Tag Archives: International House

Usual Rubbish

Tuneless fuckers.

No, there’s nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Since when are you a musical purist? I’m experimenting, man … that’s where it’s at, right? That’s what Big Green is all about. THAT’S WHY WE’RE ABOARD HER …

Oh. sorry … I lapsed into James T. Kirk dialogue for a moment. We were just having a little back and forth over some musical contrivances I’ve been attempting on our latest crop of NED TREK songs.  Last count we’ve got fully eight numbers in the works – an unusually large parcel, though our recording process has taken a bit longer than has been our habit in recent years. As some of you know, we used to take some pains over our albums (e.g. International House, five years in the making). Then when we launched our podcast, we started slapping songs together in hours rather than days or months (e.g. Cowboy Scat, a ridiculously slap-dash effort).

That's ... uh ... real good, Abe.Well, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. I think we’ve put about six months into these songs, and we’re only now at the mixing stage. Mind you, we have just a few hours a week to do anything on this at all, then it’s back to the salt mines. Still, taking time allows us to experiment a bit more, which is what Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was calling me out for just then. Not sure when he graduated from Julliard, but apparently the sight of me playing a coronet with a violin bow blew a few breakers in that little brass noggin of his. It’s called innovation, Marvin. Deal with it.

The unfortunate side effect of taking longer on these songs is that we go through longer periods of posting no new songs. That makes us tuneless fuckers for a good portion of the year. But don’t let our silence fool you – there’s a lot of music going on in this drafty old hammer mill. Why just the other day Antimatter Lincoln pulled out his banjo and started plucking. Now, there aren’t a lot of things that even Anti-Lincoln does worse than I do, but plunking on a banjo is one of them. And I’m freaking awful on that instrument. That’s why I took up the coronet. Though I’m thinking an accordion bellows would help that horn dramatically. We’ll see. Back to the lab!

Usual Rubbish

So anyway.

Music is a universal language and love is the key. Or maybe SOUND is the key. Love is the lock. No, wait … love is the music, language is the universe, and Francis Scott is the key. That sounds right-ish.

Well, we’re coming up on a little anniversary here at Big Green village, housed in the historic abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in historic upstate New York. (A lot of history up here. Did you know that this area is as old as any other area on Earth?) What’s the anniversary, you ask? Thank you for asking. It’s actually the tenth anniversary of the release of our second album, International House, which we released back in fall of 2008. My goodness … has it been that long? Well, I guess it has. It also happens to be the fifth anniversary of the release of our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. And in case that isn’t nearly amazing enough, next year will be the 20th anniversary of the release of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas.

Okay, so here are the ratios: 10:2, 5:3, and 20:1. Got all that? Good, because god knows I’m not paying any attention. Don’t get the wrong impression – we’re not one of those neurotic bands that keeps track of every insignificant date in our long history. Lord no, we gave that up on December 3, 1990 when I got that flat tire. WHY? WHY DID IT HAPPEN TO ME? Or was that Matt who got the flat tire? Maybe so. Right, then forget the why, why stuff. So anyway, we put International House out ten years ago. Kind of amazing, seeing as it took us five years to make that album in the first place. Five years, sixteen songs – you do the math. (Don’t ask me how.)

Aw, cheese and crackers!Well, so … how to celebrate? Our plan is to reissue songs off of International House via Soundcloud, so that the people can hear what they’ve been missing all these years. Because, hey listen … it’s all about the people. And what the people need is a way to make them smile. (Fun fact: every single phrase in this blog post is a lyric from some crappy pop song. Well … give or take a few.) All that’s on our Soundcloud site right now is some odds and ends, but that’s going to change, mister. You just wait and see.

And yes, we will get back to our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Patience, my friends, patience.

Usual Rubbish

Clown computing.

Wow, okay. Do that again. No, not that one … I mean the hand stand. Okay, NOW the somersault. Can you do cartwheels? Not the donuts, you idiot! The circus trick! Wait … where are you going?

Well, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is off to find a Dunkin Donuts or Crispy Creme somewhere. He’s so damn suggestible. The mere mention of sugar-saturated junk food gets his wheels rolling, quite literally. Marvin was just showing me some of his acrobatic exercises from his days with P.T. Barnum. Now, I know what you’re going to say …. Marvin was just manufactured sometime around the year 2000; how could he possibly have worked for P.T. Barnum? Well, god only knows what materials our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee used in putting Marvin’s electronic brain together, but I suspect part of it may have come from a circus wagon. Robots – where would they be without other people’s memories?

Now that you’re pondering that impenetrable mystery, here’s another one. I was noodling around on our distributor sites and discovered that I can port songs from our first two albums – 2000 Years to Christmas and International House – over to our SoundCloud site. Well, for some reason it seemed like a good idea to start doing just that. The first one we posted was our 2011 single, One Small Step:

Call that a cartwheel? Sheesh.Since I’ve been in an archiving mood pretty much all summer, I will likely start posting selections from International House (our 2008 album) in the coming weeks and share them here, forthwith, etc. Not new material, of course …. just a cheap-ass retrospective on where we’ve been. Something for you to chew on while we work out where the hell we’re going. I don’t know, maybe another interstellar tour, or maybe we’ll go all in on another album, or maybe just watch Marvin try to do cheap circus tricks. So long as he doesn’t dress up like a rodeo clown and start juggling bowling pins. That’s a bridge too far.

Of course, now Marvin is giving me that “it does not compute” look. I get that a lot. Or maybe it’s just Marvin’s default expression; he’s got brass fixtures for eyes, nose, and ears, so it’s a little hard to read.