Chaos days, chaos days. Between Lover and Twilight is occupying the majority of my bandwidth, slowly being uploaded to Irvine, California where it will be printed, pressed, returned…
It’s out of our hands now and with that always comes a certain sense of relief, but then there will be the terror of opening the box – did they print too dark? Did they print too light? Are there glitches? Did they cut them alright? I HATE that part…
Well, in any case – the ball is rolling and we’ll have a CD release on August 31st, one way or the other. They’re going to look great, they’re going to sound great – and the only person who will notice any little niggling thing is going to be either Heather or I. Getting all the last-minute stuff of mastering, finalizing the artwork in the templates, deciding on the final spacing of all the tunes – all of that always seems to take a lot longer than it should. Even now, in our Lovely digital age – though logically I know that I’m glad
Acacia Sears dropped in to my Java Mammas open mic too – and Heather singing along with her was simply exquisite. Acacia is the most human singer/songwriter I’ve known in a long time – and I adore her music. Having her and Heather singing together is hypnotic. Ash showed up at my open mic at Java Mammas in Reisterstown, MD. He played a cover of Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love” that made me cry out in pleasure. Twice. It’s embarassing to say that, but it was incredible. A house o’ cards being built by a non-musician at my open mic at Java Mammas in Reisterstown, MD. I tried not to play too many bass notes.
I’m not having to wait the week to ship it from point a to point b (or the shipping costs of overnighting something to California) it rankles my hackles that it’s going to take another seven hours for the upload to finish.
I remember when I was getting “Strength in Hare” duplicated – waiting a week to hear if my DAT tapes had arrived in Canada… all the tracking sheets to make sure the CD replication company had the same ideas on track spacing as I did… no easy .wav transfers, no CD meta-information… sigh.
Such chaos.
Of course, nowadays I have to worry about other things – as soon as they show up in my hot little hands I’ve got to upload all the track information and trivia to the Windows Media database and the CDDB and wherever else are the popular spots… I have to upload tracks to our SNOCAP account… lalalala… Computers really do just sort of add as many complications as they eliminate. I don’t have to spend as much time on the phone, but I have to spend time sorting through spam and / or the spam filters. I spend no time in the darkroom, but I have to upgrade my version of Photoshop every other year or so AND I don’t get the relaxion of sniffing lots of fixer – the two areas where that’s not true are music and type. I’ve recorded on 2″ audio tape and would NEVER want to go back… and I’ve moved lead type around and would NEVER want to have to hand set a page of text again, much less a CD booklet.
Rowan reheads his drum. On top of all the other chaos, he’d finally broken the head at the Austin Grill the night before and much of Friday night AND Saturday morning was spent wetting, stretching and tuning a new head. Space Pengin playing at the 8.13 Festival on 8.11 at College Perk in College Park, MD. HA! LOVE them goggles! OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Even So at College Perk, playing their little hearts out. Once we got sound issues figured out it was a good time had, but there was a LOT of trouble getting everything to run well. The guy who was SUPPOSED to be running things had wandered out of the state for the day, sans warning to me.
This past Saturday I booked a festival at College Perk. The music was excellent, the organization was deplorable. I’d argue that the only reason that was true was that I wasn’t in charge of the rest of it – but maybe I’m overstating my powers of leadership. I do feel like if Perk hadn’t said “oh yeah, we’ve got sound taken care of” I’d have REALLY had sound taken care of and if it’d come to me a couple of months (or even just a couple of weeks) earlier I’d have had a full day o’ entertainment and a lot MORE press-coverage.
The day was decent, not too hot… too many mosquitoes though – I’m covered in massive welts. I don’t know if it was really mosquitoes or gigantic blood sucking itch-beests… I’m hateful of them… AND wishing I had a bed made of sandpaper. Awesome performers – I think I’m in Love with Space Pengin, I KNOW I’m in Love with Acacia Sears. Even So was fun and Ira was (as usual) cute as a button.
We played well, but it was the end of a long day and it took me a little while to get into the show… it’s tricky for me to shift from administrator to performer.
