Hey everyone on the eschatone fulcrum of nibbly hell-muffin bickelly-nordfank suasion..
Did anyone get the new Skyscape record...for those that do..> email me, and I will write a song for you're loved one, or prank phone call someone you fucking hate...with pleasure. Please support our record, cause it's really fun and fuck-all-off locker cream combo dreamed... like no?
............................................................
For the holidays, I feed those that have had to pay too much capital gains tax. For those that are lnot terribly literate among that grouping; I read stories about about the greed and control wielded by government. I find that it mitigates their repressed feelings of psuedo guilt about their own 'light dabblings' in greed and control.
the man so lonely: he regretted unsubscribing to junk mail companies
the man so incapable of sleep--: the frist time he took clozapam (anti-anxiety pill) was was when his brother gave him two before boarding a flight from New York to Argentina to visit a reformed hooker named Julietta. His brother told him: "Take two of these, you won't wake up you fucking insomniac." The man took two pills of cloazpam with a brand name water than intensley bothered him, as the label showed emaciated people in the background looking at a dam of water fall into a verdantly furred black hole. He took these pills shortly after drinking almost undrinkable wine, and listening to the woman seated next to him prey about her all her children (which comforted him in a mild and unembarrasing way until she got to a boy named Hermoso Hermoso who did something with duckling that did not make sense. Our flying man fell asleep for the entire nine or so hours of the plane trip down to the southern hemisphere. It was amaining for him. He knew not the guazy tongue of a deep When he awoke to the lights of Argentina, the spanish speaking woman did the sign of the cross over him and said in spanish (which I will try to translate:) I thought you were dead, you looked so happy Mister.
Answering a great question via e-mail from J. Eric Smith. I thought the exchange brought some cool facts about Skyscape's new album Zetacarnosa to light, and Eric was kind enough to let me post the question and answer here.
JES: I'm REALLY digging Zetacarnosa . . . one of the best things I've heard you produce over the years, I think. I don't have the hard copy yet, so haven't read liner notes and whatnot, but there are all sorts of key, guitar and bass things happening on this album that are absolutely fuckin' sublime, sounds I've not heard your other bands (or even early Skyscape) make. I dunno what you did different, but I like it! Are you using a bunch of different keyboards on this album, or just different patches (or whatever you call them in the post-MIDI era) . . . there are some mind-blowing sounds here!
JED: Cool... thanks! I'm thrilled to hear that. Zetacarnosa was a tough album to do but I think I'm happier with it than anything I've put out so far. It's what it's supposed to be.
I think the reason it sounds so unique is that it literally took 15 years to record. The finished tracks contain remnants from every phase of each song's development. For example, "Autumn Punkfest" starts with a riff that was recorded on a boombox by Skyscape's guitarist at the time, Joe Aversano, as he brainstormed the song in his bedroom in 1991. I took that cassette, bounced it into Pro Tools, left the intro as it was, then brought the riff into time with the band and looped it throughout the song. A lot of the guitars on the record were done the same way - the lead on "Statement Of Intent" is from a four-track demo; some of the guitars on "Young Socialist" are from a 1992 rehearsal; the acoustic guitar on "Statement Of Intent" is from an old videotape of Dom and me hanging out.
There are also vocals from weird sources... the vocal on "Buffalo Head" was from a 1993 videotape - Dom walked in on me while I was writing the music and started improvising over my unfinished sequence. I was adding organ to the sequence at that moment, which you can also hear a bit of in the track. The third verse of "Dom's Back Party" is a voicemail Dom left for me, which happened to fit nicely with the track. The demonic voice during the solo in "Clouds" is our one-time drummer Steve Theater - it's him talking from the end of "Back To The Wall" on the Band Of The Week record. The vocals in the disco parts of "Break Your Fuckin Balls" are from the first demo of that song. The vocal on "Mall" was done by having Dom, Mike Keaney and me each cut the entire vocal track, and then mixing and matching at random. There are also tons of overdubs, vocals doubled and blended with keyboards, vocals hacked up and looped, and vocals effected in all sorts of ways.
Bass-wise, it's all Mike Keaney, with the exception of the acoustic double bass on "House Of Wax", which is Mike Neglia. The primary band on the record is myself, Mike Keaney, Kearns, and Sean; Alex played all the guitars on "Dom's Back Party" and the contemporarily-recorded guitars on "Young Socialist". Kearns played all the drums. You could look at it to some extent as Hanslick Rebellion with Dom singing.
As far as keyboards go, there is a lot of real piano and some real electric piano, but almost everything else is a sample or synth. I used every keyboard I have on the record, including the Korg DW-6000 from Band Of The Week, and primarily the Korg Triton, which I used a lot for a year or two and then put away - it does really nice percolating arpeggiations, which you can hear in parts of "Autumn Punkfest", for example. I also used softsynths, which are not really my thing, but we recorded a lot of the keyboards at Sean's place and that was the easiest way to do it there. Most tracks included keyboard parts from every single source.
It also helped that the mix engineer, Dave McNair, was extremely competent and creative, and game to make the best of the lo-fi material he was given. When I asked him to do an automated EQ sweep on the ENTIRE TRACK in the middle of "Young Socialist", he didn't even flinch. That dude was awesome.
The point of Zetacarnosa was to celebrate Skyscape in all its forms, make sure all band members were represented, and make it feel like all moments of the band's history were happening at once. I hope to do this with future Skyscape albums as well; I have dozens of hours of similar archival material to mix in, even as we write brand new songs. I'm reworking Band Of The Week now with Alex, Dom and Mike; besides newly-recorded guitars and bass, I've added a ton of four-track demo and rehearsal stuff, plus all sorts of additional keyboard material while still keeping the DW-6000.
Well THAT was long... hope it was at least a little bit interesting!
CART
