>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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.

Oh hey, I missed the zombie apocalypse again. Bummer.

Kinda neat to see that what started out as a joke among a few SF&F crit blogs has taken on a life of its own though.

Everything is better with zombies. <3

I don’t tend to post band news up here unless a band I really like splits up, but Warren – drummer with Against Me! for a good eight years – has just left the band. Or been fired, depending on whose version of events you read – follow that link for the statements. Sad times indeed. Warren is a fantastic drummer and a real friendly guy; although I only spoke to him briefly once or twice myself, it’s pretty much universal opinion that he was one bona fide cool guy. Apparently his next project will be running a Mexican restaurant in Gainesville. If I ever make it over to Florida for the Fest, I’ll have to try a few tacos.

It’ll be interesting to see where Against Me! go from here. New Wave cemented their shift in direction – a process clearly begun with Searching For A Former Clarity – away from the aggressive folk-punk of their youth and towards a more mainstream rock sound. Last year Tom Gabel – founder, singer and guitarist – released the solo record Heart Burns, an EP which was hailed by some as a return to his roots but which to me lacked the passion that made early Against Me! so utterly, brilliantly vital.

I hold no grudges against the band for ‘selling out’, and respect Tom’s efforts to lyrically document the process of being drawn into the major label music industry, but New Wave is merely a good record to me. It is a far cry from Crimes As Forgiven By, a record which hit me so hard and was so important to me that it seems fair to deploy an old cliche – it was a record that changed my life. Ironically, Crimes predated Warren’s involvement in the band (at that time Against Me! was Tom on guitar and vox, Kevin Mahon on bucket drums). So now it seems that things may have come full circle, concluding my love affair with the most important band of my early twenties.

All the same… it’ll be interesting to see where the band go from here.

Yes, we have another show. A mere five and a half months after our first! The world of rock & roll is fast-paced and demanding, and many get left behind. But not we: we have seized the reigns and are clinging firmly to the frenzied horse of punk rock.

Okay, actually, our drummer quit right after Christmas, we took a couple of months out, and we found a new drummer in March/April. We’ve had about a half dozen practices now and everything is going well, so when we got offered the chance to play with Chillerton and Cheap Girls we jumped at the chance. Actually, I like Chillerton enough that I had a little jaw-drop moment when I heard. I must’ve listened to their side of the split EP with When All Else Fails a hundred times.

Anyway, we’re on first, so I’m guessing that’ll be at about half seven, eight-ish. After us is Kept By Casino (who were Jalopy), then Chillerton, and finally touring US band Cheap Girls.

We play melodic rock with a sort of punky edge. Lots of harmonics and octave chords. We like that. I’m not sure what Kept By Casino play, but I’ve read “too indie to be punk; too post-hardcore to be indie and too punk to be post-hardcore. Fans of McLusky take note!” MySpace page is here. Chillerton play melodic hardcore / gruff pop-punk in the vein of No Idea, but with a South Coast spin. Cheap Girls play power pop that’s reminiscent of Smoking Popes and the Lemonheads. It looks like being a varied, fun line-up, plus it’s £FREE! So do come down and check it out. And if you like what is fed to your ears, bung some cash in the donation bucket so that the tour can afford petrol and food.

Click on the flyer thumbnail to see a bigger version. Facebook event page here, Last.fm event page here.

[ P.S. I'll be getting back from ATP the same day as this gig, so I will be hilariously hungover and tired. I am sure that this is a recipe for Inevitable Good Times. ]

Okay, okay. I’ve been terrible for the last few weeks. Without even the del.icio.us round-ups this blog’s been looking like a ghost town. Here’s the thing: I’ve been torn two ways between sleeping really badly (insomnia is no fun) and being really busy with the day job. I know no one reading this gives a rat’s ass about excuses, but that’s yer lot.

I also need to shake up what I’m spending my time on. Project 365! has been fun, but it’s also quite intense and I’m routinely leaving it a fortnight between posts. I think I’m going to knock that little experiment on the head unless anyone is really enjoying it. As in masturbating whilst reading and unable to achieve climax without an update. Project 52! I’ll probably keep going because it doesn’t require such regular updates, and this allows me to think a little deeper and write a little more broadly about the books I’ve read.

