two shows in one week

we played two shows last week. the first one was at the Knockout, with Moccretro and Th Mrcy Hot Sprngs. that show was awesome. decent turnout all around, two fantastic bands that we all LIKE A LOT, and generally a good time.

the second one was at Sub/Mission, and it was kinda bullshit. we didn't really know the bands we were playing with, but they were all nice people and such, and i think we'd probably play with any of them again if asked. unfortunately the venue was crap. we had a mixed experience with the venue when we played there in february, but did our best to have a good attitude about it at the time. turns out Sub/Mission is a PAY TO PLAY type venue, which i had no idea about. $350 gets you 4hrs at the space on a friday night. it's a big nice space, with outdoor smoking out back, and it purports to be ALL AGES. what yr $350 doesn't get you is a sound tech or a decent PA. oh and yr show has to be over at Midnight. our people didn't turn out for that gig, as apparently i guess the venue has developed a bad reputation around town, for burning bands i'd assume. we literally had people who were going to come out that night and then decided against it when they found out where it was. as someone said to corey, "someone is paying for you guys to play..." $350 is just a fucked up amount to ask for. if i had known ahead of time that there was a "pay to play" arrangement going on, we probably wouldn't have done the gig, as we're pretty over playing at venues around town that exploit the musicians. especially when they're making plenty of money at the bar (that probably doesn't have a proper liquor license) and also taking a percentage of the door. anyway, not trying to trash talk anyone here, but damned that was a shitty arrangement for a gig, where everyone worked hard and walked away with no money, and on top there was attitude from the staff all night long. oh well, whatever.

anyway, we're working on new songs, gonna be doing some more recording. hopefully playing again soon!

recording again

we've been recording again, this time for a proposed 7" ep (not that we've sold anywhere near enough records of tinnitus to justify such an endeavor). oh well, we're moving ahead anyways cuz we're excited about the songs. two of them are leftovers we're re-recording from the tinnitus era, one is re-purposed from corey's wildmen/archrivals days, and the other two are brand new. we're about halfway through recording, and everything has been moving along very quickly with first and second takes. above is a picture of corey doing vocals in our new rehearsal room.

last night we played a show

we played:

statement of intent
do you wanna mess around?
dead roses
sing pretty or die!
don't you want to play with me?
S.C.U.M.
i'm a man
no questions, no answers
anal fixation
the host (working title)

the space (Sub-Mission) was really big and cool. too bad turn out was low, wish we had gotten confirmation of the gig more in advance, as we weren't able to heavily promote it the way i had initially planned. the PA was pretty awful unfortunately, low vocal levels and lots of feedback coming off the mics. it's definitely a space with A LOT of potential though, and we'd be into playing there again. the other bands were cool (though again we were the weird one), and we sold a couple records. our most consistent and stress-free show so far.

we're going to be doing some recording and try to shoot a music video in the next two weeks before Corey leaves to go on tour with the Saucy Jacks for most of March. figure if we can get some tracks started before he leaves, it'll give us something to work on while he's gone. our next shows will be in April.

(((tinnitus)))

it's been a busy couple of weeks. we got our records and cds in at the beginning of the month, and we've been slowly trickling them out into the world. in fact, our record is available for purchase at these SF bay area stores:

Streetlight Records (SF)
Amoeba Records (SF)
Amoeba Records (Berkeley)

if yr at all enchanted with us, please pick up a copy from one of those fine establishments. if you can't find it in the racks, ask a sales person, 'aight!

here are some lovely pictures of us:







we're playing a show tomorrow night @ Sub-Mission Gallery (mission @ 18th st). it's all ages, and it's kind of our record release show. we're pretty excited!

feb 2nd

feb 2nd is the semi-official release date for the cd and vinyl of our new record, not that it means that much. we're supposed to get the goods shipped in on the 1st, so that's pretty exciting. we got the test pressings of the vinyl and they sound pretty great, i will put up some pictures later on. CDs will be $10, and VINYL (which includes the a CD) will be $15. we would very much like to be able to sell the damned things for cheaper, but it just doesn't seem feasible with numbers and costs and such.

we're still working on finishing up Buffie's record. six of the songs are finalized, it's just the last three that have been a little troublesome. but we recorded a few things last night, guitars and noise made with the kaoss pad, so everything that was missing should be in place now.

we've been working on some new songs that i think we're all pretty excited about. for the most part its all up-tempo catchy poppy rock stuff. Corey has a lot of new ideas and riffs, and Jimo has been working with his new toys, which include a boss digital delay pedal and an almost-new Orange Thunderverb 200 amp. i've started fucking around with Jimo's q-tron pedal and found a pretty cool sound for guitar, just not sure how or when to incorporate it yet. anyways, we've got five songs picked out to do for an 7" ep, that is if we sell any copies of TINNITUS. two of them are leftovers from TINNITUS, one is a redux of song Corey wrote for his short lived garage band from last year, the Arch-Rivals, and the other two are brand new (one of them exists only as an awesome title so far - BABY, BABY, BABY...BANG! BANG! BANG!). my goal is to get these five tunes recorded by March and if we sell some records, we can have a 7" out by late spring. we'll see!

