Less Productive than Predicted

I wasn't as on the ball this weekend than I predicted. Friday night Angela and I dropped in on Devin and Dylan so that I could grab my guitar which I plan to use for the Invisible Material video and also a keyboard which I plan to use to teach Angela to play for Turbo Sunshine. It was a nice evening, at the end we dropped them off in the rain so they could attend "Puppetry of the Penis".
Saturday I slept till just after 10am and rolled out of bed to have coffee and relax before getting to work. Angela and I then went to our buildings gym and worked out.
I then settled in to work on some mixes. I feel pretty confident that I finished Alien Nation. I burned it down to a Wav and used the new google documents feature to send it to Devin and Ronnie. Ronnie seemed pleased with the mix but Devin listened only on headphones and had some doubts. I next finished Invisible Material's cover of "My Girl Wants to Party all the Time". I was happy with the results so I dispersed it amongst Ronnie and my fellow band members.
Angela and I then went to Joans fabrics and for a drive around Glendale/Burbank. I got a text from Devin then which told me about a show they were going to in Venice. An all gay cover band called "the gayties" were doing a set at the Rooster Fish. Angela and I decided to head over to Devin and Dylans and go with them. The set was great, they even played a Hoodoo Gurus song!
Somewhere between getting to the Rooster Fish and getting back to Devin and Dylans my weekends productivity became derailed. We partied perhaps a bit too hard and ended up staying at Devin and Dylans instead of risking the drive home. Sunday was then spent in lazy recovery.

On the drive to the Rooster Fish I did have a proud moment. Devin burned down the two new songs I completed that afternoon to a cd and blared them in the car for all to hear. It sounded great and Devin agreed. Everyone was very proud of Devin's song. I'm really looking forward to the rest of the album.

Weekend Overdrive

I've got projects. I'm all talk and no action. I have become a project starter and not a project finisher. I'm going to change all of that this weekend. Here is my extremely ambitious list of things I want to finish this weekend. They will require focus and computer time.

1. Clean our ugly oven. Mandatory
2. Do Laundry. Mandatory
3. Finish Mixing/Mastering Alien Nation Mandatory
4. Finish Mixing/Mastering Invis Matter's My Girl Wants to Party All the Time Mandatory
5. Rehearse for Invisible Material Video Shoot Mandatory
6. Finish Reprogramming drums for Sleepy Town
7. Finish Mixing and Mastering on I like the Way
8. Re-write First Chapter of More Possible Than Perfect
9. Exercise Mandatory
10. Breath Optional

I'm excited you see, I have purpose and I need to get to it. Finishing things is good business.

Citizen Turbo

I have too many irons and not enough fire, or perhaps just not enough time.

I really need to help Devin finish his solo album and I need to finish the S no S project. I am promising myself that I'm going to do both of these things before I get to deeply involved in...

The two new tracks that Devin sent me last night which will become Turbo Sunshine songs!! Turbo Sunshine will be taking over where S no S left off but with the hopes that it is always a collaborative project between myself and at least one other person, hopefully many people. It is the project that I plan to put the most of myself into and something that I really would like to develop into a project that plays live, hopefully sharing stages and possibly musicians with Devin's solo project when that is up and running. I want to take the best parts of S no S, the unpredictablility and energy and further those in more melodic tunes.
Most importantly I want it to be very collaborative and in the spirit the first thing which I have completed which will wear the Turbo Sunshine name is a remix of my friend Bradley's song, "Rock Hard". Bradley puts out music under the name Swivek, and you can check him out here.
Here is the remix:
Rock Hard(Turbo Sunshine Mix) by Turbo Sunshine
Notice the fantastic backing vocals? This is the first recording which Angela has ever sang on. So cute! I look forward to making use of that voice in many projects to come.

The two songs Devin sent over last night were working titled:

"Silver Grey" I like the title and immmediatly started writing lyrics using the two colors. I'm having second thoughts about the approach today, but it was fun to even record a small bit of vocals to it last night. I did lay down a nice clean guitar line around midnight last night, which I think could evolve to bcome something absoloutely wonderful. Once I added the guitar line I realized that it has a certain "ladyslipper" quality to it, I like.

"WNN0438" is an upbeat, synthy number. WNN0438 were the call letters to my family's CB radios which we used on the farm. I started thinking about CB radios and that I didn't know until just a few days ago that C.B. stands for Citizen's Band, and that led me to thinking about the actual fact that all radio and tv bandwidth is publicly owned, which considering how it's so often used as a weapon to bad ends against us seems sort of screwed up. With that thinking I came up with a line for the chorus:
"Hey Citizen, Don't you own the airwaves".
I started working up a talking heads "fear of music" era gutar line for the song that seems like it will compliment all the synths well. This morning I was listening here at work and I heard the beginnings of a bass line.

Turbo Sunshine is going to be a lot of fun for me. Collaborating with Devin is one of my favorite things in the world, I'm very lucky.

In a State of Repair

Working away. Getting very excited about some things in life.

Planning a weekend getaway to Mexico in April.

The Oscars are in full swing so work is very busy.

I did my taxes over the weekend and once the return arrives I should be able to purchase the Zoom recorder that I've been lusting over. The applications of this device are many and far reaching. It will open up many interesting opportunities to me. I'm interested in doing a bit of extreme recording in Griffith Park. I'm interested in doing some Invisible Material recordings with it. I'm interested in doing a project with Angela and another friend with it. I also plan to do a lot of my own work on it.


Invisible Material has been hard at work planning a video shoot. This video will have the highest production values of any video of which I have been a part of. Everyone has been working very hard to make the video possible. Ben has actually taken it upon himself to build an upright bass from scratch and he's coming along nicely. What he has finished so far is pictured above. He chose to build a new bass because he does not wish to have paint splattered all over his real one, something I can't say the directors do not wish to do to us band members. It will be very messy. Our biggest snag this far is in the location, there just are not a lot of cheap places where you can throw that paint all over.
State of the bass update:


This weekend we went to a really great loft party downtown with Tiger. It was oddly held in a loft I had been to 6 years before when SG played a friends party. The place hadn't really changed much. We stayed pretty late into the night and had a total blast. Kool Kieth and Lady Tigra played.

Sunday we went to the Drive-in with Devin, Dylan, Rebbecca and Loren and saw Valentines Day and The Blindside. It was a beautiful night, we watched part of the first movie in lawn chairs outside of the cars. It was D&D's first trip to this drive in and I'm thrilled that they both seemed to love it.

Saturday Afternoon in the "flea market"( a section of our parking garage where the building and it's residents place items they no longer want or that those who have moved out left behind) we found three aloe vera plants. They were in serious need of some TLC so we moved them up to our rescue plant sanctuary, also known as the patio.

Our patio is the last part of Atwater Village home to be finished. We are working away and in march hope to add astro turf and a fountain. So as far as birthday gifts go anything that might be spent at Lowe's could come very much in handy. Hint hint hint. :)

With out further ado, our new rescue plants, alvin, simon and theodore:

Cat fancy accounting

Rain!