Jazzy Cat Time

Here are some random photos, some of which would have been more appropriate for recent posts. My girlfriend and I (new relationship with a very very dear, longtime friend! wahay!) were going through pictures of ourselves to share with one another. Because she’s a big fan of my music (and because she is herself a baller photographer) she’s seen or even taken most pictures of me that exist, so it required me to dig very deep into the depths of my hard drive to find new things.

Here we see posters for the VA show, the Jacksonville, FL show, and a picture of the Gainesville show from a strange angle.

Anyway, when we were on our way out the door, a fan of mine named Tim helped us load Chris’ truck. Not sure how exactly it went down, but he asked Geoff if it was okay to come with us and he approved the motion. Additionally, a girl named Jen that was fond of our music, but had never heard it before that night and Jaime (who does music as Rhinostrich) tagged along.

In Geoff’s house, we watched a VHS of some really bizarre Indian musical, listened to speedcore records, and engaged in general, non-drug or alcohol related reveling. After the hubub ended, I found myself completely unable to sleep. At this point in my life, it was still a little uncommon to watch the sun come up after not sleeping (it’s unfortunately become an almost daily occurrence for me now). Sleep problems have been constant in my life since as far as memory permits, but I was also having pretty intense panic attacks this evening. I stayed up and started working on a song that I called “Sleep Void”, now also known as the third track on Bad Happy. While the song talks about a lot of my weird experiences with sleep deprivation, that night is pretty heavily featured.

I guess panic attacks were pretty frequent at this point in the tour.

The next day, Geoff took us around his neighborhood. We ate food (I forget what kind) at this kinda cool restaurant that was half restaurant, half car repair place. I believe Chris needed his oil changed or something and they were apparently friends of Geoff’s.
Afterward, we went to a local coffee house, where I dropped my laptop to the curb, smashing the disc drive, as well as the only pair of sunglasses to ever fit my face without being too big or too small. I have spent some time with screw drivers prying the mouth of the slot open more, and at this point I can get discs in and out, but the process and reliability of it all is still flaky as hell.

The next morning we set off for the next city.
I’m going to have to make a phone call to Chris and figure out what city that was exactly though. ‘Til next time!

So, after Tallahassee’s show, we stayed in some guy’s house. I do not know who this guy was, nor do I know that anyone in our party knew him, either, but I do know that he had two black metal documentaries on DVD, a huge book called Plunderphonics, and had a MicroKorg.

Why do I bring up the MicroKorg?

Because at this point in the tour, we’d literally seen a MicroKorg Ever. Single. Mother fucking. Night… And that didn’t change, either! That was true of every night for the entire tour. Seriously. Don’t buy a MicroKorg, don’t use a MicroKorg, don’t even look at a MicroKorg.
Not because they are necessarily bad, but because your friend already has one, just use his or hers. If you’re in that price range and want something small that has a vocoder, just buy an Alesis Micron. Please! (Just don’t use the pre-sets on that thing. They’re painfully obvious.)

Anyway. I’m not knocking the guy for having one, he was plenty nice.

He did have to leave early. Like, early before we were ready to wake up early. Oh well. It began to rain, which quickly turned into torrential rain. I was in not the best shape, health wise, and we all needed some food. We rested in a parking lot and ate cereal, without milk, with bowls and spoons (I don’t know why we had bowls and spoons anymore). Our next show was in Jacksonville, FL, a city that looks like Grand Theft Auto. Also feels like Grand Theft Auto. I didn’t steal any cars or shoot any pimps, but I think it would happen in that city if ever there were a place to do that.

Side note: I did not just condone violence in Jacksonville, FL… or anywhere, for that matter.

We were pretty burnt out at this point. Anything after 10 days of constant chaos is pretty madness inducing (but hey, we’re doing it for a reason, right? It sure as hell ain’t for the money.) We traipsed about the city, looking for somewhere to get food. Everything we happened upon was closed. There are some really weird laws about establishments and what days/times they can be open, so the only things that seemed to be open were bars. We eventually got to an English style pub that served french fries, er, chips, that seemed good. We sat down, got our food, and noticed that our names were in a local newspaper, advertising the shows we’d played elsewhere in FL. Kind of a cool feeling, so I snatched a copy on my way out the door. We then hung out at the library until show time. The library in Jacksonville is huuuuge, and it’s an older building too, so the architecture is cool. It looks like the quintessential, grandiose library used in films where there is a scene about fact checking a conspiracy or looking up someone’s family history so they can track the villain. Even just walking through it, I felt like the camera was slowly panning down through the various floors, as people walking horizontally provided contrary motion.

