Constructivism and Punk
Thursday, March 13 2008
Posted by brockito

So I have been embroiled in school for the last six months, which is one of my excuses for not-so-frequent blogging during that time. Among other things, I have been studying Russian Constructivism as it pertains to graphic design, and this term I have been attempting to hybridize that style with the North American Punk aesthetic.

Last night was my final portfolio class of the term and I and my fellow student designers were asked to give a presentation of our work. As I scrambled to get everything finished, mounted, documented, etc., I was struggling through moments of feeling very ill with some kind of flu-type thing. Fortunately I had been given some kind of medicine—I don't know what it was but it seemed to work. I wasn't really able to eat so well though so by the time I got to school (late again) I was pretty light-headed and a little shaky.

While driving earlier this week, I had had the idea that the best way for anyone to get a feel for the look I was going for was to just play some music from that era while showing the images on the projector. So I brought some speakers from home and when it was my turn, I just played an excerpt of Naum Gabo reading the Realist Manifesto and then played Something I learned Today from Zen Arcade, followed by Black Flag My War.

Unfortunately I forgot to include some key images from my roughs when combining PDFs earlier so I got through most of what I had to show before Henry Rollins was going off with his, "You're one of them, Them, THEM !" so i had to skip to that part and then took the cover off of my mounted print. I guess I didn't feel like talking so much, so I just let the music and the images do the talking. At one point i looked up at some of the faces and I'm not really sure how to gauge the reaction. I think at least one of my two instructors was less-than-impressed. I guess in that sense it was a success, in that maybe some didn't get it, or felt alienated by it, or pissed off by it, or at least had some sort of reaction provoked out of them. I dunno. It sure felt better than trying to explain in a BCIT classroom what is punk about ANYTHING.

Here's one of my comps, trying to figure out how to let the Exclaim! type hang off the edge of the page size with some sketch marks...

Mike Conley Dead
Sunday, March 2 2008
Posted by brockito

I just checked my webmail a few minutes ago to see if my latest portfolio assignment was graded, yeah I know, I'm in school again—and along with "Just Added: Bold Spicy Flavour" from Sonicbids spam, there was a message from John K. I don't hear from John that often unless he is in town or something bad happenned, and unfortunately, this time he is not in town.

He was messaging to relay the news that yet another person we knew from the heydey of touring in a van with the Doughboys has met an untimely end. We first met Mike Conley in Sumter, South Carolina at a gig in some VFW hall or something. We were travelling down the east coast towards Florida at the time and were due to meet up with MIA and the Descendents for a bunch of gigs. Sumter was our first gig with MIA.

Now being from Montreal, this was my first encounter with California boys, and I think had we played just the one gig with MIA, I might have laughed at them and found their styley clothes and hair product kinda ridiculous.

Living in a van, I was quite amazed at how much attention went into the right shoes and clothes and so on. Drumming for them at the time was Chris Moon, whom we eventually just referred to as Moon. Last I heard he was married and selling vacuum cleaners or real estate in Vegas. There's a wild guess, vacuum cleaners OR real estate. Anyway, what I am trying to get at was these guys were all characters. Playing guitar was Mark Arnold, whom we eventually referred to as Santa, and on bass was Frank Daly. Frank and Mark went on to form Big Drill Car after this incarnation of MIA broke up, which was right after this tour if I remember correctly.

Anyways, Mike Conley was the ringleader, the lead singer and main songwriter. He and John K took to each other in a flash and their friendship lasted until yesterday when Mike was found dead in a Chicago parking lot. I don't really want to say much more right now but the link John forwarded me is here. Have a listen to Boredom is the Reason and think of him.

Goodbye Mike.

Lamb of Good ?
Tuesday, July 17 2007
Posted by brockito
That was what I overheard outside the CCC Friday night... I think I was taking off for a half hour dinner break after finally getting everything ready for doors to open and let the punters in. The kids were out in droves (1300) for another night of all ages metal featuring Lamb of God, with support from Hatebreed, Behemoth, and 3 Inches of Blood.

Usually by the time we're ready for doors, I'll have time for an hour or an hour and a half to go have dinner and relax a bit but this was the beginning of tour for LOG and we ended up helping with some pre-production tasks which kinda threw the normal timetable off. These guys are now on Ozzfest so they wanted to prepare a few things, like carts for their guitar cabs, snake looms, etc. The carts took an inordinate amount of futzing and time wasting.

