Hrm, I will endeavor to turn off my verbose brain I think to get this across.

As I write this it is 5am in Los Angeles, my sister left for Toronto this morning en route from a pilgrimage to the mystic ancient city of Machu Pichu in Peru to a Tech trade show in Canton, China.  My uncle Paco is visiting from Ecuador and is sleeping in my bed, my girlfriend is sleeping on the floor (her grandfather is being taken off life support in the morning) and Josh Joudrie, my co-producer and soundman for Blue Dog Pict, visiting from Toronto, is sleeping on my couch.  Having nowhere left for myself to repose, I am up typing this chronicle.

We started this album three years ago.  An effort to continue to the work we did with BDP almost a decade ago.  Lest you don’t know me, I am not some balding wannabe ex-rocker seeking former glory days.  I am a kid who didn’t feel like I had yet reached the root.  So I decided it was time to move to the next set of songs and find a way to tell their unique stories.  I had no money in my pocket, I still don’t, but I have found in that, some amazing benefits – restrictions engender innovation, experimentation, cunning, tenacity, faith and play, and all of those put together lead to extraordinary ideas that may have otherwise been circumvented.

I would not trade a single moment of my tumultuous journey for any other.  I have learned so much and continue to learn.

Because we recorded this album piecemeal – parts in Toronto, parts in Los Angeles, parts in England via email – it has been a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to assemble.  After months, even years of configuring arrangements, painstakingly lining up different audio sources and trying to find their relationships, something as simple as bringing a completely new voice like Marc Thomas (of LA band Madras) to play guitars can re-liberate a song  and make it feel totally alive all over again.  You see, in the editing process, we find all the various pieces that we have recorded and build a comp. After cleaning it all up it feels a little stilted and after the fact.  Having a new musician with fresh ears come in and just replay it with their own unique brain makes it feel completely inspired and in-the-moment.  And that is because it is.

Last week, Ryan Brown came in to replay some snare and cymbal parts.  Instead we ended up playing brushes on the windscreen, chopsticks on pots, pans and coffee jar lids and throwing things around the room while Pro Tools was faithfully recording at 24 bits in the background.

Marc brought in a heap of pedals and I added my own to his arsenal.  We spent four separate days tracking guitars just for Killing Days; primary melodies, harmonies, swirling ambient washes, whatever occurred to us in the moment.

I would then assemble all of this discovery into a variety of stereo tracks, line them up, make a hundred decisions, and then when I would retire as the sun came up over Santa Monica Boulevard, Josh would wake up and take over, making sure the drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and vocals all lined up, that their phase relationships were coherent and so on.  He is the ultimate audio tech head.  It’s why I keep him around 😉

Now, almost two, three years later, we are closing in on seven amazing opuses. Sonic journeys.  I have no idea what they sound like in relation to what plays on the radio.  None.  We even recorded “Box“, an acoustic album comprising several of my songs that didn’t want to be played by a band while doing vocals for this record – for me and for you – just to tide things over while we sorted out the rest in the meantime.

Sure I listen to stuff coming out now, but that has nothing to do with this other journey I have been on – that of making this record I decided will be called “Come To Life” about a year ago.  The name comes from a catchphrase for the annual Sky Pirate holiday (celebrated August 4th) I created called Robot Pride Day – “My daddy builds robots; we don’t tell anyone.  They have come to life.  Come to life.”

The lyrics are poems I wrote at some point (of trouble, typically) to remind my future self that I have endured in the past, and that I will endure again, and every time come out the wiser, the stronger and the richer.  They are about the soul, about the death of some of my closest allies, about faith, about us, about the future, about the past, about mystery, reason and benevolence and fear.

I don’t know if and when you will ultimately hear the fruit of all this labor and play and duress and fascination.  Maybe it will be your children.  Maybe it will all be buried under the ground.  But if you do, drop me a line and let me know if you tapped in to everything that is going on with it.  It is all bigger than me; the amazing talents of those involved, the adventures that led to its creation, and whatever encompasses the sum of its parts.  I want to know what it is and what it did.

I hope to have Come To Life ready by the end of 2009.

Thanks for listening.  Really.  Every time you let me know your ears are receiving these transmissions, they fill up some little emptied battery cell in my soul.

kms
los angeles, april 6th, 2009

The post Come To Life: One from the heart, about the new record appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Then the my mother’s Ecuadorian traditions took over. We would return from Mass to open presents until two or three in the morning. Often the most bearded member of the family would play the surrogate Santa Clause and everyone would take turns accepting gifts from him and take pictures and so on.

