theghostsalontapes

[theghostsalontapes]

...And So It’s Autumn

Hello All, Greetings in these first few days of the very best time of year! Autumn is VERY close to my heart - the crisp weather and falling leaves, Halloween (the very best DAY of the year), all the delicious food...fall is truly a special season, all bonfires and candy corn and grey skies and bare trees and fields. It never fails to raise my spirits, though my spirits are already pretty well raised right now.  For one, all is mostly well again in the world of Zach’s health - I may very well have a condition called rheumatoid arthritis, but I won’t know for sure until an appointment with a specialist in January, the soonest opening they had. Meanwhile, the pain in my arms and hands has almost entirely dissipated, all other symptoms have abated, and my sleep is mostly back to normal with fatigue dramatically lessened. I hope this lasts! It may not, but for now I’m feeling pretty good. Even losing weight again, which is always a good thing!  Our first album (recorded in the distant past of last summer, when we lived in Midtown Memphis), ‘The Gloom & The Glowing’, is getting some considerable praise from the indie press; the first couple reviews from Fluid Radio and The 405 have been pretty ‘glowing’, indeed (sorry). It’ll be a nice wave to ride once we start our Midwest tour schedule in March. As far as the current album, work is apace again nicely; I’ve finished a few new pieces in the last week or so, all of which seem pretty strong and potentially stellar. There’s a nice mellow ambient piece, a loud screaming shoegaze piece, and a layered folky acoustic piece...all the bases covered. When I say ‘finished’, though, I definitely mean the base structure of the pieces themselves...I’ve a list of some more experimental tactics and instruments for both Denny and I to add later, and Denny’s field recording contributions always tend to get added on towards the end. There’s still a very long way to go before even sending the album off to be mastered. I’ve also got a long list of dream collaborators I’m slowly moving through. Thank God for Facebook friendships - it makes writing to such luminaries a bit less awkward, though I still get knots in my stomach before I hit send, every time. A lot of awesome folks have agreed to pitch in and help out, and it’s super exciting and flattering that they have faith in what we do enough to collaborate with what amounts to total strangers. I can’t share names yet, as much as I want to. Soon. There’s some real heavy hitters on this list - it’s all very exciting.  Continuing to work on slowly upgrading my pedal setup before tour comes - hopefully I’ll be able to scrounge up the funds to polish off my wish-list by then. In the meantime, I just picked up the largest-size pedalboard made (a Pedaltrain Pro), so that should encourage me to keep plugging away at making it all work. Nonconnah Full Ensemble practices are also starting to sound a bit more coherent, though there’s a lot more work to do to make sense of everyone’s skills and to find where everyone fits before a first show, hopefully early in 2018. That’s all for now. I’ll keep you posted. Be Well! ZC  Listening to: MAGIC HOUR - Magic Moments Reading: PATTERN RECOGNITION - William Gibson  Watching: CHANNEL ZERO on SyFy

[theghostsalontapes]

Unexpected Developments

Hello all, Its been a less than fun couple weeks here out in Hickory Withe, I’m afraid. Most crucially, I’ve been struggling with a health issue for awhile now that suddenly took a turn for the much more serious and painful, and its led to doctors’ visits, lots of discomfort, and a bit of a shift in priorities. I’ll still be working on the album when I’m able, and it was a relief to find practicing the other night that I could still play a set without any apparent quality or pain issues. We’ve still got local shows and our Midwest tour in the spring coming up. None of that’s changing. But I did have to make the difficult decision to step back from my animal rescue work for the time being so I can focus a bit on recovering and adjusting. Mostly right now I’m just trying to take it easy.  Other than this massive and unpleasant distraction, things are going well. We’ve recorded a little more new work, but nothing anywhere near complete as of yet. While tinkering with my new looper during practice the other night (the EHX 22500), I recorded a bit of a progression direct to tape that’s turned into a lovely cassette-based piece, and now that we’re approaching time for collaborators to start filling in their ends of things, I have just the person in mind to maybe sing some wordless vocals over it. I hope it works out. As for the looper itself, I’m VERY excited by the possibilities opened up by dual, independent looping. Neil Jendon (Kwaidan, Catherine, other great projects) up in Chicago has contributed a couple guitar lines to some pieces from earlier in the sessions, and it all sounds amazing. We’ll be collaborating further with him on tour. The other night I combed over the many, many field recordings Denny’s accrued thus-far for the album and it all sounds usable and wonderful and compelling. So much is going according to plan. We even had our first album finally see release, via Custom Made Music, a solid year after it was recorded back in a little shack in Midtown Memphis. You can find the digital edition here - https://nonconnahordeath.bandcamp.com/album/the-gloom-the-glowing and the CD edition at - custommademusicva.com/release/the-gloom-the-glowing-cd/ If you’re a writer interested in reviewing the album, let us know and we’ll toss you a download code or a CD. Oh, and if you can help with tour dates for our March/April Midwest run in any way, please holler at us on Facebook. The prospective dates are as follows, with already booked ones in bold:  03/22 - Nashville, TN 03/23 - Kentucky 03/24 - Cincinnati, OH (Listing Loon) 03/25 - Northern OH/Erie, PA 03/26 - Detroit, MI 03/28 - Chicago, IL (Hungry Brain) 03/29 - Milwaukee, WI 03/30 - Indianapolis, IN 03/31 - Champaign/Urbana or Springfield, IL 04/01 - Saint Louis, MO 04/02 - Memphis, TN That’s all for now. More when more develops!  ZC

[theghostsalontapes]

