new musical explorations

just got back from jamming with my good friend nate greenslit, formerly of the stellar band HUMANWINE. what a fun time! we're planning a trio with david kirkdorffer, with whom, as you know if you're the one reading this here blog, i'm already working on some very interesting recordings.

so tonight, nate and i had a freeform drum-n-bass jam. david was unable to do tonight, and nate was unable to do tomorrow. so i'm working with each successively in order to enable them to sort of work together by proxy or at least osmosisically -- osmosically -- by osmosis.

yesterday i heard a commercial advertise that "all bras were 50% off," and i had to ask lexi if that meant that every woman had one boob out. sadly, i had misinterpreted the copy.

*************

okay, i just sat here for a clear minute and a half wondering if i had anything else to tell you, but if my mind was a blackboard it'd be fully erased, filled only with those chalk streaks left by an unbeaten-and-used-all-day eraser but for a little spot in the bottom right-hand corner where a small little man is analysing the previous "bras 50% off" paragraph, wondering if it could be made any more impactful by slight rewording.

sadly, it cannot.

Sunday at Hi-N-Dry

"do you play upright?"

Billy Conway gestures for me to follow him into the iso room at Hi-N-Dry studios as Rick Berlin is working out the piano part for "End War" with T Max. we get to the far left corner, and he turns on a light and reaches for a tall wooden shadow leaning against the corner.

"this was a custom job for andrew," he tells me as he hands me the solidly-built electric upright bass to try out. it plays beautifully, insofar as i can tell without having it plugged in. very smooth feeling. "it's not pretty, but it sounds awesome," he says, and i just want to re-do my electric bass part with the upright.

it's my first time at Hi-N-Dry studios in Cambridge, MA, and we've already gotten our basics down. T, Shawn and i arrived at the studio a shade before 1pm to bang out the bass, guitar and drums for the song, and the third (and last) take was deemed the best. i think we had two false-starts in there, but the relaxed run-thru the night before did exactly what it needed to do.

Tim Casey is there videotaping all the action. funny to meet him for the first time, since i played bass on two tracks of his excellent Brian Eno tribute two years ago. ah, the joys, pleasures and conveniences of the modern networked recording studio!

not long ago, Billy was the drummer of bass-rock trio Morphine, and the studio is filled with pictures of the band onstage, posters for concerts and more, including late-bassist Mark Sandman's bass hanging a few feet from where i tracked my bass part. very humbling, but also very comforting. you could feel a welcoming and warming energy throughout the room and those working within its walls.

while T is doing acoustic guitar, Shawn sits in a chair reading a Tom Waits interview under a shelf of about 20 basses and guitars and i have a quick smoke with Dana Colley. Dana was, with Mark and Billy, the third member of Morphine, and it was fantastic hearing him track his sax parts over the basics i contributed to.

the engineer, Jabe, and assistant, Ben, were both awesome to hang with, too. i'm definitely going to be back over there if they'll have me. i'm secretly hoping to get a call from them for a session bassist one day, too.

weekend in NJ

"most people carry pictures of their family in their wallets, but look at this..."

uncle stanley reaches into his pocket for his wallet, opens it and proudly displays a ticket stub for the 1960 football championship game. "this is the last time the eagles were the champs!"



uncle stanley and me

i'm seated at the kitchen table at my parents' house with uncle stanley, who is my father's mother's brother, with my dad, my grandfather (dad's dad), uncle john (dad's little brother) and munk. munk and i hadn't heard the story about the eagles championship before.

"look at the price on the ticket," uncle stanley insists.

"$8?! holy shit!" i say.

"that was when they played at the U Penn. season tickets cost $16, but my buddy worked at U Penn so i got a student discount. $8 for season tickets, and then $8 for the championship game ticket."

he goes on to tell us about how he was at a game one day, and it's raining really hard. stanley was a mailman, so he's in his US Postal Service raincoat and everything. the stadium is doing a contest where they pick various seats at random and people go out on the field and try to kick a 25 yard field goal. he's sitting there, half paying attention, when there's an announcement that he couldn't hear and then suddenly everyone around him is pointing at him and yelling "that's you, that's you!"

his friend had been saying how easy it'd be to kick the field goal, so stosh gives him the ticket and says "go for it!"

unfortunately, his friend completely missed to the side. it's gotta be a hard kick anyway, what with the rain and poor ground condition, but to have it be your first time trying it in a stadium full of loud philadelphia fans (these are the same people who, some years later, booed santa claus) has got to make it still MORE tough.