I had weird feelings about the show. This was back in Myspace times, so I got a lot of people excited to go to it, but they were all under aged and this was the only 18+ show of the tour. As I predicted, very few people showed up. There was a line of maybe ten people at the bar, plus between five and ten people directly in the stage area. It was still a fun show, but it was an unfortunate situation, because it could have been a little bit more dense in there if it were all ages.

I remember a [married] woman flirting with me, trying to take my day-glo windbreaker, scene here, and then giving up on flirting but still wanting the jacket, offering money instead of… you know… her body. The other acts at the show were mostly the same ones we’d been playing with, plus one local thing that was all-hardware dance music. Definitely always fun to watch electronic music sets that rely on the consistency of voltage and human accuracy, with overwhelming set-ups.

We packed up after the show and, with way more party members than we entered with, headed for Geoff, Lissajou’s domicile for a weird night and a day off.

Only took me a week or so to find the time and drive to do this again! That’s not so bad, right?

Anyway, I suppose I let off in Florida. Why, on the very date this poster depicts! How fortuitous!

By the time we got to Florida, I’d become homesick. I’m not the biggest fan of my living situation, but perhaps the lack of good bagels and pizza as getting to me. Didn’t help that I am an anxious mother fucker. Well, I was a much more anxious mother fucker at this point in my life anyway. Florida (and the South in general, for that matter) has some really strange parts. We crossed through a city on our way to Gainesville that really looked like it hadn’t changed since the 1940s. I imagined that all life within this bubble was unaware of the outside world. I felt like we were probably one of the first pieces of modern life to pass through this place, and the people who may have been existing inside of the dilapidated homes looked out in fear at our scary futuremobile.

Arriving at The Laboratory, I was filled with more weird vibes. Nothing bad, just unusual. Gainesville is a weird place. Inside, Kim (Strangelette) and her friend Miss Dracula were waiting for us, as well as the other artists and the guy behind Electronic SubSouth. Kim graciously bought me some food and a ton of Mexican cokes (by the way, Coca-Cola, I’m a huge fan of your products and I hardly even care about your unethical business practices or the fact that your products are killing me inside. Would you do me a huge favor, as a big proponent of your sugar drink, and actually sell SUGAR drink in my fucking country? I don’t like needing to spend extra on import prices so I can get the quality version that almost every other country gets, in a nice feeling and looking, easily recyclable glass bottle. What’s your deal, man?) It was much needed, too, as diet related illness was taking hold by this point. Something healthy and enjoyable was nice.

The show was a ton of fun. Lissajou, Rhinostrich, Goatslacker, c-c, and Oddknock were the standouts, for me (well, Yatagarasu, as well, but that’s always true of him/them). There is some footage of this show online where you can hardly see what’s going on. I ended up on the floor, soaking wet, and covered in glowsticks that I’d thrown at the audience. I also high fived every person in the crowd during the end of Erin Battle. (Or maybe I hugged them? I used to do that kinda thing…) Often, Erin Battle ends my sets and I jump into the audience and they hoist me above their heads or dance around with me, but the crowd was too spread out and I had nowhere to jump from.
At some point I had to help someone get into an alien costume. He made me swear to not tell anyone who he was.

We heard word that there would be another, more impromptu and weird show at a house that night, and Chris was all about playing. Casey and I were a little beat, but Chris never backs down from a show offer. I hung out with Goatslacker, Kim, and Miss Dracula, and stopped back into the house for Yatagarasu’s set (which was done solo). The crowd was extremely into it. So much so that their enthusiastic jumping and moshing caused Chris’ NES to glitch out, and he had to stop in the midst of every song.