Farewell August

And so begins September, summer fleeing quickly now, the nights cooler and the light tinged golden as it slants across the fields and back roads in the lengthening evenings. I’m never sorry to see summer go, as I find it a fairly miserable season (other than the opportunity for swimming), and autumn is by far my favorite all-too-brief time of year. It’s an indefinable feeling, the fall. It has an air of impermanence and bittersweet change that the other seasons lack.  A lot is happening in our world, as usual. I’ve replaced the looper I’ve had for years (Digitech Jamman Stereo) for a more versatile model with tons more features (Electro-Harmonix 22500), so we’ll see how that pans out. It’s the first step of a major pedal upgrade I hope to complete by the time we tour in March. Also, we have our first rehearsal tomorrow evening with our new ‘full band’ lineup, who’ll be occasionally backing us at special performances. I’m excited to see if we can craft some sort of harmony out of so many skilled and eccentric musicians banging away together. Surely it’ll take some work.  A couple of short new pieces struggled to life today, a blustery, stormy day where recording was briefly interrupted at one point so the cat and I could cower in the bathroom together until the tornado warning expired.  One new piece is called “Eschatology!”. Just some distorted acoustic picking in a weird tuning I forgot to write down, reversed and processed, with several further layers glitched-out via the Izotype Vinyl plug-in’s ‘scratch’ setting. The other piece, “Sense Delete”, is built entirely from a simple pattern on autoharp (said autoharp belonging to our friend Elizabeth Firestone, who unfortunately relocated recently for work reasons, from Memphis to Boston area). This piece crumbles and distorts and comes apart a bit in places. I’m keen to add some tape noise to it. I also finished up some gazey guitar work for our bud Linden Pomeroy’s new album, which should be arriving sometime soon. Both of these pieces are far from finished but hold a great deal of potential. We’re still nowhere near even a third of the way done with this release, but I really do hope everything will be wrapped up, except maybe the mastering, by the time we set sail on the March tour. Time will tell. Best laid plans and all. 

‘Till soon,   ZC Listening to: MOGWAI - Every Country’s Sun Reading: STASILAND - Anna Funder Watching: Mr. Mercedes on Audience Network

[theghostsalontapes]

Blotting Out The Sun

This afternoon found many of us outside and staring up at the sun from the edges of yards and parking lots, as if searching for some hidden message stitched between the clouds and contrails, an unofficial community united in collective awe of great and looming natural forces at work. Denny and I watched the proceedings from our acreage, then from the lot of a crowded Mexican restaurant in nearby Oakland when the clouds moved in at home. 94% totality wasn’t bad, but next time I want the full 100%. It’s a crucial difference. Still, I’ll never forget that eerie, faded purplish light. There are live Nonconnah shows in Memphis tomorrow and Wednesday, as well as the usual headlong plunge of volunteering, seeking part-time work, mundane tasks at home and around Memphis, and social gatherings. We’ve both been very busy lately, but have managed to cobble together a few new sounds that have since been largely discarded re: quality control (one piece, the fittingly-titled ‘Path Of Totality’, did end up being sent off for an eventual Christmas compilation appearance, and as is the tradition with us and comp tracks, it won’t be released elsewhere). More importantly, I’ve been listening back to everything we’ve worked on so far, making notes as to what to add and subtract, where to adjust and how to proceed. I was happy to discover I was further along than I thought - there’s about forty minutes of workable material thusfar. As we’re slowly plowing our way through demos for this release, and as there’s still nineteen demos left to toy with, it’s still a very long road ahead. Even when the tracks are mostly finished, we still have outside contributions to capture. The hope is to have the album done by the time we tour in late March. Little else to report, but keep your eyes peeled, there’s always more to come. 

ZC Listening to: THE DISTRICTS - Popular Manipulations Reading: STASILAND - Anna Funder Watching: PREACHER on AMC

[theghostsalontapes]

...And Vanish

Hey folks, Been meaning to get to some new recordings all this week, but the events in Charlottesville and their aftermath have been taking up a lot of our attention, as with many people. Not going to dive deep into that black well of despair here; suffice to say that there’s no room for hatred, or sympathizers with hatred, in our worldview, and I’d hope we have no fans that even remotely toe those lines. Tonight, I did finish one new piece, and I’m quite fond of it. I’m calling it ‘To Pass Through The Walls And Vanish’ (once again, it seemed to fit). Basically, I worked the piece out of a rough demo of some delayed electric guitar loops we had made while housesitting way back in July of 2015, at our friend Trudy P.’s house in Carrboro, NC. The recording (via a Zoom H2) proved high-quality enough to provide a base...heavily processed of course. The first half of the track is a polished version of this, the second half fucked up with static and drops and warbles and all sorts of that good shit. Because I’m hanging around a house with a piano tonight, I added a few simple piano bits, as well. Just a few notes where needed, processed lightly, used very sparsely. A noise sample provides the introduction to the piece (a NASA recording of the Juno spacecraft entering Jupiter’s orbit), and a dialogue sample bridges the two sections (an excerpt from Brother Stair, a ‘charming’ End Times cult leader in South Carolina whom we exploited far too often in Lost Trail for his unhinged shortwave ramblings). Trials by fire and chosen ones. It’s 2017 in America.  That’s all for now, friends. Back soon.  ZC 

[theghostsalontapes]

A Shimmering Veil

Greetings, friends.

Hopefully, at least for the moment, our car woes are behind us. I’ve purchased something I’ve lusted after for quite awhile, and I’m quite excited about it. If you’re really a car nerd like me and into details, it’s a 1982 Porsche 928, a rare Weissach edition in white-gold metallic. I couldn’t be more delighted.

In other news, I’m spending some time tracking this week while Denny’s occupied with night work. I’m still working in the guest bedroom with a compact guitar-pedals-interface-Macbook setup, as Ghost Salon itself is insanely hot and the old window AC insanely unreliable. Tonight I completed (my end of) a new piece I’m calling ‘A Shimmering Veil Pulled Taut Against The Sky’, which was the title that fit best from our giant list of potential titles. 

Now, anyone who knows me knows how devoted a Smashing Pumpkins fan I’ve been since a very young age (until post-2001, anyway, whatever goes under that name these days I care not to partake in, thanks much). MTV exposure to ‘Siamese Dream’ at a young age cemented in me the idea that distortion was supposed to sound like Billy Corgan’s did on THAT album. The fuzz used on ‘SD’ was a 1978-era Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Op-Amp v4, and while those will cost you an absurd amount of money should you manage to track one down on Reverb or wherever, there’s a few pretty good clones out there, one of which I picked up from a friend recently (Robert Rodgers of Stoic Automaton). It’s the Wowpedal Hello Meow. Pretty rare itself. It does the trick! 

