For starters let me say, Damn I wish google wave was launched a year and a half ago, it is very much what I wanted for Disembody. Two years in the making at Google by the team that built google maps. Obviously Jonny could have built it for me if he’d really cared!

So, another day another mix of SPP4. We’re getting really close, basically tweaking the finer points of the doublebass and piano. For this recording we used a great studio, with awesome separation (by our standards), but we do have bleed from the piano and rhodes in the doublebass mic. That’s requiring a good deal of finessing. In the past we had no separation on mics, and that made mixing easier, as we had far fewer options. With these really clean tracks I can do a lot more in the mix, and the final record will sound a lot better. But having bleed in just one mic (out of 19), and unfortunately one of the most important mics, introduces a world of conflicts. Very time consuming. OTOH, I’m learning a ton about mixing and EQing and balance and the like.

I updated my photos and resume at IMDB today. I think I will be able to get work as an extra in scenes in biker bars and insane asylums now.

Tonight, more updates on vime. And recording my backing tracks for Copy Lake.

Another full pass on the fourth SPP record.

And now I’m trying to pick and sequence the tracks for the md*me cassettes and CDs we’ll be taking on tour. Last night I knocked out this rough image for the tee shirts:

It makes Alex uncomfortable. You know, the cliched use of a battered anime sexpot, so tired and sexist. Whatevs.
Also made this one for tee shirts and badges:

No one could have trouble with that. Except Fox’s and Groening’s lawyer’s, of course…

Did some reading on zombies for Vile Dead today, as well. I also updated the 23E Studios site to reflect that we’re in pre-production on VD and post on Disembody.

I started organizing my notes for an article on contemporary art, in particular the work I call Gutteralism.

Finally, I updated vime, and fixed up my laptop to maximize its processing power when playing live.

(the garoffice during SPP4 mixing. I’m finishing the mix on the machine I started it on, my laptop. To facilitate multi-tasking, and avoid moving my crappy speakers from machine to machine, the laptop is setup in front of the desktop. I right hand mouse the desktop and left hand mouse the laptop. I keep notes on the desktop, as well. It’s kind of ludicrous. For my upcoming mixes on other records [oRSo9 and orso9rmx, MSP, MD8ME, SleepWalks, Kenton Camerata, Brother X, My Special Porpoise, ect] I am sticking with the desktop. To that end I just re-installed Live on it. I am abandoning ProTools for mixing. I can’t see launching it unless I need Pitch n Time, at this point. Mixing with Ableton is faboo.)

I’m pleased to say that we’re closing in on the final mixes of the fourth Stowe-Pembleton Project record. A few more good days, like I’ve had this past week, will get it in the can. And then it’s off to Soul Note. We’re pretty confident they’ll pick it up for release as our third release on their label.
But the third SPP record, embarrassingly, is still not mixed. D’oh! Heaven only knows if the label it was originally recorded for will still be interested. Rest assured getting SPP3 mixed is high on my spreadsheet of things to do. Well, item 13 of ~59, anyway. But since some activities exist in overlapping states, it’s higher than 13 might seem to suggest.

Research for Vile Dead continues. Which is to say I’m watching zombie related tv and film, as well as horror and supernatural flicks. I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. This weekend I watched The Hunger (the first 2/3 is awesome. Then it’s downhill into complete, “quick, wrap it up, we’ve used our allotted 70 minutes! Screw linearity, comprehensibility, plot, characters and everything that’s happened in the film thus far, we need a quick ending. Oh hey, could you throw in a twist! Don’t worry about it making sense, this a vampire movie with David Bowie and lesbians, we can’t lose!”) and Hellboy II (Lots of fun to watch with absolutely no promise or pretension to being anything else.) I must admit, I always love the research phase of projects, but VD is particularly enjoyable.

Yesterday 23E Studios hosted a little tea party in the front courtyard of the garoffice. Our overlords, the Nightmare City City Council, were in town and wanted to check up on us. I think we passed the spot inspection. They declared the garoffice very nice, and expressed a strong faith in our ability to be productive in the 23E complex. While here they picked up their tribute for the year, the Nightmare City arcade from the Disembody installation/set. And their outfits from that film for use in future NC ventures.

(This is the courtyard. In the pic it is setup for mixing SPP4. It looked much nicer for the NC3: no computer paraphernalia, just my blue teapot and white cups and saucers.)

You’ll note from this post that the rebuilt desktop is performing fine thus far. I yanked out two internal drives, and hope to replace them soon with much larger drives for the logging and editing of Disembody. That’s one of the first things that came up in my logging strategy session with my father. The other big thing at this stage is establishing the best possible naming system for the clips. And defining parameters based on future uses of the footage. To that end I’ve begun a catalogue and timeline for the footage.

In other Disembody news, the NC3 think they spotted the dumpster from Disembody still residing in an alley in Chinatown where we filled it. The dumpster company has still not carried it away. Why not?
In sad Disembody news, 20th Century Props, where 23E rented theater seats for the Morgellon, is selling off its props and closing its doors. Oh, if only we could buy those seats for future projects! They’re being auctioned off, but A) I’ll be on tour and B) I have no money. So…

Above is some of the messy Copy Lake/My Daddy Ate My Eyes setup for our coming shows (and hopefully tour) in July. I’m mixing a MD8ME demo today. And rehearsing for the shows every day for the next many weeks. Also working on new material for Forever What?. We hope to rehearse in August in preparation for shows in Fall. With luck we’ll start gigging out semi-reguarly here in LA starting in September.

The garoffice came together today. It is more or less complete. Hoorah!

It features two music spaces. The first is for my Arp Odyssey and X-Station. The X-Station will run Live, as it has for the past couple years. The laptop will fit on the upper shelf between the mixer and Kaoss pad. So awesome. This will probably be my primary composition and rehearsal space. This is where I will work on the SPP and oRSo and My Special Porpoise and SleepWalks and FW? and Kenton Camerata stuff.

The second music station is more focused on My Daddy Ate My Eyes and Copy Lake, bands wherein I don’t use the computer. That station is super old school, with equipment that goes back to my early 90s music days in Carnival De Carnitas and Meow (and Suplex and Pale Ghost and DragKing and oRSo.) It’s all motors and toys and contact mics and bent tape players etc. I really look forward to playing with all that awesome goodness again. And working it into my other rig.

While on the topic ogf music, I worked on SPP4 a bit more today. Remixing Wich-i-tai-to twice. The way Nobu and I mix the SPP records (living on opposite coasts as we do) is a little bizarre. I mix and upload. He listens and calls. We debate, discuss and argue. I make a new mix based on our conversation. And upload it. And then he calls…

About the only other newsworthy 23E/MVM news is that the primary video editing computer, my desktop, was booted up today. It is imperfect. It was a great machine for many years. But ever since I was evicted in November 2007 from the Green Door Studio, it has been unreliable. It won’t run two monitors. It drops external drives. One of the RAID sets has disappeared now (but not one with any valuable data, fortunately.) This makes me sad as I obvs can’t replace this machine and have to log and edit Disembody on it.
Tomorrow, troubleshooting the dual monitors and RAID issues!

But now it’s time for more Vile Dead research. Buffy season 3, a zombie episode entitled, the Zeppo.