Our house was the central HQ for the holiday season and so all the uncles and aunts and their growing legions of offspring would descend upon it. We could numbers in the dozens and the piles of wrapping paper could become quite formidable.

These traditions often came with some bemoaning as we opined about the gluttony and greed and consumerism, but also they maintained something else that was very important – the spirit of togetherness in a time of year that becomes quite cold and quiet and dark. It was a reminder that we all came from somewhere and that the things we believe, our perception of the world has direct roots to our upbringing. They also provided some sense of constancy in such a volatile reality and thus afforded us an anchor in the storm.

Years ago I studied Kaballah under the tutelage of a mystic named Gahl Sasson. One year, when I couldn’t make it home for Christmas, Gahl talked about a pattern that existed among all the great religions and traditions at this time of year – that is – that they all celebrated the Light in one form or another. I never forgot this teaching and was never quite so jaded about the holidays again. I Googled Gahl and sure enough he had a recent blog entry recapitulating what he had taught us in that ashram years ago. Rather than paraphrase I include a quote from his blog at CosmicNavigator here:

“The winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, is the day we encounter the least amount of light. The winter solstice has proven to be rather traumatic for many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere. As we progress toward the winter solstice, the days are stripped of their light. Everything becomes dark and gloomy. Early stargazers and shamans recognized this phenomenon and its deleterious effect on human mood and behavior…Bears have found a practical solution to winter depression. They just go to sleep. Psychologists devised a different remedy. They expose the patient to light. They call it light therapy.

[snip]

All over the world, wise elders, storytellers, religious teachers, and astrologers lit upon another solution. I am sure that you and your family have already practiced this same preventive medicine many times before. It’s called the holiday season, or to be more specific, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Saturnalia, and Yule, just to name a few. Our astute ancestors, like modern day psychologists, could not help but notice that people’s moods sour as the days grow shorter. Versed in the practical applications of the ancient alchemical axiom of “as above, so below,” they figured that as the light slowly disappeared above, people’s energy levels declined correspondingly below. In order to enliven their communities, these ancients decided to concoct holiday festivities to crown the winter solstice with special significance. During the darkest time of the year, they created the holidays of light.”

Indeed as I walk through my neighborhood in Hollywood, California, I reflect upon the strings of white Christmas lights adorning the hedgerows in front of people’s homes and recognize that they are reminding us of the little lights in the darkness.

This was a fascinating and challenging year. The economy faced a shakedown the likes of which we haven’t experience in half a century.  Dozens, if not hundreds of major corporations, banks, and even industries went under. The game changed in so many ways that we were simply forced to surrender expectation to be able to maintain any semblance of sanity as we were tossed around the storm of change and entropy.

We also saw America elect the most unlikely of candidates into the Presidency. Barack Obama was an essentially untried politician whose message of hope and desire for change captured the imagination of not only the country but of the world.

I began the year by releasing a humble solo music album. I had fifteen years experience launching albums and thought that my knowledge and wisdom in the music market would serve me well. What I found was quite different. Gone was the interest of print media, even handmade indie Zines, as was the process of submitting a music video for television broadcast or even college radio. In its place were music micro blogs, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, free music streams, linkback directories, and handing out CDs for free in the hundreds of units. Before I was a prophet of guerilla marketing. Now I was a podcaster, a blogger, a new media consultant. All because I recorded a small intimate collection of acoustic songs that I wrote in the windy forests of Northern Ontario, Canada.

I proclaimed the death of Web2.0 – that world of social linking and networking. I decried the glut of intentionally made viral videos and begged for the next phase, one that had already become comfortable with the ubiquity and reach of the new broadcasting power afforded to anyone with a webcam, and created something of substance, art and depth.

I may have been radically premature in these proclamations, however the bell tolls.

I am a different person at the end of 2008 than I was at its outset. I have been exposed to very powerful tools that track how people shop, think and behave, though I look at their thought processes in terms of keywords and statistics.

When I removed myself from Facebook, I felt a strange void, as though a giant lead wall had been erected between me and social network. As though I was the last man on Earth. And yet my hope and desire was that my self-imposed exile would restore the warmth and intimacy of those relationships.

I started reading more books, more of the time as a result. I took more walks out in the world. I recommenced drawing, exploring various hobbies like Lomo photography, model-making, cooking.

And now as we face the shortest days of light in the year, I can see the little beacons of humanity set out on those front lawns, reminding us that someone is still home. They are displaying those strings of little hopes that say, its alright, the world may be at its darkest, but we have been here a long time, as substantiated by our traditions, and we have returned after the darkness to explore new ground time and time again.

Have a happy and safe holiday and thanks for reading The Culturepin this year.