uncle john with grandpop in the background


dad, munk, and uncle stanley 'round the table as stanley takes a call

good weekend!

thirty-eight days

the countdown is on... 38 days to the Red Sox opening day!

things are always very exciting as spring approaches, buses full of baseball players arriving in florida to get conditioned and ready for the season, new players to get to know, sometimes new haircuts on old friends. three years ago, johnny damon showed up with his beard and long hair, last year manny showed up with his long dreads.

this year we have no manny (so far) and we have the circus surrounding dice-k. i think it's looking to be a good year for our sox. let's hope so!

right now, though, lexi is probably very happy that there are no sports on. i mean, basketball and hockey are on, but i don't watch basketball and i haven't been following hockey lately. i never followed it all that much anyway, but i'd keep an eye on stuff and at least catch some bits of games here and there. but studio stuff has been so busy anyway, so i've not been spending too much time by the tv unless we're watching something together or, more rare of late, i'm playing a videogame.

anyway... in other news, we've been having internet issues for the last week or so. our DSL has been not quite up-to-speed lately, anyway, but we've been getting by alright. but since this past weekend we'd been intermittently been unable to get online at all.

so wednesday i call verizon to see what's up, and the friendly guy tells me that they're working on some wiring issues in our area and that things should be resolved by wednesday evening by 8pm or so. i figured, well, give it to tomorrow and see what happens, since deadlines for repair can be so easy to miss if only for murphy's law. lexi, for her part, is lobbying strongly for a switch to comcast high speed internet.

yesterday (thursday) i get home from the gym, fire up the computer and try to sign online. same problem. "well," thought i, "i should give them a call and see what's going on, 'cause this is really getting ridiculous." pick up the phone.

no dialtone.

are you kidding me? so i call verizon on the cellphone. the (again very nice) guy traces the line, finds there's a break in the line not far from their office, and tells me they will get it fixed asap, but possibly not 'til saturday.

a couple of hours later, however, lexi picks up the phone and finds a dialtone! yay. she was subsequently able to get online, as was i, but the connection was still much slower than it should be.

we'll see how dependable the connection is over the weekend. in the meantime, i may be hitting bestbuy for a cable modem and then hitting comcast for the necessary software. supposed to be pretty fast (6mbps download/ 8mbps upload), so this should be MUCH more workable. especially since i'm going to be doing more remixes plus Funf work, all of which is dependent upon sharing of large files.

wish us luck!

more sonic adventures and more

last night i went to the gym. first time in a few weeks.

some time ago i realized the secret to not being disappointed in your gym attendance:

you can always go tomorrow.

i've found this to work unerringly. i've never missed a tomorrow!

but anyway, i motored after work last night and hit the gym for 20 minutes on a stationary bike and 10 minutes on a rowing machine. felt really good. gotta keep it going, though. none of that 'tomorrow' crap, unless it's for real!

after the gym and dinner, i had to buckle down in the studio to finish off my remix of The Luxury's song "Let Go." i think it turned out pretty well, overall, though i think i can improve the levels a bit. maybe i'll be doing that tonight.

but i had a really good time twisting the hell out of that song. another guy -- lexi said that steve is The Luxury's drummer -- remixed the song, too, so i had to approach it in a much different way than the original and his remix attacked it. so i started out by time-stretching a loop of the drums and then laying the vocal overtop of it. really turned it around and gave it a much darker, almost claustrophobic vibe, so i began programming sounds, processing other original tracks, editing, etc., trying to push it in that dark direction.

lots of fun... now i've got so many things on the back burner awaiting my attention. i owe david kirkdorffer a call today, and we've got to get back onto that stuff. i did get some drum loops happening for one of the tracks, but they've not gotten as much attention as they deserve yet.

it's no wonder i don't have a lot of readers on here, given the "joe's life recap" approach i've been giving this. almost every day, i say something to lexi and she replies "that's how your blog should start, and you should write about that." but i don't do it right away and i forget the interesting things i said. then, sometime later, i say "crap, i should update that damn thing," and i fill it with the recap since i can't remember all of the interesting things i say.

really, you can't imagine all of those interesting utterances. not amidst all this droll crap.

