Another great practice – we have the arrangement of “You Have / You Are” finalized. Zakula and I are gonna workshop some new bass lines for variety this week, and other than some vocal work in the mid section – it’s done. “Squinted” is done – tight as fuck, just needs vocals. We did more work on Jason’s new drone synth guitar piece – first time with Zakula – and we just nailed it. It’s not even three practices old and it already sounds great – it can only get better.
I’ll try and get a few practice MP3’s up next week.
In other news:
Sushi Typhoon – Slapstick-ing the living hell out of ultra low budget gore films. I was a teenage gore-hound, had a subscription to Fangoria and everything, but I grew up. Movie violence got more sadistic and less fantastical as the 90’s wore on – I had no interest in it. Sushi Typhoon seem to both revel in the more mind blowing aspects of 80’s horror movies while, weirdly enough, removing the sadism and replacing it with a level of 3 Stooges dopiness. While I hesitate to call a style of film that routinely has people reduced to hunks of quivering flesh “cute”, I’m having trouble describing some of their marquee titles (Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, The Machine Girl, Yakuza Weapon, TOKYO GORE POLICE, Mutant Girls Squad, Dead Ball etc.) otherwise.
Zakula was out on Sunday due to being incarcerated for a fatal Road Rage incident NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS!
Sean, Jason and I finalized the arrangement on ‘You Have / You Are’, a track that had been giving us some amount of trouble, but well worth it.
We then moved on to a track Jason has been working on which is a fantastic piece of ambient guitar synth that Sean braced with the PERFECT drum part that is… I dunno, amazing. This track is hypnotic, but without succumbing to that soma-coma that dominates a lot of this type of material. For the want of a better word, it actually grooves.
In Zakula related news, like I said last week, she had brought in the Angry Goat pedal – and it sounds great, but I felt like it could use more low end – a problem with any bass fuzz. This week I realized – duh! – I have one of those Boss Bass Synthesizer pedals:
I’ve had this thing forever and never really found a worthwhile use for it. Well, this was it! After some extensive tweaking and playing around with a bass and a similar fuzz (one that has a blend knob) I was able to dial in a sound that had a booming low end shot through with a blast of grimy dirt. In addition to that there were some cool additional effects I achieved beyond the typical ‘pew pew’ sound that seems to be what this pedal wants to do about 90% of the time.
ANOTHER great practice. A lot of hard work on everyone’s part – the vocals are the only thing left, though those probably won’t get ironed out until we record (more on this later). Mmmm, what to say… we focused on the provisionally titled “Aluminum” (not the final title, and a very embryonic version can be heard in our Box.net box on the sidebar), “Linear” a song that I imagine will be a highlight when it’s all said and done, and my newer contribution, “You Have, You Are”.
“Aluminum” is all but finished, musically speaking. It starts with a brittle post-punk / folk sort of sequence before getting into the noisy ‘gale force’ guitars before switching gears into a – dub isn’t really accurate – but it has aspects of that kind of rhythm, but the guitars are more ‘downtown NY’ if that means anything to you. Pretty cool.
“You Have, You Are” started good, needed something to take it out further and – dammit we did it. Now we’ve gotta figure out how to get back!
Skip from Untied States came and checked out our recording set up last week – we’ll be doing some demos with him at the helm pretty soon.
In other news:
Got a copy of the Cirio H Santiago ‘Maxploitation’ epic Wheels Of Fire this past week. On deteriorating, video store vet VHS to boot! Awesome Junk to be sure, by the Master of Awesome Junk. The basic premise is the same as all of these movies: Post-Nuke ex-cop drives a bad ass (nuke powered!) car around the wasteland after some shoulder-pad wearing bad guys who kidnapped his big boobed sister – Mayhem ensues!!!
Practice was, despite Zakula’s absence due to pending interstate trafficking charges a headache, fantastic. Becoming increasingly bored with my guitar part on ‘Conflict Palace’ I retooled it to be more textural with some delay and fast ‘black metal’ style tremolo picking for the verses and changed out the dunder-head power chording at the songs finale for a single note counter melody that fits into with the new endings ‘decay’.
