Nice... Sorkin has a sense of humor about himself

The thing I like most about Aaron Sorkin on 30 Rock is the extra-textual nature of his appearance on the show that kicked his ass. When Tina Fey launched a show set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live (but not really) sketch comedy program, her 30 Rock was in direct competition with Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, created by an acclaimed, award-winning, television heavyweight. Aaron Sorkin's show was set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live (but not really) sketch comedy program.

Media chatter didn't indicate much hope for 30 Rock. Sorkin had done a TV behind-the-scenes series before (Sports Night was critically adored even if the ratings didn't win the show longevity), and he was at the height of his TV powers post-West Wing. The market wasn't going to bear two shows about the same thing, and there was no way some former SNL writer was going to stand up a show that opened with a dynamite, Network-style tirade that got everything right.

“You're familiar with my work. The Social Network, The West Wing, A Few Good Men.”

“Studio 60?”

“Shut up.”

And then Tina Fey kicked Aaron Sorkin's ass up and down the block. The beating was bad enough that his guest spot on 30 Rock probably couldn't have happened without 5 years distance and a Social Network Oscar salving his ego.

A lot of people saw Studio 60 was in trouble from the start with an unbelievable premise: a genius comedy team shunned from an industry run on coke and controversy due to drug addiction and scandal. I'm no industry insider, but if you ban all the comedy writers with coke problems, you're going to be scrambling hard after you fire 50% of your workforce. (Is that figure too low? 75%)

Even if our hard working, genius protagonists were in the doghouse for their failures many years back, Studio 60 also somehow thinks a comedy show's audience would care. It's a fair guess that less than 10% of Saturday Night Live's audience could name one of the show's producers or writers, much less tell you if they had a dark history. The only writers of a sketch show that people generally recognize are ones that get in front of the camera-- I found out Bob Odenkirk wrote for SNL after watching him on Mr. Show, and never would have known Tina Fey's name if she hadn't starred in 30 Rock.

Worse, Studio 60 was a workplace drama (Sorkin's stock in trade) that made the crucial mistake of showing the efforts of his characters' skills: if this was a team of comedy geniuses brought in to resurrect a failing sketch show, why are their sketches so painfully unfunny? Saturday Night Live might be floundering, but it does at least try to make jokes... I can't imagine anyone mistaking the Gilbert & Sullivan parody on Studio 60 for comedy, much less finding it funny.

Comparatively, 30 Rock is, in and of itself, very funny, and shows very little of TGS. When we do see the show Liz Lemon and company are putting on, it's lowest common denominator (“Someone put too many farts in the fart machine!” or the Robot vs Bear Sketch) and accepted that the writing and producing team are far from geniuses... but 30 Rock and its behind-the-scenes of an unfunny show is damn funny.

30 Rock got its licks in early, too; in its first season, with Studio 60 still competing with them, the list of bad sketches included a Studio 60 reference (“This is worse than that Gilbert & Sullivan parody we did”), a sly dig that TGS could have done a sketch that bad... but no one in the writing room or the audience was going to claim it was the work of geniuses. They also take a shot a Sorkin's style, albeit in the most conventional way possible (“Kenneth, can you walk and talk?” “Gee, I've never thought about it before.”)

As both programs are ostensibly about comedy writers for a comedy show, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the funny one is coming back for a 6^th season and the drama is a TV history footnote... but Aaron Sorkin's appearance of 30 Rock made me think back to the time when he was in direct competition with Tina Fey in real life, and no one thought he could lose that fight.

I'm giving away the ending for every Atom Egoyan Movie

Having just seen Chloe, I think we need to get Atom Egoyan to admit that his auteur aspirations are just an excuse to show graphic lesbian sex. I'm beginning to doubt he has any loftier ambitions than to get young actresses naked. When someone first told me to watch Exotica (which I had dismissed as part of the Basic Instinct/Joe Eszterhas sleaze pool), their reasoning was that it was actually a good, somber, psychologically dense film... in spite of the strip club setting and cover nymphet peeling off a schoolgirl outfit. I'll admit that Exotica, my first Egoyan movie, was actually better than I'd expected, but it's become apparent after several of his movies that it is just like every other Egoyan film. In his own way, Atom Egoyan is a more predictable filmmaker than M. Night Shyamalan. He's Nicholas Sparks-level predictable...

