>>Nostalgia For Infinity

[Young Archie approaches me, holding a toy truck.]

Archie: Where is this?

Me: Where is that? In your hand?

Archie: It’s a truck!

Happy Wednesday, I’m on holiday!

A few weeks back my band spent the day in Studio 284, Brighton’s number one seafront-based DIY punx recording studio. I figured I’d write a little diary-style piece to celebrate our first crack at proper recording.

Why were we there? We wanted to record a three-track demo for two reasons: firstly, so that we could acquire a new bassist once Jake heads off to spend three months in Japan, and secondly, to try and convince promoters to give us more shows. Sans bassmonkey that second point might prove tricky, but hey, we’re thinking ahead.

Unfortunately I don’t have any mixed and mastered copies of the recordings as yet. We ran over the slot we’d paid for by a couple of hours and still didn’t quite get everything done. The only really problematic bit of what we got was in the vocals, which aren’t great. Ben (singer and lead guitarist) is planning to re-record these but it may be a few weeks before this gets done. Some of the guitar and drum parts were also a bit sloppy, but the drums don’t matter since we were playing to their rhythm anyway. It’s just the guitars, really, which are occasionally slightly out during the faster parts where both Ben and I are palm-muting. I’ve always sucked at palm-muting really fast. Still, fingers crossed this can be ironed out in the mix, and hopefully then I’ll be able to at least get some vocalless masters to put up here soon so you can check those out.

I took my camera down with the intention of taking some photos but ended up not bothering. It turned out to be way more fun to drink and listen to / play music. Who knew? So anyway, I turned up later than everyone else as I had to work the morning, but when I arrived we were still getting the drum tracks down. Jack has only been drumming – with us and at all – for about four months, and thanks to Jake skipping town we’ve not practiced as a band in the last two. So, it figures that those would take a while, but eventually they were done. Then Jake mocked us all by recording all of his bass parts in the first couple of takes. The bastard.

Ben got his guitar parts down in about an hour, including setup, and then it was my turn… I took about two hours, most of which was spent on our fastest and most complex song, ‘Like Corpses’. The final recording of it wasn’t perfect but it was about as tight as I was going to get it in the circumstances. Fortunately, after spending an hour repeatedly trying to get that bastard perfect, I went back to my favourite song (‘The Bus Song’) and nailed a perfect take. Woohoo! Fortunately Austin, 284 recording chap and he of Flatpig, convinced me to play with his Les Paul which was a damn good call. It is a nice guitar and for the first time I want something to play instead of my Epiphone SG.

The vocals took a while to get going since the first pair of headphones Ben tried were screwed up in a weird way: the recording came through fine, but his own vocals were entirely inaudible. So the first few takes were pretty bad! They got better once we switched out the ‘phones for another pair, but we didn’t have time to get them spot on as we had just 10 minutes to get some backing vox down for ‘Like Corpses’ (which has a three-headed shout at the start of the chorus) and ‘Down With The Ship’ (which I do some backing gruffness on during the chorus, and which Jake busts out his finest scream crunk screeching for the bridge). As luck would have it I got the broken headphones so couldn’t hear myself, but apparently my policy of “if in doubt, max the gruff” worked out.

It was fucking good fun and honestly, I can’t wait to get writing more songs and get back in the studio… it’s a helluva lot less pant-wetting than playing live, hahaha.

An advert for an Israeli mobile phone service provider which purports to show how the segregation wall can be good fun:

The less light-hearted results of an attempt to reproduce the advert:

Both videos originally found via the Tomb (one and two).

There’s a good discussion in the comments thread of a post in Nick Mamatas’s livejournal. (If you’ve not figured this fact out already, Nick’s blog is equal parts funny and intelligent – both the posts and the comments.)

I figured out when I was in my mid teens that ‘getting’ music was about familiarisation, or “acclimatisation” as I put it at the time (I used to scuba dive). That is, you needed to hear something enough times, hear enough variations on a theme, get sufficiently intimate with the conventions of a genre in order to get where it was coming from… to be able to parse the structure and language and aesthetics and so on. When I was younger and someone gave me the first Deftones album I just didn’t understand it. It was so loud, so distorted, that all I heard was noise – everything just smushed together into a mess. But I persevered because so many people said it was good, and eventually I got used to it, heard some more metal bands, and it all began to make sense to my ears. It didn’t take long to realise this didn’t only apply to music.

I guess this is part of the reason why I’ve always been so enthusiastic about trying out new things since then. Once you realise that not liking things is often just a result of not understanding it, it’s hard to walk away. I’m sure a lot of smarter kids figured this out when they were much younger, so I figured I had (and have) a lot of catching up to do. Besides, once you know all the rules it’s time to break them, right? That bit of received wisdom was drummed into me by a hundred how-to-write guides.