buy our record in mp3?

so the TINNITUS record is now available on mp3 store across the internet, which is kind of a weird feeling. we paid $50 to a website called TUNECORE (to which we uploaded the album) to distribute the album to all the different MP3 retailers they have available. so it's up on AMAZON, LALA, RHAPSODY, probably iTUNES (i haven't checked to see if it's up there yet, but they do indeed have separate iTUNES stores for different countries, like Japan, New Zealand, Europe, etc. and it'll be available on all of them). what this actually means though is jack shit. here we've got this record that we've worked very hard on, and like it's super cool that it's available to some random person in say Japan, but it's not like some random kid in Japan knows or has a reason to know it exist. and even as such, an MP3 is such a shitty and undesirable format for "purchasing" and "owning" music as far as i am concerned. i just can't imagine EVER paying money for an MP3 file under any circumstances. there was like one time where i almost brought myself to do it in order to get what turned out to be an easily attainable BORIS b-side (floorshaker - that song is awesome), but i routinely mock any of my friends who admit to having purchased an MP3. especially if they could have purchased the CD or VINYL at a real store or online. it just seems like a shoddy disposable product most of the time. it's my understanding that the different retailers tend to offer differing terms of MP3 quality, as what we uploaded to the TUNECORE were the Master Wavs straight from the CDR. from what i know, iTUNES gets away with murder selling low quality files that sound worse than a 2nd generation dubbed cassette tape. i mean, 128kbps just sounds really crummy, no matter what magic AAC crap they claim to do. i really don't know what LALA or AMAZON or RHAPSODY or even whatever the fuck it is that calls itself NAPSTER these days actually offer. but if one is inclined to purchase an MP3 version of our record, i would recommend looking at these aforementioned various retailers and choosing the one that offers the highest kbps. and then pirate it to all yr friends! cuz that's how i find out about new music, shit!

so yeah, buy our record in MP3 for under $8??

or, CD and VINYL coming soon!!

end of recording

we finished recording Buffie's record last night. it consists of nine songs and is about 40 minutes long. it took nine days to get it done, with the majority of Jimo's lead guitar parts being done yesterday and the day before. recording vocals was not too tough, we only made Buffie cry once, so yeah. actually i got to be a bit of a tough slog towards the end, as i was very adamant that we finish yesterday on schedule. unfortunately i ended up a bit grouchy towards the end, as some of the songs presented some unanticipated difficulties. whereas we thought that the simple blues song Movie Star would be one of the easiest to track, it ended up being very challenging to capture the right feel for the tune since it was so structurally limited. i don't know how many damned takes we did of Buffie, Tommi and I trying to play the song through in one take, but it just took forever. Jimo also thought he had the lead guitar parts "in the bag," but it turned out to be far more arduous, as he realized that he hadn't played any heavy blues since becoming part of PARAE. the other song that gave us trouble near the end was Electricity, which actualy was very seamless except for one vocal hook part. Tommi had the brilliant idea that Buffie should spell out the title of the song, which she absolutely refused to do under any circumstances. so after trying a multitude of different things, eventually we settled on her hollering a nasty primal scream each time through the Scrotum Smasher. i supposed it works well enough...anyway, now all we gotta do is mix the damn thing, and we have about two weeks to do that. on the whole, i'm pretty proud of it and happy to have been involved with facilitating the recording process.

we're gonna be redesigning the website a bit in an effort to streamline some of the useless areas of it and make it look more in line with the artwork for the new TINNITUS record. we should be getting our test pressings of the vinyl any day now, and it should start popping up on MP3 retail sites after tomorrow (for whoever uses those things).

project buff buff

for the past week and a half we've been working on Buffie's record. she's a good friend of mine from college and is out here for two and a half weeks to make an album with us. basically, tommi (drums), jimo (lead guitar), and i (bass) are acting as her backing band, and we spent the first six days with her rehearsing and learning her songs. this past saturday we started laying down drums, and after two days we have drums, bass, and rhythm guitar for five tracks out of the nine done. we're currently a little bit ahead of schedule, but i'm still imagining that it will be a tight crunch to finish recording, as we only have eight more days to finish before she leaves town. after that we'll have a couple weeks to mix, and she'll take it from there! i do believe she is open to entertaining offers from record labels, so if i must say so myself, aside from the powerful vocals and strong songwriting, her record is going to be awesome.