Used this for a louder, gazier piece tonight. Just a layer of reverb-coated distortion and another layer of pure fuzz noise (me grinding the side of the pick against muted strings on the highest fuzz setting), and some reversed high-gain lead work above that. I then sent it off to a man who knows a thing or two about Big Muff action, Neil Jendon, up in Chicago. Neil is known these days for his gorgeous experimental ambient compositions, but when I was a kid, his (deeply underrated) alt band Catherine allegedly inspired Monsieur Corgan to go the Big Muff route for Album #2. So we come full-circle. Both the 13 year old Catherine fan in me and the adult fan of Neil’s contemporary work is beyond stoked to have him contribute a stellar guitar line or two to the album (I also sent him a quieter track from earlier in the sessions, ‘They Say The First Few Hours Are Critical’). If all goes well, he won’t be the last Special Guest turning up here.

Now, as the hour grows ever and ever later, I’m working on some poetry, which is the first time in at least a couple of years I’ve done so, revisiting a folder of about forty-plus earlier works and penning some new material. I’m a fair bit rusty, to put it lightly, but I’m not entirely pleased with the idea of just having a lengthy essay rant of some kind appear in the new album’s packaging; a big part of me would rather all photographs and poems be collected into a small book. So that’s where I’m at right now; who knows if I’ll change my mind or not.

More coming in the next few days, I’m sure. Until then!

ZC

Listening to: ARGIFLEX - Summer Is A Relative Term II Reading: SUBURBAN NATION - Andres Duany Watching: STALKER - Andrei Tarkovsky

[theghostsalontapes]

Checking In

Hello again all,  Not much to report tonight, really. We’ve been quite distracted by car troubles and the resultant financial crush. Just wanted to check in and say that I’m still working on album ephemera, mostly writing, but hoping to take some more photos (digital, Holga, 35mm, Polaroid, all of the above?) this weekend.  Listened back to everything I’ve recorded for this album again tonight. I’d say about a third of it is usable, at least as interludes of connective tissue between eventual longer pieces, and a little bit more may be salvaged through the contributions of others or further tinkering. It seems recording at a slower pace is resulting in less usable material, but that’s fine. It’ll take as long as it takes. I’m pushing myself to work harder and take more risks, even if it doesn’t pan out. I’m sure I’ll revisit a lot of this stuff down the line and mess with it further, to spin straw into gold, so to speak. The album and its associated processes is still a big part of my life right now, but other matters (potential part-time employment, volunteer work, car issues, getting healthy physically) have kind of eclipsed tracking and developing pieces a bit. I aim to properly refocus shortly.  Did manage a short, two-minute piece the other night. Not sure how I feel about it, but there may be something there. It’s mostly just heavily-processed acoustic picking on cassette, built from a simple demo I recorded a couple years back and underlaid with a sample of a stream that Denny recorded while we were camping at Doughton Park, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of ole NC. For now, this lil’ piece is called ‘Pictured Here In Happier Times’, just because. That’s all for now, kids. See you soon. ZC Listening to: TEENAGE FANCLUB - Bandwagonesque Reading: SONGS FOR THE MISSING - Stewart O’Nan Watching: Preacher on AMC

[theghostsalontapes]

An Update

Hey folks, Getting back into the swing of things around here. Been really busy this summer working with the rescue animals and also tending to non-recording album ephemera (refining writings, taking new pictures). I’ve also been upgrading and swapping out some gear - first step was swapping out my beloved Roland JC60 for a more powerful JC120. Exciting stuff.  We’ve been assembling lots of photos and taking even more - found a place in Memphis to sell me 120 film for my Holga, and discovered an incredible old 35mm Pentax in Denny’s storage stuff that I can’t wait to try out. I’ve made a huge list of interesting and abandoned/blighted places around Memphis, and we’re chipping away at shooting them, bit by bit. We’ve also been working on assembling a live band to back us at local shows, reflecting the more expansive material we’re working on recording. This is an incredible group of Memphis musicians I’m beyond stoked to work with, and we start rehearsing early September for a planned debut (likely at Crosstown Arts) somewhere towards the end of 2017. Joining Denny and myself are Dominic Van Horn, Robert Traxler, Kate Ryan, Joshua Keller, Jack Vaughn and Kelley Anderson. Dominic (of Aster) is a frequent collaborator both live and recording-wise, and he’ll be contributing modular synth work, as will Robert Traxler, the multi-instrumentalist founder of the Memphis Concrète Music Festival. Kate Ryan and Joshua Keller are both talented (and professional) multi-instrumentalists who will mostly be contributing string work (violin and viola da gamba, primarily). Jack Vaughn is an ace bassist; he and Robert have both contributed to Jacques Granger’s post-punk project The Family Ghost. Kelley Anderson, aka Crystal Shrine, is a long-time veteran of both the Memphis and Nashville scenes, and a super-talented guitarist (among other instruments); she also is the founder of the Beach House arts space near downtown Memphis, where we’ll be rehearsing.  On the recording front, we’ve laid groundwork on a couple of new pieces for others to eventually elaborate on. One of these is a gazey sorta piece called ‘Detonation Speedwave’, which is built around a simple synth arpeggio line that I recorded on a cheap Casio back in Burlington, NC a couple of years ago. The base draft of this piece can be found at our Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/nonconnah/detonation-speedwave The other piece is a more typical drone track; Denny and I camped for a couple of pleasant, quiet days at Land Between The Lakes recreation area in Kentucky recently, and on the drive home I recorded a couple minutes of improvised acoustic strumming beside two old rusty silos in Cedar Grove, Tennessee. Slowed-down, pitched-down, and drenched in reverb and delay, this piece is what resulted, along with a couple reversed lead lines on the Gretsch. This song is entitled ‘When You Begin To Blur’.  I’m not sure if either of these pieces will make the album in any form, but it’s nice to be working on the recording end of things again. More coming soon! ZC Listening to: S U R V I V E - LLR002 Reading: SONGS FOR THE MISSING - Stewart O’Nan Watching: CONTROL - Anton Corbjin