An unfortunate side effect of keeping an open mind is you can be too forgiving of mediocrity, purely through trying to see if there’s something more in there, buried deeper than you’ve gotten. Genuine awfulness is easy to spot, yet it’s tempting to keep trying with something that seems to promise more than it offers. But no, some songs, books, films etc. are just too average to be worth much of your time.

London’s LR Rockets play new wave-inspired electro-indie in a style that’s pretty popular right now. As always this is a hit and miss situation; they have a lot of potential fans out there, but they’ll have to clamour to get themselves noticed amongst hordes of all-too-derivative bands. In fairness to this quintet, however, they’ve got a knack for a catchy up-tempo tunes and I can see the a-side track ‘Renee Loves Losers’ going down well on a hundred indie rock dancefloors.I dig the 70s-style UK punk guitar work as well; reminds me faintly of the Vibrators and their ilk. B-side ‘OK Let’s Talk’ jumps out less immediately but it’s got a similarly frantic vocal delivery and a neat refrain in the chorus.

Apparently the band have already toured with The Horrors and Of Montreal so if they continue writing catchy tunes I can see them doing well for themselves. I’m not blown away myself and, despite the hooky, well-polished nature of the tunes, I wish there was a little more depth, rawness or passion on display to elevate LR Rockets above their legion contemporaries. Horses for courses: if a guitar band rocking it disco-style floats your boat, you may want to check these fellas out.

LR Rockets MySpace | Ctrl Alt Del Records

Steven Deighan has been plugging away in the indie horror scene for almost a decade now, and published his first collection in 2006 (which I reviewed for now-defunct site Yet Another Book Review). It was a promising if unpolished set of stories and I felt it was worth keeping an eye on Deighan’s work. Now, along with illustrator Terry Cooper, he brings us a short graphic novel titled ‘Feels Like Stephen King’. At a bit under 40 pages it’s more of a graphic short story than a graphic novel, but who’s counting? Aside from hardcore comics fans who are already grumbling at my use of the term “graphic novel”, of course…

Deighan’s story focuses on a somewhat autobiographical subject: Eric Bain, a young horror writer who is struggling to get his work noticed by a publisher. As the story opens he receives a returned manuscript in the post, and at first is filled with anger at another rejection. Once he reads the cover letter, however, he realises that DM Publications wish to publish his novel ‘The Dying Game’. As his relationship with the head of the publishing house develops, however, Eric finds that his life is beginning to resemble something out of one his stories.

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Del.icio.us links for July 13th through July 26th:

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[There was a totally hilarious picture of a boxer dog right here, but I was getting too much dumb traffic from people googling "lol", so I deleted it.]

If you’ve not been following, which is sensible, but want to get clued up, which is not, I’d recommend going here and sniggering at the fail on display. This is also amusing.

The most amusing thing is that genre magazines continue to use this sort of awful, juvenile artwork. Publishers should consider offering free pull-out brown paper bags in which to conceal your sordid little fantasies and skiffies. Even TTA’s Interzone, which has had a lot of great covers and artwork, has fallen into this painful trap on a few occasions.

I’ve never been particularly fond of following award ceremonies or prize schemes, usually happy to instead meander along my own exploratory routes through culture old and new. By which I mean I tend to have rarely read more than one book on any given shortlist before voting season rolls up, and thus don’t feel particularly qualified to choose what I think is best. Nonetheless I’ve found the nominations and winners of various past awards interesting, and sometimes I’ve even gotten involved despite myself.

I sat in on the 2007 and 2008 British Science Fiction Association award ceremonies, having voted, and watched genre luminaries win endearingly DIY trophies. I have the blurred photos of Ian McDonald to prove it. Sometimes I’ve experienced the momentary flush of anger when it turned out that the views of the majority didn’t correspond with my own. The Interzone readers poll is one that I’ve sometimes participated in since I’m a subscriber who reads every story. Of course I’m also absent-minded with a poor long-term memory, so sometimes I opt not to vote as it would involve re-reading a half-dozen magazines.

It’s great to see friends do well with polls and awards – such as Gareth Powell’s excellent ‘Ack Ack Macaque’ topping last year’s readers’ poll – and the one time a short story of mine was nominated for an award’s longlist ranks among my warmest and fuzziest of writerly memories.

But for the most part I’ve not gotten involved and stood instead on the sidelines, as an observer. There are a lot of anecdotal reasons to be cynical about awards. » Read the rest of this entry «

Yup, I reviewed a DVD collection of one of Adult Swim’s dumbest comedies. Because I love it. It is deeply silly and a great deal of fun, and it was very strange to write a review of the show that treated it seriously. Still, I managed it, and you can read my review here.

I totally intend to get back on the music reviewage bandwagon soon, and also – ALSO! – hope to write a few bits of flash fiction to post up here. I suppose my promises sound a bit empty at this point but my good intentions are there, paving the road to hell.