Filed under: Daily Grind
29th July 2007
I’m so tired today. Last night was a little wild. But fun. Especially when I started thinking I could do back flips, citing the rationale “You just have to trust yourself”. It was the Gin speaking. Hillarious. Glad I only ended up doing a forward role. Its all to do with g-forces I guess. Its something I know is in be but I just don’t know how to unlock it. I suggested attempting a flip from and elevated surface… but everyone thought that would be even more dangerous. Suffice to say, the worries about spinal cord injuries got the better of me.
I’ve managed to banish the grizzley hangover and I’m now eating ambrosia rice pudding. Its really nice. I’m heading to the practice room in a few minutes to demo the song which I was stressing about the other day. Hopefully it’ll come out well. I can feel that there’s something thats gonna have to be re-done though. Something about it isnt quite right just yet. I hope I prove myself wrong. It happened before with the last tune I wrote.
30th July 2007
So I headed back to the practice room today to tack guitar and bass. Again. I felt it was a bit sketchy yesterday. I still feels its a bit sketchy, but its okay. Some parts of the song need to be looked at. Especially then end of the bridge. But it has some excellent parts. Hopefully I can resolve my issues with it. I hate it when things get like this. I cant stop stressing over songs when they arent quite right. Recording is so close and it just makes me worry.
A quick band practice with my other band ensued, then mixing and stressing all night. Jeez. Lets see what happens tomorrow ey? More video soon.
Filed under: Daily Grind
Song writing is so fucking stressful. Constantly trying to out-do yourself and raise the bar on old material, but maintain the aspects which you like and motifs from the past. We’re writing new material to record mid-August. Lots of it is sounding good, but when you progress in writing songs and develop free-flowing structures with almost zero repetiton, it gets difficult to make the sections cohesive. Especially when you write the start and end sections, and someone else writes the middle and you’re supposed to make it work without making the song 4 minutes long.
I have a general rule that 2 mins 40 seconds is the perfect time for a song. This is getting pushed these days though. I’m moving to around 3 minutes now. This one might turn out to be 3 mins 30. I guess its okay if not every song is that standard length, but I do get bored by long drawn-out songs (with the exception of Propagandhi and anthrax… and a few others.) But I realise songs get boring.
I also realise that you can try to be interesting and have virtually no repeated parts… and by following that path you can verge on weird. I know from experience. I wrote some weird songs last year, most of which ended up being re-written about 6 months later much to my chagrin, in a much less experimental format.
So this new material is complex, interesting and difficult to perform. But I find myself appreciating slow music a lot more these days. I mean, sure, I admire technical music and enjoy playing it. But some people have the ability to discard complex musical sections and write awesome melodies and chord progressions. Its a hard thing to mix the two styles that I love. Simple and effective yet fucking awesomely tech.
I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how they come out. We have some great music and excellent lyrics this time. A lot has changed in a year. For the better I hope. I’m sure everything will come together in the end. We’re demoing some stuff tomorrow which will be fun. I enjoy doing that. I’m sure we’ll be able to revise sections and improve it for the real recording in August if need be.
Thats all.
Filed under: The Channel
This episode, or should I say Thrashisode, is an amalgamation of clips taken around the 25th of July… and earlier. Some of it dates back to Spring 2006 I think. Happy Birthday Tony Forbes. Hope you are having a shit day… it would match your trainwreck of a personality/life.
Only joking. Or am I?
I may be off for drinks today. That may be fun.
More video tomorrow? Perhaps. If I can shit a video out every 2 or 3 days thats good going I think.
No video today. Definately no video today. Maybe tomorrow when I have some more material. Last night the following plan proved too much to handle:
- Get stupidly drunk.
- Film it.
Only half of the plan was accomplished. I’ll let you deduce which half it was from the lack of footage and excess of headache. So I took a trip to Marc Mallan’s house with a bottle of my finest vodka and proceeded to drink until the wee hours whilst watching a mixture of top notch music dvds and Curb Your Enthusiasm series four. What a great show.
Today is a little less eventful than the past week. A band practice with my other band then home. Should be quick and painless. I need to borrow Jord’s guitar though. I’ll go in half an hour. I dont want to move too fast. I’ll probably do myself a mischief.
I wouldn’t like that.
While I’m here I’ll take a few moments to explain about how the blog is going to work as far as organization is concerned. If you want video clips only, its best to click on “The Channel” to the left of the page. It’ll be a lot easier than sifting through monthly archives once lots of content is posted. Apply the same reasoning to the other headings to the left, and that’s how things will be organized. Aren’t you clever? Yes.
Filed under: The Channel
So yesterday our band was booked to play a gig in Newcastle at Moot for Violent Crime’s last ever gig, but also to support Power Corrupts and Big Difference along with Kanashibara. As evidenced in the video above, we set off from our respective houses, picked up cabs and heads from the practice room and made our way to the venue.
After initially worrying we were late, we arrived to find no one had arrived except some young teens who were eager to see the show. They were kicked out which is shitty. Mark probably would have made some more cash to pay his deposit and the touring bands if they were allowed in.
About five minutes later Mark arrived and we set about carrying all the gear into the basement. Moot has changed a lot! It used to be called The Stout Fiddler and the interior was a lot like a normal pub at ground level, with a basement which looked pretty run-down. Almost like a cave. Its basically a trendy wine-bar now. Not cool.
We played our set after a late start. A few technical difficulties such as a sliding bass drum and shit PA, but we really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. Plenty of people were there and its a really tiny place so it was cool to look at from the front. Even the odd jive from the crowd in ska sections was seen. Unheard of? Almost.
Everyone played great. Power Corrupts had some nice Ska sections. We had met their bassist Dullah before in his other band Black Bats when they supported Mad Conductor with us. Nice guy!
Things got nice and rowdy when Big Difference took to the stage. It was running late all night basically and they only got about 15 minutes on stage, but they were cool. We finally doozled back to the practice room at 11:30pm and after unloading everything, arrived home at about 12:30am. A good night. Cheers to Mark for sorting that out!
More video tomorrow probably.
Filed under: The Channel
I hate horrible music. Especially when people from Consett make it. So here is a trailer for the Channel. How wonderful I hear you exclaim. More video tomorrow!
Filed under: General
And here we have it! The first (and probably last) post on this brand new page. What will follow, is the realization of one of my wildest dreams in a blogging format. I hope you will stick around for this extravaganza.
Thrasher is the (pseudo)name, blogging, it would appear, is the game. Well. According to the droves of mundane, self-indulgent assholes who insist on posting material which should have been resigned to a public toilet decades ago (had the medium been realized back then, of course.)
So as not to reveal too much I shall leave it at that for now. Stay. Tuned. Assholes.
