2019: June 5th Stereophonics - Mr. Writer

Wow. It has been a minute since I dug into Stereophonics. So long, in fact, that I'd forgotten how great this band is. And this particular track comes from a great album, too, although one that can be difficult for me to engage with, since it mentally and emotionally ties my thoughts back into The Yellow House, a band I was in that I loved, but that ended abruptly. That's tough; bands breaking up are a lot like couples breaking up. There becomes an entire subset of people and music and corridors of thought that you end up having to put to the side to avoid those messy little nerve triggers. With Stereophonics - and more specifically the album Just Enough Education to Perform, which I'm listening to for the first time in at least ten years as I type this - those triggers kick in on the second track, Lying in the Sun. I remember hearing this song for the first time after The Yellow House was already really up and running, playing shows and getting our name out there. I remember hearing this track and thinking, "Hey, that's a lot like what we're doing. Cool." It meant a lot at the time, to have a band that was successful in a way that we wanted to be, that had a similar aesthetic. Stereophonics weren't really all that big in this country, but at the time almost nothing worth hearing was. They had a solid fan base probably everywhere else in the world, and they were cool. That's what was largely missing from the 00s. Not many people were cool anymore; that aesthetic - which granted can go sideways real fast and make you look like a douche - was replaced mainly in the 00s with people yelling and screaming about their prozac, how messed up they were, and the like. Bands like Stereophonics and BRMC were cool.

My introduction to Stereophonics also dovetailed with my first trip abroad: I remember walking into the first hostel in Dublin in January 2002, and this video was playing on the tele. The track has always had the particular ability to spin me back in time to that exact moment, the way the air tasted, the electricity of being somewhere new. Which is always something to be experienced sparingly, so as not to wear out the Magick.

Hearing these tracks this morning, I'm blown away; the songs and my responses to them are a reminder that I am a completely different person today than I was during The Yellow House. Which is precisely how it should be, but it's interesting to step back every now again and remember.

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NCBD! Very excited for these, especially The Walking Dead. If you're reading it, you know why!

Found out recently this series ends with a double-sized issue #30 in July, so this is the penultimate chapter! Expect even more insanity than we've had, which is really going to be saying something when all is said and done:

Despite initial confusion, I ended up loving the Lapham's Lodger series for IDW's Black Crown. And now, I'm excited to be back with the old gang again in Stray Bullets:

The start of a new, and apparently longer, arc. This book is aces. Read it:

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About the time I posted yesterday's blog I realized I was sick as fuck and not going to work, so I spent June 4th confined to bed, where I finished Gemma Files' Experimental Film. A powerhouse; such a great novel. Creepy, well-written, and almost clinical in its plotting. I wondered if the climax would go as large as the plot teased, and if so how that would work. There's that moment where, depending on how supernatural or numinous a novel's plot has teased, Speculative or Weird Fiction has to make a decision to either go full-bore, bringing the 'monster' on camera or not. Ms. Files goes all the way with it, and she does such a fantastic job with it. Nothing seems ridiculous. That's the trick. You have to give the reader something they've never seen before and make them believe in it. And Experimental Film does that very well indeed.

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Watchlist yesterday was another episode and a half of Doom Patrol. SO fun watching Cliff Steele kick nazi ass while Dead Kennedy's blare on the soundtrack. I can't recommend this show enough.

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Playlist from 6/04:

Cat Rapes Dog - Maximum Overdrive
Tears for Fears - Songs From the Big Chair

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Card of the day:

Remain open to the influence of the Universe. Pretty sure unexpectedly digging into old Brit rock and staying home from work (and feeling guilty about it) for the second day in a row are the direct manifestation of this draw. I've been sick or not feeling well (read: exhausted) since the 19th of May, and the recurrences from what seems a tiny bug are due, I think, to a lack of rest. So yesterday I didn't leave bed, save for about an hour where I sat in the living room and listened to two records while reading. Also, I didn't allow myself to write at all. I put all the anxiety and expectations and frustrations of this final edit under the bed for a day and just did nothing but read Gemma Files. Today, while once again planning to stay in bed, perhaps I will work on reading the book.

2019: February 7th

Wow. My good friend Jacob messaged me a few weeks ago about the then-just released split EP Minsk and Zatokrev released at the end of 2018. Minsk is pretty much always a sure thing, but I'd never heard Zatokrev before. And now I am a fan.