After the second show, we went back to Chris’ (not Yatagarasu, the guy who runs ESS) house. The place was on some sort of other planet. One of the trees on the side of the winding sidewalk had shovels instead of branches. The foyer had ancient, mummified creatures and animal bones all about, and the living room as decorated from floor to ceiling with Residents memorabilia and action figures spanning several decades of quality cartoons. We talked a bit and went off to sleep.

The next morning, we woke up early for breakfast with everyone that had played the night before. Some strange fellow some of the people seemed to know offered us all shots of… I don’t know what… but he certainly wouldn’t tell us. He just gleefully insisted we have them. I abstained, but it was apparently some combination of booze that tasted like thin mint girl scout cookies (creme de menthe involved, perhaps?)
As we’d lost our show in Panama City, we asked Oddknock, who was in charge of a show featuring most of the same artists as the night before, if we could hop on the bill and he happily obliged.

I decided to ride with Kim to this show. A car with leg room and air conditioning was a pretty enticing thing on it’s own, but Kim had been a friend of mine for some time.

When we arrived, we unloaded and noticed that the club was… well… a dance club. A discotheque. At this point in my life I’d never played a place of the sort, never even been inside one. The twin disco balls spun wildly, casting disorienting light that made it impossible for me to walk in a straight line. I wondered if all dance clubs were like that.

There was also the terrible stench of fog machine smoke and cigarettes. I don’t know about you, but as harsh as cigarette smoke is on my voice, fog machine smoke is way worse. The smell sticks in my throat and my nose and my hair and makes me feel like I’ve taken a bath in truly vile, experimental chemicals. My synesthesia makes me see this gross, sparkling gray matter, too. Somehow, that makes it much worse.

All the same, I had a really fun show. Everyone was superb, even though the fog machine decided to also be really loud, in addition to its olfactory assault, making every set full of occasional WHOOSH sounds.

Oops!

Sorry about my delay to post more updates in the tour retrospection diary. Life went nutty the past few days. Things are well right now. Very well, in fact. When I am not so busy again I will resume. Probably tomorrow night!

Take Control Continues

I realized that my pictures were getting progressively more and more distant from the date of the events of my entries descriptions, so here is a picture of setting up for the show in Roxbury, which started this tour.

The drive to Statesboro was, in a word, miserable.
We stopped at a truck stop in South Carolina to stretch our legs and I made some calls to comforting figures in my life. I remember squatting by the truck and the pavement being wet, as though it’d rained recently.

Travel stops catered towards truckers are really weird, if you’ve never had the experience. I have a picture from Take Control 2.0 (a 2011 tour) that exemplifies this perfectly, but it’ll be some time before that is uploaded.

As we approached the venue, after a grueling 8+ hour drive in immense heat and discomfort, we made a sudden stop because of a hidden stop sign. This stop gave a piece of hardware (I believe it was the Jomox) enough propulsion to launch directly into my spinal cord, at the top of my neck.
This, my friends, was painful.
I seemed to be fine however, and I’ve never been one for hospital or doctor visits, so we carried forth.

This show, too, was at a game store. However, it was not underneath homes, nor was it a chain. This was a place known as Gamesboro, and like any self respecting game store, it was stocked with “vintage” titles, functioning arcade machines, and more obscure pieces of gaming hardware (think R.O.B., the NiGHTS Saturn controller, Virtual Boy, the Pikachu N64, or the Intellivision Music Synthesizer, and you’ll start to understand. I don’t remember exactly what they actually carried anymore.) The employees were quite the ragtag group, quirky and fun, and any number of other generic collections of words used to describe enjoyable, non-generic collections of people.

The show was fun. Many of the acts dropped off without warning, including Minusbaby and a favorite nanoloop artist of mine, Lissajou, but the bill still contained quality artists. It just went from being a “fest” to being a “show”.
The crowd was super enthusiastic, sizable, and many of them were clearly quite new to the idea of chiptune or video game sound utilizing, original music. Brett Moots opened the show, and I recall the man being rather charming.

During my set, I got a little silly and kicked my shoes off into the audience, which began a strange game where people playfully threw my shoes at one another. While this was going on, an apparently unpleasant male was flirting with Casey. I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but I believe Chris detected what was going on and threw one of my shoes at the guy. Instead of tossing it to someone else, he was flabbergasted and outraged. “DON’T THROW THE SHOE AT ME!!” He stormed out of the store in a huff.

