Tuesday, June 9, 2009

before i sleep...

today was okay. not dynamite, but ok. not awful, but not great either. i got a bit lippy around lunch-time. anyway, it's over and i'm home now- listening to the new grizzly bear album (this will make time number two today). i'm waiting for everyone at work to get sick of me playing it every day. it's very good- so good in fact that i haven't listened to 'yellow house' in ages. or 'friend' for that matter. there's a new deerhunter ep coming out- i can't figure out if the vinyl is out right now. i have discovered a useful feature- reckless.com will tell you which reckless records locations have what you're looking for- they'll even tell you formats. THIS i love! it's getting to the point where there is nothing more annoying to me than taking the train down to the record store only to find that they don't have a new release that i'm looking for on vinyl. it's also getting so confusing these days because just because a new release has come out on cd, that certainly doesn't mean that it's out on vinyl at the same time. the vinyl version of 'middle cyclone' isn't coming out until after father's day. RIDICULOUS!
life is okay at the moment- i'm getting more and more wistful and a bit sad about the impending end of the 'all hope is blind' album. i haven't even had the 'dandelions' ep replicated yet (i have the final masters in my possession and the cdman order forms filled out and ready to send- i even have all of the money accounted for- right now i'm waiting for a quote from them because i got a 10% off coupon in my inbox a few weeks ago and i intend to use it, dammit!) i'm going to try to enjoy myself during my 'time off' (which will be spent going through old recordings and probably doing a lot of demos and possibly getting back to making another record towards the end of it). i do still want to get ahold of a nintendo and a few of the old classic games... supposedly my friend adam snow wants me to score a film for him- which i would LOVE to do and i hope that this comes to fruition... i'd also like to play more shows during this 'down time'- although i suspect this will be a bit difficult as well and probably a carbon copy of this year's show list (we've only played three shows so far this year). i did make contact with someone in a pretty darn good band on the spiritualized message board and it looks like we might be able to play a free monday night show at the empty bottle in september or october. not much else to report- i get to start bugging the guy at schuba's again in a week. definitely looking forward to that one! it's fun to bug people endlessly without any real results...
we are still planning on doing a christmas show at the end of the year with our string players. i'm thinking that if we can't get that together anywhere else we'll do it at elastic. i thought about doing it at the church that we saw nick play at once. he played with this really terrible duo called hecuba and i just saw that they have a record out and that you can buy it at permanent records. how the fuck did they get signed- they were really awful. there were only two of them and they used tons of sequenced beats and whatnot and the dude in the band had electronic drums and a few real cymbals, played the piano and the girl in the band wore a leotard and sang and did weird dances. their lyrics were awful. we couldn't figure out if they were being serious or if it was some kind of a post-modern 'the joke's on you' kind of thing. either way we didn't like it. and now, naturally, i'm seeing that they've been signed and have a record out. it truly boggles the mind, doesn't it? i think as a bit of self-preservation it would do me a lot of good not to take things like this personally. even without taking it personally that some terrible two-piece band that might possibly be intentionally awful gets signed and i've never been approached by a label despite being ridiculously committed, passionate and having created a sizable body of work of formidable quality while not taking ourselves too seriously and becoming completely hopeless pretentious assholes on a less-than-zero budget (how did we do that again- even i don't know) it still boggles my mind that a band like that is getting signed right now- especially in the current 'music business' climate. this is true of a band called mi ami who were just signed to touch 'n go. also of crystal antlers- i really don't understand why they've been signed they are insipid and obnoxious. the only conclusion i can draw is that even indie labels are now forced to sign ridiculously pretentious acts because, if nothing else, in a pinch, a painfully pretentious act is going to sell more records than an unpretentious one. i guess we should just get some stupid costumes and start acting like idiots. i'm joking, but in my heart i am aware that this would probably actually work. you've seen the king khan bbq pictures. who hasn't for god's sake?!
anyway, i think that's all i have to say right about now...

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