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Sick Ridiculous at the Submarine poster
(12 Jun at 18:54) |
I've already announced our upcoming show in DC in my previous two posts. I just want to share the concert poster I drew:
I think this is one of my best posters (at least on-screen), but you can make up your own mind. I made it in Flash in about five hours. What takes the longest is the thousands of partially-transparent brush strokes that give that hand-worked look. I really like this style (also used in e.g. head cat) because it allows me to be kind of sketchy-sloppy, yet gets better with age. But it takes a long time. When I make an illustration in Flash I usually use the animation timeline as a way of saving my history, in case I want to go back (I never do, but it comforts me right before making a big change). That means you can see an animation of the steps I went through to draw it, if you like.
Here is a Facebook Event, now properly adorned, which you can use to organize your busy social calendar, or to invite your DC-area friends to the show. (By the way, the other two bands sound really good to me.) I always RSVP "maybe" but rest assured I will be there to do the guitar and technos. | |
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Sick Ridiculous - Microchronograph
(06 Jun at 13:45) |
My band Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous has been deliberately hunkerin' down, to the nitty gritty I mean, and writing songs for Phase II of operation Rock and Roll. We only played one show in Qs 1 and 2 of 2k10, at Alan and Mike's birthday barbecue. This is the song we wrote for the event, Microchronograph:
Sick Ridiculous – Microchronograph We were challenged to write a song about both of the co-birthday co-hosts; one is a researcher and the other a reporter with a name that we like to make creative jokes about. This song is about academic dishonesty, specifically a nanoresearcher who decides to drastically shrink all of the graphs in his paper so that the referees of the journal cannot actually read them. The "microchronograph" is the name joke on "Mike Cronin" (think: Cronin the Barbarian, Croninator, etc.), and also a very small watch used to measure very small nanotubules. Get MP3'd.
The hunkerin' down has produced four new songs, and there will probably be more soon as Nels returns from his world tour, for example we will need to make a song for our upcoming show in DC. (No actual more details on that; just see the previous post until there's a Facebook event or somethin.) So please prepare for an earsplosion. | |
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Sick Ridiculous - Duckles Chuckles
(13 Feb at 12:52) |
Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous — Duckles Chuckles
Here's a newly recorded Sick Ridiculous & etc. song, Duckles Chuckles. We wrote it for Stephen and Laura's going away (eventually everybody gets married, gets Ph.D., and gets outta Pittsburgh) party; the cover picture above is from when we debuted it the first time in public (with dance routine) at Club Café on New Year's Eve Eve.
In order to fully understand this song, you need to know that Duckles Chuckles is fringe local slang for Washington, D.C., where Stephen and Laura moved, that Stephen's login ID was "smagill", and that "all up in my Chevy Chase" is like a quadruple entendre, with Chevy Chase being cockney rhyming slang (which you might consider "Duckles Chuckles" akin to) for "face", and also the name of various towns and neighborhoods and agglomerations thereof in the DC area, and thus an example of the confusing geographic status of common to the area, referenced in the first line. Nice one, doods.
Of course if we were writing this song today it would have to include Snowpocalypse, but rest assured that one of our newest unheard songs may or may not be about winter weather! | |
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Club Café show, new year's eve-eve
(22 Dec 2009 at 14:04) |
We will be playing the new year's eve-eve (that's Dec. 30th) late show at club cafe with our real-life friends Slingshot Genius (acoustic version) at Club Café in the South Side. I've always wanted to play at Club Café; I think it's my favorite venue in Pittsburgh. (In particular I always love the sound there.) So I'm pretty psyched! Also psyched to play with Erika's band. Come down South if you're in town! (Facebook event for the web-lifestyle enabled.) | |
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Sick Day video
(26 Oct 2009 at 09:31) |
Behold! A new music video by my band, Sick Ridiculous (&c.). Nels and I filmed this a few weeks ago and I just finally got the time to put it all together this weekend. The song is Sick Day, which is sort of our band theme song, and easily one of my favorites. Watch: Please consider watching in HD at Vimeo, or even downloading the 1080p original from that page. This is some life-size pro shit we're talking about here. The recording is new, too; get the Sick Day MP3 for your growing collection.