we picked up a few new cds in the last week. lately, i can't stop listening to the new TV On The Radio album, Return To Cookie Mountain. some really great stuff throughout. the tune that is on infinite repeat in my head is Hours, and the remix of it that sits right by the end of the record kicks the crap out of me. SO awesome. also digging on some Gnarls Barkley, but that hasn't sunk its claws as deep as TVotR. at least not yet...

busy! crazy! mostly studio work...

i should write my blogs as soon as i think of something. or i should tape myself talking, transcribe/ edit those utterances and turn that in my blog.

busy last couple of weeks. banilow show and the rehearsals that go with it. onlyone studio work. commercial production work. production of a demo for my good friend t max.

i did receive a twisted and bizarre new piece of gear from a couple of guys that call themselves Folktek. they design and build specialty electronic instruments and devices, and this thing is out there. needless to say, i love it. i like to think of it as a short-wave radio or scanner that only picks up alien transmissions, mostly 'cause that's kinda what it sounds like. i've already used it to build a new experimental electronic track ('ROBOTFIGHT,' so named by lexi) hosted on my myspace site.

essentially, the device (which is a Pluton X2) combines voice synthesis and chance somehow, and gives you a handful of switches and a couple of buttons to control it with.



dig that sexy beast. the eye in the center lights up, too, for added mystery and fun.

i'm still working out how to do things with it. but as one of the few instruments/ devices i've found that i can't control (yet), it really captivates me in a strange way. i'm sure a lot of strange samples will be extracted from it, too. i'll probably get to play around with it more over the next few days. considering utilizing it for some odd sounds behind the Kirkdorffer/ Kowalski project. could be fun.

anyway... t max is back over friday night to finish off his song. the commercial project is awaiting word from the agency. i got that in early, and i'm hoping the song will be embedded in their heads enough that we'll have a leg up on the competition. worked with neil (the banilow collaborator) on it, and chuck showed up saturday to pick up a cable. while he was over, we took advantage of his considerable musical talent. he pitched in some ideas to improve things musically, and he played some great guitar for us. if i'd have played those guitar parts, it would've taken twice as long to get something half as good, so that was great.

wish us luck!

stay tuned for more...

books, baseball and music

been writing a lot lately, making some good progress on the new onlyone record. some shapes and colours are becoming apparent, and the new stuff has a wild sound to it. very excited about this.

just got word about a baseball-related recording project that will be very time-sensitive. gonna start working on that tonight. this will be really cool if it pans out, and i think it could. i'll be in pretty stiff competition with some production houses across the country, so it's by no means a given. but what fun anyway! my hat will be in the ring with the rest of 'em, and why not me, huh?

next week i'm helping T Max record a demo of his anti-war song for later production with a full band. that'll be cool, as i've played with T before but have never had him over for recording in the studio.

just finished reading this GREAT Teddy Roosevelt book The River of Doubt, about his trip through the Amazon rainforest surveying an as-yet-unsurveyed major tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil. very well-written, quite a page-turner. and very informative, too. it wasn't happy just describing the adventures of the group, which were many and each more dangerous than the last, but it also delved into the extremely diverse ecology of the rainforest, the isolation of this portion of the world and its unique effect upon the evolution of species within its basin, South American history and more. one of the more surprisingly fascinating detours was a foray into the myriad of different tree species and how they compete for their reproductivity.

an amazing book. i was disappointed to finish it so quickly. this morning on the way out i grabbed It's A Slippery Slope, by Spalding Grey. this was one of the books i got Lexi for christmas. she's already finished them, and i thought if she's such a big fan of his work he's got to be pretty awesome. i'm only familiar with the staged monologues, and i use "familiar" here really just to mean that i've seen them once. just Monster in a Box and Grey's Anatomy.

i saw Grey's first, and it really put me off right from the top.

**** darrell, if you're by chance reading, you'll want to skip this part. ****

the beginning was various "real people" in interview clips describing in succession some sort of horrible eyeball-related accident that they had experienced, and they each describe it with some curious detachment ("...and i looked in the mirror and sure enough there's this 6-inch hunting knife sticking out of my eyesocket..."). and one of them would've made the point. but there were like six in succession.

**** d-man -- you can tune back in now ****

so, that being the introduction to mr. grey's work, this is how familiar i am with him. once the heebie-jeebies subsided, i did finish Grey's Anatomy, and it was quite good. Monster in a Box was even better. i like his style.

so anyway, i'm only a few pages or so into Slippery Slope now. but it flows nicely. enjoying it a lot so far.

wish me luck on the baseball piece!