this is josh g

isn’t this the whole reason I have a blog? isn’t this why youtube was invented?

While I was in the middle of my eye troubles, my parents were coming into town to take everyone to see an opera at The Met. My mom had booked tickets like last summer or something(!) and even though Max and I aren’t that into the opera, it seemed like something that would be good for us, so we agreed to go. The time came, and I was out of the picture due to my eye. So my parents were in town, and one Saturday night they met up with Maxine, my sister and some friends of theirs for dinner at a little French place and then the opera. By this point I had been in our living room for coming on 3 weeks, and was kind of going nuts. It was depressing me further that everyone else was going out and having this good time, and I was stuck at home. I decided to watch a movie.

Maxine had seen Revoultionary Road a few weeks ago and said it was good, so I figured I’d give it a shot. But damn. I was already depressed, and this thing was like a monster of a downer…I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say it’s pretty clear from the beginning that things aren’t going to go well. I couldn’t take it, had to stop it about halfway through, I was so down, it was a killer. Seeing a film about hopelessness was a bad bad idea. I needed something else. And then, like a ray of sunshine from the heavens, came Pineapple Express.

Now this wasn’t a perfect film by any means, the violence was kind of weird (everything really seemed like it really hurt, which is odd in a comedy), and the Mad Magazine style hijinks didn’t fully mesh with the filmmaking style. It wasn’t even the best dope film I’ve seen in recent memory (that award has to go to Happy Face). But damn was it funny! Maybe I was just in the right place where I really needed a pick-me-up, but I was laughing out loud, and having to play parts over again. It was a damn good time. This was one of my favorite bits, some of the dialogue seems so familiar. They’re in the forest trying to make sure there’s no way they can be traced to a roach Seth Rogan threw out the window…

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

It’s a really smart comedy idea to take that kind of stoned banter and put it in the context of a chase-y action-y film…

foxes…

Here’s a couple more of the tape tracks…

This one was recorded by my old suite-mate Pat & I, no clue why or how, but I do remember him doing the lip-flap and thinking it was funny…still do, it sounds like avant-garde idiocy…

Is It Lou Reed?

This is one of the piano tracks I recorded myself. When you recod with a 4-track, it records stereo right and left, and then essentially the stereo right and left of the other side of the tape. That’s where the 4 tracks come from, get it? So if you’re recording 4-track onto an old tape that already has music on it, you have to record over every track, otherwise you can get weird leftover stuff that plays backwards because it’s coming from the other side of the tape. I know, it’s confusing to explain, you kind of have to experience it. I’m only explaining it so you can get a sense of what’s going on in this track. This is a (kind of long) improvisation I recorded (in D minor?) in a practice room. I’m pretty sure it was meant to be straight, with no overdubs or anything, much like that first track I posted last week. But when it came time to mix it down, I was on acid.

I remember at the time I was really impressed with myself, I thought it sounded like some kind of heavenly choir, or other-worldly voices were mixed in there and I was sort of amazed that this is what I had recorded. That night, still on acid, I played it for Jack’s roomate and his friend (who were both on acid as well) and it blew their minds. They couldn’t believe I had made this. Hell, I couldn’t believe it either. It was confusing.

The next day I realized what I had done. My piano bit is in there, and then some kind of sped up overdub coming from a stray track that eventually turns into some backwards Led Zeppelin that I was trying to record over on the other side. Also Jack’s 4-track had this built-in reverb which I had cranked up so it does indeed sound otherworldly and odd. It’s almost 6 minutes long, and all kind of clashes together and sounds a bit like a mess to me now. But I bet if you took acid it would sound amazing.

Dirgible Impromptu

This last one I can’t stand, but Jack requested it. I think it’s maybe the second thing I ever wrote with lyrics, and I’m trying to do this spoken word thing, and the lyrics make me cringe terribly and sound very immature to me now. Yuck.