LOG uses some absurd number of 4x12 and 8x10 Mesa Boogie cabs which are stacked three high and two high respectively. Each guitar cart has two or three loaded ones on the bottom (that means they have speakers in them and actually work) with six dummies on top. Dummies are basically props and have no speakers in them but look otherwise like a regular cab. Blah blah blah, so anyway, yeah, we were arranging some of these carts so the cabs would sit right on them when stacked and it involved a little carpentry project with circular saw, half inch ply and gorilla snot glue.

The end result was that at 4:30pm, no one had sound checked or line checked and we had three metal bands worth of gear and dead cases scattered around the hall, no barricade yet built. Amazingly enough, we did manage to bury all the deads, backline all the gear for all four bands, and find room for the remaining two drumsets before doors, even though doors were technically a little late.

A quick bite of pizza and some coffee and we were back at it. 3 Inches of Blood were really good, I thought, but they still had to cut their set a bit due to things getting a late start. We got the first changeover done and ended up striking drums in the area right between the room B which serves as band dressing rooms and dead storage and the side door into the hall.

I heard some commotion outside the door and then three bouncers suddenly plowed through the double doors struggling to contain some skinhead punter dude who had apparently already been thrown out once and had snuck back in. Now this was a pretty intense struggle and the blows were flying and landing. The four bodies all kinda linked together were moving around like a rugby scrum while me and Double Cheese and Sean scrambled to move the partly disassembled 3 Inches of Blood drum rack out of harm's way. Doouble Cheese was wide eyed and Sean was suddenly in the scrum and I was grabbing cell phones and radios dropped onto the floor. Before too long, the security guys had buddy pinned face down on the linoleum with his arms and legs twisted behind him like a pretzel and the cops were on the way. This kinda threw a wrench into our ability to finish striking 3 Inches of Blood and load them out since the security guys kept this guy pinned until VPD arrived, right where we were working.

As I walked into the production office I saw that first aid already had had some customers and there were already some kids with ice on their heads and noses and so on... Things were getting busy, and this blood stuff kept turning up all over, little blobs here, a smudged footprint there, mostly between first aid and the bathrooms.

Things settled down a bit after that and the next couple changeovers went fairly smoothly. Since we hadn't finished 3 Inches of Blood due to the scrum action, we had to load out Behemoth and them during the next change and while Hatebreed was on, so i didn't really hear much of how they were other than a far away din of warfarelike mayhem coming from the main hall. Greg later told me that the singer in Hatebreed was absolutely commanding the crowd.

They sure were hyped up and were making plenty of noise during the last changeover as we got Hatebreed off and LOG started linechecking. This all took quite a while due in part to the fact that LOG's FOH guy had only just picked up their Yamaha PM5D desk about two days earlier and was trying to make sense of it on the fly. Things eventually did get started but came to a screeching halt almost immediately.

I was hiding back in production having a snack or something when Hutch noticed there was no sound coming from the hall so I dashed off towards the stage to find the Rocky (house audio) guys rewiring stuff and searching for another subsnake, no band onstage anywhere. Things did not look good. I helped Paul find the subsnake and passed it over to LOG's guy behind the drums so he could repatch stage right inputs. I figured there was not much more I could do to help and it seemed like they had it worked out so I went back to production. When things still did not resume after a minute I headed back to the stage.

By this time the crowd was plenty vocal and none too pleased to be still waiting. As I stood offstage left looking at Paul in monitor-land trying to see what he was up to, the crowd started chanting, "Nickelback sucks" in response to my crew shirt with Nickelback 07 on the back. I had to laugh because this was the second comment I'd received already regarding that particular shirt. Now, I guess when you go to a Lamb of God show, you carefully select your black t shirt (the kilted guy with the "Jesus is a cunt" shirt for example) but when I go to work, Lamb of God or no, I take the top black t shirt from my pile of like 20 black t shirts. I could care less whther it was from a Nickelback or a Ministry show. I later wished I had egged the crowd on and launched my shirt into the crowd to be devoured in a feeding frenzy but I didn't think of that until a few minutes later. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone at Switchfoot was offended by my Ministry/Revolting Cocks MasterbaTour shirt ? Who knows.

