intensive studio week and making mix cd

I'm making a mix CD for my friend Jeremy. Jeremy is recording me right now and I told him that I'd put together a mix CD of stuff that would give him an idea of what I'm thinking of artistically. It's a difficult thing to do actually, try and find songs by artists which typify the sort of sound and asthetic that you want on a CD. I wish I could just hand him a bunch of old tapes of things I've done myself but that's impractical for a number of reasons, mainly it wouldn't work because the stuff I'd give him is in storage and some of the tapes are lost. I'm curious though what Jeremy is going to do with what I do give him because it's really a departure from the sorts of music that he makes and records. It's been a long journey for both of us from the days when we were swapping punk CD's at all ages shows and getting high in North Van to now. He's become a keyboardist in a famous industrial band and I've gone on to make folk music in my bedroom. I'm really curious to see what comes of this collaboration, I think that if it works it will work very well. I have a lot of confidence in Jeremy and I'm happy to be working with him on a project finally but if it doesn't work then it's going to suck.

Fingers crossed for this working out. I'll be in the studio just about every day until I leave. If you're in North Vancouver and want to get together send me an e-mail and let's try and work around this.

making a mix tape

That's right I'm making a mix tape. The sad casualty of digital technology making mix tapes used to be a real art form like knitting or recording an album finding those songs that are just right, inserting arty and interesting filler when you end up with thirty seconds of dead air at the end of a side creating a cool looking tape cover and listening to the whole thing afterwards and writing up the song list. I think it's been almost ten years since the last mix tape I made.

This one is for my mom on the occasion of her 60th birthday. I took a lot of raw audio of songs I'd either written or learned and I had been thinking of putting them all together in one place for some time this just seemed the most appealing way. So I've been working on it for hours and it's just about finished. I really like how it's come out and I learned something really awsome about my double tape deck. It doesn't exactly record over something... It records overtop of things, so I can layer tracks overtop of one another but after two tracks it starts to get muddy but this means that I can basically make primitive audio collage, and I did.

I'm sad that the mix tape has been phased out in favour of the ipod and mp3 technology. We think that this technology has made things easier, and maybe it has but it's also taken a lot of our freedom away. I'm talking about the freedom to record and shape sounds in analog. If you want to do what I did today with track layering you need to buy a lot of fancy audio software and get really technical and granted if you've got the time and the skill it could come out better than what I did but all I had to do was put on two tapes and record them playing together and with a little patience and good timing I've made some awsome sound collage.

The Killing of Sexy Wayne

So someone asked me one time if I knew anything about the business of selling human hair

And so I says: Yes as a matter of fact my father was a hair salesman, and his father before him. I was raised in the noble trade of hair selling. But I opted instead for a life of wonderment as a Siamese twin in a circus side show. We travelled all through the south until one day I was so sad that I was beside myself. That’s when I knew that show business just wasn't for me.

The days of vaudeville were gone and nobody in America ever went into sparsely populated communities to show Russian films from the side of the train, show business was dead they all used to say. So I went into the patent medicine business

Ever heard of snake oil?

Well I never sold that, but I heard it was pretty lucrative. I sold rock oil... otherwise known as petroleum.

I didn't make up the name of course, that was done by some dunce who found some petroleum on these rocks someplace and figured the rocks were excreting the oil.

He was pretty sad to find out that the oil came from dinosaurs instead of rocks, especially because he didn't even know what a dinosaur was...

I first got into selling petroleum when I was running away from the circus and the patent medicine thing was really big at the time so I started mixing petroleum with opium and selling it as a nerve tonic.

It made people so calm that they died.

So I got out of selling petroleum and instead I began to buy large quantities of bananna peel.

What?

Aren’t you interested anymore?

Ok so anyway

I started to buy all these banana peels.

I got it into my head that the best way to make me a living was as a professional assassin and that the first thing I needed to do, as an assassin was to get a calling card. That way everyone would know who it was that killed the guy and I'd get famous like the Joker.

So I bought these banannapels and started placing them on the ground near places where I figured guys who needed to die would hang out, y'know places like lavatories and ice cream parlours and dinosaurs.

So yah I started putting these banana peels down everywhere and sure enough people started slipping on them and cracking their heads open and saying "ow my head".

That’s about when when Al Capone hired me to start running petroleum for him back in ought five. Yah Petroleum had taken off in a big way, but not as a nerve tonic. See it was the thirties now and people wanted a new way to keep their skin all shiny and reflective so they began using petroleum instead of tanning butter, which they had started putting on their toast.

Why they used tanning butter on their toast I'll never know.

I'm not an expert on bread.

So yah Al Capone, he hired me to run petroleum from Chicago to New Delhi. But I wasn't too good at that so he got me to do his taxes. But I wasn't too good at that either and so he went to jail…

...Alcatraz I think it was.

Yes.

So I went back into business as the bananna peel killer. But the bananas had gotten wise and didn't want to get killed no more so I started to think that maybe this whole human hair kick my pops was on wasn't such a bum idea after all...

And that's how I became president of the United States of America.

We ate our way across the prairies.

Exerpted from a longer piece titled The Saskatchewan Play By Play

On our way to Regina we went through this town called Wroxville which had no paved streets and one sidewalk which somebody probably thought was a good idea back in 1960 but then in 1961 realised it wasn’t a good idea and decided to forget it ever happened… it’s always the sidewalks which suffer the most in situations like that.

We went through Wroxville because there’s a big old Orthodox church there that I had to take pictures of. The church was the tallest thing in the town the rest of the town consisted of a few houses and some trailers and a couple of long forgotten and boarded up storefronts. We wanted to go inside the church but some people in a vegetable garden next door said that it was only open on holidays and then one of them, a man about my mom's age, said he had never been inside of the church as long as he’d lived.

There was a falling apart old grain elevator near the train tracks, it sort of slouched and shared its commiserations with us over the death of the Wroxville parish district as we drove out of town.

I had a lot of fun on my family trip to Saskatchewan.

hehehehe

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