[theghostsalontapes]

Returning From Absence

Hello again, I know I’ve been elsewhere for some time now. Life issues got in the way of album-making for a bit (health things, car things, trips out of town, etc etc etc). Mostly I’ve been away from recording while healing up from an unfortunate lower-back issue, and in the meantime I’ve been working on the ephemera that we hope to include with the final product - writings, photographs, packaging plans, etc. Definite progress has been made: most notably, I’ve managed to pare down the hundreds of bits of ideas and demos we’ve recorded since July, 2015 into a pile much more workable. What’s left are twenty-five song outlines I hope to workshop for the album, a collection of individual movements that will form the longer pieces as they come together. I still have no idea how long or short this album will end up, but I imagine it’ll turn out on the longer side. That whittling process, as well as writing, as well as sorting through photos and making plans to take some new ones (almost fifty new abandoned sites around Memphis we’re planning on shooting!), has taken up week after week. Now that I’m healing up a bit, I hope I can begin to focus on laying down the tracks. If all goes well, I hope the album may be finished (save for mastering) by next summer. Maybe it’ll be done even sooner (or later), but I want to take all the time needed to properly develop these pieces into something truly special.  We’re assembling a bit of an ad hoc band to tackle this complex new material live, as well, at least for shows in the Memphis area. Our past collaborator Dominic Van Horn (of Aster) has signed on to handle synths and samples, while good friends Robert Traxler and Jack Vaughn will be taking second guitar and bass duties, respectively. As always, Denny will help out with live tapes and samples as her busy schedule allows. What we still need the most are folks to perform strings (violin, cello), so fingers crossed on that front. If you’re in the Memphis area and know of anyone who might be interested, let us know.  $$$ is tight with a new car purchase (as Denny’s old Impala finally bit the dust in recent weeks), but I did manage to score a fuzz pedal that’s modeled after the 1978 Big Muff V4 Op-Amp that Billy Corgan used on Siamese Dream, an album featuring my very favorite fuzz tones (okay, it’s pretty much my favorite album, and has been forever) which I’ve long been hoping to replicate. It’s a Wowpedal Hello Meow, and I can find zero information on the company, but it sounds awesome, and that’s pretty much all that matters. Now’s time to put it to work!

‘Til Soon, ZC Listening to: CHUCK JOHNSON - Balsams Reading: A DARK MATTER - Peter Straub (still)  Watching: TWIN PEAKS, Showtime 

[theghostsalontapes]

That Great Gretsch Sound

Hello again everyone, Distractions continue to abound as we make our careful way towards summer here in Memphis (it’s already stiflingly hot and humid!). Car breakdowns, Twin Peaks, binging The Keepers, a trip to Kentucky for a cousin’s wedding this coming weekend, and all manner of other items large and small have kept me from working on the album as much as I would like, but I hope to really dig in and make some serious progress in the coming weeks. Fingers crossed! There’ve been a couple of happy developments, however. One is that I recently moseyed down to rEvolve Guitars in Bartlett and traded in some old pedals and an amp I didn’t use - and lo and behold, what would be for sale but a guitar I’ve always wanted, a Gretsch Electromatic Jet Club. I had just enough in store credit plus a little extra $$$ to grab it, and let me tell you, this guitar is incredible. Absolutely worth far more in tone and materials than the price would suggest, rich and jangly with a light, chambered body. It will be a useful friend! Also, combing through all these demos has proved very fruitful, as I’ve discovered a set of twenty or so ideas from a recent acoustic session that really seem forward-thinking; the possibility to shape these into full pieces has breathed a bit of new life into this project, suggesting some more musically complex and enigmatic forms for this album to take. It’ll be an important step in shifting Nonconnah away from the specter of Lost Trail, into the kind of territory I hope this project can come to inhabit. Really, I’d love to leave all question of genre behind, and leave it at ‘experimental’. I feel these songs can do the trick. “They Say The First Few Hours Are Critical” is a short piece I recorded tonight, mostly as a test for the Gretsch to see how it would sound through the Apogee interface. Since I didn’t overthink it, just recorded a couple quick guitar tracks before heading into Midtown to mix and edit later on, it came out pretty nicely. It’s a simple creature of two-and-a-half minutes or so, all volume-swelling chords and fluttered, warbly reversed leads, vinyl crackle and a burbling sample of shortwave frequency noises. A nice exercise, even if it doesn’t make the album...but it might have its place as a brief outro somewhere, with a little tinkering. The album’s gonna need a few nods in Lost Trail’s direction, anyway. I’ve enjoyed direct-line recording, which is largely new for me, though I do hope to do some amp-work shortly - having sold off this tube amp to rEvolve, I now have only one tube amp remaining, a vintage little Harmony that Denny found years ago at the Carrboro Really Really Free Market. Fact is, I’ve discovered that I simply prefer solid-state amps to tube amps, and that’s just the way it is. They’re clean, reliable, and sound perfectly transparent with pedals, not coloring the sound in any real way. When I switched from a Hot Rod Deluxe to my Jazz Chorus 60, it changed my playing for the better. Solid-state ‘till I die. So that’s where we’re at. It’s unlikely I’ll get any more recording done until early next week, but I’ll be poring through the rest of the demos while we’re on the road. I’ll keep y’all posted as to what develops - exciting times lay ahead!  Listening to: DO MAKE SAY THINK - Stubborn Persistent Illusions Reading: A DARK MATTER - Peter Straub Watching: MOMMY DEAD & DEAREST NOTE: One unfortunate ‘distraction’ in recent weeks has been the violence that occurred recently at Murphy’s in Midtown Memphis. I won’t go into details here (links below), as I’ve talked the subject into the ground with friends and family since hearing the news that Saturday morning, but suffice to say it’s never far from my thoughts. I’ve been to Murphy’s a good half-dozen times since moving here, and could’ve easily been there that Friday night. I had actually spoken to Alyssa just hours before all of this happened about selling her an amp. You can’t help but thinl: I only wish I had known what was about to go down. Other friends were present as well, quite a few of them. I cannot even begin to fathom what they’re feeling and will continue to feel in the coming weeks, months, years. It’s an incredibly sad situation all around; Memphis is essentially a big small town, and everyone in the music community here pretty much knows each other. This is not something that I expect will stop hurting, for those involved or for the community at large, anytime soon. And I absolutely don’t want the situation to make its way onto the album, but it’s definitely in my heart. It’s pretty horrifying that the Memphis Police Department dropped the ball so thoroughly in this situation, that they had chance upon chance to do something to prevent this situation and chose to do nothing instead. As someone who’s played bars like Murphy’s all over the country for nearly a decade now, I never really considered that our positive, peaceful, art-sharing communities are subject to such random acts of savagery. I’ll certainly think a bit differently now whenever I take a stage or a floor. Everyone, please be careful out there.