We got some manner of free food and Chris and I spoke a bit about meanings behind our music, in particular talking about the disparity between some of our happy sounding material’s apparent tone and what they are really about. It’s always nice to know that you’re not alone with certain ideas and ideologies.

Statesboro was, like many places, a shining example of what it’s like to temporarily become a part of some group of people’s lives, and experience what Chris calls “fast forward friendships”. When you stay with a group of people, you often get a really candid look into their lives. What they normally do, what and who they love and hate, you learn who plays what role in a group, gather collections of data on their personalities and senses of humor, and, generally speaking, you’re pretty well accepted and integrated, regardless of how you feel. There can definitely be elements of weirdness, or the group’s behavior will be altered because of the exciting stranger, but you still get this immersion that makes every day feel like forever. It’s kind of like how a move feels longest the first time you see it. But then, when you leave the next morning, everything feels like it happened in a flash. Your new, lifelong friends, are back to their former state as outsiders.

When we left the dorm we stayed with them in (which was completely full of video games) we were headed for Gainesville, Florida, for Beep South II, a chiptune festival. I know that the date of this show was August 29th, because the poster is on my wall.

Since my phone pictures have been thus far basically unrelated to the coinciding post, I’m going to change the format a bit.

Sorry for being a day late with this post, too!

mkebrown-deactivated20120525 asked: What do you think is the saddest song you ever made?

It would be something that’s not been released yet. I wrote an album in the past few months, to be title Milquetoast, that is full of the most upsetting material I’ve done.
As far as things that are released at the time of this post, it’s hard to say. There is a bit of a discontinuity between how I perceive songs of mine versus how they feel for outsiders. Feeler than I’m old is a pretty upsetting one, for me, as it’s partly about thinking of myself dead, as seen through the eyes of people I love and people who look up to me and Betrayal is okay. is also up there, as it more or less reminds me how crappy my relationships with people are. I think a safe saddest is Time Zone Proclivity, but Paper Punch Out Dreams probably makes me feel the saddest.
I can’t explain why exactly, but that song just elicits such an immense response from me. I know it sounds really self-absorbed to call my own work powerful or moving, but that’s why I do what I do. I try to capture and express exact feelings of mine and preserve them, otherwise I may simply forget.

kangaj3w asked: COME TO WISCONSIN! I now have my drivers license therefore I can travel to somewhere other than Milwaukee! lol @ you probably not knowing who this is.

I do know who this is! Milwaukee is impossible to book, I don’t understand it >_<
You need to make friends with a venue or something! (I mean, not like… you LITERALLY NEED TO… I think you get what I’m saying)

harvecito asked: Any shows near LA anytime soon?

Perhaps in Spring, definitely in the summer. If someone books me out there and pays for my flight, however, I could be out there any time!

moldycrouton asked: Yo, when am I gonna be able to get my hands on a studio version of "Here He Is HE'S GONE?"

http://www.mediafire.com/?6vdjy2oh25jg191 It’s on the 2007 split with Scissor Shock!

September 3, 2009

So, I have quite a bit of space to fill with now, since the last picture.
The date of this picture won’t be covered in this update, but it’s of a sign asking for bands to fill in at some venue. I used to write down every potential contact I found for shows, and this is one of them. I decided to block out the phone number for this upload, just in case there are any weirdos reading this.

Virginia was strange. Very strange. But I am known to like that sort of thing! Brendan (who does a chiptune project called Inverse Phase), who also more or less supplies all of the games and arcade consoles and other electronics to MAGfest (or at least did at the time) had an apartment filled to the brim with exactly that + games, DVDs, computers, and other fandom memorabilia. Anyone who has seen my interview video from two years ago knows I enjoy that sort of thing, so I was feeling a little goofy. A lesser known fact about me is that I work at anime conventions semi-regularly (like one a year, sometimes two, though not every year) so there’s a strong reaction and set of memories I have attached to that sort of immersion.

