Tag Archives: Ned Trek

Usual Rubbish

Burning Verses.

2000 Years to Christmas

Got the toaster plugged in? No, not THAT toaster. I mean the kind that pops up CDRs. Yes, it needs juice – what the hell century are you living in? Jesus Christ on toast. No, that WASN’T my breakfast order!

There are times, my friends, when it feels like I speak an entirely different language from my flopmates. And this is one of those times. Now that the nice weather has returned to upstate New York, you might think that we would venture forth from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house, and enjoy the five minutes of sunshine we get each year, whether we need it or not. Well, you would be wrong to think that. God, no – Big Green is still cooped up inside this dump, trying to decide how to slice and dice the mountain of makeshift recordings we’ve done over the past five years under the rubric of Ned Trek. Now, is that any way to spend your summer? (All five minutes of it?)

What’s the urgency? Well, I can’t answer that, except that there appears to be some line of code in Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s programming that requires him to do an exhaustive inventory of our work product every seven months. That’s all well and good, except that we are – as you likely know – the most disorganized band in the history of music, so our efforts to accommodate this half-crazed automaton fall more than a little bit short. Story of our lives, right, people? We just write ’em, play ’em, and record ’em. What happens after that is not our department. So as a consequence, we’ve got songs lying around the mill, knee-deep in parts, jumbled together in a hap-hazard fashion – an auditor’s nightmare, to put it succinctly. Every seven months, it makes smoke come out of Marvin’s brass head. (Note to audience: that’s NOT supposed to happen. Marvin is battery operated – no emissions, period.)

Slave driver!

Take Ned Trek (please!). We had something like 40 episodes of the show, posted as a feature on our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, with a “rebroadcast” on a separate feed as simply Ned Trek. Something like half of these shows were musicals, which means that they included five or more original songs – sometimes as many as 8 in a single episode. After five years of production, more or less, we have about 100 Ned Trek songs in total. Marvin wants us to funnel them all into disc-length (80 minute) albums, like we did with Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (another product of THIS IS BIG GREEN technology). That sets us up for a conundrum – do we (a) put all of the songs onto multiple discs, or (b) cherry pick the ones we like best (or hate least) and consolidate them on maybe two discs? Just a preliminary sort brings us to five or six discs total – that’s just nuts. Even Marvin can’t count THAT high.

Well, whatever we decide to do, the next thing we’ll need to do is try to find people who still listen to CDs. (We save that hardest shit for last.)

Usual Rubbish

Banjogeddon.

2000 Years to Christmas

So, wait a minute. You say the Chicago tuning is like the top strings on a guitar? Is that so? What about the standard plectrum tuning? Oh … and I think I turned the peg too many times … unless it’s supposed to sound like that. My bad.

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a session. No, it’s not the kind of session we usually have here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted squat-house in upstate New York) – something a bit more prosaic. As always, Big Green is making do with whatever is around us at any given time. When we made 2000 Years To Christmas, for instance, we were short on effects, so we had to use the mill’s steam HVAC system to get some decent reverb. Then, when faced with a shortage of horn players during the sessions for International House, we had to retrofit the mill’s HVAC system so it could be used as a brass section. And when our mastering deck broke down in the middle of mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, in a moment of desperation we routed the tracks through the HVAC system, which may explain why that album sounds the way it does. (There has to be a reason.)

Right, so we’re sorting through the songs we’ve written and recorded since 2013, mostly Ned Trek related numbers, with an eye to enhancing the tracks before attempting to release them to the public. And in more than one case, it seems like we’re a little light on the stringed instruments. Only trouble is, our guitars are all out at the guitar laundry …. I mean, the tech. The only thing we have left is a four-string banjo left here by the “Old Ones.” (How many centuries ago? Even Ruk doesn’t remember.) The strings are made of some nameless substance that I’m afraid may have once been a living thing. The tuners are worn away to nubs. There isn’t a good thing to be said about the remains of this instrument. In other words, it’s a perfect addition to our next album … whatever that may be called. (Something with banjo in the title?)

Hey, that's great, Abe.

I have to tell you, it’s been close to a decade since I last played a banjo. (And what’s worse than that, even then, I never knew how to play the effing thing.) That’s why I’m working with our resident expert, Antimatter Lincoln, on how to at least tune the instrument. He prefers the Chicago tuning, being a former resident of antimatter Illinois (or Sionilli, as they call it). After that, he started giving me some pointers. Things like, “Don’t cross the street with your eyes closed,” and “Keep your feet under your knees at all times,” and who could forget, “Avoid the Ford Theatre on April 15, 1865.” No pointers on how to play the banjo, but he did rip into a couple of songs while I was in the room, and let me tell you … he makes me look like a good banjo player. (Notice I said “look” and not “sound”.)

This may end up with some kind of dueling banjos standoff between me and Anti-Lincoln. Who will prevail? Music, my friends … that’s who.

Usual Rubbish

Cold Files.

2000 Years to Christmas

How long do we have to stay down here, man? It’s five below zero. Next time we’re bringing a can of sterno or something. Maybe one of those highway flares. Ah yes – blessed warmth.

Hey, out there in internet-land. Yes, here we are at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, doing what we usually do – nothing much, interrupted occasionally by nothing whatsoever. We lead a sedentary life out here among the ruins of a former mill-driven regional economy, brought low by the greed of post-industrial corporate financiers. So I suppose it is they we have to thank for our adopted abode, right? I mean, if they hadn’t massively dis-invested in this community and moved all their operations to the Philippines ages ago, there wouldn’t be any abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for us to squat in. So it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good, somewhere. Somehow.

What’s the nothing that we’re doing today? Ah, nothing much. Just digging through our piles of junk in boxes, looking for old recordings and unfinished projects begging to be reborn. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to serve as a kind of metal detector/divining rod, using his advanced sensor technology to scan for magnetic tapes or abandoned discs. When he comes close to either one of those types of objects, lights start flashing and his antennae start twirling around counterclockwise. Then a little mechanical bird pops out of a little door in his forehead and crows the hour. That’s when we all break for lunch. (Even if it happens at 10:00 at night. Lunch is whenever the birdy sings, that’s it.)

Joe: Hey, man .. You picking up any signals? Marvin: squx.

You may ask if we’ve found anything interesting, to which I would reply, “Funny you should ask!” Actually, our time rooting through the basement was pretty much wasted. Hell, I could have looked on our old hard drives for music projects of every description, unfinished, abandoned, neglected, and so on. We started recording Rick Perry songs (later collected in our ridiculous third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick) in probably 2011, then went right into the Ned Trek songs, which number in the scores – probably 120 songs over the course of six years. In between all that, we started to resurrect some older material from the 1980s and 90s – songs we had done demos of but never full-on recordings. I’m not sure how many of those there are. We’ve played a few rough mixes on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, but some have never seen the light of day. Or the dark of night.

So now, when we’re bored, we rack up one of those old numbers, hit play and twiddle the dials until it sounds like something that’s not junk. If we do that long enough, we’ll send some of it your way. That’s just how we roll.