So, spoilers for all Egoyan pictures coming up in both the micro and macro levels, I'm going to give them all away.

1. The Big Secret-- Where Shyamalan films became predictable because you knew to expect the “what a twist!” at the end, Atom Egoyan always has a Big Secret one of the characters is keeping, and when it is revealed, it will retroactively inform all their actions. These movies are always dialogue heavy, and whichever character spends their time telling stories and providing lengthy soliloquies to the other characters... well... they're lying. If you know this, it becomes very easy to predict how the movie will end, because the entire film is built around this character's misdirection. The more time they spend trying to lead you away from the Big Secret, the more obvious the nature of the secret becomes.
2. Dour and Stultifying-- no one will ever have any fun in these movies. Egoyan makes “dark” films about “serious” issues, where “troubled” people and burdened by their dark and inescapable “drama.” There's never a laugh in these movies... not even Where the Truth Lies, which is about a Martin and Lewis-style comedy duo.
3. Kink/Perversion-- and the air of seriousness is really hard to take seriously when the stories always seem to go to the well of anything from (at least) naughty sex to (at most) child abuse and molestation.
4. Hot, Young Lesbians-- I swear, this is why Egoyan got into filmmaking. These scenes are extensive, graphic, and shot like soft-core porn. Though the Big Secret of Where the Truth Lies is that Martin had a big gay crush on Lewis (and the girl who found out is dead), Egoyan has no interest in filming Colin Firth making love to Kevin Bacon-- not when he can slip Alison Lohman a roofie and have her tumble into bed with a girl in an Alice in Wonderland costume. So it's not a gay thing; it's all hot young lesbian sex, all the time. And, yes, Chloe's Julianne Moore isn't a pretty little starlet, but her long and graphic sex scene is with Amanda Seyfried. Admittedly, it doesn't happen in every Eoyan picture, but I'm pretty sure it's a 2/3rds majority.
5. Great Tragedy-- All of the heavy breathing is apparently justified by a Great Tragedy that haunts the film (and will be related to the Big Secret). The Great Tragedy is so oppressive that it is crushing the souls of most of the characters, so much so that they didn't even have any fun while having all of that serious, somber sex.
6. Death-- There's no way around it. Either the person with the Big Secret has to die, or their Big Secret is that someone's dead because of them.

So... yes, in the first act of Chloe, as Seyfried is telling the stories of her sexual exploits and maneuvering (and we see them hazily, in her mind's eye), my Egoyan Sense started tingling and I knew: she's keeping a Big Secret, and these stories she's telling are false. The pattern has become so unmistakable that I immediately knew how the film would end. I'm pretty sure this cookie-cutter formula negates these movies' play at art, which seemed to balance out the inherent smuttiness; with all the mock-serious pretense stripped away, these movies are just... sleazy. In a Joe Eszterhas sort of way.


As a postscript-- I never saw Ararat. I know that it centers on the Armenian genocide, and so its Great Tragedy and Dour Mood must be firmly in place, but I’m not sure I want to watch an Egoyan sex scene with a holocaust as the backdrop.

Show hosting 101: Don't be an ass

I can't quite get my head around a venue (and venue's staff) that has a handful of bands show up to play and then spend the entire night treating everyone in the club as if they were a massive inconvenience. Sure, it's a sunday night, and the club is far from packed, but still... we've played empty houses on off nights before, but none of those venues greeted band members or audience members with the "I'd be having a better night if all of you decided not to show up" vibe.

The best example of this happened to Michelle-- since there was no guest list (in much the same way there were no drink tickets), she wanted to pay for someone who was coming later. The response she got was "That's a huge inconvenience."

