Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Freak week.

That’s kind of an odd sound. Did you hear it, Anti-Lincoln? What’s that? No hearing aid? I didn’t know you were hard of hearing. Huh. Explains a lot, really. I think we all just sort of assumed that you were obstinate and disagreeable. And manic depressive. And a total asshole. Oh – well, you heard THAT now, didn’t you?

It’s hard to ‘splain what it’s like living with a bunch of freaks like the entourage surrounding Big Green. I know that if you’re a rock music fan, you have probably read all the stories about the folks who hung around with the Beatles or Justin Bieber’s posse or whatever. Yeah, our group is nothing like that. Though I suppose we have the rough equivalent of “Magic Alex” in our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. Just call him Magic Mitch. (Not to his face, of course.) Once caveat: his version of the “nothing box” would probably be explosive.

Maybe it’s just that you get more sensitive with age. You know, the goings-on in the middle of the night, the moving stuff around and slamming doors, the playing instruments at all hours – I should really stop doing all that shit. No, seriously … I’ve become kind of attached to the idea of sleeping through most of the night (especially this time of year, when the nights last half the day.) In fact, I get SO attached to the idea of sleeping that I need an frightfully loud Two useless inventionsalarm clock, which now takes the form of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) setting off one of his servo-alarms while standing next to my cot.

You know you’re living in freak land when the most normal individual in your group is a man-sized tuber. (I would say my brother Matt is the most normal, but that would just be a dirty lie.) Of course, that has never stopped us from making music. In fact, you could say that it has contributed to our productivity. The freakier we get, the stranger the albums get. That seems like a natural progression to me.

Okay, well … back to whatever I was doing before. Odd jobs, like bending pretzels, perhaps.

 

Usual Rubbish

Parts and parcels.

What is this … another carton? This one’s from Madagascar, no less. What the hell. Does it rattle when it shakes? Does it roll? If when it shakes it both rattles and rolls, it might be Jerry Lee Lewis.

For the life of me, I don’t know who’s ordering all of these packages. They just show up at the door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (Big Green’s longtime squat-house) and subsequently disappear. At first I thought it might be Mitch Macaphee, but he has long since abandoned the notion of ordering goods from various merchants. He just invents whatever he needs, which is a handy skill to have. (Perhaps the handiest!) Then I thought maybe anti-Lincoln was behind all of this mail order, since some of the boxes came from Urban Outfitters. (He’s taken to a more cosmopolitan wardrobe of late. Very smart.)

I know, I know – I tend to get a little suspicious, living in a condemned post-industrial hulk like I do. A few months here and you start to see conspiracies around every corner. What are those mice talking about? Do the crows in the courtyard wish me well or ill? Perhaps it is THEY who are ordering stuff from Crate and Barrel. Maybe they need crates and barrels for something, I don’t know. Idle minds, right?

A bit too far, Marvin. Just saying.Someone’s handing me a note. It reads, “You idiot. It’s probably Marvin (your personal robot assistant). Mitch Macaphee just made him wi-fi compatible.” Oh, right. So Marvin doesn’t even need a smart phone to buy a bunch of useless junk on credit. All he needs is the credit. Fortunately, he doesn’t have … doesn’t have … hey … where’s my wallet? MARVIN!!

Okay, Marvin has been using this magnetic lock gizmo ever since he saw one on Lost In Space reruns. My guess is that he’s down in his basement room, frozen like a statue in his magnetic lock, placing orders over wi-fi without even lifting a finger. And the boxes that come are probably piling up around him like a fortress – a fortress of consumer joy! Doesn’t that remind you of Christmas?

Anyway, if I’m in the pokey the next time I post, it will be that mindless robot’s fault. See if he’ll let you use my credit card to bail me out.

Usual Rubbish

Knob turning.

That doesn’t sound right to me. Twist the knob a bit further. No, no – not that knob! The one below it. Give it a good twist. Wrong way! That sounds horrible. Try the next knob down.

Oh, man … these sound consoles are so confusing. All those knobs and buttons and sliders and levers, each one doing a whole different thing. And then there’s the analog/digital thing, so a lot of the knobs and switches are assignable, which means they do DIFFERENT things for DIFFERENT people. Holy shit, that’s complicated. My brain hurts.

You see … that’s the trouble when you spend most of your life writing and playing songs and very little of your life learning the complex technologies involved in putting those songs across. Like most musicians, our reaction is … you mean I have to learn TWO things? That’s outrageous! Double duty, indeed. (As you can see, we are truly in the mainstream of American thought and sensibility.) I think about this every time I listen to old tracks from our various albums and ramshackle collections of unreleased material. I remember the hours of pulling random levers, spinning random knobs, etc., that lead to the final product and I ask myself: How? How is it that it sounds like anything at all?

Too damn complex, Mitch ... Must be a reason that sound comes out of the speakers when you play our recordings. All I know is that we make noises, put them into machines, and voila. Maybe Mitch Macaphee goes in there after we’re done and fiddles around with the sound molecules, perhaps in hopes of precipitating some kind of sonic explosion. Perhaps not. (I know that there’s usually an subsequent economic explosion, or implosion, to put the matter more precisely.)

As you know, our process for writing songs is somewhat unorthodox. I’ve described it in these blog pages before. Matt pretty much writes songs in his sleep, which explains a lot. I tend to write best in the shower, but I usually don’t have much to show for it other than some sodden, blotchy shreds of paper.

Do what you do best; that’s what I was taught. Now if I can just work out exactly what that is.