I’ve enjoyed the few music reviews I’ve done recently and I want to start doing more of those. Every time I listen to a new record or attend a show I’m thinking about what I can write about it. The actual writing it up part is a bit trickier, but I’ll work something out. Even if it means taking a little notepad to shows and looking like a bit of a dork.

Friday flash fiction: as you’ve no doubt seen there’s been very little of this for a while. I’m pleased that the few people who got back to me about ‘Funeral’ had positive things to say as that was an interesting one to write. Going back a bit further, however, to the week where I posted four stories in five days, I realised that I was pushing myself to achieve quantity rather than quality, and often I was writing up half-formed ideas. ‘Heralded By Iron’ isn’t even an idea: it’s a collection of vaguely cool images. I don’t want to be sharing sub-standard fiction. Or at least, sub-standard for my own meagre abilities.

So as far as the flashfic goes, I’ll post one up when I feel like writing one. No promises. I get the most readers and feedback for my short stories, though, so don’t think this is me abandoning the Glorious Experiment altogether.

I also want to get back into writing longer fiction. In fact I have a couple of novel ideas floating around that I’d like to try and make a start on. It’s been some time since I attempted a novel (not since ’07, I think). This is not even mentioning the dozens of longer short pieces that I need to rewrite and try to get published. Did I mention that I’m lazy and poorly motivated?

Here’s the plan: I’m not going to force myself to meet any sort of schedule. I react poorly to deadlines and very quickly grow to resent them. What I am going to do is write what I want, when I want, as often as I want. This may be a music review or flash fiction or a P52! post or even one of my intermittent political ragebursts, and you folks will see these. Or it may be some work on something longer, and you won’t see these, but if there’s something interesting about the creative process, my mistakes, or my successes, I will probably share these anecdotes. I may even write occasionally about my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic, because our new drummer has pretty much nailed all our old songs and we’re looking to write new material and start gigging again.

Sound fair?

Thanks to everyone who regularly visits this blog: you make it all worthwhile.

I’m not going to pretend these are the best records of 2008. I’ve only heard a tiny fraction of what’s come out, and I listen for pleasure – not to pick out something unique, evolutionary, or a “generational lightning rod” (source: the Observer, predictably). No doubt next year I’ll hear something I missed that will blow me away, and I’ll be kicking myself and mixing metaphors all up the creek without a paddle. But as of right now, at the very end of 2008, these are my favourite albums released this year.

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A bit of WordPress blogstat geekery: I’ve been looking at the posts that have proven most popular over the past year. Predictably, It’s post-a-rejection-letter Friday! is sitting pretty at the top by a wide margin: 1,056 views. This just goes to show that cheeky responses to blogosphere teacup-storms are always good. I was at first mildly horrified when I saw that hitcount zooming skywards, but the responses on various blogs and in comments from people who felt similarly were wonderful. Oh, and this was also the first time I experienced my name being widely misspelled. Hurrah!

Pleasingly, second place is held by my review of Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, with 133 views. It’s been receiving a lot of search engine clickthroughs in the last month – clearly people are starting to pay attention to the book, and damn right too. In third is a post about snatching music and sound files from the game Portal, which is probably assisted in its position by the title (“If at first you don’t succeed, you fail. And the test will be terminated”).

In 4th is my review of issue #2 of Greatest Uncommon Denominator magazine, which also pleases me. The people, they want the good fiction (probably why my own stories appear quite far down this list). In 5th is a linkfest page that places so highly because I linked to it for background/context for the rejection letter furor.

Other worthies are my review of Mitch Clem’s Nothing Nice 2 Say collection, the About Me page (haha), and my most popular piece of Friday flash, We’re Never Going Home!, with 54 views.

Taking my cue from Gareth L. Powell, here are my top ten Friday flash fiction stories of 2008.