"Can I do it, though? Can I pay for him now and you just let in when he comes?"

Keep in mind that, at the time this conversation took place, the girl at the door had... er... processed about three people. This includes taking their money, making change if necessary, and applying a stamp to their wrist. She'd had to do this three times. Being asked to take money in advance, she said, was "a huge fucking pain in the ass."

"So... you're not going to take my money?"

"I didn't say that. I just said it was a huge fucking pain in the ass."

Understandable: she was swamped. I think she had to send detailed information via text message about everyone she processed, and the workload was astonishing-- she was slaving over her cell phone for most of the night. She didn't actually have to process many people (it was a slow night), but the amount of time she spent typing into her phone was astonishing. Whatever they're paying her, it ain't enough.

Most of the people who worked for the club had similar attitudes... it makes me want to break out the word "pissy," which doesn't come up in conversation much, but is definitely applicable here. Pissy attitudes about having to deal with the inconsequential bands of the night (obviously beneath them) and the poor saps dumb enough to pay to enter their establishment.

The weirdest bit, to me, is: if you hate putting on these little, off-night shows... why do them? There are other venues that size that don't book bands on Sundays or Mondays or any night they think isn't going to bring people out... in much the same way there are plenty of other venues that are perfectly happy to put on smaller shows and slower nights, happy to see the bands come out, and treat the people who come out like worthwhile human beings. It just doesn't make sense to book the show and then treat everyone in attendance like shit.

This particular place has a reputation for being unpleasant: we have people who wanted to come out, but just didn't want to go there... I've sort of defended this place in conversation against friends who call it the worst club in Seattle (the attitudes of the security staff and the quality of sound on the main stage are the biggest complaints). My response has usually been "It's not that bad," which was all the defense I could muster.

It's not much, but I never bore this club any ill will... but after last night, who would waste their breath defending this place?

And I've met the owner of the place: good guy, nice to talk to, always treated me well. He was not at this show. His employees are the kinds of people that give this venue its reputation... the kind of place that, even if you like the bands playing, you just don't want to be there.

"I'm never going back to Guitar Center"

I say it every time I walk out of that place... and I consistently walk out empty handed. It's always a frustrating experience, and every time I walk in I think "I know I said never again after the last time, but today I just need one simple thing, and there's no way this trip will be a waste of my time." It's always the same self-rationalization as a slink into the K-Mart of music stores against my better judgment, trying to pretend I'm not in a crappy mood just because I crossed their threshold.

Most recently, I just needed a phaser-- specifically, an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone. I walked in, walked up to the counter, and asked for a Small Stone. The clerk looks at me blankly. "Who makes it?"

I answer "Electro-Harmonix."

"You mean a Small Clone?" He responds, naming that company's chorus pedal.

I try not to rankle at his correcting me: "No, I mean the Small Stone." Anyone who doesn't play, and play through pedals, might not get why this annoys me: the EH Small Stone is probably the second most popular phaser pedal in the world, not quite as ubiquitous as the MXR Phase 90, but it's been in production non-stop since the mid 1970s. Someone working behind the effects pedals counter at a music store should at least have heard of it.

He looks up this strange and unfamiliar pedal in his computer. "Hmm... I don't have one in stock. I could order it from a warehouse and give you a call when it comes in." And this is the primary problem with Guitar Center-- if I wanted to order one, I would have done so online, without dealing with the fluorescent lights and the ambiance of someone practicing Metallica riffs on an out of tune guitar: that's what I use the internet for. I walked into the mega-chain-store because I wanted to exit the store with an extremely common pedal in hand.

I've made this mistake more than once-- I have often gone to Guitar Center because they're a big chain, and I expect them to be well stocked. I don't enjoy being in the store, I don't like shopping there, but their size always makes me assume that if I want to find something that everyone uses, something mass produced, this will be the obvious place to go... and I am always wrong: I leave empty handed, wondering why I had to describe a Big Mac to a McDonald's counter jockey (you mean Quarter Pounder? No? Maybe I can order you one from the store across town)

It's got to work on all systems

I don't know who's going to follow me through this metaphor, but...