You'll notice a binaural beats album on the playlist from yesterday. I have a weird suspicion about these; that they're a pop psychology/new age product made from something valuable. Way back in 2001/2002, when I was in The Yellow House, I had a pretty good makeshift studio setup in the basement of the house where we practiced, Joup's Joe Grez's original Palos Hills, two-story home. He lived there with two other guys he rented to as roommates, and we had the basement as our rehearsal/studio space. It was the early days of Pro Tools being available for laymen, and I was fresh out of Colombia College with a minor in sound recording. We had a pretty sweet monitor situation in the basement, but also had some big ass stereo speakers, located at opposite ends of the room. I was deep diving into Magick, the Occult, and all things related, and had stumbled across the waveform science that eventually begat Binaural Beats. I was fascinated and began conducting experiments, first on myself with headphones, then Grez became intrigued and asked to take part, then I began expanding my horizons, broadening my experiments to unknowingly include guests to the house. We'd often finish practices and end up with friends hanging out, and for a while they became involved. Nothing malevolent at all, but interesting...

Here's the deal: Theta Waves occur from 3 to 8 Hz, and are the frequencies of dreams, memory, and intuition. And the brain does a funny thing; if you apply a frequency to the brain using, let's say headphones, the brain will match it. Now, speaker responses are normally from 40 to 4k Hz, so speakers - which are transducers, that is they take one form of energy and turn it into another form, in this case sound waves to electricity - cannot at this point in time be made to physically handle sound waves outside of that range. So how do you apply 4 Hz to the brain and induce Theta state? Well, the brain does another funny thing; if you put 48 Hz in one ear, panned hard right, and 44 Hz in the other panned hard left, the brain splits the difference and matches 4 Hz. Crazy, right? So back in The Yellow House studio, I'd do this to myself and try and induce unease, nausea, joy, trance, etc. And I started doing it to visitors when they'd hang, put Hi-Beta waves (15-22 Hz) through the room by using a tone generator to pan 60 Hz through hard right and 72 Hz through left and watch too see if people began to feel irritated or high strung.

They did.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've utilized this. I have a meditation tone I constructed in Pro Tools a few years back, but other than that it's usually difficult for me to do that kind of thing with my now antiquated set-up. I've been wanting to get back to dreaming and dream journaling, and Lucid Dreaming has long been elusive to me - I've done it exactly once that I'm aware of. So when a co-worker who has a kind of pop 'metaphysical bent' to his interests told me he'd started using binaural beats to induce Lucidity in dreaming and it worked, I figured why not. I listened to this yesterday during the day, no where near the hour I went to bed, but I did have a pretty insanely vivid dream right before I awoke this morning, so maybe it will work.

Playlist from 2/06:

Ghost - Infestissumam
Bob Mould - Lost Faith (Pre-release single)
Bob Mould - Patch the Sky
Binaural Beats - Lucid Dreaming
Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun
Bigod - Minsk & Zatokrev

Card of the day:

Interesting. I have a meeting this morning this could be relevant to. The dissolution of old paradigms to make way for something new...

The Yellow House - U R Ur Car Official Video

Okay, this is circa 2001 I think. The track was the 'single' from our first and only album "Refurbished"(there were two subsequent E.P.'s).You'll notice that it looks as though we are violating my 'don't show the band playing the song in the video because they're not really playing' policy, HOWEVER, that is not the case. Erik Hansen shot and cut this and he did a freakin' amazing job - we rented this roller rink, rented a collapsable stage, erected it in the middle of the rink, put an ad in the local newspaper that said something to the effect of, "Music Video Shoot - come and skate and be in our video" so that although many of the people you see are our fans/friends, some are people who just showed up for the novelty of the experience or because they would have been there anyway to skate. My point is, we shot the video but played some degree of a show as well, so when you see us playing, we're really playing. Any visual that matches what's going on in the music is simply Mr. Hansen's skill. A lot of this is pretty goofy, and I'd def do some stuff different looking back, but it is what it is and I hadn't seen this in ten years or so until just a week ago, so I'm trippin' off it for sure right now.

I'd also like to point out that the band was named after the yellow house where Van Gogh and Gauguin lived and worked for a time. We wanted something that represented the line between genius and insanity.