our new record TINNITUS will be available on all the various MP3 stores starting Tuesday January 5th. it probably won't show up on itunes or amazon until a bit later, as apparently the lead time for these things is 2-4 weeks depending on the retailer. but we made jan 5th the official mp3 release date since that's corey's birthday, so happy birthday to him and his big broken ankle. skateboarding accident xmas day, haha... so if yr the type of person that is inclined to purchase MP3s, the album will be there in that medium for you to purchase and then pirate accordingly! for all you normal people, the album is still on track to be here in late January on Vinyl and CD. we should be getting our vinyl test pressings next week, so we're super excited about that!

we are ever so vain in our pursuit of folly

OK! we delivered the master of our new record TINNITUS to the manufacturer yesterday, Pirates Press, which is based here in SF. me and Tommi and Jimo all went in and met with our sales person and it was a super cool experience, nothing but positive vibes. we all left with a good feeling about it all, and Damon the guy there had so much information about different types of vinyl and printing options and more than answered all of our questions. so other than the fact that the damn cd/records are gonna cost a shit ton of money, they'll at least make for a fine looking artifact!

we had the record mastered by Timothy @ Stereophonic sound again (he did the Meta Ambigue 2cd thing), cuz he's super nice and willing to work with us nitpickers, and oh yeah, cheap too, yay. we're all quite pleased with the final mastered sound, basically pumping up our mixes with more low end heft and overall punch without brick-walling the fuck out our tunes (as is currently the custom/trend - loudness wars sux).

we were also pretty damn meticulous with the artwork. i would have really liked to have made the LP a folding gatefold, but it was just gonna be too much money (it's already more than we can afford considering the tenuous nature of our theoretical popularity potential). it's been brought to my attention that there are indeed a few people out there who may harbor a general excitement about our band, and per chance may even desire to purchase a record or cd. i remain ever skeptical of the existence of such persons, but look forward to the opportunity of being pleasantly surprised!

we're playing one last show of the year, again at the Stud, cuz they let us do whatever we want and it's our party, so we'll cry if we want to, next Thursday Dec 17th. it's going be x-mas themed, and should be pretty epic. we've written our very own fucked up christmas carol (the same one we talked about doing last year, but with revised lyrics), and it sounds like Ween playing Christian Rock. it's gonna be so very very wrong. we'll also be doing a cover of my favorite Misfits song, cuz it took about 20 seconds to learn and is awesome.

after that, Jimo and I will spend the next 3-4 weeks recording an album for one my dearest old friends from college, Buffie Roseanne. she's coming out here from NYC and we're doing it for the glory of it all. and because she is awesome. she hid her voice from me for so long!

aside from that, we've got 6-7 new songs we're currently working on, and looking at booking shows in the new year and doing some guerrilla touring, as the record should be here by late January for us to hawk.

the KZSU radio show

so we went down to Stanford University and played on the college radio last night! it was pretty cool. we basically had an hour to play but only 40 minutes of material properly prepared. we tried our best to pad things out, but still ended up blasting through all of our tunes at breakneck speed. i was under the impression that there would be some sort of interview interspersed, but the host - the big chief - while a nice enough guy, really didn't have a whole lot of real questions to ask, aside from when's yr next show, what's the band name mean. funny how he saved a lot of the more in depth questions for after the show when we were off the air and breaking shit down. anyways, it was pretty cool, we ended up padding out the set with a bunch of shit corey didn't want to play, as he suddenly became the voice of professionalism once we were on the radio, haha. but we managed to bash through them anyways without crashing and burning. i even managed to consciously eliminate all swear words while singing, and then twice accidently drop F bombs on the air between songs - oops! anyway, we played:

statement of intent
don't you want to play with me
the escapist
fear of death
no questions no answers
persona
sing pretty or die
do you wanna mess around
dead roses
scum
you don't love me anymore
anal fixation
-----
goodbye horses
barnacle carnival
369

everyone down there at the radio station was super cool and nice, and we even got a cd of our performance afterwards. from listening to a bit of it, all i can say is - oh those poor kids mixing us, i guess they tried their best. i realize now, we ought to simplify our sound for these live on the air radio show type deals, as the people mixing us we're doing it cold with no idea of how we're "supposed" to sound. and unfortunately, once they'd figure it out, we'd change everything for the next song. i think in the future jimo and i should limit ourselves to one or two guitar tones and volumes so that overall our sound will be more cohesive. also i wish i had remembered to ask for more reverb on the songs where i needed it. oh well!

sunn enforcer

i got a new amp! off ebay! very exciting. it is a SUNN Enforcer from the early 80s. apparently only 100 or so of these were made. it definitely an upgrade from the albatross of the b52 at100. here are some pictures!