When you're working out a mix of a song, you have to check it on different systems. This lets you make certain that the song doesn't just sound good in a studio, on nice monitors. You want to make sure it sounds good on bass boosted DJ headphones, on laptops' built in speakers, on a boom box, and on a pumping home stereo system. It's even important to check the mix in mono (there's a number of reasons to do this... but for right now let's just focus on "if you can make the mix sound good without a stereo image, the thing is pretty solid"). If it only works on one system and fails elsewhere, you've got more work to do.

And so we get to the point:

If you want to argue the quality of Avatar as a film around the argument that it can't be appreciated without 3D special effects and an IMAX screen... you may be right. It may very well be designed to show of an amazing system, but if the thing doesn't hold up in mono (so to speak), it's not really that good.

Tone

"What the hell was wrong with your guitar sounds tonight?"

A lot of people don't know this, but different rooms have different sounds... with everything set exactly the same on my bass, amp, and pedals, I can have completely different sound in one room than another. I was struggling with that at the last show: I didn't sound quite right to myself.

What's even worse: how you sound to yourself is never how you sound to an audience: the sound is different in different parts of a room. For example, on the same night, Lea from Noise-a-Tron felt that she sounded a little quiet on stage; I was in the audience, and her bass was huge (they sounded great). When we got up there, I thought I sounded really thin and anemic... but people in the audience say we sounded great that night.

It's tricky.



... and as an aside, when you do a search for "Skwisgaar and Toki" images these days, you find a lot of slashfiction images. I had to go three pages before I could just find a normal shot of the two of them.

a little past the peak

Being a pedalgeek with some small awareness of what's going on in the pedal geeky world, I was impressed when VisualSound announced their new pedal, the Vans Warped Distortion. Cash-in and fad pedals aren't new, but it takes some real balls to try and sell the sound of Warped Tour punk rock in a pedal... especially since the festival is 15 years old now. At least DOD launched the Grunge distortion in 1993, and Ibanez's Phat Hed distortion and chorus with the wack'd setting launched in 1999: sure, these companies were digging in for kids' Seattle and nu-metal obsessions, respectively. The pedals didn't sound anything like the uber-popular music they referenced... it was just a calculated cash grab, aimed at teenagers who just got their first guitar. Seriously, people: Kim Thayil doesn't play through a pedal labeled "grunge" and Munky doesn't have a pedal that says "wack'd."

But that doesn't stop the corporations. Visual Sound used to be a nifty little pedal maker that got bought out by Dunlop (who has been gobbling up pedalmakers like a comic book villain). Vans was sold in 1988 and is owned by the same corporation that does Lee and Wangler jeans. They have teamed up in the name of a massive festival to create a cheap pedal to sell in 2010... you know, for "punk." Which I think lives mostly at malls.

Out of step

Though it's about three guitarists I'm not really fond of, I just saw It Might Get Loud... which bore investigating, because I love the documentary Dig even though I dislike both of the bands if focuses on and I love Comedian even though I don't find Jerry Seinfeld funny: I can like a movie without being enamored of the subject. However, It Might Get Loud is actually pretty annoying.

I get why Jimmy Page is in the movie. I've never liked Led Zepplin (sorry kids, it's me and Ben Weasel skipping merrily down this path), but if you're doing a movie about guitarists and their instruments, this guy is the 70's blues-rock lead guitarist. I don't like the stuff, but he's the king of that particular hill.

I actually hate U2, but from an interview standpoint, The Edge is an okay guy to have in the movie. He's an 80's superstar, so there's some generational contrast between him and Page's 70's thing, and he's pretty candid about his "riff" being absolutely nothing if he switches off his effects (Bill Bailey beat him to this punch, but it shows some self-awareness to have the guy actually demonstrate it).

