add another one to the list...

sian alice group are playing at the empty bottle on september 21st. rrrrrr. they're only opening, but still. i'm sure they'll probably play the exact same set, but it would still be nice to see them again.
i'm crawling out of my skin trying to get this tour set up and finalized. i posted all of the shows that we would like to play on our website and it came out to about 9 shows total. amazing! it'd be nice if we could get them all together. haw haw haw. i even emailed some people from missoula and i haven't even heard back from them yet- what the fuck? it's fucking missoula people- you shouldn't have to beg for a show there, that just doesn't make any damn sense.
started some new tracks last night- one that is between a few song titles- 'forever drowning,' 'drownsong' and 'plainchant' i think (i'm most lukewarm on the last one) and the other is called 'ashes, ashes.' both had percussive loops from the hitting the guitar and sampling it and sending it through tons and tons of gooey reverb. i just sampled the rhythm, recorded it along with a guide vocal where i would count off when the guitar should start and sang the verses because both songs will be using the same rhythmic backdrop and meld into each other. the bowed guitar is back kids- what works best for these songs is excessive volume paired with extremely restrained playing. it gives a nice amount of tension and some unexpected surprises. it was very nice to do something quieter that went a lot smoother. when i got home yesterday i tried to finish a song called 'fall' that was started as part of the 'down to sleep' cycle. i'm kind of going back to finish a handful of those tracks as it occurs to me to do so. it looks like most of them are finished except for a few that don't have any drums. i was pondering redoing 'all i have' because that song occasionally comes back to haunt me. i filmed myself building parts of that song for that whole 'down to sleep' diary thing that i never put on youtube. i don't know if anyone would like it very much. it is pretty funny and actually shows us as fairly normal people. there are also a ton of shots of me in a room by myself playing guitar really loud. i was thinking of attempting to do the drums for them as it occurs to me to do them. very few of the unfinished ones are grabbing me at all as being serious candidates for release in much of any form. we did finish 'wake up' and it turned out pretty nice i think. i've earmarked that for a digital single for 'angels floating on the head of a pin.' i'm trying to figure out if i should bother with extra tracks for that one. the tracklist for the hidden tracks on the ep has kind of changed around a bit- two new songs that were written in that 'down to sleep' style kind of popped up. both could possibly be really good live songs. stefanie needs to add drums to one of them, the other we were going to do live like we did 'voices in the air' (which stefanie needs to redo her vocal for- it was a bit flat before and then when billy added his cello part the two sounded so awful together that it occurred to me that it would be best to just have her redo it as there was also a ton of unwanted hiss and such). one doesn't have any lyrics- it has a full bunch of lyrics that had to be scrapped- and it has a nice bass loop with some other percussion in it. the bass line was pretty much lifted from my favourite black angels song, the main guitar chords were lifted from a warlocks song, the chorus chords i came up with on accident. the other song will allow us to play 'you turn down' live which has been sounding thoroughly decent lately. what's more it's an easy one to play- a good candidate for a set opener and close to the 'angels...' tuning. last practise was pretty fruitful if you can't tell. we played all of 'down to sleep' in order minus two songs ('ahn' and 'so goodbye...' because stefanie doesn't want to play it) in the hopes that an instore will come together. we haven't heard anything about it just yet- i've emailed the permanent records folks and normally they are very prompt in responding, but not this time. i think i might email them again because playing the whole record was really really fun. only one of the songs really didn't work i felt like but it's that damn 'crawl to you' song that's hard to get to work live. the best time we played it before was actually at permanent- we just did it acoustic with the little floaty samples like we normally do. we also did two from the new ep- 'voices in the air' and 'sitting in the dark' which is a fantastic live song- the vocals are particularly gorgeous if i do say so myself. it's a bit long, but that's nothing new i guess.
when i go home today i'm probably going to do some more work on the next full length (which is supposed to come out on vinyl). i'd like to post some samples some time but the songs are in an embryonic state. i discovered that we have a way to use some nicer mics and such through a friend of mine at work whose boyfriend has a really nice home studio setup- he has some nice analogue keyboards that i'd like to rent some time to play for some things and he also has a 1/4" 2-track which i would like to see if i could use to mixdown the ep once it's finished and the record as well. it's nice to have something to fall back on in these troubling times. they keep telling me to come by sometime and see the studio. i'm almost afraid to- i feel like it'll open a pandora's box and they'll never be able to get me out of there.