, personal writing is prima-facie good. But I do know that I’ve been censoring myself without even realising it. And I’m going to stop. Because I don’t much care about being cool, or about fitting into a specific and arbitrary sub-category of a genre. Bring on the real