After that, I think we should try to roll up all of the pretentious shit that falls out of Jack White's mouth over the course of this movie and beat him to death with it. I don't like the other two guys, but the whole Jack White thing is just bog-standard 70's rock... and Jimmy Page is already in this movie. Half the time I can't tell the White Stripes from any other classic rock revival band until the bassline fails to arrive. I don't think he's a bad guitar player, really, but a stunningly average one who (from what I've heard) has never done anything original and has a couple pop radio hits.

Seriously, was Jonny Greenwood not returning this movie's calls? They couldn't get anyone interesting? If it had to be an American (as opposed to the UK guys for the 70's and 80's), why not someone like Tom Morello? I know the Rage Against the Machine thing is way past its sell-by date, but at least he was innovative. Not only that, but if you'd add someone who had his push in the 90's and is still remembered, there's sort of a guarantee that you're not dealing with someone destined for the cut-out bin by next year.

Hell, I think Dean Ween and Larry LaLonde are better candidates... and they're bound to be less smug in front of a camera.

PSA: Gear is heavy

As Public Service Announcements go, this one's more of a note to self... but, as most every part of me is really, really sore today, the whole thing is burning bright neon in my frontal lobe.

ubik. is currently practicing at Crybaby Studios, and our show last night was one block away, at The Comet. One block! Hey, it's not that far! My brain whirled around bringing the van up to Capitol Hill, loading into the van from the practice space, trying to find parking by The Comet, loading into the club, and then driving around the neighborhood to find a place to park the van until the end of the show... at which time, we'd have to repeat the process (albeit, in reverse). It made perfect sense to just walk the gear over to the club.

I maintain that theoretically, it was a good idea. The whole thing got shakier when put into practice.

Gearwise, ubik.s basically pair of bass cabinets, amps, a pedalboard, basses, and a drum kit to move. Where guitarists can have a Vox or Fender combo amp (a single piece unit that has a handle on top... obviously meant to be lifted by one person), bassists like us are usually in a two-man-lift situation. The upshot is: these things come with wheels. Downside: the wheels are fine for moving across a room, or a hardwood floor-- nobody ever meant them for a long hall across cracked city sidewalks. Joel's cabinet, for example, is an Ampeg 8x10 that stands taller than Michelle: it's a large, heavy, upright rectangle with four little wheels on the bottom.

My pedalboard is its own challenge-- this thing also takes two people to carry (1 1/2" to 2" plywood, with its lid on, it looks like the world's cheapest junior-sized coffin), though I did decide to get it there on my own: I had Tyler help me lift it onto my cabinet, which is half as tall as Joel's, and then I rolled it over myself. That was actually my first trip, and I figured out it was a bad idea before I had crossed the street. Another note to self: it's easier to pull these things than to push. Luckily, two of us just grabbed a side and carried the board back for the return trip.

Crybaby provides a shopping cart just for the "let's wheel our gear over to The Comet" types of nights (that actually introduced the idea in my fertile subconscious), so we used it to load up all the cymbal stands and other small, heavy pieces. I wasn't part of the shopping cart experience, though I know it pulls to one side, but I did carry the kick drum over to the venue; while I have loaded that thing in and out of a show more than once, it does get heavier after half a block or so.

The whole thing was manageable, and it really wasn't the world's biggest hassle, but... I am definitely sore today. All in all, it wasn't my best idea... and yes, it was my idea. Next time, we're taking the van. A block is a lot longer when you're carrying one end of my pedalboard than it is when you're just walking around.

everyone's got their distractions

me, I'm an unrepentant pedalgeek. When the night drags on, I tend to click around (bandwidth permitting), and can spend a bit of time checking out video demos of pedals... which is a decent way of figuring out not just which pedals you're interested in (a good service) but also which gear you're just not interested in (absolutely invaluable). ToneFactor provides a lot of these videos and they sell a lot of these pedals, so their site can offer a lot of perspective on the kind of gear you can't find and test out at the local shops.

