Startless

I am finally finishing up some images for a couple of new Startless releases. The first one is for a live 3" and I am going to need to fiddle around with photographing it in different light. There is some glare that is really bothering me and I am having trouble getting rid of it. The second is for a full length that we recorded at the same time as Circulation Decay. We were hoping to have both done in time for the fest at Enemy next weekend. It looks like the 3" will be ready, but not the full length. It has been a bad week and I didn't have as much time to work on these as I would have liked.

What Were Tapes

After I posted the photos of the slowly growing collection of cassette uptake reels, a couple of friends suggested that I start a Tumblr photo blog devoted to them. So, I did. You can find it here. Right now, there are just some of the same cell phone pics that I already posted here. However, I will soon be uploading some other fun stuff: hopefully daily. My goal with this photo blog is to document the strange details, subtleties, and ephemera associated with tape. I am planning on expanding beyond the original suggestion to make a tumblr about uptake reels. Instead, I will focus on a wide variety of photos of interesting aspects of this dying technology.

Spring Break

This last week and a half has been more productive than I thought it was going to be. I finished up and sent off masters for cassettes on Ides Recordings, Banned Productions, and Chondritic Sound. I sent off a master for a compilation on Rainbow Bridge. Finally, I finished up the designs for a couple of covers. One will be a live, Startless 3". The other will be a full length Startless CD-r. We are hoping that the Startless releases will be done by the fest at Enemy in Chicago this month. You can see the images above. Both will be in full color and will be put into frames.

Ides

This weekend is weird. I have been in a bizarre depression lately trying to get through an intense several week stretch of demanding and emotionally draining work. This weekend, for the first time in quite a while, I have some free time. I am going to finally be able to get back to work on some fun stuff. I think that first up will be finishing up this track for my cassette on Ides. This damn thing has been on my to do pile for a long time. I am hoping that this weekend will be the end.

New "Dots" Review.

This is a really nice review from Richard Pinell. An excerpt follows, but you should check out the whole thing at his Watchful Ear Blog.

"The really nice elements of this music are the qualities of the individual sounds. From the opening scratches and scribbles to the deep, dry, gradually building roar that lights up the central section of the disc, there is a really nice feel to all of the sounds here, not just a throwaway electronic screech or a bit of static, but sounds discovered on the surface of tape, full of detail, history and a sense of natural texture."

Splice

I am experimenting with some processes that I have been thinking about for a new recording that is tentatively called Walking Around in a Body With No Bones. It is based off of a phrase Chris Sienko used in a review of my Heraclitus cd in his magazine, As Loud As Possible. He used this phrase to describe the feeling he had while listening to the end of that CD. The passage in question could not be farther from being "as loud as possible" if it was silence. I am not going to reveal too much about the recording I am working on. However, here are some images taken from the first step in the process.