Tilt-a-whirl

Let’s see, this month’s banner photo was taken by Maxine, I’ll post some more tape mp3’s soon, my blog by camera phone plugin isn’t working (which is killing me), my eye is doing still better (good stuff) and I saw this which I really liked:

The Lost Tribes of New York City from Carolyn London on Vimeo.

I knew I was going to save this one for Friday. So last semester of my senior year of college I had electives open and I took an Audio Production class. The teacher wasn’t that good, but I got a lot out of it and it was a blast. The projects the prof gave us were good, he just wasn’t very good at explaining things…i.e. performing the role of the teacher. Ask Dan R., he took the class with me. The good thing the prof did though, was make us learn all the analog ways of doing things before bringing us into the digital world. So we were splicing tape with razor blades, making tape loops that were held in place with pencils and so on. It was great. I have this experimental tape loop piece but it’s only on reel-to-reel 1/4 inch tape, so I’ll have to transfer that later.

Even once we made the move to digital, the system was so crash prone that you couldn’t do a very long piece, you’d have to stitch several short ones together. We used the system to "master" the first Raygun Theatre album (also on cassette) and I can remember it was a glitch-plagued nightmare, increasing Jack’s every distrust of the digital world.

But what I have for you is my final project for that Audio Production class. I can’t remember what other people did for their final projects, but here’s mine. It’s an 8-minute acoustic guitar rock opera of the story of Samson and Delilah.

Jjosh – Samson and Delilah

My favorite part is the bit in their duet where they start singing at the same time. She’s going "Samson" and he’s going "Delilah, aww I love ya" — I’m still proud of that bit. Delilah was sung by Molly, the girlfriend (now wife) of my pal Pat H. She knocked it out of the park, the piece really comes alive when she enters. She even nails the absurdist ending that I tacked onto the story, she was great.

For some reason I think my sister is going to love this track.

It’s been so fun posting these, maybe I’ll continue a little into next week…

(first image that shows up when you type "happy take trash head toe" in google images)

I was using these MIDI machines they had in the college music lab — you could play a piano/synth that was hooked up to a computer and it would transcribe it into musical notation — and showing Jack how great it was. I then went further and demonstrated how you could type in lyrics and they would appear below the music. I was just typing nonsense to show how it worked, and for some reason I typed "I’m a happy take take the trash out with my head. Head of a toe head." No idea why, they were just the first words that popped into my head and anyway, I was just trying to show Jack a feature of the software.

Jack started laughing like to bust a gut. He thought that phrase was so damn funny, we printed it out and somehow that night recorded this track. Now I don’t know if you know about bouncing tracks on 4-track, but you can do this thing where you record 3 tracks of stuff and then mix it down onto 1 track. You can then record 2 additional tracks with that one and mix THAT down to another track. In this way you can pile track on top of track on top of track. The only issue is that the first stuff you record will get pretty buried in the mix.

Jack and I came up with this idea to record the main phrase as this singer who was in a club and the crowd slowly gets it and starts to sing along until everyone’s doing it at the end. When we recorded the voices of the club’s crowd, we decided that each one would be someone we admired who was at the club. For one take, Jack did Bowie and I did Tom Waits. He did Lou Reed and I did Black Francis. He did Screamin Jay Hawkins. I can’t remember the others, but there are a bunch in there. We also added the sounds of glasses and other ambient stuff to really make it feel like a club. It makes me laugh every time I hear it.

This is the kind of stuff we did when we were bored.

I’m A Happy Take Take – Live from Jack & James’s

My friend Sandy had given me an acoustic guitar that he found in the trash somewhere and I was trying to learn how to play. Then this strange thing happened where my Aunt Helen ended up with an electric guitar and amp at her house because someone owed her money and they gave her the guitar as collateral. I found out about it somehow and asked if I could borrow it and she said sure but that I would have to give it back if this person ever paid her. I took the guitar and worked harder I had this idea to write a song for every chord I learned — not an original idea (see: every punk band ever), but fun.

