Oww. Did you feel that? I did. Feels like another podcast coming on. I always imagine this is somewhat akin to launching a new naval ship, except that THIS IS BIG GREEN is full of holes the minute it gets lowered into the water. Oh well…
Things have been kind of noisy around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, actually. Pretty hard to finish a podcast with all that clanging, drilling, truck traffic, occasional machine gun, etc. What, with Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm now using our adopted home as a platform for hydrofracking, I suppose I should expect as much. Some might think hydrofracking and music production aren’t necessarily compatible, but that’s …. well, that’s just plain ignorant and insensitive. To some people’s ears, the sound of extractive enterprise is melodious and enchanting. And the smell … just like flowers.
Not that Big Green has always required complete silence while working on an album. Far from it, my friends. Just listen to our first two albums. You can hear someone eating lunch in the background of just about every song. It’s only gotten worse over the years, as more people congregate in the cultural Mecca that the Hammer Mill has become over these last twelve years. Our podcast is a good illustration of that. Last month, I think you could hear a truck backing up through most of our incoherent rambling. Unless it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) making that beep, beep, beep as he rolled backwards in terror and revulsion during a particularly noxious tirade.
Noxious tirades – not a bad name for a collection of podcast excerpts.
Then, of course, there’s all that noise in the background of our “first draft” recordings, included in each episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. That thing that sounds like a banjo in “Fallin’ Behind”? Yeah, well… that was a banjo. But it might just as well have been the hot water pipes just above our mastering deck, down in the sub-basement studio we call home. Hey, they’re first drafts. You expect a little bit of rough, don’t you? Otherwise they would be finished productions, right? THAT COMES LATER.
Not much later, admittedly. Have to get to work on that. Expect a new album sometime later this year…. assuming we haven’t been hydrofracked to kingdom come by then.
Make no mistake – this is not an authorless crime. In Iraq and Saudi Arabia, in the Congo, in Indonesia, and in many, many other places, we have used a heavy hand to maintain effective control over valuable resources. And our extractive industries – oil, gas, mining, etc. – have been an integral part of that process. So just understand, if these companies have an eye on all that shale gas, they will use every means available to get to it. I’m not suggesting military force, but everything short of that. They have deep enough pockets to buy politicians, propagandize on a massive scale, and pay off residents enough to divide communities.
Oh, well…. hi there. Just negotiating a small issue with a representative from Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., the entertainment branch of the titanic multinational that has agreed to, once again, sponsor Big Green – take us under their cold steel wing, as it were – in exchange for mineral rights to the land upon which our adopted squat-house home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now sits. What is it about these Hegemonic guys that even their A and R people wear full body armor? They seem a little, I don’t know, nervous. This guy I’m talking to has a very twitchy trigger finger. Wish to hell he’d put that Kalashnikov down.