Also: We are playing this Thursday at Smiling Moose in the South Side, upstairs. We're opening for Sound Of Urchin (and others), who themselves opened for Tenacious D on a recent tour. Yes, we are now in the Six Degrees of Billy Joel territory. If you're in the mood to rock, come see us! The Facebook event has all the deets. Costumes encouraged. | |
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Lausanne... Jealous?
(26 Aug 2009 at 23:12) |
Lausanne... Jealous? by Sick Ridiculous & etc. Photo Marcus S.
A few weeks ago our friend Donna successfully defended her thesis and threw a party, even waiting until a Tuesday night so that Nels and I could play at that nice party, so of course we wrote a song for the gig. It is called Lausanne... Jealous? because Donna is about to take a post-doctoral position at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. More than usual—which is saying a lot—this song is loaded with detailed in-jokes and difficult puns. I will provide some hints, since we received positive feedback about the fact that we did this before playing the song at her party. There are three national languages in Switzerland: (Swiss) German, French, and Italian. The Swiss invented the Swatch watch, which you are encouraged to wear multiple of on your arm, for fashion. (Nels and I predict a Swatch fashion resurgence, soon.) They also invented the Swiss Army knife and cheese. Donna always serves mostly cheese at her parties because she has a gluten-free diet. Donna's dissertation is about some objected oriented programming stuff. At EPFL she'll work on Scala, a maximalist language which combines all known programming ideas into one Java-like syntax. It was made by Martin Odersky, who also made a Java extension once called Pizza. That's probably enough to get you started.
Still in queue: ICFP contest report (very soon I'll even be able to include the final results, heh), new T7ES song, Pac Tom update, pics from various events. Shame. | |
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Two new fresh ampersand delicious musics from ridiculous de sick
(02 Jul 2009 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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Waffle Shop report
(15 Apr 2009 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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Sick Ridiculous at Waffle Shop
(08 Apr 2009 at 23:44) |
Hey: Some of you locals may know about this place called Waffle Shop in East Liberty next to Shadow Lounge. It's a "real" waffle store in the sense that they serve waffles, but it's only open from 11pm to 2am two nights a week because it's also a CMU art project to create a reality TV show about local people's stories. Here's a story: my band Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous will be playing there this Saturday night. The show is free. Since we're the only band and it's starting deep into the evening and it is pro bono we should have pretty good control over the start time, so I promise if you come you won't need to wait hours for the show to start. (We'll update the Facebook event and maybe here if the time estimate changes.) But moreover there are not just promises about not disappointing you but promises about 'appointing, e.g.: I got a new guitar which should increase our rock-sound without feedback quotient, which is also beautiful and has a rainbow strap and sounds a monster; this same night is a big WRCT dance party at Shadow Lounge and Ava next door so you can combine both activities into one wholesome well-rounded night on the town; we will be debuting our new song that I think is called School of Mines; and as resident musicians it is bandatory for us to invent a waffular concoction that will be available for purchase that night only. I can say for pretty sure that the waffle will be vegetarian and named after some contortion of our band's name; for example if it were composed of x86 and ALPHA microprocessors it might be called the "CISC Ridiculous and the Sick RISCdiculous", but optimally the named parts would not only be vegetarian but actually non-toxic food. Do you have suggestions? We have some ideas but we will absorb your ideas too if you deliver them to us by commenting. All submissions become property of Sick Incdiculous, LLC. | |
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Lava lounge tonight!
(19 Mar 2009 at 09:12) |
We're playing the Lava Lounge tonight, continuing our intraneighborhood South Side tour with Central Plains and Big Hurry. | |
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