everything about this is wrong/re: new Yakuza record- repost for a new friend

This is a typically ill-advised, insomniac ramble I’d posted last year-ish on fastfude.com, the completely awesome home of bands & fans of contempo music in Northern Ireland. BTW, from here on until forever, I’ll probably write ‘NI’ or ‘norniron’ instead of Northern Ireland. This I put up right after we’d gotten the new Yakuza record back from mastering (by Stephen Quinn in Dublin). My first references to living in Sasquatchland, I think.

This was on the thread http://fastfude.org/topic.php?id=34513 “New Yakuza Track”… I think the song-at-mention “We Are Not The Rolling Stones” is still up at http://www.myspace.com/novarecordsonline … I’d look but that would require effort.

So, to reinforce my own neurosis that I am indeed irrevocably deranged, I’m re-posting the sprawling mess here. A new net pal asked about it so I went looking, amen:

“http://fastfude.org/topic.php?id=34513&start=15
posted by: dubhdavidblack Fri 29th May 2009, 10:01 am GMT

i hear all the kids are now into ‘MüDBÿíTCH’ and ‘Slÿïppprëÿ Giÿupzÿë LÿpppSchtïK’ round yer way… what is the dark secret history of these two groups? And where does this ‘Yakuza’ ensemble fit into the picture? Why not even a single umlaut? 
Will there be further recorded documentation of this revolutionary period of NI music?

Is it some akin to, like, the triumvirate of Foghat, Grand Funk Railroad, and Badfinger all just oozing out of an erotic, yet oddly pungent mist? Dare I dream it akin to Air Supply, Daniel O’Donnell, and somebody’s toothless great-grannie in an L.A. hot tub 3-way soap rub?

On the topic of your own forthcoming ‘Long-Playing-Recorded-Album’ in general…
I just wish you boys would turn down those noise-adder foot-units you insist on playing perfectly decent guitars through. For goodness sake, even young Phillip has purposefully chosen to add distortolative and screechy Satan-farts to what was once a respectable instrument. Boys, if you have to shout to be heard, your electric guitar hi-fi set-ups are just too loud. And the drummer is going to put out an eye with those sticks and the hitting those metal splasher-disks so hard. Sooner or later, someone is going to get laryngitis or break a nail or a sprained anus even, the way you all have carried on.

And on this “tumbling stones” number here… the whole sound is wrong wrong WRONG. This sounds NOTHING like Miley Cyrus or even ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, if you insist on a reference that’ll appeal to your ‘underground sensibilities’. How do you expect to meet Oprah or get harshly buggered by a Big Record Company if you insist on making records that sound like you’re playing live, at say, a stadium in Leeds for example, 30-some years ago, or maybe some stone cottage in Wales, for godsake. And to take an instrument of the CHURCH, an Organ, the lord’s 2nd favorite instrument*, and soiling it in your immoral stew of fetid caterwaulings…

And then, you go flying into the heart of Sasquatch and redneck country with your music to let some diseased lunatic abduct and molest it? What was he doing all that time? It sounds as if the whole band was playing in the same room, at the same time even. And the vocals are like they were recorded in a big wooden room, or something, with a human singer– hasn’t that syphilitic anarchist pervert out in Portland heard of gating and Auto-Tune? It’s as if he was intentionally emphasizing the actual rooms you recorded things in! You should have water-boarded him immediately.

Since you yourselves recorded it, why didn’t you stuff the drums with pillows, and each of you be properly isolated in an anechoic, subterranean vault? Ewww, it’s icky when there’s leakage between mics! No mic should ever EVER be used in recording, except for the 5 min. it takes to collect the various phonemes needed for the computer to construct a PERFECT VOCAL TRACK©

And you still actually use acoustic drums?! Are you stuck in the dark ages, or are you high on insecticide or what? Ding ding!–2009 calling! GarageBand has everything you should ever use, including guitars and drum loops that’ve been thoroughly focus-group tested to have peak demographic appeal. Get that and AutoTune. Plus, there’ll be loads less cursing and brawling once that slacker-drummer-malcontent of yours goes and gets a REAL job. THAT’s how real ‘records’ are made. THAT is how you’ll get those lucrative mall tours.

