Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Inside October.

The morning came up like thunder today. That was something. It poured so hard it felt like it was raining in my bedroom. Which, in fact, it was – the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill roof has some issues, as you’ve probably heard. Hey – over a century old, abandoned by its owners, neglected for decades … you’d have a leaky roof too.

So I’m sitting here at my superannuated mixing console, laptop open and running, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) holding an umbrella over me as I type. What better time is there to give a rundown of the recently posted October installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast. Here’s what’s on deck for October:

Ned Trek 25: Not the Children One, Please! – Based on the original Star Trek episode, “And the Children Shall Lead” (one of the most annoying episodes ever), the Ned Trek version features the current crop of demon spawn circling the drain that is the modern presidency. Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz appear as the children, all poorly impersonated along with the voices of their fathers, Ron, George, and … uh … Ted’s dad, respectively. The evil angel ringleader is played by Judge Robert Bork. Lots of singing, chanting, dancing, and fist pumping. You know … kid stuff.

Song: Johnny Got His Gun – A selection from our 2008 album International House. We included this one as a nod to the Oregon shooting. Our version of Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, in a sense, written around a subject that seemingly never goes away.

Put The Phone Down – Matt and I wheel through a variety of topics, from a discussion of the ridiculousness of the movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, to one about my brief childhood excursion through the Catholic religious instruction process (a.k.a. Voyage to the Bottom of the Holy See), to random talk about Matt’s primitive diet and the ongoing atrocities in Syria. Basically, our mouths move and sound comes out – that’s all I know.

That's great, Marvin. Thanks.Song: It Should’ve Been Me – The closer on our 2013 album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Something in the way of a tribute to cousin Rick Perry, who ended his 2016 presidential bid this past month. (NOW what will we do?)

Song: Enter The Mind – Another selection from International House, this one about enhanced interrogations and the mindset that promotes them.

Song: Why Not Call It George – This is an unreleased recording of a song Matt wrote decades ago, recorded on 4-track cassette, I believe, with Johnny White on drums and a positively volcanic guitar solo by the amazing Jeremy Shaw, who played with us in the early 1990s. One of Matt’s songs about geoscience (I think there were others) and plate tectonics, with a dash of mad science. It’s a particular favorite of our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee, who would name a reconstituted Pangea “Mitch,” I suspect.

Usual Rubbish

Losing wheels.

Are you sure it’s July? Absolutely sure? How is that even possible? All right, Jesus. Where did the freaking Spring go? No, no … not THAT spring. I meant the SEASON spring! God almighty.

Yes, here we are … three months after posting the last episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, and we’re still short of posting the next episode. Sure, it’s summer, but this is about wading in the water at the nearest beach resort. God, no! This is about the wheels coming off. This is about a leak in the hull. This is about a seized engine, smoke drifting lazily skyward from its molten husk. (Do engines have husks? Well .. ours does.) This is about production delays that are not voluntary, but ultimately necessary.

Brother Matt is our show editor. I think it’s common knowledge that he has been caught up with fledgling Peregrine Falcons for the past three months in particular. Aside from that, his computer imploded, taking many of his work files with it. Not a good circumstance, as you can well understand. I mean, think about it – how the hell are you supposed to complete a Star Trek parody like Ned Trek without the requisite ship sounds, particularly when it’s an audio podcast? The audience has few enough cues to work with, in that there are no visuals and we are lousy actors. (Though strangely that last bit doesn’t stop us from trying to get our point across.)

Sheesh. When things go wrong ... I know what some of you are probably thinking. I know because Mitch Macaphee has built a special mind-reading device that reveals the inner thoughts of anyone who so much as glances at this blog post. So … I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING … and aside from all of that stuff about Donald Trump’s white baseball cap, I totally agree with you. That said, some of you probably assume that the reason we do Ned Trek is just to provide a vehicle for distributing new songs. There’s some truth to that. We are not tremendously introspective here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, to be honest – a lot of the time, we’re just running on enzymes. Knee-jerk creatives, that’s us.

So hey … don’t give up on THIS IS BIG GREEN. We will be posting someday soon. In the meantime, amuse yourself with classic episodes of Ned Trek at www.nedtrek.com. Lotta laughs there.

Usual Rubbish

Just whistle.

I’m sorry – that’s as soft as a piano will go. The very word “piano” means soft, for chrissake. (Sure, piano is short for pianoforte, which means “soft – loud/strong”, implying dynamics, but that’s beside the point!) Just get some freaking earplugs already!

Neighbors. I guess you have to have them, even when you’re living in an abandoned hammer mill. I like to think that we make every effort to be good neighbors. I like to think it because, well, it isn’t true, and thinking things that aren’t true is something of a hobby of mine. Actually, we are crappy neighbors – up until all hours of the night, banging on noisy instruments, tooting on sousaphones, launching rockets, creating energy dampening fields that affect entire continents (note: those last two are down to our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee).

Our neighbor to the north, a guy named Wilson, has been leaving subtle hints that we are making too much noise. Today, for instance, there was a scroll of parchment posted to our front door with a railroad spike. (Apparently Wilson used to work for New York Central or Amtrak or something.) The parchment had two words scrawled on it in a shaky hand: “TOO LOUD”. I brought it to Anti-Lincoln (who has become our de facto legal adviser, being the only individual amongst us to have attended law school in some centrury) so that he might determine the full implications of this writ. He scanned it with a look of consternation, then offered in his characteristically reedy alto voice, “Yep. Somebody writ it.” Not sure where we’d be without him. (Someplace more permanent, perhaps.)

Well? What does it mean?In spite of what our neighbors think (or demand), making music is an intrinsically noisy business. We are working on an album, for chrissake. That means take after take, recording rhythm parts, experimenting with sound – painstaking work that generates a lot of ambient sound, despite Mitch Macaphee’s efforts to soundproof our makeshift studio. His latest attempt involved having Marvin (my personal robot assistant) hold up sheets of foam core, one in each claw. Did it work? Your answer is nailed to our front door.

Well, we’ll plow on in any case. That’s what we do. If we didn’t do that, we’d have to do something else. And then I just don’t know what we would do. (Got all that?)