Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

About your face.

I don’t know. Do you really think it’s that insulting? Not sure why anyone would take it personally, frankly. Unless, of course … they have a particularly hate-able face. A hate-friendly face, if you will. Oh, well.

Yeah, here we are, in the midst of one of our summertime projects. Always something to do here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, even if that something is virtually nothing. You could say this entire blog – all 17 years of it – amount to virtual nothingness, am I right? In any case … we’re just hashing out what the rest of the season is going to look like. We’ve got some archival material yet to go through; the kind of stuff that accumulates over three decades of playing and writing and recording together. A mountain of … something. Give it a listen, then you pick the descriptor.

This week’s “Wayback Wednesday” release was another selection off of our 1993 video demo – just us playing our set list live in front of a madman’s camera. We posted Matt’s song “I Hate Your Face“, the first verses of which goes like this:

God, I hate your convulsive face
Four, sixteen, a million, your annoying face
has got me sick and I’ve got to go

God, I made a big mistake
Eight sixty-four, a million, a huge mistake
when I parked it here
Did I stay too long? You know I stayed here far too long
Back in the day

Teenage angst? No sir. He wasn’t a teenager when he wrote it, for one thing. I won’t speak for Matt, but it always felt to me like a parody-punk song, complete with faux-teenage angst. By the way … this isn’t about YOUR face. Just putting that out there. It’s another face entirely, folks.

What’s left? Well, from the video, there’s a bunch of cover songs, a couple of which we may be able to get away with posting. (Expect pop-up ads.) We also have a lot of audio content – a bunch of live songs, some even listenable. We also have a handful of studio numbers that we can put out.

I know, I know … stop talking, start posting. Right, right.

Usual Rubbish

Toast terrific.

Damn it. Misplaced my breakfast again. Third time this morning. I definitely need more sleep. If anybody trips over some cold toast and a half-empty mug of tea, drop me a line.

We keep odd hours here in the cohort of collectivists known as Big Green. Matt, the naturalist in the group, is up at all hours chasing after critters, feeding them, changing their diapers, keeping them safe from the elements. That’s a slight exaggeration, but only slight – the guy is attempting to single-handedly make up for all of the injustices meted out by god and man. Kind of time-consuming. Me? I am the unnaturalist in the group. When I am outside, I think to myself … “This is too strange for us, Hanar. We are creatures of outer space. We long for the comforting closeness of walls.”

Okay, if I’m paraphrasing classic Star Trek, I must be a little groggy. (Too much grog, perhaps.) I’m up late at night in the lab, sometimes. Did I say lab? I meant studio. Cranking up the keyboard, jamming along with drum loops, listening to old recordings and occasionally committing something to disc. Then I’ll climb the stairs to my bedroom and get halfway through a decent night’s sleep before Mitch Macaphee detonates some weakly controlled “experiment” in his lab (yes, lab), shaking the walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill to their very foundations. We’re not so different, Mitch and me. Profoundly sleep-deprived. Trying to make loud noises using sophisticated instruments. Nearly bringing the house down on our heads.

Lincoln, did you steal my toast?One of my obsessions of late has been rebuilding our YouTube site. That’s my hobby, if you will, until Matt returns from Peregrine Falcon watch. (To catch up with him, see his Falcon Watch blog.) We don’t have a lot of video to post as of late, but we do have archival material that may be of interest to those who have limped along after Big Green for lo these many years. I will drop a note to all and sundry when I launch the new YouTube channel. There will be a few takes from an old video demo in there, most likely, along with our usual compliment of strange videos.

Okay, down goes the toast. Turn the keys up to eleven. And Mitch is back in the lab, so … boom goes the dynamite.

Usual Rubbish

Woodshedding.

Wait … where the hell are my lyric sheets? I had a big stack under my piano bench since we occupied the mill. Marvin – did we go digital at some point without my noticing it?

Yeah, so I’m just going over some old material, as I mentioned last week. Old videos, old audio tapes, old records, old robots. (Yes, robots – we have a roomful of toy robots in boxes, all acquired during our “Captured by Robots” obsession during the 1990s and 2000s. Evidence of misspent youth, except that we weren’t young then. Misspent oldth.) Just reminding myself of all the songwriting Matt (especially Matt!) and I did back during decades past – a full canon of material. Wait … that’s where I put those lyric sheets! In that old cannon Mitch bought at a mad science garage sale!

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is lending me a hand (or a claw) as I sift through a mountain of discarded bullshit. Amazing how a band full of anti-materialistic, anarcho-syndicalist hammer mill squatters can accumulate such a bewildering array of random possessions. Sure, there are pockets of useful items, like the robots (we can, for instance, plan some kind of robot invasion of the convenience store across the street), but mostly nameless junk. We found some things that were acquired on our various interstellar tours, but much of that is either invisible or too radioactive to handle. (You’d think invisible junk would take up less room, but noooooo.)

He's behind me, isn't he ...?Anyway, I’ve been taking this opportunity to relearn the keyboard and vocal parts to some of our older songs. There are literally hundreds of them, so I suppose if I wanted to, I could play a different one every day for the next nine months, then start again. (I only have time to play one song a day, and usually it ends up being “Summertime” or something like that.) Yesterday’s song was Matt’s “Promised Land”, which is one of those Dylanesque songs Dylan never wrote. We’ll record these at some point, though we have scratchy demos of all of them, recorded on cassette portastudios back in the stone age. (We’ve played some of these on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.)

So if you’re looking for me, I’m down here in the catacombs, pounding on the keys and warbling. Just knock loudly and beware of the robots.