For example-- I got one of my favorite pedals from them:



That box is both the synth break in disrepair and the grinding dissonant lead in cyclocosmia (which will be online soon... it's being mixed). Neat, eh?

quality cheap instruments

I took my tenor home with me last week, so I could work out a few arrangements and practice a bit at home. This instrument, my stage bass for ubik, is a cheap piece of gear bought specifically for me to ruin it-- a luthier has routed the body, another has redesigned a nut, almost half the hardware on it is additional... I'd never buy a good bass and perform this kind of surgery on a beautiful instrument, so I am (for all intents and purposes) using a piece of crap gear.

There's a bit of mythos, however, about the player sweating mojo into an instrument after years of use, and... honestly, I have really come to love this instrument. It's still not a great instrument, but it's got a lot of personality, and it's been with me for so long... hell, I've done more than half the frankenstein modifications on it myself. For a cheap bass that I've all but destroyed, I enjoy playing this disheveled machine as much as I enjoy playing beautiful, tasteful instruments.

(and, for the record, I've played one of Mike Watt's basses, and he treats those things with the kind of reckless abandon that my poor monster of a bass receives)

been dead a long time

The foreword of the book I'm reading (which is an excellent diary of the making of a record in the major lables... very compelling, very funny) ends with this:

Music of conviction and personality will always go on, but in this artistic end of days, where Jimi Hendrix is sold as nostalgia rather than art, and rock and roll, once rebellious, is so establishment that there's a Les Paul in every doctor and lawyer's closet; the music that a lot of us grew up on has been so mollified we can barely recognize it.

Rock and roll is dead. Consider this its autopsy.

Strange thing that came of this-- it made me think of a friend's declaration: "The Beatles killed rock and roll," and my response "I never really liked rock and roll, anyway." Both statements could be provably true, as long as we define our terms.

Mainly the term "Rock and Roll."

As far as I'm aware, Rock and Roll is the thing that came up with Bo Diddley, took off with Chuck Berry, and was sold to suburban America by Elvis: rhythm and blues based, obsessed with I/IV/V, backbeat, and a hooky chorus. So, the thing that is Rock and Roll was gunned down by the Beatles around the Revolver/Rubber Soul era (when they started doing away with a lot of that formalism)... though it managed to crawl to LA, to slowly bleed to death.

By the year of my birth (1974), Rock and Roll only had the barest relation to its R&B origins... if the Rolling Stones worship Robert Johnson, so be it, but the music that was subversive in my grandparents' era was the mainstream in my parents' day. By the 8os, not only was rock dead, but its reanimated corpse was wearing a lot of make-up, teasing its hair, and donning spandex.

Generally, the term Rock is applied to just about anything that has an electric guitar involved... which is fine, so long as we all agree that we aren't actually talking about "Rock and Roll" when we're using the term. The great "rock" bands today (the ones that I think are great) have nothing to do with the 40's and 50's-- even those godawful retro rock acts that had a groundswell a few years back are dedicating their lives to unartistically copying the 1970s arena stuff (from Zepplin to AC/DC: the kind of thing I just don't like. Sorry: I don't like it). Seriously, though-- even the stuff they're aiming to emulate has got nothing to do with Little Richard.

Currently "Rock and Roll" tends to be either a nostalgia act or modern corporate programming: crap like Nickleback-- a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy... ad nauseum. Either way, I'm on board with Rock and Roll being dead... though I'm quite thankful that there's plenty of other music out there for the rest of us, the "music of conviction and personality" mentioned in the opening quote. I have no idea what to call any of it (though new, arbitrary names for anything we're listening to will be coined weekly by local, free papers), but it's everywhere, if you look for it.