We worked a bit on ‘Aluminum’s crescendo – I like my part, I need to work a bit on the tone. Not exactly sure which way to go – right now it’s very spiky but I feel like it’s perhaps too thin for the part – the trick will be in pedal pushing as I have no free time to twist knobs.
We hadn’t played ‘Linear’ in so long I lost the timing on the one part I needed to hit and by then we were so spent we just called it a day. Overall – fantastic!
Something big may or may not happen this week so send some good vibes our way that it works out because it could be a great development for the group. If it happens I’ll let you know!
In other business…
I’ve been on a British comics kick as of late – heavily digging back into the 2000AD adventures of Judge Dredd and his world of Mega City 1, as well as the comic that preceded 2000AD – the then controversial mid-70’s anthology title – ACTION. In it is a strip called Death Game 1999. Well, Death Game 1999 is a slighty (read: barely) modified version of the popular 1975 film ROLLERBALL starring James Caan (The Godfather, Thief) and directed by Norman Jewison (The Thomas Crown Affair, Moonstruck).
Which of course got me thinking about how excellent and weird that movie – and most pre-Star Wars 1970’s sci-fi – was. The movie is about a dystopian future (about 5 steps away from our very real present) where the corporations fought it out and nearly destroyed the world. The funny part is that – unlike our reality – the corporations in Rollerball made no attempt to hide what their wars were for. In the end what few corporations that survived have taken complete control of society and rule the masses with mindless entertainment (sounding more and more familiar, no?).
One of the most effective is the ‘sport’ of Rollerball. Rollerball is part hockey, part rollerderby (which was hot shit in the seventies), part motorsports and all ultra-violent. Though the object of the game is to put a large metal ball into a magnetic chute for points, it quickly becomes apparent that the real point is to satiate the public’s lust for blood. Crippling injuries and even death are commonplace in the Rollerball velodrome and, as such, the sport’s heroes are quickly replaced. This is no mistake as it is revealed that there is a lesson being taught to society through Rollerball – the individual is useless.
The Houston Energy team is headed by veteran player Jonathan E (James Caan) who is being pressured from all sides to retire, even though he is the best, and most recognized, player to ever hit the velodrome. When he balks at the idea, the game is changed to become even more violent than it already is in an effort to force him out (or get him killed). Of course, in the end he rises above (grimly, at that) proving that – yes- one man can make a difference, etc. etc. In short, it’s awesome, like most 70’s satirical science fiction (Death Race 2000, Mad Max, A Clockwork Orange, Logan’s Run etc.).
Practice was pretty good. Jason unfortunately couldn’t make it due to his contract killer duties taking his son to his basketball game, so we focused on tightening up “Squinted” and “You Have / You Are”. “Squinted” is probably the tightest thing we’ve got going and I’m very happy with it. “You Have / You Are” is going through some arrangement calisthenics; necessary, for sure, but not exactly sure what we’ll end up doing. Sean tried out changing the accent on the bridge and it’s shifted the track into a less ‘pounding’ but darker place – that much is working. We worked with Zakula on adding some more bits to some of the long stretches in the verse, though we’ve generally got it worked out we didn’t put it into play. I pretty much trust her instincts on when to hit it and she’ll probably improve on the root notes we agreed on, so that’s cool.
In other news – yes, we’re changing the name from Uncanny Valley to something else. Nothing as of yet, though a few possibles have arisen. Coming up a good name is actually very difficult – the synergy between meaning, simplicity and appeal is nothing short of alchemy. If you pick something from the real world, as we did, there’s a good chance someone else has as well (or numerous someone else’s – or increasing numbers of someone else’s) while picking something too esoteric risks not only coming off as pretentious (not that big a deal to us – I’ll indulge on a later post) but of being forgotten because no one can recall, say, ‘Arum Obscurum’.
My vote was for Vibrar Vaqueros – “To Vibrate Jeans” in Spanish, but everybody just laughed.
And, because simple text is too dull to survive in our modern internet, enjoy the weirdest giant monster movie ever – Big Man Japan:
Step Into The Outer Hall 