no optimism goes unpunished

after i wrote my rambling blog entry yesterday i was met with a giant glut of rejection- i checked the calendar at the empty bottle to discover that the decision had been made for the opener for the sian alice group show to discover we, of course, didn't get it and weren't going to receive a confirmation in our inbox. i listened to the band on myspace and at least they had been around roughly as long as us and they weren't bad- i'm probably not going to arrive early to see them, though i must say. after finding out that this wasn't going to happen i went ahead and emailed the hideout to try and weasel my way onto one of their bills that i've had my eye on for a while. they managed to email me back within two hours saying the bill was full but thanks for getting in touch. that's the most they've ever sent to me in an email in the several times i've emailed them over the years. in the early days of hassling schuba's i used to get more responses. i went to the myspace page as well to see if they'd actually visited at all and that was a big fat no. thanks folks.
so basically the long and short of it is that i'm back to the pit of never-ending discouragement. this must be payback for when i was walking around with stefanie in kansas city and talking about how i'm really happy with where the band is right and that we are making progress- no matter how slowly. the never-ending pit of discouragement usually means that it's time to concentrate on getting the record released/mastered/what-have-you. at least cllct.com's back up and people are listening to the records again. i've done an awful lot of shit-talking about that place over a long period of time, but right now i'm grateful that it's a place where we at least are heard. we get a reasonable amount of random myspace views and stuff, a fair amount of strangers getting to our stuff through our website, but cllct.com is where most of the random listeners we have find us. so that's about the long and short of it. i dunno. i suppose i should get the fliers together and ready to mail out. i should start to plan the near-mythical tour. if nothing else it'd be nice to get at least a few out of town shows out of the effort we will make. one would hope anyway...
yesterday i experimented with syncing up two cassette 8-tracks. i got it to work fairly well by the end of the time. yes, i have two cassette 8-tracks right now- i brought joe's 8-track back to our apartment because i feel it would probably be good to mix our records on. it's a bit more functional than mine is (a bit i said). it's been sitting in the closet at my parents' condo for a long time, so i just grabbed it and took it up to chicago. it seems to me that joe isn't really that anxious to get it back. if i ever have to do more travelling recordings then i guess i could just use my fucked-up cruddy one. i don't really anticipate this happening any time soon, of course.
i worked on a song yesterday that had previously only existed as a bare-bones instrumental- i did an experiment where i recorded four guitar parts direct to see what i could come up with by adding the effects later. it worked fairly well, but i found that i was kind of stuck with something that seemed all too familiar- just another reverb-drenched, ambient, slow and sad instrumental. this is what spurred the whole dual 8-track experiment. i figured it would be a good idea to try and add more stuff and kind of mix everything together later- do a drum mix, add strings, possibly organ. i even hit upon an idea to ask stefanie to write her own lyrics independent of the ones i'd already recorded. i think it might work pretty well, so i guess i shall remain optimistic on that front. half the time when i have a difficult time getting shows it means i just need to get to work on getting some more recordings going. now might be a good time to go through all of those old instrumentals and start redoing them on the 8-track. my idea is to get them very stacked. i might even refine my whole 8-track syncing idea and doing submixes and whatnot so that i can build them up into just massive tracks. i'm already quite sure that we won't be able to recreate them live, so i might as well go all out.
i've been loving this weather we're having at the moment- it's nice and quiet and empty here at the coffee shop. very rare. i'm hoping this carries over into the next working week. i am sort of dreading getting back to the old, normal 5-day schedule. september's going to be quite a difficult month.
oh, i also almost forgot to mention that katelyn, the violinist, was supposed to come by on wednesday and wasn't able to make it- i think this was the second time we've had to reschedule. she's back in school and in my mind it's kind of become indicative to me of the fact that the era of using a ton of strings might be over. she basically told me that she most likely wasn't going to be able to find time to do any more recording for a while. i think if i need strings what i might do from here on out is just call aleksa and chris and have them record at the same time and have chris overdub the violin part. i don't really know what to do any more...
i emailed elastic to see about doing another show on the 23rd of october. hopefully that'll work. after that i wanted to an acoustic show in december- one that wouldn't cost us any money or anything- maybe with james at uncommon ground or something like that...