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Been on hiatus

I moved to a new apartment. I have big plans in the works. Trying to move to boston to make it happen. I fervently created for a couple months straight, i realized if i was gonna get any better i needed a fat break to reset my creative process. Im planning to restart this blog when i end up actually moving to boston. But im getting antsy i wanna make something soon. Wish me luck on my interviews.

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took a break

put together the cover with my friend for my rejects album: roanoke search party and hyperborea pt.III, just a little collage section and my friend did most of the work, smudged the fuck out of the title and i dont give a shit, its definitely representative of how i feel about the songs. its something that will be uploaded to my personal youtube not to indy cat. i just want to move on from these songs

also included is the song we made that day, kinda crap but we had fun. Hailey's album just came out and its doing incredibly well on youtube and Spotify, its the biggest thing this record label has released by far. im so grateful for the opportunity to work on at least a song on something so amazing. you should check out draconid if you havent already.

its been hard to motivate recently. came into the new year just feeling like crap all the time, and the same time im feeling this way is the most attention on anything we've done. its depressing that i feel like im not all the way present during such an important time for the company.

all i can do is focus on the art and making something that im proud of. but all these hidden stressors are putting my mental off kilter.

ill have more eventually im not giving up on this blog.

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Learning process

Made a song today, more 4-track fuckery. im still making shit just for the sake of making, no grand project in mind. its good for me to practice this instead of obsessing of some idealistic massive project that will instantly fix everything about my life. its been a meditative process.

Here's the lyrics, i like how they turned out:

Oh I've been praying to something that I cant feel hoping that it washes over me proving that it is real and I reach up screaming oh god, cant you see me all down here? but the same damn feeling comes, the same damn feeling comes to me. The same damn feeling comes, the same damn feeling comes to me. Looking out the window for a big truck to come past it'll spits up water on the street like an iconoclast is life just waiting for something to make the time go fast? the same damn feeling comes the same damn feeling comes to me the same damn feeling comes the same damn feeling comes to me.

This song was made using my worst quality tape and setting the 4 track on normal speed instead of the default fast. How 4-tracks work is that the faster the sound gets put on the tape the higher quality the recording is. for Greater Anatolia i did the whole thing on fast and you can barely tell its on 4-track, I've been feeling the need recently to experiment more in distortion and fuzz and low fidelity. I think it suits my style and its a lot of fun.

also some more little sketches, im trying to draw every day again. I used to draw so much in middle school and highschool but i sort of fell out of the habit when i discovered music. right now my life is built around trying to experiment with different mediums so i figured it wouldnt hurt to do at least a little something every day. these are by no means good at all, its just fun to show off the progress of what im doing everyday.

In other news, i completely fucked up episode 6 of the new vegas series. i accidently deleted the entire file and lost it all. it wasn't that interesting of an episode but i spent like and hour and half editing it and then right before rendering to make space on my hard drive i accidentally deleted too much haha. im just gonna skip over to episode 7 its no biggie but its a real shame.

thats all for today, happy new year all.

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downward spiral (emplemon reference)

My mental health is a pretty fickle thing, its something that ive grown accustomed to just based on how cyclical it is. I have very high ups and then i crash down eventually, just something i have to deal with. Lately ive been feeling the down and i kinda already predicted that it was coming. so today instead of wallowing in it i did a bunch of shit that was productive and healthy (yuck).

I made this song today, kinda just wanted to put something on tape because i hadnt made a song since the tiger tape. its pretty fun just to make something for the sake of making it without having this grand project in mind. so much of my focus for song writing lately has been very specifically that. it was refreshing to just indulge myself in making some sadcore shit for no reason.

also playing with some charcoals today, i went to walmart as my enrichment activity. Like im a tiger in a zoo, sometimes youve got to throw a pumpkin filled with ground beef in my enclosure. so walmart art supplies were my pumpkin today lol.

My friend suggested that i do a self portrait just to practice and i tried my best, i dont really think it looks like me at all haha but i had fun doing it and it made me realize how much i like charcoal. i hope to do weirder shit with the medium in the future.

also finished editing episode 5 of the new vegas series. if you cant tell i was manically creating today haha. its the best medicine for me when im feeling this way.

merry christmas yall hope you had a good holiday, thats the reason for my lack of posting lately, i had to drive 4 and half hours to get home, there and back, so ive just been exhausted with all this garbage ive had to deal with to prepare. i should be back in the swing of things now.

thanks

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Draconid release date

Sorry for not posting, not that it matters, all I've been doing is playing New Vegas and recording it to practice editing. I learn a little more each time i open the program so I'd say progress is good. ill include the last episode of the series at the end of this post so if you care about that its here. all this shit is gonna be privated eventually but right now its fun and interesting and new.

In other news my very close friend and bandmate set a release date for her first full length, which I'm very excited for. The song that I'm on i just think is so fucking cool, and all the other songs are so great and incredible. I cant wait for the release on January 5th.