Pitchfork articles on the Murphy’s incident -  http://pitchfork.com/news/73509-memphis-musician-dead-after-setting-himself-on-fire-at-crowded-bar/

http://pitchfork.com/news/73530-memphis-fire-death-perfect-storm-of-domestic-abuse-and-mental-illness-targets-family-says/ Relief funds for victims:

https://www.gofundme.com/alyssa-moores-recovery-fund

https://www.gofundme.com/PaulGrecovery Help:

http://www.thehotline.org/

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

ZC

[theghostsalontapes]

Distractions Abound

Hey all, This has been a somewhat eventful week, with a few distractions popping up that have kept me from focusing on recording as much as I’d hoped. I’ve recently developed some issues with an irregular sleep pattern that I think is due to the medication I’m taking, which has made it difficult to find the energy to work in those rare hours when I actually AM awake. Also we’re finally facing the replacement of Denny’s car this weekend, as her trusty Impala has developed a couple of regrettably-fatal mechanical problems. These stresses and others (an upcoming wedding trip to Kentucky, acclimating the chickens to their new home, friends and family coming into town soon from NC) have piled up considerably, though I hope next week offers a freer schedule to work with.  I did manage to mostly track one piece late last night, a simple song that came into being only because I felt like being loud in the studio for a couple of hours. It’s a fuzzed-out, gazey track that might resemble latter-day Lost Trail a little too much, but which I liked enough to put into the ‘Possibles’ folder. Rocket Mangler fuzz with tremolo-picked fuzzed-out lead lines and some feedback from both the Super Fuzz Boy and the RM. It came together fairly easily, but it’s probably not finished. I’m hoping to add some sort of static or tape noise, maybe some light piano to contrast all the thunder, and to tinker with the EQ’ing a bit. It’s a soaring, emotional piece, but one that definitely needs adjusting. I‘m calling this one “In Spirit Patterns” for now; that’s definitely a working title. Denny is busy gathering field recordings for me to drop into these pieces when the time comes, and thankfully I’ve got folders upon folders of un-used .wavs of old found sounds, both recorded by Denny and myself, to work from as well.  It’s surely much too early, but I’ve started to put out feelers for violin and cello folks in Memphis (and outside of Memphis if e-collaborating is an option) to add to these tracks down the line. One friend suggested I contact the University to see if there’s anyone studying in the programs there interested. I’m also hoping to find someone to do some pedal steel work, but I might know a few folks. Eventually, this is going to be very much a team effort, with lots of folks chipping in. I’m hoping to get a few players I really admire to add to this project. Early to bed tonight in hopes of breaking this unfortunate sleep cycle I’ve found myself in. If I can manage to wake early enough tomorrow, I might get in some tracking before evening, when I’m trekking out to rEvolve in Bartlett to sell off some amps and pedals I no longer need to help finance this car purchase. Saturday’s packed, but Sunday evening may offer some time to work, also. ‘Till Then,

ZC Listening to: MY BLOODY VALENTINE - Ecstasy & Wine Reading: GARDEN STATE - Rick Moody Watching: TRAIN TO BUSAN

[theghostsalontapes]

