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Two new fresh ampersand delicious musics from ridiculous de sick
(02 Jul at 00:18) |
Well they are not that fresh. As I have mentioned before when we are invited or invite ourselves to play at a party, we (Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous) have a deal (as in contractual obligation) to write a song for (and possibly about) the party. These are two songs from two parties in Q2:
Come with me iff you want to live. (Pronounce: "if and only if".) This song we made for Cortney's birthday party at Gabe's house. It is about the public policy implications of when in the year 2039, our future automaton overlords send back in time robotic simulacra to kill Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in order to stop House Resolution 676, his present day perennial bill to create a single-payer health care system in the United States, on account of in the future the Universal Health Care system is the one remaining outpost of human resistance against the terminator bots. Right?
Hurricane Dan (2006). This one we made for Katrina and Dan's party for when Katrina got her Ph.Desus. The joke here is how we introduced it as a song about hurricanes, but it turns out to not be that hurricane that you might think we'd write if we were writing a song for Katrina's Ph.Desus celebration about hurricanes. I bet you have a hurricane named after you too, or at least a tropical depression. Continues our surfing minitheme.
Both are guitar and singing affairs with super rude electric guitar solos. If you're just gonna listen to one, I think I like the second better. | |
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style="color : robin's egg"
(11 Jun at 23:51) |
I made this Tom 7 Entertainment System tune tonight instead of following through on the other projects I told myself I'd do. It's called style="color : robin's egg" and it does kind of go Rogue in the middle for a bit. | |
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Waffle Shop report
(15 Apr at 20:15) |
As foretold by the bards, we played our show at Waffle Shop. This was awesome. It's a totally cool place. The folks running it were super friendly and helpful, like e.g. offering to brew me coffee and tossing us free shirts (seen above), and serving our custom waffle, the "Twix Ridiculous and The Sick Bisquickulous". Lots of people came out, sang along, and even people wandered in from the street, maybe on purpose. We unlocked an achievement: Our Facebook page now has 1 fan that is not already our friend. I don't know if it's related. What you see above is Waffle Shop standard operating procedure, which is that they in addition to serving fresh, golden-crispy waffles, also film a reality show on the premises, which mainly means interviews with patrons but in our case interview with the musical guests. More lovely pictures on flickridiculous, courtesy Maja. There are some muy bueno pictures of us playing too, courtesy some dude née drxiv. Overall a great experience. I think Waffle Shop was happy too, like they kept our setlist to display in their tool shop / kitchen and seemed pretty impressed with the crowd volume. In fact if you go to waffleshop.org right now you will be greeted with manifold splendour. I dunno when video will be available, if ever. I hope eventually so you can see my dancing, which was very popular. We decided during the interview that the right way to describe it is "aggraceful."
I recorded the show: Sick Ridiculous Live At Waffle Shop, in which you can hear us embarrassingly call the place "Waffle House" several times. Even more embarrassing is that the levels are way too high in the recording, though it gets a bit better once I turn my guitar down. Sorry for always blowing the MP3 version when I do line-in; I thought I was correcting for having this same problem last time by turning it to the lowest setting, but evidently I need more.
We have two shows coming up. Art All Morning on the 26th in some warehouse in Lawrenceville will be some kind of acoustic oddity, but is at 10:30am. I am just telling you, not inviting you; 10:30am is a crazy time to go to or play a concert. Especially if you go to Cortney's birthday party at Gabe's house the night before, which we'll also be playing at! Expect new material and Febreezed classics.
Fact: I did my Federal taxes like a month and a half ago, and saved my state and local for the last minute, giving me the worst of both worlds. It could be worse, though: this page has a 600 page PDF with all people and entities that are delinquent on their taxes, and some people are dozens of years late. | |
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openho~1.mid
(01 Mar at 13:46) |
This weekend was Open House for visiting prospective graduate students for Computer Science at CMU. I graduated like a year ago but I am still interested in perpetuating the program and helping young people make positive life decisions, so Nels and I played a Rock & Roll Techno show at the unofficial open house weekend house party. As is our contractual obligation, we wrote a new tune for the occasion. It is openho~1.mid. Because it is apropos many of the cleverness in the lyrics might not be apparent, but how could you not like the 7/4 beats and my sweaty freeform dance paroxysm?