Sorry for the quick update, i don't want to clutter this blog with asinine Lets plays of a 20 year old game, and that's all I've been doing. below is episode 3, episode 2 got hit by copyright because of the fallout radio so there are big chunks of silence in it. Lesson learned and ive fixed it for future episodes. I just love the RADIO SO MUCH IM PISSED.

If you cant tell I've been having a lot of fun making myself laugh with these thumbnails hahahaha

alright that's all for now, thanks.

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New Vegas save me

So i decided I'm actually gonna have to practice the video stuff before i can make anything good. here's me playing fallout New Vegas for awhile haha. I did learn some stuff in the process and i actually had a really good time making it. I'm getting more comfortable with the program, no where near where i need to be to be proficient but I'm gonna keep doing it to see what else i can learn.

I don't wanna make a post today that is literally just look at my lets play hur hur, so I'm gonna also talk about my 2nd album Jamestown tree craving.

I cant even listen to this anymore, I've talked to the owner of my record label a couple times being like "please can we take this down or remove some of the songs or something". there is just so much fat on this album, at one point during the recording process i was making a song a day. like one right after the other, a lot of songs are just improvised lyrics, there is no structural identity (except for a few songs that talk about the simplest of thematic baseline). Jordan assures me that it really doesn't matter and this album isn't that bad, so I'm not gonna fight him on it.

there are some good songs here that i still like. Alone is good, wallow, visage, quiet reflection, glutton, my friend, all are solid songs in my opinion. but there are so many songs that I'm just like cringed out by that i really don't sit down to listen to this at all. Part of Greater Anatolia was trying to prove to myself that i could actually do it, because to me this is the worst thing I've ever made.

my first Ep wasn't even supposed to be listened to, i was recording songs out of a necessity to make something after i worked my 8-5 soul sucking office job. but i still like it better than a lot of this hahaha

alright that's all for today, i hope i can get up to something good this week.

thanks

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I'm still trucking along on the whole learning how to edit thing, but i made some progress today. I mean the tiger tape video still looks like shit, i think i need to figure out the clips better, everything still feels very awkward, and i might just start all over. I'm going to keep fucking with the whole file to see if i can learn something new, today i watched this tutorial on how to digitally emulate VHS resolution and color grading digitally, its basically halving the color resolution over an already halved video resolution with blur but i think it looks kinda cool and i bet i can make it look cooler.

Today, since i don't have anything new i can show, i figured Id post the raccoon tape since its in the same vein as the tiger tape, just sillier.

The story for this one is that Ryan got bit by a raccoon on our road trip to my hometown Rochester NY. My dad against all advisement likes to feed raccoons that live under my family's cottage and at night they like to come up and scratch directly on the glass of the sliding door connected to the living room. After Hailey and I had already gone to sleep, Ryan and Jordan decided to stay up until 6am fucking around and getting hammered, and when the raccoons started scratching at the glass, Ryan drunkenly tried to pet them and give them treats directly. Obviously, it went poorly, and he got bit right between his index finger and his thumb. the next morning we were driving to go to a summer festival in Bergen NY called "parkdays" and Ryan casually mentions that he got bit last night by a fucking wild animal. In his mind it didn't even register as that might be something to raise concern. Immediately Hailey and I freak out thinking that he's got rabies or blood worms or something, and he's just sitting there being like "whatever, if I die I die". eventually we force him to the emergency room after driving around aimlessly looking for one that was open and prepared for this kind of thing, and Ryan has to get like 12 shots and sit in a waiting room for 4 hours. I mean it was hilarious, we died laughing about how ridiculous the situation was, like he just in passing after talking about what he and Jordan did after we went to bed just listing shit "we drank and talked and we took a walk and i got bit by a raccoon and we ate snacks"

after getting Ryan out of the hospital with a thick bandage wrapped around his hand and a new anti parasite medication he had to take every 6 hours we just decided, like manically, what if we made an album right now about our dumbass friend.

so that's the raccoon tape, i really like some of these tracks, and we filmed the whole process of making it on Jordans camera. I hope that will be out one day.

thanks

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I'm Procrastinating

I had an incredibly busy day, i work at a bank so this time of year gets really tough and i had to stay till 6:30 to close up because some suit in Canada thinks it's real important that we take care of the 2 people max that come in after the clock hits 5. I spent the whole day thinking about what I would do when I got home and when I got here I couldn't do any of it. But for prosperity here is what I'm thinking about:

In the elephant 6 documentary theres this scene, a real passing remark where one of the interviewees says "everybody was doing something: writing, drawing, painting, recording, filming" and on the screen flashes these really weird sort of mercurial drawings from jeff mangum, the speaker says that "jeff always used to do these really recognizable little guys" I cant help but be in awe of the originality and the abstractness and just the will to live of these little guys that jeff drew, and its not even something he really cared about or put thought in. it feels like these guys in athens georgia were just screaming look at what a genius i am, and no one heard them but each other, and so they worked and worked and eventually when someone did hear them it was too late and too much and jeff went crazy and never showed his face in public again.