drinking 4 loco before the show...not a good idea

we played EL RIO last night, and it was a pretty shit show. the sound guy had a bad attitude the whole time and was giving us negative vibes all night. the guys in the band that asked us to play (domestic electrics) were all really nice, and they brought in a good crowd. unfortunately that crowd (and part of ours) came after we played, cuz basically we had to start right at 8pm, which was ridiculously early. especially since there was no third band. it was just lame. bad experience, bad night. not fun. and we weren't playing coherently, so the whole thing kind of just became a big goof, or least it was for me. by the end of it i was laughing throughout my vocals, cuz shit was just going wrong and we were sounding so bad, so it was just totally fuck all, haha. i feel bad for our friends who came and had to watch us flame out in such an unexciting way.

anyways, it looks like EL RIO is another place we probably aren't going to play again (unless the circumstances are absolutely right). it just doesn't make sense for us to keep playing these shows with straight ahead MOR indie rock bands. it's not a crowd that is at all receptive to us. these are adults that are just there to see their co-worker's band play once every six months and otherwise don't give a shit about live music. it's just not something where we can cultivate an audience. i mean, generally i like to think that my attitude is that we should always play the best that we absolutely can and put on a awesome show, but after a certain amount of piss in the face - it comes down to - fuck it. ha! we suck tonight, bummer for you kids!

as for playing first, the benefits of playing last are far superior. i felt like such a dick by the end of the night, waiting to get paid while tommi and corey loaded out during the other band's encore (cuz they just refused to wait any longer). i mean, they were all nice guys, and it was their night, it just wasn't any fun to be there by the end of it.

oh yeah, we played:

statement of intent
don't you want to play with me
the escapist
no questions, no answers
dead roses
SCUM
do you wanna mess up the intro?
fear of death
goodbye horses (everybody loves that cover...)
sing pretty or die laughing thru the verses

report on the show last thursday 10/17

we had an excellent turnout for our KIMOCHII party last thursday at the stud. i attribute it to the fact that it was the first show for each tiger butterfly and the glassines. people always come to your first show, haha. it's getting them to come back that's the tricky part! skeletal system also played, and they were excellent, probably my favorite of the evening. we finally hit around 1am, and were typically pretty loaded by that point, but i suppose we did our best. we played:

anal fixation (sound check - i forgot like half the words)
statement of intent
do you wanna mess around?
no questions no answers
don't you want to play with me?
the escapist
369
dead roses
she can't understand me
goodbye horses (q lazzarus cover, from silence of the lambs)
sing pretty or die!

i couldn't hear my guitar for much of the set as i had to play through my old crate amp that we usually allocate for the keyboards. we had an excellent practice the night before and in a moment of drunken excitement i spilled modelo especial all over my accursed b-52 amp. not sure if it straight up died or not, figured best to turn the damn thing off before it shorts out or i get electrocuted. anyway, that's being repaired...so i bought an old rare SUNN off ebay in celebration! cuz really, i've had enough fuckery from that damn b-52. goddamn shitty sounding amp anyways.

we're still working on the artwork for the record at a snails pace and letting some friends give us some feedback about track sequence and such. so, delayed as always...

oh yeah, the laptop got fixed. some kind of problem with the logic board, whatever that is. it's been acting a little wonky, the hard drive thinks it has 8gb that i know it didn't have before and crashes once it's filled up past those 8gb (cuz i got too much crap on the damn thing).

it all might be gone

my laptop died friday night rather mysteriously. i took it to the apple store on saturday, and they were like - hmmm, dunno what's wrong, gonna have to ship it to a third party repair place, that'll be $310 please, oh and another $99 if you want us to try and save everything on your hard drive - plus tax! so there's a small chance that all of the 24 bit final mixes of the record are gone along with the raw tracks to half the album. kinda fucking shitty. there are only two 16bit copies of the record out there on CD - corey has one, and jerry has the other. all those times tommi kept telling me to back everything up and i just didn't get around to it yet...ha!

in other news, we're playing a show, at the stud again, this thursday the 15th. we're under-rehearsed as usual as corey has been sicker than hell for the past week with swine flu / strep throat or something. my goal is for us to not be completely fucking wasted, as we're playing last (AGAIN), so i suppose i'll have to be the drink nazi all night long. good times! anyway, that's about it for now...

it's finally almost done

last night we recorded corey's final parts for the record. it's took awhile and a dozen or so beers, but we got some really good bass lines and vocals done. my goal is to have the damn thing done by the end of the weekend (but it'll probably take longer to get final mixes).

on tuesday we did a photoshoot for the record where me and corey and jimo were zombies chasing tommi thru a graveyard. here's some pictures:





we're going to probably make it look like it's a old B movie poster or something.

other than that, we're going to be putting the rest of the artwork together over the next couple of weeks, and will probably start playing more shows again in october!