"Winter of 1849" is a 2 chord song and Jack and I recorded it on 4-track (surprise) in his freshman dorm room late one night. We added all these other misc sounds to it (trying for Tom Waits and failing), and other random voice sounds and mixed it into this short weird stew. Jack does the "Oh Yeah"’s. We drank a lot of beer that night and ate a lot of chocolate chip cookies (not recommended). Once I got back to my own dorm room I threw up and then this girl I knew came over and stayed the night. This was the point where college started to get good.

JJG – Winter of 1849

At one point I started multi-tracking the piano, adding layers of piano on top of other layers of piano. Since I didn’t have a click track to play along with or anything, the rhythms were all really chaotic, but I liked that, thought it gave it a good random quality. This is my favorite of the multi-tracked piano pieces: Mellow Warpath. I like this one a lot, it starts off sweet, locks in around :20 and then kind of goes nuts until the end. I also like the very end, with the last notes coming from an underlying piano track that you kind of didn’t know was there.

Jjosh Multi-Piano – Mellow Warpath

FACT: I can’t remember anything about how to play this thing, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of where to start. I like that too.

One of the only good things to come from my eye scenario is that I finally hooked a tape player up to the computer to digitize all the stuff I recorded to cassette during college. I’d had this box of tapes laying around forever, so it’s great to finally get this stuff recorded and mp3’d. Also, since most of doing the task was just listening, it was the perfect project for my eye. I figured this week I would post some of the recordings — not sure how many, most of them are so cringe-inducingly cheezy that I’m not really sure why I digitized them.

This first one is recorded in a piano practice room when I was going to college. My pal JW lent me his 4-track and I recorded a bunch of piano songs that I had been working on; digitizing this tape made me realize how much time I must have spent that Freshman year in the piano room. Freshman year wasn’t a good time, and I guess I channeled that stuff into the piano. The weird thing is, I would record these tracks and not re-do them if I made mistakes, so you’ll hear little wobbles in there and parts that aren’t quite 100%, but so be it. I think at the time I was mainly influenced by Windham Hill New Age music.

At the end of Freshman year I had to turn in a cassette of a bunch of tracks for some kind of class project, so my friend PH and I named them with the cheeziest names we could think of as a joke.

So please enjoy "Losing You and Finding Myself".

Jjosh Practice Room Session – Losing You and Finding Myself

here is something to tickle the eye…

 the whole fight is amazing, but how I felt last Friday can be found at 6:00 in…

Unfortunatley I am still experiencing (bio)technical difficulties in my left eye…look up “corneal ulcer” for a hint of the fun I’m having. Regular posting will resume once this is sorted out, hopefully no more than a week or so…

Now this is more like it. It’s been a while since I felt like I hit a vein of gold on the ole internet, but this is jaw-dropping solid. Using clips found deep deep in the belly of youtube, this artiste has sampled, cut, sliced and diced them to create some phat trax. Sure, it’s the same thing folks have been doing with James Brown and P-Funk samples for years, but there’s something fantastic about harnessing the collective talent of the crowd and resampling that.

The site has an album’s worth of tracks, and there’s no easy embedding, so go check it out over lunch or whatever…I’ve recorded the first track as a sample so you can see what I’m talking about, but the other tracks as just as good and some moments are better…this one is nice ‘cuz it starts slow so you can see what he’s doing, and then it kicks off into the stratosphere…

enjoy…

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

major hat tip to waxy…nice one…

I mean, this is why the copyfight is a good thing, because appropriating footage of The Monkees lets us a, re-appreciate the original and b, add to the exuberance and joy that this song and video can bring us. Keep fighting.

Listening to fluxblog‘s fluxcast that focuses on comedy, and the first track is so damn funny I keep having to replay it…these Lonely Island guys are good, and the songwriting is sharp, the absurdity is fantastic, the beats are fr3sh, the satire is pointed…

plus its so great to hear this track while I’m working on upfronts (i.e., massive marketing tape that will be produced by committee and end up as a piece of junk that everyone hates)…take a meeting indeed…

Lonely Island – I’m a Boss