Now that guy with the "Jesus is a cunt" shirt was another story. His girlfriend had been concussed and needed to leave the show so she asked if we could tell her boyfriend.

"What does he look like ?"
"He's wearing a black kilt and a shirt that says Jesus is a Cunt"
(Peter adds later: "There are about ten guys that fit that description !!!")
Hutch goes to find him and says, "Hey, come here, i need to talk to you.."
Kilt dude turns and dashes off into the crowd at top speed...

Anyway, I digress. Alas it is nearly three am again.

So yeah, eventually Lamb of God got going again, but not after the entire stage had to be re-wired to the house FOH desk because of issues with the PM5D.

I've gotta rehearse with Shining Hour tomorrow morning at 10am so that's it for now...

New Shining Hour EP
Wednesday, July 11 2007
Posted by brockito

OK so I just got back from the printer this aft and have the first batch of Shining Hour "Fin" cover art. We're doing short runs of these five songs as mixed by Sho Murray (of Three Hills and Shocore fame).

From today, those of you who would like your own hand numbered copy can order one from SCAMindy for a whopping $5 plus whatever postage costs - call it a buck fifty for now until I can get to the Post Office and find out exactly, so $6.50 ppd. Just send well concealed cash if you want, or email me for a paypal invoice. The "Fortune" cover art will be available sometime next week and before too long I'll get a package off to CDbaby for those of you who like to order through them. It usually takes four weeks or so to get things into the iTunes pipeline so stay tuned for that.

That's it for now. We'll be heading out to Alberta next week to test this stuff out in front of people. Hope to see you all soon !

-B

Overdubs
Sunday, April 15 2007
Posted by brockito
10:37am. Back at Profile control room. Greg is resuming heavy guitar passes to Guilty. Jeff reading a New Scientist magazine and eating a JJ Bean muffin. Terry is driving protools and spinning in his office chair.

12:17pm. Greg working on Even Now. Somehow the click track tempo is drifting. Terry is struggling to get his protools preferences back. Apparently, someone must've been in here editing last night after we were done, and they must also have changed and resaved preferences. Unless you save some sort of session template, protools applies preferences globally. Anyways, after scratching head for a while, Terry has got things straightened out and Greg is now laying his first dry pass. Terry has just got off the phone with Stephen Drake, who turns out to be the suspect in question. He was also evidently admiring our rawk wall of amplifiers set up in the overdub booth. For you gearheads, we have Greg's 4x12 cab closed back, with his Peavey 5150 head and Traynor reverb master, the Vox AC30 with Greg's rack including his Marshall and Bulldog and Shockker's Vox AC15, then on the right, the Traynor 2x12 cabinet with Garnet head and Fender Vibro-Champ on top of that.

So far, the winningest combination is emerging as the Vox AC30 and the Garnet. It is a really powerful sound with plenty of tube breakup but without losing any beef.

15:27 pm. Just done with Brock Melody Maker guitar passes to Nothing is Good Enough. Switching gears for Greg's balls beefy chording parts. We even stretched out into a bit of a science project part with ebow melody during the breakdown in the bridge. Greg came up with the bright idea to add the old Boss Chorus Ensemble pedal but after hearing it decided to try the Roland Space Echo instead. He and Terry were tweaking it and as I played the notes in the booth, Greg was fiddling with the feedback knobs. Anyway, we now have a few of those spacey parts to lighten up the bridge building back into the chorus end. Really cool to have a super collaborative support for that instead of a competetiveness. I think Greg's Les Paul track(s) will fatten up the song well underneath my trashy single coil parts.

17:07pm. Greg tracking 2nd pass to Say What You Mean. I am starting to fray at the edges a bit due to lack of food and perhaps the letdown of energy following creative intensity. Greg's last two passes to this song are dry and super beefy - Terry and I finally got what we wanted right off and combined with my surf beat a la Bill Stevenson and Jeff's pedaling eighth note bass part is giving a bit of a Descendents feel. Greg is now putting down his wet tracks with the lead in there. Overall, our day has been all about mammoth guitar sounds. Too much fun !