general

Hi, H____,
I saw Oblivion Sun this week at the Knitting Factory here in NY.
They were great, and I like their CD too (subject to the usual complaints about lyrics and their occasionally sounding too much like Genesis).
Very small crowd, but thunderous applause and yelling after every song. These were NY's hardcore Happy* heads. Mostly men, mostly ancient, sigh.
Besides the new material, the band did a lovely "Leave That..." and for an encore, an improvised jam that led into "I Carved..."
I talked to Stanley before the show. He remembered me, and I told him I had seen you this summer.
I didn't stick around to [say hi to] Frank (I doubt he'd remember me), but I gotta say his songwriting is as amazing as ever. His three tunes on the new CD are standouts. Always surprising chord shifts and a kind of darkness or poignancy or profundity not all of the Happy/O.S. writers have. (Check out "Fanfare" on the MySpace page.)
...I really do idolize his musical abilities and will probably have to send him a fan letter.
I'm tempted to describe him as "an American composer" [which is how he's described on his wikipedia entry], who with time and distance from his genre might be given his due as such. Or is his talent inseparable from the band's/bands'? The solo things he posted to his site didn't interest me much but "Death's Crown" is all credited to him and "Ibby It Is" still gives me goosebumps.
Hope all is well!
Best, T___
PS I am not an unapologetic or unrepentant Prog Head. These guys have state of the art keyboards with computers but the computer revolution seems not to have affected them at all. Hiphop, electro, sampladelia, drum and bass are not a phase they worked through. And thus their sound is a '70s time capsule and I think it will hamper them with finding a younger audience, except for the few that seek out a highly structured music that also "rocks."
PPS *About that Happy the Man YouTube--it's progressive rock a la Yes at their peak but without the gold capes and gnomes dancing around Stonehenge. Just normally dressed older men being very professional about playing extremely loud music at high speed. I believe this to be good.

Caught about 10 minutes of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace in the wee hours on Cartoon Network. Holy shit, that was funny. All live action--not a cartoon. A very Pythonesque bit where a priest is rattling on at a funeral ("God moves in mysterious ways. Coming in at a steep angle, swerving from side to side, then swooping up unexpectedly from below..."), then the coffin starts shaking, a zombie pops out, and a very poorly filmed shootout ensues as the mobsters around the graveside start firing off shotguns and flame throwers. Most of the humor is in the appalling production values--it's apparently an ongoing spoof of an '80s horror film. Only about six episodes of this British TV series exist, it's amazing it's airing at all. I want to see more.

jimpunk and Abe Linkoln have returned to the blogosphere as collaborators with triptych.tv. Caution, browserbuster! I got about half the page loaded, roughly ten pixels at a time with the right vertical scroll. The page groans with the weight of embedded media set to autoplay. An abundance of skulls, which should thrill Paddy Johnson. These were the bloggers behind SCREENFULL and 544X378WebTV--they are joined by Mr. Tamale for this outing.

jimpunk has been posting manic video collages to YouTube, such as this one, Unicorn. They are part of a larger project, YTB.

I've been remixing my tunes, getting ready to make some CDs for "demo" purposes.
I've been using John Parker's excellent production on our Scratch Ambulance disc, as well as the two tunes of mine that sounded decent through the PA system at Galapagos last month as my "baseline" and adjusting tracks to that baseline.
I'm not using much equalization but mainly eliminating "muddy frequencies" by moving too-closely pitched sounds to different pan-locations. Also getting basses and kick drums on their own tracks and leveling them separately.
I eliminated about 100 tunes from what I've posted online so that's about 120 I could potentially use. I have done one disc with 20 songs I'm fairly satisfied with, but I'm thinking a multi-disc set is where this is going, just so I have a hard(er) copy record of a fairly productive couple of years.

Just received an email for an audio plugin that "simulates analog tape" for digital recording and producing.
VirSyn is the Germany-based software company that makes it.
Here are a few of its features:

VTAPE Saturator

- Realistic tape emulation
- Tape saturation / compression
- Tape hiss
- Wow & Flutter
- Equalizer
- Aliasing free distortion

25 years after CDs were introduced to the market as a "noise free" sound system, there is a sizeable industry devoted to adding high quality realistic noise to digital sound. There's a moral in here somewhere.