Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Cheer up.

Get out of my room, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). You too, tubey. I’m having one of my captain sunshine days, as you can tell. In fact, I’m rear-admiral motherfucking sunshine today, mister.

This means war
In a bit of a mood today.

Oh, fuck…. I mean, fudge. Didn’t know you were listening in. Sorry you had to hear that outburst. Nerves are getting a little frayed around the hammer mill just lately. What the hell, I’ve been sleeping in an abandoned hammer-stock storage silo for the last 10 years, springs poking out of my mattress like in those old cartoons, the windows leaky and cracked, the mortar crumbling to dust between ancient bricks. Not to put too fine a point on it – this place is a DUMP. Now I know why they abandoned the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill.

What’s that? They condemned the place? What the hell, Marvin … you had that in your memory banks all this time? Weren’t you just dying to tell me at some point before this? Irrelevant?!? I’ve obviously got to talk to your inventor about upgrading your relevance sensor. To say nothing of your gaydar. The freaking boy scouts should hire your ass. (Damn, there I go again! Sorry, people of Earth.)

I’ve got a case of what’s called Dyspepsia Engineeris, an affliction that usually strikes individuals in the middle of a large music post-production process. Mixing an album consumes every ounce of your creativity, and hell … I’ve only got two ounces to begin with. Needless to say, we haven’t been producing new material, just finishing what’s already in the can. We have, however, dug up some old, previously unreleased stuff that we can play on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, in the spaces where we might ordinarily have published new production. We’ll pour some of that in before it posts, I promise you. And one day, one day, we will return to making music (as opposed to merely mixing it).

Well … now that I’ve chased all of my friends away, I guess I can get back to … to … mixing. Arrgh.

Usual Rubbish

Lookout. Below.

Okay, now where was I? Wait, don’t tell me. I was complaining about…. something…. No, not the song “Something”. I rather fancy that. Something to do with Web servers.

F'shaw
BG goes all traditional-like.

No matter. Here we are, back to the blog. What’s happening at the mill? Lots. Working on the January podcast, now days behind schedule. Later every month, right? That’s the natural course of business here in Big Green – land. Still…. our first installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN should be worth the wait, if you like weird, asinine, and abysmally non-commercial media content. True hallmarks of the TIBG brand.

Smell something burning? Neither do I. But (and this is the point) we bloody well should, and here’s why … Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is supposed to be thinking up a viable creation myth for our upcoming collection of songs attributed to and written in tribute to cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas. The album – Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – is such a monumental event in our lives, it fairly demands a creation myth of its very own. As such, we handed that task off to Marvin, and by rights the smoke should be pouring out of his brass visor as we speak.

It is not, my friends. What can I tell you? So look, we’ll just have to cook it up ourselves, I guess, without the help of robotian inspiration. We’re thinking something along the lines of “The Creeping Terror”. Cowboy Scat is all that remains of an epic musical written about the arc of cousin Rick’s political career. Only on the eve of its production, the script was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe. Such a tragedy!

Okay, well … we can flesh that out a bit. Give us time. Maybe Marvin can work with …. on second thought, maybe not. Scratch that, friends.

Usual Rubbish

Readying.

The studio is stuffed to the gills already. Yes, it has gills! How do you think it breathes underwater? Didn’t you go to grammar school? Oh, right.

Sometimes I forget that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) isn’t an undereducated human like myself. He is, in fact, a mechanical man. Much must be explained to him, and what can’t be explained must be programmed in by force, if necessary. That’s the lot of a robot assistant, I’m afraid. Work, work, work.

Anyhow… the quintessential American holiday is now over. (We also survived that day that comes before Black Friday … what do they call it? Thanksgiving?) Time to fold up the balloons, disassemble the parade floats, and send the marching bands marching home. While many find the Macy parade enjoyable, it is not a simple matter to serve as the end point of that annual extravaganza. Just finding enough space to store deflated Spiderman is proving more challenging than you might imagine. Sure, without air in his ass, he’s smaller, but – and this is important – not all that much smaller. And then there’s those freaking Smurfs.


As you can imagine, every nook and cranny in the mill is stuffed with gear from the parade. You can hardly turn around in the studio these days. Still, we press on. Matt and I did a couple more mixes for Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick this past week. Gonna be a bit hard with all these deflated balloons lying around, but we’ll manage. Fortunately, many of Rick’s songs are country-like numbers, so the mixing is fairly simple. We take a naturalist approach – not too much FX, not too much compression. Just record it clean, mix it pure, and pour it into a tall, clear glass to check for impurities before quaffing it down. Pure audio ambrosia, that’s what I’m talking about. Sure ding.

We’re also furiously preparing for the holiday episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. Last year raised the bar a bit – two hours of pure horseshit. Not sure how to top that without a bigger shovel, but we’ll try.