If you have any interest in starting a band or doing any type of audio art these days you are going to need a way of recording it.  The tools these days are cheap (pawn shops and torrent sites), but using those tools is a different story.   A good place start is  http://www.benvesco.com/blog/ 


There's a lot to learn, people go to school for this stuff you know.  But you...you don't have to.  You can figure it out as you go.  Just start the experimentation.   

Oh and it is the abyss.  Some songs on here have taken years to finish (Over My Head, Going to Idaho to Die)

'Where have I been?', you might ask me one day.  The answer:  The abyss.  Start recording your own music and you'll find see me there.

JG
 
I just posted an old song, re-mixed it a bit.   It's aptly titled "Aurora's Fault".  It's Instrumental.  Think of it as a soundtrack for sleepwalking.  Do you remember, Bri?

Aurora's Fault

JG
 
 
 
Off to the TubeLand for an encore performance. No one knew what they could do...

Oogie waits for just another day
Drags his bones
To see the Yankees play
Bones Boy talks and flickers gray
Oh, they slip away

Once a time
They nearly might have been
Bones and Oogie on a silver screen
No one knew what they could do
Except for me and you
They slip away
They slip away

Don't forget
To keep your head warm
Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd
Watching all the world
And war torn
How I wonder where you are
Oo-o
Sailing over
Coney Island
Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd
We were dumb
But you were fun, boy
How I wonder where you are
Oo-o

Oogie knew there's never ever time
Some of us will always stay behind
Down in space it's always 1982
The joke we always knew
Oo-oo
What'sa matter with you
C'mon, let's go
Slip away
Oo-o


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E1jiV8Mo2Y

In it's temporal glimmers, it's always 1982...even then we knew, in our collective amnesia, that the joke would move...c'mon let's go...

So the tide rolls in and who will remember? Who will remember what once lived in those seaside ruins, those river towns? C'mon let's go...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBLkiWCTwrw

Greg

 
 
Yesterday's Land Of Dreams heads into the sunset. The implications contained in this economic set of shifts are massive, in just about every way. 

http://news.yahoo.com/report-says-poor-moving-nations-164704252.html


The mining camp of Bodie, California, the Wasatch Front and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metro region either do, or soon will, stand to remind all of that by taking the irrational drive for a "nice paradise" a rough history of non-resolution, at best, or a crumbling pile of someone else's memories, is staring us in the face with every tank of motor fuels purchased. 

Piling the family into the station wagon and heading off to Western Sizzler or Bob's Big Boys or piling the family into the station wagon and heading down to, say, Topsail Beach or Nag's Head was to be the happy fate of the generations born to traverse the heavens at hyper-light speed. Piling the family into a Chevy Suburban and heading off to Kolob Canyon was to be the happy fate of those generation born to go fly off to Kolob, flying at hyper-light speed. A cancer-free, hyper-light speed, it might be added...all done thanks to the Invisible Hand Of A Divinely Informed "Marketplace". 

After all, we humans DID break the sound barrier when those suburban ideals were yielding up what seemed to be an endless vein of prosperity. Strolling the malls, even with consciousnesses ice skating on the rings of Saturn (or, as applicable, Kolob) would be one endless pleasure after another. 

Like the supposed pleasures of the mining camp, the pleasures of the suburban build-out are for all of us no less than the sort of hang-overs experienced by those inhabitants of Bodie, with it's 200 plus saloons catering to the 8000 or so residents there at the peak of Bodie's population. Like the venereal disease rates recorded (however incompletely) by what scant public health offices Mono County, California, could arrange in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there's is that cold, morning light. Rosa May (born Rose, or possibly Rosa, Elizabeth White, probably in 1851 or 1852 somewhere in the Philadelphia area,  probably to parents fleeing the Irish Potato Famine) and her sad stable of women echo into what those suburban dream homes of not so very long ago seem destined to become as the void spreads over what once was. 

This is "Bodie" and "Salt/Wake" shaking us at a structural level. 


Greg
 
 
Just as there was a revival in the fortunes of Bodie when corrosive chemical-informed gold recovery was introduced after the "low hanging fruits" of the gold veins had been worked to the last few bits, we see a similar pattern with a substance even more vital to the economic viability of suburban sprawl. Here we have a scant few dribbles of oil, extracted a great price, all brought to the surface in order to keep up with illusions that our petrochemical build-out might continue.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/05/the-new-abnormal.html

As an even deeper metaphor, there is what we extract from our lives as, in a sense, a mining venture, resource extraction.

In going to look at the initial phases of what were known locally (I live in a place in Northern California known chiefly for it's political business these days, as the agricultural facilities and working farms were long ago removed to make way suburban housing) "the automobile suburbs" (as opposed to the central Mid-town area, served as it once was by an extensive network of streetcars and, later, buses) I am often left to question how we will redefine our relation to the world around us as those "automobile suburbs" fall into disrepair and, finally, outright decay. Necessarily, how we create our art---and this includes popular song forms---will be of significance.

Will the suburbia envisioned in the 20th Century, that place so consciousness-defining in all aspects of North American life, become something similar to what one finds in the Over The Rhine section of Cincinnati, Ohio?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-Rhine

The true story of Over The Rhine being thrown to the scrapyard of history is found a bit down into the wikipedia item, in notes from the US Census Bureau. The Over The Rhine neighborhood provides us with a glimpse of what the once vast tracts of homes in places such as the Wasatch Front the the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metro region may come to resemble as the harsh light of our totally avoidable, petrochemically-induced, decline becomes the rule, rather than an obscure exception in Ohio.

What then? Clearly we cannot just move away after the resources run out. That was the fate of the mining camp that was Bodie.

In no small way, it will be our artistic response to this geological resource depleation that will provide us with a way forward.

Greg