P.S. "Pop" is not a genre. It is an abbreviation of "popular." It's only musical connotation is that it sounds like what most people are willing to buy.

theirspace

Before I dig too deep, I've got to say I appreciate that MySpace has been a boon for independent musicians-- it's still the default to find smaller bands, hear what the lineup for a show on any given night sounds like, etc. Even now, ubik.s booking is done as much through MySpace messaging as it is through email or phone. Yes, all the music on the MySpace players sound terrible, and yes it is an amazingly ugly system, but it's the default-- the first place people look when they want to find a band.

But... as they take their role as music disseminators to heart, the MySpace music front is actually the antithesis of a grass-roots, independent music system. Down here on the ground floor, we all use it the same way, but MySpace has big plans for itself, and it falls more along the lines of the corporate starfucking of mTv and Clear Channel radio.

Any time you sign in, someone's being promoted in the box on the left: "Today on MySpace," which, when it comes to music, is always used to promote people who don't need promoting: Disney sponsored, non threatening, emo bands... millionaire diva-tastic gangsta guys (seriously: extravagant furs and flamboyant jewelry? Elizabeth Taylor'd tell these dudes to take it down a notch). My last login displayed an invitation to Paris Hilton's birthday bash ("If you're in Vegas this weekend..."), which would be an awesome way to get the Stupid Spoiled Whore Playset autographed.

Similarly, the new MySpace music player allows MP3 sales through Amazon.com, which is fine for what it is... but that only works if you're in bed with the Corporations. For example, our digital aggregator has our album on Amazon.com (I prefer physical manifestations of albums, cover art and whatnot, but that's just me), but you will not find the Amazon "sale" button popping up on our MySpace music player... it's just not something they're giving us.

I find these things slightly frustrating because I know that the record industry is a vile, incestuous, corrupt system... but the internet has given musicians of all stripes a competitive edge and a DIY tool for personal success. That MySpace is acting more like the former than the latter is disappointing.

But I say "slightly frustrating," because after all: it's MySpace. All the little bands like us still use it not because of its quality, but because it'd be idiotic not use it. You can't be too frustrated by the site that was whoreish years ago becoming more whoreish over time, just sort of disappointed, and hopeful that, like Geocities before it, a change in standards will make it obsolete.

echoes, effects, and U2

Sadly, every echo enthusiast gets compared to The Edge (who did not invent the dotted quarter note delay. Honestly, people), for better or worse. To wit, Bill Bailey:

Thank You, Portland!

Well, the shows were excellent, but we learned a few things: Touring will be kind of tough, especially if you make a big party of it every night (and have to play again the following night). Also-- don't sleep at the party house. Or try to sleep there. Because you won't.

That aside, Portland crowds seem to stay out later, and are really receptive and responsive... which is awesome. They also paid us pretty well: if every night pays like these nights (merch and CD sales included) the tour will pay for itself completely, and that's a DIY touring wet dream.

The van survived yet another trip. All love to the van.

self-described

we're a long way from cassette trading, dual-deck dubbed demos, and mixtapes... for better and worse, a band doesn't self-launch on the tape underground just by being available and free, anymore-- every band is available online now, and you can listen to pretty much everyone for free. The downside of this is that there is so much Noise in the line, it can be hard to discern a Signal (the upside, of course, is: hey, new music!).

The trick, now, is to get people listening, and that generally means describing a band engagingly enough to warrant a listen... which I thought was going to be easy, because ubik. is a pretty unique band, and the songs tend to be fairly different from anything I've stumbled upon.

Unfortunately, every band in the world describes themselves as "unique." The writeup from the emo band that sounds like they belong on a mid-90's teen sex romp soundtrack call themselves unique, the white-blues lead guy playing nothing but pentatonic minor scales over I-IV-Vs calls himself unique, the heavy rock band that really wants to be Tool call themselves unique. These bands bore me to tears simply because they really do sound like every other mediocre entry in their genre, are nowhere near unique... but I don't think anyone wants to describe themselves as sounding like everyone else.