There is also an mp3 of the whole show which is very overdrive in the techno songs but sounds pretty good in the guitar parts. | |
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T7ES: Gnocci Dokie
(04 Dec 2008 at 13:43) |
 The thing about T7ES music is that it's just the right length of project, like an hour with no stress about scheduling or anything. Obvious that I have to finish it right now, and then it's nice icing to make a album cover for it and think of something clever to put in the lyrics field. Especially when I can finally click again after a week of keyboard-only computing! So here is this week's song, a tune chiamato Gnocci Dokie. There are two things to say about this song. One is the middle quiet wandering 7/4 part right before the melody comes back is not awesome. I know this. I tried my darndest to add something to the stereo sinewaves line that made sense, but I did not darn it enough. Second is that the whole point of this song was to exercise my exceedingly minor theory that guitar players find the chord played with all guitar strings open in standard tuning (EADGBE) to be more pleasing than average, just by virtue of having heard it a lot and reminding them of a nice guitar. (I wonder if they are also attracted to guitar-shaped people more, too?) It is not naturally a nice chord. You can tell from its name, Em7add11. Depends who you ask. I thought there was some common mnemonic (like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge) for remembering EADGBE but I could not find one, otherwise a reference to that would be the name of the song. Point is I think I get a little titillated when I hear this in the same way that symphonygoers probably feel when the symphoniers are tuning up. This song doesn't use that chord directly because it sounds truly ass, but its main line can be played on the guitar without using any fingers on the left hand. Like this: (high)E, B, G, D, B, D, A, (low)E. If that line makes sense I think you are a guitar player or crazy. If that line does not make sense I think you are not a guitar player or you do not like ear experiments. | |
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Many Happy Returns
(04 Nov 2008 at 20:57) |
Happy voting day! I wrote this T7ES song tonight: Many Happy Returns. Now I am going to an election party.
By the way, if you visit radar.spacebar.org to read Tom 7 Radar (rather than using RSS syndication) you have probably noticed that I have implemented categories and applied them to a lot of old entries. (See for example favorites and album a day.) That's kind of useful since a lot of stuff that I do gets posted only to this weblog and there is no other way to find it. Not at all obvious is that you can also get an RSS feed for any category. Just take the category name, replace spaces_with_underscores, and subscribe to a URL like
http://radar.spacebar.org/f/a/weblog/rss/1/5/t7es
to see all the posts having to do with Tom 7 Entertainment System. (Always use the number 1 after rss or it won't work, and the number 5 is the maximum number of most recent posts to show. For most syndication software 5 should be plenty.) I use this to, for example, post customized news feeds on the last.fm pages for my various bands. You can use it for whatever you want, which is probably nothing. | |
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Theme from Petrolatum
(29 Oct 2008 at 00:28) |
| I wrote a new song for Tom 7 Entertainment System: Theme from Petrolatum. Directions: Apply as needed. | |
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Sick Day
(13 Oct 2008 at 08:17) |
Nels and I played a rock concert as Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous at Brianne's birthday party. We were all jazzed up for this one and then beset by a series of runtime failures. Like, in the first song there was feedback (normal, tolerable) and then I got a text message while the song's backing track was playing through the PA off my phone (blunder, but funny) then I broke a string on my guitar, and though I had a spare set of strings I only had the other 5 because I had just replaced that one two days prior. I learned that when a string breaks the whole guitar goes uniformly out of tune (makes sense, since the tension on the neck is reduced); we thought it was Nels so he disappeared to tune and then the next song we were totally not calibrated to one another. But we couldn't give up during that song because that song is about not giving up. We forgot words but that is pretty normal. It was really hot in there too. These are not complaints or excuses, but humorous anecdotes. It seems like it'd be impossible to disappoint these party crowds filled with our friends. In invisible failures: I wasn't recording directly off the PA for the first few songs, and then my guitar mic was off(!) for the rest, so there aren't a lot of usable videos soundwise. This one is just us singin' on the phone:
(Like before, I recommend clicking through to view the HD version or download the original AVI, for maximum quality.) When we are permitted to play a party it is our now publicly proffered deal to write and a perform a new song for the occasion. Usually we just finished writing it so we don't know it and totally blow it in the first performance; this video is our second performance of Unfairbanks. We wrote this for our departing friend George Fairbanks's friend-departing party. It's about the credit crisis. You should know that Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous has a good track record of forecasting financial events. This song was written in May. At the end you hear my advice to "sell the shit out of" your stocks, even if it's after hours. Following that advice could have saved you from the worst week of market losses in history. However, past performance does not indicate future gains. (In truth, our only forecasting strategy is whimsical pessimism.)