1. Our Bright Horizons – A deliberate stylistic and thematic departure from much of what I’d written before. Difficult, but fun.
2. We’re Never Going Home! – the first of a series of latter-’08 tales with titles stolen from my favourite bands, and an attempt to fuse my love of punk rock with my love of surreal fantasy/horror.
3. Interdiction Zone – a mildly amusing – and slightly inhumane – piece of post-apocalyptic SF set in the same dying world as several other F3 tales.
4. Love Story – an experimental piece of fiction that tries to bind language directly into the narrative, a trick I freely admit I stole from Ellis Sharp (who does it much better than me).
5. My Mother the Robot – yet another stylistic experiment, this was written in the style of a young girl’s diary. You can either take it literally, or regard it as the sort of fantasies children develop to deal with parental divorce.
6. Watching the Valves – another post-apocalyptic SF piece which is inspired by both Mad Max 2 and The World Without Us (specifically the chapter about the Texas oil refineries).
7. This Urban Aesthetic – probably one of the few F3 stories I wrote that works well as a stand-alone story. One of only a few of my stories to receive a positive response in Zinos-Amaro’s review of Illuminations.
8. Bitterness the Star – it’s very recent but, to paraphrase Neil, I like the macro/micro scale juxtaposition. Has some thematic similarities with ‘Love Story’, above. I wonder why that might be!
9. Earthbound – the other F3 writers who commented like this quite a lot, perhaps more than I did. Just goes to show that writers oughtn’t listen to themselves too often.
10. Releasing Moments – a flawed 2nd-person perspective experiment that revisits the concept central to Carry These Songs Like a Comfort Wherever You Go.

I think the calibre of my writing has improved greatly over the last 12 months, especially where flash fiction is concerned. I’m proud of these stories.

This year I’ve written 23 pieces of fiction, which is a bit less than one every fortnight. I think my poor output over the last three months has really dragged this figure down. So it goes. Still, ‘Bitterness The Star’ last Friday brought my overall total to 39 pieces (or 40 if you include Excerpts from Eastercon as two, or 39 again if you exclude the over-long Half-day of the Dead). Roll on F3 ’09.

My band, Wrecktheplacefantastic, has its first gig next Friday 28th November. In case you don’t know the lineup, it’s Ben on lead guitar and vox, myself on rhythm guitar and shouting, Jake on bass guitar and screaming, and Fran on drums and not making vocal chordy noises. We play slightly punky melodic rock music – not sure exactly how to define it so why not come see us, then tell us what we are…

The gig itself is The Offcuts’ album launch show, where they’ll be releasing their first album ‘White Horses and the Unicorn’, which from what I’ve heard so far will be a fucking masterpiece of weird, spazzy, jazzy hardcore punk. Seriously, these guys rock. Also playing are the Rolo Tomassi-esque Charlie Uniform November Tango and the very very loud Bunny. If you’re on the Facebook, there are full details here.

If you want to have a listen to the bands:

The Offcuts | C.U.N.T. | Bunny

We don’t have any properly recorded material, soz. At least, nothing with real drums.

You can buy tickets directly directly from me, or Rounder Records / the Punker Bunker. They’re £4 in advance; alternatively, it’s £5 on the door.

Would be great to see some friendly faces out to show us support – for most of us it’ll be the first time we’ve played in front of a crowd. But if you can’t make it no worries – there will be other shows!

This weekend turned out a bit busier than I had planned, so no review writin’ was achieved. I didn’t even get to play with my new home recording gear (very sadface). I’ll probably stick up some photos of that once I’ve got it all set up. Modern technology is great. All I need now is a drum machine or some bucket drums (I’m trying to decide which of the two options appeals more).

Did I mention that my band has a name now? We’re Wrecktheplacefantastic, and we’re gearing up for our first gig which is a mere two months away. Two months! That must sound like an eternity to other, more competent musicians.

Anyway, in lieu of any writing from yours truly, here are some other cool things and stuffs by other peoples on the intertron (done manually, since I’ve not gotten round to fixing my del.icio.us autoposts yet). Small Town America just stuck up their fourth Public Service Broadcast, which I’m still listening to but thus far my ears have been pleased by Disco Drive and Baddies.

Elsewhere, the aforementioned Greg has successfully located his blog and uploaded his first post, which is a consideration of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Seb over at Comics Daily has posted a thorough(ly entertaining) trashing of something called DC Universe Decisions. I hear tell that it is a comic, which is a little like a cartoon except the pictures don’t move and you must read the words yourself.