Time Goes Backwards

So late Friday night, I went for a bite with a good friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. We hoped to dodge any drunken Cinco de Mayo foolishness by avoiding Mexican fare altogether, but when we arrived at the greasy spoon off the Highland Strip that was one of two places still open at that extreme hour, a DJ blasting salsa beats at top volume ended up driving us outside into the unseasonably frigid (for Memphis in springtime) night. We parked ourselves at a rickety metal table and continued the long, long talk we’d begun earlier in the evening; said friend is a musician whom I greatly respect, so I was eager for his opinion on a few matters. Among other things, we talked mixing challenges, DIY workarounds for lo-fi limitations, and of course this new album I’m working on. I vented my frustrations about having made less progress than I’d hoped thus far. And it helped, for whatever reason, as simply talking often does. Last night’s recording went much smoother than that of the previous weeks, and resulted in the first piece I’m considering actually putting on the album (For the time being, I put it in a folder marked ‘Definites?’). It’s a pretty good little piece, it achieves exactly what I set out to do, and hopefully this is a sign of even better results to come down the line. I feel encouraged by the considerable progress made.  The piece is a little over two-and-a-half minutes, likely to end up an interlude of sorts if it does end up making the album, and built around a gently-swelling bed of reversed, clean guitar chords, curling and echoing across the stereo field, lightly reverb’d and Dual Tape Deck’d. On this bed I built a few interlacing lead lines, added some delay, and maxed out the ‘Flutter’ tape simulation plug-in I love so much. I ended up recording one of these lines back to tape, and fed it back into the DAW, warbling in real-time with the pause button, letting the notes gleefully go off-track and lag behind the rest of the guitar sections, like a machine with broken gears and pulleys coming to slow and buzzing rest. A little dusty vinyl noise, some light EQ’ing, and that’s pretty much all she wrote. The real basis for the track is a dialogue sample, though, which runs the entire length of the piece. As I told my friend the other night, it’s difficult at times to make a dialogue sample match sonically with the music in a track, even if the content pairs well thematically. This time, I fed the sample through my trusty Izotope Vinyl plug-in, turned up the ‘wear’ controls to full wear, and set the age parameter to 1950, the RPM to 78. It aged the sample to the point I think it meshed well with the music of the piece, taking center-stage as intended without overpowering the guitars. The music and words play off each other well. We’ve used a great deal of samples and found sound/field recordings in Lost Trail, and in Nonconnah thus far. Sometimes they simply fill a space where vocals would go in a traditional song, and sometimes they significantly add to the emotional core of the music by saying something at just the right moment, over just the right sounds. One of the themes I repeatedly find myself fascinated by is that of passionate belief, especially unusual or extreme belief systems. Before I became a fairly devout Quaker in 2012, I was agnostic bordering on atheist my entire life, and joining the Friends only deepened my interest in the more radical side of religious mania. The Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties, where parents and fundamentalist groups really threw themselves a field day blaming all sorts of social unrest and violence on heavy metal, horror cinema, and the occult, especially when it came to teenagers, is a subject of great fascination for me, an interesting (and thankfully fleeting) time in this country’s history that makes me think of the Puritans and their assumption that the great forest spreading beyond their isolated villages was populated by untold throngs of demons and witches. I don’t believe in a hell, nor demons, but I have always had a sense of another shadow world lurking beneath the surface of this one, barely glimpsed at times through the thin-stretched fabric of our decaying age, of the reality we construct over the real nature of forces at play beneath. I think passionate zealotry and extreme devotion to an ideology is a product of that tension, and Satanic Panic is a fearful example of people willing themselves to believe in a bogeyman, in something, anything, to blame for their teens being teens...whether it be that loud newfangled music or those gory movies. I find myself returning to this subject in my art time and time again. So this sample is a true gem, from a multi-part lecture series I found on YouTube concerning ‘signs of Satanic abuse’. There’s a real dichotomy between the soothing tones of the woman’s narration and the imaginary fantasies she’s enumerating. The section I used concerns the concept of ‘backwards programming’, i.e. spiritual brainwashing of a subject to encourage belief in opposing reactions to stimuli or perception. Up is down, left is right, pain is pleasure, time moves backwards, etc. This lecture goes to some really wild places - implantation of a ‘backwards room’ through ‘magic surgery’, the latter phrase tossed off in passing and never explained...it’d be funny if people didn’t actively persecute others using such outlandish and paranoid beliefs; we’re not far away from West Memphis, Arkansas, after all, where three innocent young men were jailed for the murders of a group of children based on zero evidence save for- ‘they look evil, and there’s rumors of Satanic cults around here.’ So for now I’m calling this little song ‘Magic Surgery’, because I find that phrase both hilarious and very haunting. This sample’s even given me a working title for the album, one I think may line up nicely with all the themes I hope to cover - For now, this album is called ‘The Backwards Room.’ ZC 

Listening to: Forest Swords - COMPASSION Reading: Rick Moody - GARDEN STATE Watching: FIVE CAME BACK, Netflix

[theghostsalontapes]

Early Friday Morning Feedback

Hi again. Denny’s out of the house for four nights on an overnight babysitting gig in Germantown, which means a lot of recording is likely to happen tomorrow and over the weekend, as I get restless without Den around in the evenings. Last night/this morning I managed to track a short piece, but once again it isn’t wowing me. I’m still struggling to get into the groove here and shake off the rust. It isn’t any lack of inspiration, quite the opposite, just an inability to transfer what’s in my head into my fingers and the DAW. All I can do is keep trying, I guess, but I’m hoping for at least one sure-fire keeper from this weekend. This track was built around a looped bit of strummed ‘E’, tracked directly from the Reverend into GarageBand and slathered with reverb and delay. I pitched this fairly low in the mix, as a gentle pulsing hum, almost organ-like, atop which I layered a simple line of reversed and echo’d E/A finger-picking, run through one of my favorite Audacity plug-ins, Dual Tape Deck. A scrim of vinyl dust crackle and two tremolo-picked, reverb-drenched lead lines lurk in the periphery. Near the end, all of the picking drops out and is replaced with a warbling, tape-recorded ghost of itself, soaked in a bit of ear-splitting feedback from the Super Fuzz Boy and the Rocket Mangler and run through the JC-60 (we’re fairly isolated here in rural Fayette County, but we do have nearby neighbors, and I wonder if they can hear such late-night/early-morning noise-fests and what they think of them). The feedback is mixed low and smeared in reverb, a faint trace of dissonance before the track cuts off abruptly with the sound of the tape machine clicking off, a lullaby interrupted with finality. After mixing down I doused the whole thing in another layer of Dual Tape Deck effect, which added a nice panning sort of half-tremolo to the master mix. I put this piece in the ‘Possibles’ folder, but really it’s likely an ‘Outtake’, as once again my reach has exceeded my grasp, the result differing greatly from the imagined (I named this one ‘Stop Scaring The Birds’, which was on my master list of un-used titles, but I have no idea what it means or where it came from...sounds like something Denny might have said?). I’m nowhere near discouraged yet, but I do hope I make some significant progress soon, as it would be encouraging to have in hand the first bit of something that’s sure to make the album. Essentially, this is going to be much harder work than I thought...but really, aren’t the things in life worth fighting for always? More tomorrow, I hope. Until then! ZC  Listening to: LUH - SPIRITUAL SONGS FOR LOVERS TO SING Reading: Rick Moody - GARDEN STATE Watching: BLOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN, Netflix

[theghostsalontapes]