So we've given up on self description, mostly-- it seems to be a futile effort. People have compared us to everyone from King Crimson to Rage Against the Machine. Michelle gets comparisons ranging from Karen Crisis to Bjork (though she sounds nothing like Bjork, she has black hair and a small nose, and that seems to be enough similarity for a lot of people... music be damned).

We've taken up our own genre: psy-prog drift core. We actually asked people to name our genre, and the most intelligent response we got was someone telling us that we are, in fact, a rock band... which is pretty much true, but telling a would-be listener that we're a rock band doesn't tell that listener anything: it could mean anything from The Beatles to Soul Coughing.

How people describe us is a whole other phenomenon. Everything from funk to metal gets thrown at us (seriously? funk?), though psychedelic and progressive get thrown in there often enough. A recent show billed us as Am-Rep inspired prog-metal... and though prog-metal always makes me think of Fate's Warning and Dream Theater, so be it-- but I don't even know what Am-Rep is. What does that even mean?

everett mkII

Strangely, though our Everett gigs are plenty successful (2 for 2)... man, these are difficult shows to like. I wished I'd had taken a video of stepping into that place, panning from the stage to the body of the bar (crowded with video poker and pool tables) as Sweet Home Alabama played on the overheads. It was sort of like playing the Blue Moon, but where the Blue Moon is Harley Davidson, this place was Nike (and really brightly lit).

I have to go back to the thought that this particular "girls rock" showcase was the ultimate venue to play Let's Hunt and Kill Gwen Stefani, but it was a very weird version of the Girls Rock motif (a theme that, so Michelle tells me, was irritating enough to her that she would have turned down the show had the booker told her that's the bill she was agreeing to play)-- the first band lost a member and played a short acoustic set. The other band's singer was too sick to play, so there was no Girl there to Rock... neither being any band's fault, really, but it's a good way to hamstring a show.

just say no

So here's a first... we just said No to a show, just because we didn't want to play it. It wasn't pay-to-play, or a night one of us couldn't make it because of work or whatever Whatever was in the way: we just didn't wanna.

That was kind of cool.

It's not like it was frivolous, or we didn't have a reason: it was sort of a dingy sports bar sort of atmosphere, which never works for ubik. as a band. It just doesn't work. We've done sort of poorly at The Blue Moon and Goofy's, and there's just a certain "feel" of venue where we don't fit-- we're not comfortable there, the video light show never works very well, and the dug-in crowd just doesn't get us.

Also, it was in a location where we probably couldn't get anyone to show up, so we wouldn't be doing the bar any favors, anyway.

the new ubik. CD is on sale now (both online and in stores)

CD IN STORES NOW!

ubik.s album The World Is A Glorious Biomechanical Nightmare is available now both online and at record stores around seattle. Buy it online here, or stop by Cellophane Square (U-Dist) or Silver Platters (Queen Anne and Northgate).

Pretty keen, eh? We're all pretty excited to be getting these out into the world.

production

When we took the album to be mastered by the talented and very helpful Steve Turnidge, mastering engineer extraordinaire, he asked us if we were able to do this stuff live. I think the actual phrasing was "can you guys pull this off live?"

I think Joel was the first to respond: the question should be inverted. We do this stuff live so often, we weren't sure if we could translate it to a studio recording (my worry was always that it would end up one of those flat, lifeless records that never lets any of the band's live energy come through).

But the more I think about the question (and the more I listen to a few albums and compare them to their live counterparts), the more I realize how valid it really is. ubik. actually took the songs, as we play them live (which includes timing changes, large dynamic shifts, effected vocals, big flourishes of reverb and echo, one-beat gaps of silence, sound-design style screeches, etc), and just taped it. The sonic identity of our songs was not done in post-production: we didn't really add much after we finished taping the instruments live in the room.

...but those sounds happen on a lot of albums (especially now, in the land of plug-ins and pro-tools). It's not uncommon to hear distorted vocals on one verse or an wash of echo or some strange sound effect on any random album-- it's just not that common for those things to have anything to do with how the band actually sounds when they play.