And remind me, which one of the yakuzars is the big-lipped, highly strung, underage junkie? Well for fk sakes, if you’ve got that in the band, then you don’t even need to bother with songs, just make sure he’s the front-man. The rest of you focus on Pilates and Tai Chi and finding the very best team of stylists you can. Rule of thumb: pick the ones with the most improbable names and accents. When in doubt, pick the one wearing jodhpurs and a mesh top. Yes, I know that’s how you picked the Portland guy to mix it, but that rule doesn’t apply to technicians or musicians, just hair/makeup/wardrobe & choreographers– the artists in the project.

You know nowadays, you can get cheap third-world sweatshops & child prison labor to manufacture your whole album, and you all just mime sexily along.

crap i knew i should’ve logged off hours ago.
dear god….quick your task is to use “L.A. hot tub 3-way soap rub” as a title and write a song around it. Hmm and probably ‘Sprained Anus’ as well.

*the Lord’s very favorite instrument is, of course, a tie between the contra-basoon, Theremin, and hurdy-gurdy.
yeah… ‘nite. we shall never speak of this night again”

skypellation. No citations, so ©®™ me, 10 March 2010. Woo.

No hint of it via googlington or Urban Dictionary. SO:

Skypellation: A user-name, alias, or appellation used as both ‘address’ and identifier by a user of Skype, or other internet/video chat applications.

Yeah, I know really it’s about 5 years past relevant. But this is the sort of thing insomniacs do.

On a tangential trail, parkinson’s & handwriting don’t mix. Here’s a trippy brain-rewiring-itself instance: I’ve written left-handed exclusively all my life, and the ‘dominant’ side is generally first affected by parkinson’s. So over the last couple years, my handwriting has become tinier, scrawlier(hmmm must check Urban Dic for that, too), and pretty much unintelligible. BUT, about 4 months ago, my heretofore-mute (sure why not) right hand just picked up a pen when I needed to take a note. It wrote that note, more readable than anything I’ve hand-written in years. Trip, no? It isn’t perfect, but fkn hell it’s a blessing.

the hugh/fred/elaine & (tba) project

Hugh Hopper, April 29, 1945-June 11, 2009. Hoping to do him proud with this record.

This is going to be a lovely, fascinating project to be a part of. Hugh Hopper was a huge part of the best years of Soft Machine, with a groundbreaking (really~) distorted and melodic bass style. He really was an original among other innumerable, under-acknowledged innovators. Hugh and Soft Machine never really stopped being an influence on the progression of ‘rock’ and many sub-sub-sub-genres thereof. I’m not the only musoid here in the Specific NorthWest* who played in a somehow-Soft Machine influenced band in 90’s Seattle… or is in one now, in towns from here to Japan, taking the long route round.

I will probably disintegrate with glee if we’re able to include even half of the guest performers we hope to involve.

Hugh made some great records in the last 15 years with the core of Fred Chalenor (bass) and Elaine diFalco (piano-esque instruments and her emotive, incantatory voice!). They’d been corresponding regularly right up until Hugh’s passing last June, and Hugh left us with reams of sheet music & tons of audio source material to arrange and build on. To say I’m thrilled to be involved in the producing/contributing/whatever-ing is a Mariana Trench of an understatement.

Our only goal is to make something that Hugh would love. It’s going to take a considerable amount of time. We really don’t have an end date in mind, but I bet we’ve something for you to hear by the solstice, if only because I recently had a dream that we would. Dang it was fun today, working here with Fred.

This video is of a Soft Machine classic- Moon In June. If you can’t swing the whole 9’15”, just drop in from about 6’15” and ride the climax. It’s quite interesting to me that this vid was shot 2 weeks after I was born, maybe I heard it in the cradle… my folks were pretty into the outré music that was available to them…. in 1969 Texas…

*SNW= Specific North West, USA. Outlanders might call it the Pacific North West/PNW but I like this toim better. the area encompassing sorta vancouver, b.c. through bellingham, seattle, olympia, portland, eugene, between the pacific and the mountains…)

blue scraped sky

6’44 am March 5. Lovely sunrise again today. I’ve started a scorched dozen blogs across 2 centuries, none of which grew to even a months solid postings. It being 6’58 am after a no-sleeper, how brief this will be! Likely the shortest post I’ll ever lay. Eventually, we’ll get into ‘Atypical/Young Onset Parkinsonism’; audio recording & production techniques and projects I’m involved in; I’ll make rash statements about politics in the states & various countries that I have no business making; I will serve punch and pie.