The song we actually wrote for this event is called Birthday Control, since it's a birthday party. When I'm linking these up, they are links to recorded versions, sure as hell not our live ones. And then there's our new song Sick Day, which actually is a "live" recording of my favorite of our new songs. Live just means one take in my bedroom in this case. | |
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NEW: Still Yet More T7ES tunes, blah, blah
(02 Sep 2008 at 23:16) |
It can't be helped. When I'm in the mood I keep doing it. Here are two new Tom 7 Entertainment System songs:
Theme from updn. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I first realized at the age of nearly 29 that "updn" exhibits perfect rotational symmetry in many fonts, which is pretty lucky because taken as the opposites "up" and "down" it's also sort of self-describing. I'd like to claim that this song has some kind of rotational symmetry too (that would be an interesting experiment), but it is just a song. It does have some parts that go up and some parts that go dn, though. Perhaps too much so. Theme from msiegler. This one is unusual in that I had finished it enough to record it to MP3 and have it on my MP3 player over the weekend and I decided that I liked it enough that I needed to fix up a lack of ruling during the midsection by adding in some more ruling. So I gave it another shot this evening and I'm glad I did because that's when I added the ripcord freakout portamento stuff, which is now my new favorite part. While writing this one I really tried to own some of the weird chords that came up, not brushing their hair really at all, and just surrounding them by (relatively) easy melody to make them fit as best I could. (e.g. the uneasy part near the beginning that goes G♭7sus2, D♭, G♭m, B♭dim—B♭♭5 or the E7♭5 before it loops.) (I don't really know the names of chords aside from the easy guitar stuff nor do I think it really matters, but I bet that if I looked these up they'd look impressively weird, which they do.) I like this one better than the above.
These are clearly new-phase songs (I was looking at the Beatles's Let It Be LP just recently and found it pretty ironic-sad that it claims boldly "This is a new phase Beatles album!" on the sleeve), but you'll perhaps notice that I headed off that dangerous trend that would have suggested that these be 7 and 12 minutes long, respectively. Brevity is the soul of wit. | |
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OLD: Spastic Moose
(21 Aug 2008 at 21:56) |
I thought probably nobody cares about my old band Spastic Moose (web page is literally 10 years old) but then two different people this summer have tracked me down and asked, out of the blue, for old Spastic Moose MP3s that they had found floating around the internet or had from mix CDs (!) but then lost. Both were asking about the same song, actually, Sultry Pantry. It is a favorite, it's true.
So anyway I got off my lazy ass and organized the MP3s I have on my computer, scanned the album art and booklet inserts, and uploaded them to my server where I will try to keep them available forever. This magic directory is the Spastic Moose magic directory. What, you say, only two albums? Well, those are the best ones that I have digital versions of, and are probably the only ones that even these internet weirdos want to listen to. Actually I like both of those albums a lot. I have MP3s for the first two albums too, which I will try to organize, but when we first handed out tapes of the first album in high school for $3 or whatever cheap price it was, and then people listened to those tapes that they had spent actual money on, we got some intense reactions. Basically nobody bought the second album. In my opinion this was mainly because people were not expecting our precocious Art Brut aesthetic. Hamden High School was not ready for that shit. And I like those albums and the middle times albums (which I only have on cassette tape somewhere with no way to play), but there's so much other music to be organized and uploaded so I will wait for the internet crazies to ask for it.
VECTOBOT does have a nice watercolor cover, doesn't it?
PS. I want to be able to play guitar music live more easily, so I am thinking of getting some kind of pluggable mic/pickup thing for my acoustic guitar. Maybe today. Does anybody know anything and wish to express opinion about these? I think they sorta sound bad. I'd like something that doesn't sound bad, but I'm willing to take the best bad-sounding thing for the convenience and ability to move around a little bit when rocking out. I'd like to not have to drill the guitar, or even take the strings off to add/remove hardware. I doubt it matters, but in case it does: I have a Martin DX1 and play with heavy bright strings and often play really hard. (But sometimes crybaby sensitive finger-picking stuff too.) I would consider getting a new guitar but really I'm waiting for the auto-tuning robot guitar system to make its way to the acoustic world first.
PS #2. I'm uncharacteristically up at 7:00am on Saturday so as to run in the Regent Square "Run Around The Square" 5K. It's at 9. I haven't been taking this nearly as seriously as the marathon, but my publicly stated goal is to run this thing under 20 minutes, even if I puke. You may ridicule me if I do not succeed. | |
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