We had to leave his house for a bit, while he went to work. We grabbed some bagels (not as good as NY/NJ, but they were certainly good. Did I mention I’m a snob about local food? Maybe you’re learning too much about me here >_>) and hung out at the library for a bit. Brendan called us after some amount of time and we waited for him at his residence. I recall red ants scurrying about and a loud, tiny dog. Also it was hot. Insanely hot. By the time we had packed everything into the truck, I was a sweaty mess.

Brendan took us to a restaurant that was in the style of a diner and I sat next to his friend who designed and made remarkably high quality fursuits. The only problem is that I’m inexplicably terrified of mascots in that style. She showed me pictures and I nervously talked about their apparent level of quality, afraid to mention that I was… you know… afraid.
During the meal, someone at the table said “It’s so crazy to have real live chiptune in Virginia!” to which Chris and I glanced at one another knowingly and responded “yes, pure, unadulterated chiptune”. It’s not as though this guy was expecting us to be bleeps and bloops, but you can understand why that description is humorously misleading of either of us.

We unloaded into the venue, a Play-N-Trade, and a crowd began to form. It was a rather large crowd, especially compared to the venue. I was excited to play… that is, until the neighbors began to complain about noise levels. Yatagarasu’s set was just cut short, while mine was just plain butchered. I turned down to hilariously low levels and whispered over my last song. There is video footage of the whole thing on Youtube, but I don’t feel like locating it, haha.

Afterward, we went to a house to stay that had a mess of arcade consoles in their living room. There is footage of Yatagarasu and I playing Taiko No Tatsujin, allegedly the only machine of that version in the USA, at the time of us playing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIxw-_H4eFc

The next day, we were awoken rather early, and rushed out of the house. Understandably, not everyone will trust three strangely dressed strangers to simply sleep in your house while they are gone and lock up without taking anything. (When I tour alone I am almost always trusted to just be left wherever. Not sure why people know they can trust me.) Our next stop was Greensboro, North Carolina.

The drive was notably long, and I was having kind of expensive food cravings again. My body was not acclimated to surviving on cereal bars, pretzels, and soda.

Side note: I have since discovered granola and nuts. Also water and juice! Wow!

We stopped at a Panera and I ordered a sandwich while Chris grabbed some leftovers from a nearby table that’d been vacated. People waste so much food. We called Sam, who does a project called Three-Brained Robot, and had booked our show, and weren’t sure what to expect. The show was at a house, and house shows almost always go one of two ways: extreme awesome or extreme horror.
This one was the former.

Sam is a very strange person. We met him at his college and he took us on a very long feeling walk across the campus to his parents’ house. I’m told it’s almost a mandatory experience for bands he books to ride the tire swing on his parents’ front yard, so I obliged. I have a high tolerance for motion, but I do believe it may have made me sick. I get sick to my stomach a lot when I travel.
His house was pleasant and his parents were welcoming. His father is a sculptor, so the property was lined and filled with odd art pieces. I kinda wish I could go back there, now that I’ve acquired a small amount of knowledge about the art form.

When it was time to leave, we hopped into his sketchy white van and we rode towards the house we were to play at. It was on a line of houses in a section of town that I assume to be considered a bit more “ghetto” than where we’d been before (more on that at the end of this tour’s related posts.) We were introduced to the homeowners, their two pitbulls, their Scottish terrier, and their awesome cat, Doughboy. I enjoyed his company the most. Not because I have anything but like for everyone else, but because I like cats. Especially old, chubby, anti-social cats with one tooth that open up to me for no reason. (It should be noted that anti-social cats often like me.)

We set up the sound system and a huge group of people amassed on the porch. This was apparently going to be quite a show. I have vague memories, since we ended up playing here again at the end of the tour, and I tend to get the two events confused, but I know that every set was intense, and I know I got thrown really hard into the wall, smashing a decorative porcelain owl statue. The Three-Brain Robot’s set ended with everyone grabbing a parachute and dancing in the street with strobe lights. His sets are a thing to behold, especially when the audience indulges him and participates.
The entire thing was definitely a tour highlight, and Sam had us booked for another show in Greensboro for the end of the tour, but for now we had to part ways and head to Statesboro, GA, for the first chiptune festival style show of many chiptune festival style shows in a row.