***Fuzz***

Very early Sunday morning here on the rural edge of Memphis, and the night bears shades of summer come early - all-too-brief thunderstorms followed by sticky humidity and heat. Denny had hoped we would make it into May before turning the air conditioning on, but this day was just too stifling to bear.   I’ve been hunched over the Macbook in the studio all night and into morning, dripping sweat on the old linoleum, accompanied by friendly visitors here and there (a rather large spider, an anxious cricket) as I strum my Reverend and plug various cables into various pedals. I worked on a short-ish piece tonight that turned out pretty gazey and heavy, truth be told (I’m imaging this album as a series of long pieces broken up into different movements, so this may become a small section of a greater whole). As it is, it’s pretty good, the first piece I’ve recorded in awhile I feel fairly positive about. I’ve created a ‘Maybes’ folder for pieces like this; no 100% definite inclusions yet, but I’m sure I’ll get there.  Anyhow, I started this one off with some thick layers of fuzz, the higher gain stuff coming from the Super Fuzz Boy mixed with the chunkier Muff-ish tones via the Rocket Mangler, and EQ’d to suit the Siamese Dream-ish tone I was aiming for, all dunked in plentiful reverb and delay to craft a heady drone. Pedals run nice and clean into the Apogee interface and then into the DAW, with little to no discernible hum. I’ll use my JC-60 for amp tones at some point, and a few of my various other amps when called for, but perhaps not until I figure out why the ground hum is so bad in the studio (could be a number of causes). Right now, I’ll work around it. Atop the fuzz drone I added some reversed leads awash in reverb, delay, and subtle chorus, panning frantically around the sound field, with a pitched-up second layer coming in at the halfway point and fed through a rotary speaker plug-in that I like. Beneath all this is some barely-in-the-mix tape warble, and as is usually the case I applied some light ‘flutter’, courtesy of the awesome Airwindows plug-in of the same name, to the master track. Mixdown and save! As I said, it’s a pretty decent piece, and it doesn’t sound too terribly Lost Trail (or more accurately, it kinda sounds like some of Lost Trail’s louder, gazier pieces but BETTER, better produced and better organized), which means I’m getting closer to what I’m looking for.  I intended to head to bed fairly early-ish tonight, as I have to be up early for Quaker meeting, but this mix just demanded my attention (I almost gave up on this one a number of times, frustrated at not being able to nail the sound I wanted - glad I kept working on it until it clicked). So it goes. I may add a few little sound shards to this piece eventually - some static or tape noise to broaden out the sonics - but for now I’ll put it aside. S/O Simon & Garfunkel - I’m cheekily calling this one “Michigan Seems Like A Nightmare To Me Now”.  Selling off a little Fender tube amp I don’t use, along with some old pedals that have become superfluous. Gonna haul them down to rEvolve in Bartlett and see what they’ll give me for the lot. Taking part of the proceeds to get some Nonconnah shirts finally printed...but what about the rest? Another amp? Another guitar? It would be nice to find an affordable twelve-string electric... Now to paw through a few demos and tackle some Lovecraft before bed! Be Well, ZC

Listening to: Lazy Legs - CHAIN OF PINK Reading: Rick Moody - GARDEN STATE, H.P. Lovecraft - TALES Watching: THE HANDMAID’S TALE, Hulu

[theghostsalontapes]

This Is Anti-Music

[theghostsalontapes]

Shaking Off The Rust

A humid mid-April night has yielded the first finished piece of the new Nonconnah album sessions...but said piece is a lesson in how much I have to re-learn about writing and recording music since the Lost Trail days. Unfortunately, it’s just a little too familiar, too much like the kind of song Lost Trail would make, and I’m aiming to do something radically different this time around. Also, the mix shows how out of practice I am. Old habits really do die hard. It’s not bad for a first attempt, and as a test of the new interface’s capabilities (note: it works great and results in surprisingly high-quality tracks considering its low purchase price). I suppose I’ll throw it on the outtake pile for the inevitable cavalcade of runoff material resulting from these sessions. Hell, I’ll even post it as an audio post right after this, so you can listen for yourselves.  The track (”This Is Anti-Music”) was recorded entirely on the Reverend electric, directly into GarageBand and Audacity via the Apogee. Vinyl crackle, several tracks of reversed and modulated fingerpicking plus taped warbles (both reversed and forward), some tremolo-picked lead lines run through rotary effects (with a couple pitched up an octave), and a reversed fuzzed-out slide line towards the end. That’s basically it (and yes, I used some plug-ins, including some of the GarageBand plugins, which are surprisingly decent). Oh, and a sample from this notorious moment in Memphis music history, as well, which resulted in the title - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U-k32L0KCc It’s an okay song for a first try. But you’ll hear why it’s too much like Lost Trail. In other news, I was happy to discvoer that the Apogee works with other quarter-inch-run instruments besides guitar, which means my synths can be run directly into the DAW. My primary live tape recorder has four quarter-inch outs, so I figured I’d try to run the interface through it into the DAW for conversion purposes, not thinking it would really work. It worked beautifully, resulting in the same high quality (in a lo-fi way) that recording tracks on the guitar had generated. One downside: I usually hand-warble tape recordings by lightly manipulating the ‘pause’ button during playback into the DAW, and by running it through an interface you can’t hear any playback, so it’s all guesswork as to how the warbles will end up sounding. I like working with unexpected surprises and accidents, though, so leaving another element to chance is fine by me. It’s going to take some serious work to shake the rust off, I think, and deliberately head in a different direction than had become automatic and rote with Lost Trail. Only time and effort will tell how long it will take. Until then, I guess you can enjoy this and other early attempts to get down to business.  Now I’m going to start sifting through the mountain of ideas and demos I’ve recorded over the past couple years and see if anything is worth expanding on.    More soon, ZC

Listening to: Slowdive - SLOWDIVE, Interpol - TURN ON THE BRIGHT LIGHTS Reading: Stewart O’Nan - SNOW ANGELS   Watching: SOUTHLAND TALES, MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 (Netflix), OUTCAST (Cinemax)

[theghostsalontapes]

Pushing Off From Shore...

