Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Downville.

Hey, you know what? I saw a car pass in front of the mill today, just a few minutes ago. Amazing, right? Wait a minute … there goes another one!

Yeah, I guess you can tell that this town is dying. No doubt about it … since the old Cheney Hammer Mill shut down, there’s no reasonable way of making a living around here. Some stragglers work at the corner CVS, a handful more at the non-name convenience market across the street. It’s just plain dead. Damn good thing we don’t perform any more, or we’d be starving to death for lack of paying gigs. Sure … we’re starving, but it’s for an entirely different reason: inertia!

You know what they say, though. (That’s all I’ve got on that, because, after all, you know what they say, so I don’t have to tell you.) There are a lot of things you can do while standing still – one of them is mixing. That’s what we’re doing … or that’s what I’m doing, anyway – rhythm tracks, mixes, blah blah blah. A lot of standing around, pacing back and forth, cupping your hands behind your ears and furrowing your brow. Once in a while, I’ll send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out for some take out. (He wheels over to the local quick lunch stand and looks for unclaimed packages, basically – the discount method!)

Standing here.As I mentioned in previous posts, we’re finishing eight songs for the next episode of Ned Trek, our Star Trek parody that’s the baloney in the cheap-ass sandwich known as the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. Even when you fly as low to the ground as we do, mixing eight songs is a heavy lift. Imagine sweat dripping from my brow as I twiddle the knob on my superannuated Lexicon effect processor, Marvin occasionally daubing it with a facecloth. More reverb? A rotary effect of some kind? Those vocals need help, damn it! These and a thousand other decisions must be made before we upload our work to literally handfuls of fans. Hard job, but somebody has to do it.

So it’s just as well that there aren’t a lot of distractions around these parts. Call it a musician’s paradise.

Usual Rubbish

Spring is … psych!

Had the weirdest dream last night, Anti Lincoln. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill …. I mean, I dreamed there was snow all over the place, like it was mid January. Talk about unrealistic. Hey, pull up the shade … it’s kind of dark in here. What the …. WHAT?

Yeah, that snowfall took us all a little bit by surprise here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in frosty upstate New York. Somehow, after a freakishly mild winter (which I personally think was cooked up by our own Mitch Macaphee, mad science adviser), snow has returned in early April. Once again, I think Mitch might have had a hand in this. He’s got this big-ass smoke machine that shoots unnamed projectiles into the heavens – missiles loaded with I don’t know what the fuck, and lots of it. Mitch cranks it up, the sucker sputters and pops for a few minutes, then it starts snowing. Kind of. (That might be torn up fragments of Mitch’s membership agreement with the National Academy of Mad Science.)

Nice gizmo, Mitch.Okay, so let’s assume the weather has nothing to do with Mitch’s cloud bazooka. This is effed up, man! Remember now – we are squatters in this here hammer mill, see? And, well … the heat in this place is a little unreliable. Most of the winter we depend on an old wood stove in what used to be the shipping office. It’s the mansized tuber’s job to stoke the thing, and sometimes he falls down on the job a little. But most days we manage to keep the ice off the dishwater … though I don’t suppose you’re aware of how effective ice can be as a dishwashing medium. It scrapes, it emulsifies, it …. okay, I’m exaggerating. You have to look on the bright side when you’re freezing your ass off.

Winter is in extra innings. We can live with that. After all, we have spent weeks on remote planets, like Pluto, for instance.  We have traveled to the center of this here Earth. We have, I don’t know … done lots of stupid stuff. Certainly this is no stupider.

So, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the mansized tuber are tasked with fanning the flames for another week. Good exercise, even for a robot. And an animate stump.

Usual Rubbish

Six or seven. (Eight?)

Jesus Christ on a bike. I told you this hard drive was full. And now there’s smoke emanating from the processor. Can’t understand it. It’s a 486, isn’t it? Sure, hot damn. Fast as one of those new-fangled horseless carriages.

Oh, hello. Just grappling with some minor technical difficulties. You know, little stuff like gear that was obsolete in the last century, now over-burdened with production content, bowing deeply under the weight of yet another project, bursting at the seams. Just the kind of thing we’re likely to run into here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted squat house. Things can always be worse. We could have opted to do something else with this space, like start a church or something, but that doesn’t always turn out that well. (See Word of Life Church, Chadwicks, NY … up the road a piece.) Music it is.

Sure, I know … it’s been three years since the release of our last album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. And while we haven’t completed a new album, we have recorded the equivalent of about three albums worth of new material over these last few years. It’s all stuff cut into our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, so you may have heard it (or not). Bunch of songs, some of them sung by a pantomime horse. Who wouldn’t want to listen to that? So there’s little doubt in my mind that at some point we will package some or all of Eight songs? Really??these into an album of sorts and toss it out on the street for passers-by to happen upon and drop into their MP3 players.

Now you may ask, what kind of an economic model is that? Well, friends – we are a creative collective, built on an anarcho-syndicalist theoretical foundation, but with neo-socialist flavor notes that put us more into the worker-owned enterprise category. At least that’s how I describe it while hopping around on one foot. (I do that when someone is shooting at me for talking like a goddamn commie. This IS upstate New York, after all.) We’re giving a whole new meaning to “dance band”: We hit the first chord, and Yosemite Sam pulls his six-gun out and shouts “Dance, varmint!”

So, yes … we will assemble a new album by and by, assuming I can find a big enough technological bucket to carry it around in. Stay tuned!