So yeah, i didnt get anything done. Because how do you think about that all day and come home and make something you are proud of. Im trying to write something here everyday as an open journal to keep myself accountable to what i think is important, im so prone to rot and do nothing and hate myself without reason, and i do truly love this shit, even if no one sees it or reads it or listens and understands. I just wish i felt confident in a path forward for my art and that it was easy for me and it just flowed out of my head like water. i know these feelings are apart of finding it.

The video linked above is a performance my bandmates and i (here's my stupid face) did 2 weeks before greater anatolia came out. we recorded it and uploaded on the same day. right after this performance im pretty sure i at least drank 18 spiked lipton iced teas, a really stupid idea, and i got more drunk than i ever have in my life, well, maybe not the most drunk but definitely top 5. in my head i was celebrating finishing an album, and i did really have a really great time.

the song itself i think is one of the more interesting ones on the album, its by no means the one anyone mentions to me when the say they listened (usually stele for bronze, or adam and eve) but something in me just loves the sparseness of the lyrics and visceral unexplainable emotion that it brings me, its definitely a creation of my own head though. ill include the lyrics below just so maybe anyone reading can tell me if im crazy or shit.

thanks for reading

Grasping an old familiarity so old I cant remember its name it grabbed me tight it wont let go of me it extends to mortal tribes of every kind I saw a kid diagnosed with cancer it ate right through him all on camera I saw it happen while i was laying impending self reflection and I was horrified scared of the burden i've been given grasping an old familiarity taking a step closer every goddamn day increasingly medicated to the truth the hand of thanatos would be so comforting so comforting

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Today I learned that I can't edit video. I've been playing around in my head with the idea of trying to establish some kind of visual identity, I think it's important for an artist nowadays to be able to do it all, the problem is starting. my assignment today was to at least start the editing process for the tiger tape footage. this is a 6 song EP that me and my bandmates made over a weekend.

we've experimented with this concept before, putting down as many tracks as we can on a 4track as quick as possible. Just earlier this year we recorded the raccoon tape which we did a similar thing on in just 6 hours, this time i wanted to take 3 days to actually polish some of the stuff we wrote better. id say overall it was a success, i cant speak to the actual quality of some of the tracks (i already cant listen to the first 2) but i think there is some solid stuff in there towards the middle.

but yeah the video, i filmed a bunch of stuff as we were recording the tracks and i ended up having just over 2 hours of footage of us playing the songs. problem is the audio quality from the camera is ass and i filmed a bunch of boring stuff. i figured i could get around this by just focusing on one song, or the song that i think is best on the tape, and making like a mini music video compilation thing. but editing in a program you just downloaded is hard and unsurprisingly i cant intuit how to use Davinci resolve out the fucking womb. Im not giving up just yet and im going to watch some tutorials tomorrow to get a better grasp on how to use the more advanced features. Tonight i managed to accomplish putting together the most interesting clips albeit awkwardly on top of the wav for the song tigers.

Check out the video for the actual EP above if you'd like, some of the stuff is pretty good, honestly id skip to the song tigers and just listen from there but to each their own. this project was pretty fun and we've got more plans to do animal themed improvised tapes in the future.

thanks

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I recently made CDs for my latest album, Greater Anatolia, here is some collage work I did for the cover and the inside fold-out of the jacket. Everything for the art of this album was done on one posterboard I bought from a grocery store. the images are from 1950s -1970s national geographic issues, and there are also some post cards from the 50s i bought off eBay. honestly this project wouldn't have been possible without eBay haha. this album was entirely recorded chronologically on 4 different cassettes using my tascam portastudio 424mkII (also purchased on eBay), after the recordings were finished obviously we did some digital touch ups on a DAW but for the most part everything was recorded analog. It was my first time attempting doing something like that, my previous album Jamestown tree carving was done completely in reaper with basically just an AT2020 microphone and a UMC22 audio interface, which speaks to the horrible audio quality on that album. for anatolia i upgraded to an SM57 and got a bluetube presonus Preamp i added to my audio chain. But for the analog recordings it was mostly just direct input from SM57 into the tascam.

Ill probably speak about this album in later posts just because its the most recent, and what i am most proud of, if you havent listened yet, you should check it out on spotify. heres the link to my spotify:

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Beginnings

I make a lot of stuff, but I suck at showing it off. This blog is a way for me to practice putting effort into showing people what I do; because what is art without an audience to hate it.

To start im going to focus on stuff I've already made in the past and posted, but give a little more insight into the process of making it, or context for what it means to me. I really am screaming into the void here, so if you are reading this I hope you find something cool here.