In June of 2016, my wife/bandmate Denny and I relocated from North Carolina (a lifetime home for Denny and a longtime home for myself) to Memphis, Tennessee. We renamed our musical project from Lost Trail to Nonconnah to reflect the move and begin anew with a fresh slate, and in honor of Memphis waterway Nonconnah Creek. We soon purchased a home on the outskirts of Memphis, in rural Fayette County, which came complete with a spacious former beauty salon attached to the garage. This was to become our new recording space, and to remark upon its former usage, we named it Ghost Salon. Now, in April of 2017, as we near the end of our first year of adjusting to new environs and friends, that space is ready for use.   As I’ve said in interviews and in person, the new Nonconnah album is going to differ from Lost Trail’s work in a number of ways. Nonconnah will be more collaborative in spirit than Lost Trail, bringing in a number of musically-inclined (and maybe non-musically-inclined) friends from across the earth, but especially aiming to utilize the diverse musical community in Memphis as much as possible. The work will still be thoroughly experimental, but less hemmed-in by particulars of genre; ambient and drone are beautiful shades, but there’s many more colors to paint with. Most importantly, this is going to be a large-scale, long-form project. No more churning out endless streams of music like Robert Pollard on a meth bender. We’re taking the time to carefully craft what we do, and it will take years to get it right, probably with a host of leftovers to show for it. This is an ambitious project covering a huge number of themes and sub-themes, and it will incorporate many visuals and writings as well as a (surely lengthy) collection of music. I’ll expand on the feelings and moods behind the album as the recording comes together. Right now, it’s all a drifting haze of half-built comprehensions, and who knows where these sessions will take us?  I hope to alter many of my ingrained work habits in this project, focusing more on the particulars of layering and mixing than in the past, using a wider array of instruments, and re-learning how to read notation as well as (hopefully) improve my piano and vocal skills. I’ve purchased a whiteboard for longhand idea scrawling, and I’m starting this blog as a way to document the minutiae of the album’s sessions as they come together (I’ve tried this before and not stuck with it, hopefully this time will be different). Denny will also be contributing more in the way of instruments themselves on this album, in addition to her field recording work. In many ways it’s still Lost Trail, but in many ways it isn’t. I think our best work is yet to come. So let’s begin.  Today, 04/12/17, was the first day I spent a considerable amount of time in the studio. I had planned to start the recording process in earnest the previous week, but an unfortunate accident involving a pitcher of lemonade and my Macbook Air meant I was delayed while a replacement shipped to us. Now I’m working with an older Macbook Pro, which despite its age I’m enjoying much more than the Air (it’s more solidly built, with more memory and a DVD drive). Here’s hoping it survives these sessions. I spent today rebuilding my guitar pedalboard, a tedious but necessary task involving much yanking of velcro and untangling of wires. I have a good dozen or more pedals in addition to the ones now on the board, some of them ‘nicer’ than what I put in place today, but this is what I’m feeling is right for the beginning of this album (I’ll probably change everything in a month or so, anyway). For example, there’s considerable snobbery in the guitar pedal world concerning Behringer pedals, but they’re ample Boss clones as long as you use them gently, considerate of their cheap plastic housing. I had hoped to upgrade all my pedals earlier in the year, but life expenses got in the way. So it goes. I’m nothing if not an old pro at making do with what I have available on-hand, and I’m lucky to have a wealth of plug-ins on board, as well. As in the past, I’ll mostly be using GarageBand and Audacity for tracking, and my Zoom H2, in an effort to keep things simple. I’ll experiment with other DAWs as time goes on, though I’ve never liked being overwhelmed with options. The new signal chain follows... JHS Little Black Buffer>Raygun FX Super Fuzz Boy>Devi Ever Rocket Mangler>Behringer Ultra Feedback>Digitech Whammy Ricochet>Behringer Space Chorus>Boss Tera Echo>Boss PS3 Pitch-Shifter/Delay>Behringer Slow Motion>Digitech Element Multi-Effects>TC Electronic Flashback Delay>TC Electronic Polytune 2 Mini>Alesis Wedge Reverb Module>Digitech Jamman Stereo Looper I always use a number of accessories in my playing as well, such as a bottleneck slide, a flathead screwdriver, an E-bow, a violin bow, a broken computer speaker, various tape machines, a portable shortwave radio, and various toy laser guns. On this album I plan to play - electric guitar, acoustic guitar, classical guitar, banjo, dulcimer, glockenspiel, piano, accordion, harpsichord, chord organ, electric organ (I picked up a Baldwin Fun Machine not too long ago), drums, synthesizers, drum machine, music box, wine glasses, lap steel, Marxophone, melodica, violin, yerbonitsa, mandolin, hand percussion, bowed cymbal, bowed tape recorder (I built one myself), theremin and voice. Others, and Denny, will contribute these and other instruments. I’m going to mostly leave it in folks’ hands what they contribute. Though I own a number of guitars and amps, and plan to use them all, my main electric for this album will be my Reverend Ron Asheton signature, and my main amp will be my Roland Jazz Chorus 60. This is what I mostly use live lately, and I think it’s a setup that I’m comfortable creating with.

Before sleep tonight, I’m going to begin the long and arduous process of going back through my ‘demos’ folder and picking likely candidates to be fleshed out into full songs (this is also new for me, I’ve never demo’d for an album before). Since early July of 2015, I’ve been recording bits and ideas and rough demos with whatever instrument was on hand, wherever I found myself (a friend’s ukulele while house-sitting in Carrboro, NC, a broken piano by the side of the road in Snow Camp. NC). This, along with collected field recordings from the past nearly two years gathered by myself and Denny, has swelled into quite a gargantuan of .wavs. Now it’s time to parse strong ideas from weak; I hope I’m up to the task of judging these snippets. Tomorrow I plan to at least test out the new Apogee USB interface I picked up, and see if it’s as suitable for line-in recording as I hope. If I’m lucky, I may be able to find some time to begin proper recording before the end of the day. I’ll keep you posted as to my progress. Until then! ZC  Listening to: Do Make Say Think - STUBBORN PERSISTENT ILLUSIONS, The Robot Ate Me - ON VACATION Reading: Stewart O’Nan - SNOW ANGELS (again)  Watching: THE PATH, Hulu