Wooden Birds/Jupiter Watts @ The Earl - October 6

Our next show is Tuesday night, October 6 at The Earl here in Atlanta. We'll be opening for The Wooden Birds, a pretty dandy combo from Austin, TX, featuring Andrew Kenny, former singer/songwriter from whisper-rock legends American Analog Set. Word on the street has it that Matt Pond -- of Matt Pond PA fame -- is the touring guitarist with The Wooden Birds. This should be a fun one. We go on around 9:30. Oh Dorian opens the show at 8:30.

To put you in the proper frame of mind, here's a link to a page with a couple oldies but goodies, as yet unreleased.

Hope to see you at the show.

Kisses,

J-Watts

we're still here...

...and we're finally getting back into the swing of things. Yes, it's been a bit longer than we said (shocker), but we have been working in the interim, and we're pretty close to being done with this group of songs. More importantly, we're finally putting up the only song you haven't yet heard from the forthcoming record. It still needs a little work, but it's pretty close to finished, and we like it a lot (despite it being maybe our weirdest effort yet):


ebb/flow (rough mix 8-23-09).


We've got some other news, too: we're finally gonna start getting out in the world and playing again! Our next show (and first in quite a while) is going to be at the Five Spot on September 20. It's a benefit for one of our favorite local nonprofits, a group called Georgia Lawyers for the Arts; they do pro bono work for musicians, artists, and all sorts of creative types who otherwise couldn't afford legal representation. They could really use a little help at the moment, and we'd love to give them a boost, so come on out to see us. Check this space and our myspace for details in the very near future. And keep checking - we're working on a few more shows for this fall and winter, so you ought to be able to catch us out on the town soon...

last two for a bit...

Things have been slowing down a bit on the recording front lately as we've all been getting busy with other things, and now, sadly, we're going to be taking about a month off before we get back to it. Well, it's only sad for some of us, who will be working; some folks are going to be on vacation. But we'll all be back at it at the beginning of August, and we hope to be close to finished by September. We'll see how that goes...

For now, though, we have two new rough mixes, thanks to some essential overdubs we finally got around to doing. First, as promised, we have the nice-sounding version of "one by one:"

one by one (rough 7-4-09).

This one's still in a somewhat experimental stage; we may add some more stuff or take some away. Right now it's only six tracks, and a couple of things are doubled! We think it sounds pretty good, though. As mentioned here before, we used to call this one "melodica song" for good reason, since it features the funny little instrument. And, as it turns out, it can be a pretty funny sounding one, too - it took a lot of work to figure out how to make it sound good. In the end, an omni mic from way far away smoothed out the rough edges. It's still a bit pitchy, though, so let us know if you think it sounds charming or just crummy (we're hoping for the former). And thanks to Matt from the Liverhearts and the Preakness for loaning us those Earthworks omnis - as predicted, they were just what we needed.

Next up we have one of our favorites from this batch. It's been up here before in an early cut-and-paste demo version, which we've conveniently provided below for comparison (there's also a solo acoustic version on the blog, too, featuring Hutch from Cadillac Jones). This new version is all live instruments, though we have done quite a bit of post-production on it. It's still got a ways to go; we have some decisions to make, including whether we want to edit down a couple of sections to keep it moving a bit more (though of course we do love to go on and on). Let us know what you think:

the target (rough 7-4-09).

And here's the original version:

the target (epilepsy warning version).

So don't expect to many posts here for the next month or so, though we may put up a little tidbit or two. There's at least one more song from this batch that hasn't been posted yet, and it's the craziest of the bunch, so you won't want to miss it.

So seeya soon, and happy Independence Day!

overdubs.

No mixes of late because we've been spending our meager time on overdubs. As anyone who's done any recording knows, this can be the most tedious stage of the process - for some parts, at least, you have to do it over and over until you get it right, which sometimes becomes less and less likely as you do it over and over. It can be lots of fun, too - you get to experiment with sounds, try new things, do stuff the band can't actually pull off live, and that sort of thing. So far, our experience has been a little bit of all of this, especially for the song we were working on this week. This one's been around for a long time, and we're still fiddling with it. In fact, the picture above features Clay trying to come up with a Wurlitzer part on the spot, which is always fun. It's a lot easier when you have great moral support helping you along, though:

















Ramon is truly expert at yelling out chord changes and endlessly suggesting new and exciting variations of the same few notes.

You'll get a chance to judge the results fairly soon, but in the meantime we thought we'd put up a super-old version of the song, from when we first started working on it way back in 2007. It's interesting how much it hasn't changed, though some things have been added and some have been taken away since this very basic version was created. From the start, though, it's featured one of our favorite weird instruments: the melodica. It gets used by our local friends the Preakness, and, somewhat more famously, by one of our heroes, Augustus Pablo. It also turns out to be fairly hard to record well, but you'll hear more about that soon...

Here's the oldest demo version we have of what we once called "the melodica song:"

one by one (demo).

You'll be hearing a nicely-recorded version as soon as we make it sound nice.

princeton 88.

Here's a little something to tide you over until the next mix pops up here, hopefully early next week. This is James and Ramon in the rehearsal space improvising a bit on "Break the Curse," which we posted a mix of the other day. Ramon is also making use of the Buddha Machine, one of our favorite toys - in fact, we just discovered that we got a mention on the official Buddha Machine blog back in November - thanks, guys!

we are truly honored.

So, has anybody else noticed that the new Sonic Youth album cover:






















...is clearly an homage to the cover of our last record?:




















It's nice to see the influences go both ways sometimes.

By the way, if you want to compare more closely, you can get a copy of our self-titled record here. And you already have a copy of "The Eternal," right?

Oh, and don't worry: Our current recording project is still ongoing - keep checking back for more actual content.

the mysteries of phasing...

OK, so it's been kinda slow going on the updates, but our initial rough mixes were rough enough that we weren't in a hurry to put them all up without a little more work. Plus, we had to drag this out, right? So, today, we present rough mix #2, which was actually the first song we tracked over Memorial Day weekend:

break the curse (rough mix 6/8/09).

This mix is a bit less "rough;" we spent a couple of hours messing with it yesterday. Though the performance is pretty good all around (including most of the scratch vocals), as the first go with our live-in-the-living-room setup, this one came out a bit funny at first. The main problem was boomy, muddy bass; anyone who's recorded in less-than-ideal environments knows all about that. But, when we flipped the phase on the bass track and dropped the low-end EQ on a number of other instruments, things came out sounding quite a bit nicer (we're big believers in subtractive EQ). It's not as tight as we'd like, but at the same time, the overall sound seems to fit the mood of this song well.

This particular track arose as an instrumental quite some time ago; we debuted it at our "Wandern" gallery show, which was in some ways the genesis of our current approach. It started off as an improvisation and later morphed into this thing that some people might actually call a song, though it does stretch the definition a bit. Keep an eye out for chord changes, they're easy to miss!

Ramon plays drums on this one; the guitar drone you hear most of the time is a loop he starts before moving over to the drums. We actually recorded it that way to create the sound in the room we're used to hearing. The lead guitar on the left is James', recorded as discussed before. We also did a bit of reamping on this one, running Clay's keys - recorded direct - through a tube amp for a little roominess; they may need some more, yet...

This reminds us; we didn't give much detail in the last post on the song featured there, "I Propose." But if you're interested in hearing those crazy Grundigs that sound like the legendary Sennheiser 409, check out Ramon's guitar on the left. And somebody tell James his fuzzy tone on the right side complements it nicely; he's not sure about it. For your convenience, here's that song again:

I propose (rough mix 5/29/09).

Keep checking back, there'll be more this week...