Keram

The post The Celebration of Light and 2008 in Review appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

We Breathe So Brief

As with most songs, I had a chord progression on the acoustic guitar and had yet to fill in lyrics. In my head, there was clearly a female vocal harmony that played counterpoint to a pair of urgent closely harmonized male vocals.

One afternoon I had Jessica Hathaway come by to drop some demo vocals so we splayed out on the carpet and scribbled down stream of consciousness ideas for her to sing. Those eventually became the lyrics to this track which is heavily inspired by my love for the early 90’s wombadelic period that included My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless”, Stereolab’s “Transient Noise Bursts and Random Announcements” and Dinosaur Jr.’s “Green Mind.”

The second half of the track is a classic Blue Dog Pict-syled “garden section”; a voyage into the subconscious – visceral, dreamy and typically more jammy – inspired by David Sylvian’s “Secrets of the Beehive” and all the luscious, impossibly melancholic warmth that it rendered on vinyl.

As with almost all the songs, the drums were laid down by Ryan (Brown) at the backyard tracking studio in Burbank, and the acoustic guitars in the sauna at my parent’s house in Toronto. Peter Devlin, a true guitar hero, tracked the funky strat stuff on my parents’ porch one sunny July afternoon, as well as the Pink Floydesque licks in the latter half of the song, but the rest was far from conventional.

Wes Styles came by the (Chemical Light Factory) studio in Hollywood with his huge guitar pedal board and laid down three bass tracks – one that is pure grindy bass fuzz with octave pedal, one that is through his wah and chorus and became the primary “clean” bass track, and one that uses delays and flangers and an old Coke bottle as a slide to toss out random bass fx and swoons.

Before she moved to NYC, I had Natalie John stop by to track vocals and a trumpet solo which was later redone by Stewart Cole (a horn prodigy). Natalie’s vocals are still in the track and sound slutty and surly as ever. Brilliantly rendered. So much charisma.

I later recorded some vintage 80’s keyboard pads and after that some Ebow guitars through some amp sim plugin to create controlled feedback (guitar feedback is an absolute BDP/KMS staple).

After a couple of months of letting the track simmer I returned to track the electric guitars. This is a track that is different than any other on the record, but for its particular early 90’s-ness it is perhaps my favorite – reminiscent of “The Cost of Admission” off BDP’s “Spindly Light und Wax Rocketines” which may be the best track I have yet released, in my opinion.

I conferred with Josh Joudrie via MSN and webcam over the progression of the track and discussed methods for completing the sound canvass of the song.

Finally over the course of a week (during which my dear support friend Misa Cohen presided with tea, humor and wine) I tracked all the electrics on my trusty, highly customized Fender Strat same one I used on all the BDP records – yes Johhny Camden’s “Watson”).

All in all the song has over 24 guitar tracks. L, R and center channels for clean JCM 800 clean, crunch, power chords, MBV bends, and Princeton Chorus jazz leads. I then ran stuff through the McDSP plugins to rebuild everything I had ever learned from using the true analogue gear at Number 9 Sound in Toronto during Spindly and at Tone King Records during the Project:Ribcage era.

Essentially I built a signal path that pushed the guitars through an SSL console strip then into a Manley VariMu compressor, using a Urei 1176 to shape their transients, and then into a Neve 1073 or Avalon just for the tube stage, and then squishing it onto Ampex tape with a 100hz rolloff with a 6db boost at 100hz. Of course, every single track required its own treatment, but the end result is pretty colossal in its approximation to the old school Spindly sound. Despite all the influences, it really does end up sounding like nothing more than post-BDP. I guess it’s just the fact that everyone involved came from that school.

At any rate the track sounds almost like what I heard in my head that muggy LA day almost a year ago. I am stoked about unleashing it on the public. This song, for me, is just an indulgent throwback to the days when music existed for its own damn sake – to uplift, to throw up its arms and say “I have no idea what the fuck to do, but it sure feels good doing it.”

I thank Jessica for her inspiration and truly instinctual input – she and I have an irascible bond and it can be felt in the end product of this track.

“
Radical experiment
Lavender peppermint
Rainy days
Cloudy nights
Manta ray, iolite
Here’s the test
What’s your best
Can you rest
Never night
It’s my turn
Have I learned
Do I care
Take the stairs
Or just breathe
Or just bleed
Or just leave
Lifelike dreams
Lifelike fears
Lifelike deaths
History’s silhouettes

We breathe so brief
Release beliefs
That kill me slowly“

The post Making the Record – Song Diaries pt. 1 – "We Breathe So Brief" appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.