Wednesday, September 24, 2014

updating inrijected (inri022) & inrimixed (inri023)

i've also converted two tracks on this record (3,4) from mono to stereo.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected



as well as tracks 1 and 2 here.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrimixed



that's all of them.

updating inrisampled (inri003)

today is a listening day and i heard something i didn't like.

these songs were created in mono, and i didn't see any reason to convert them to stereo; i actually thought the mono sound added a bit of a charm to it. they played through both channels in cool edit, on youtube and on bandcamp, but i just got the annoying left-ear thing through the downloaded flac, so i converted them to stereo for the upload.

it won't sound any different through the streaming. maybe there's a slight loss of character in moving from the original to the mono, but i think the ability to play it on modern equipment is more important.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrisampled

to spin inside dull aberrations (final album mix)

written in the summer of 2001. remembered over july, 2014. completed august-september, 2014.

publishing to spin inside dull aberrations (inri048)

that completes inri029.

i want to see how much of the main track of inri030 that i can salvage for the j-squared part, but i believe the vocals are inseparable from the bass, permanently placing the track in rabit. i may have a trick or two.

the next project is that choir.

i don't expect a track to cost me as much time as this did for quit a ways, looking forward. the pace of uploads is going to increase quite a bit.

--

this track represents somewhat of a refocus, but it never found itself to fruition in the way it was meant to.

over the summer of 2001, a friend of a friend decided he wanted to start a band and asked me to play bass. now, we didn't really have a lot in common besides both being musicians. i was spiralling out into obscure independent music, and he was into all the mainstream rock bands. 2001 was the point where grunge was losing it's last bit of mainstream potential, and giving way to nu metal and various watered down, corporatized offshoots of hardcore. so, i was sitting around listening to tortoise and writing jazz compositions and he was sitting around listening to limp bizkit and writing mtv/radio rock. how could this legitimately work?

there was a small amount of overlap, centred mostly around tool. it so happened to be that tool had just released a new record, we were both listening to it and neither of us really had anybody else to talk to about it. so, something formed out of that.

now, when you're an isolated twenty year old that's never been lucky enough to meet another musician you can start a band with, you take what you can get. it seemed implausible that it was going anywhere, but wasn't that the case for every other band that ever went anywhere when they first started off? i don't think either of us thought we were natural creative partners, but we had a set of common goals and if we could put aside our differences...

see, the thing is i knew that the only way anything was going to happen is if i sat down and recorded a bunch of stuff. but, i also knew that this is a guy that defines himself in terms of his oversized ego and that the whole purpose of it from his perspective was to give himself a way to explore it. that's not the worst trait to have if you want to start a band, either. my overwhelmingly shy introversion hasn't exactly got me filling stadiums, has it? nor is it ever going to, and i realized it even at that stage. so, a natural role would be for me to play the producer (along with the bass guitar) while he throws some stuff at me. if that meant i'd be doing 90% of the actual recording, that would be ok, but i realized i had to let him provide the actual song structures or he'd storm off and pout about it.

so, i waited for him to provide some material. and waited. eventually it became clear that he didn't actually have any serious songs. we did a few demos, but he could barely play what he was trying to demo and the tracks were not of a gigging quality level.

in the mean time, he'd recruited a guitarist. he kept saying he was talking to a drummer (no drummer ever appeared), and he also recruited another friend of a friend as a singer. so, we had what seemed like a full band, if you include the imaginary drummer. what i saw was an opportunity. if he wasn't going to write some songs, i guess i'd have to...

the other guitarist almost immediately dropped out, and the whole project really fell apart rather quickly when the guy that initiated the whole thing stopped showing up to practice. it was several weeks in a row that only the singer and i showed up. i had a few songs i had written, so we started working on those instead and that became rabit is wolf. predictably, there was much pouting.

that leaves this particular song in an isolated limbo. when it was reworked for rabit is wolf (jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-day-i-saw-you-cry ), it took on the epic and experimental nature i was exploring at the time and lost the crux of itself as a stadium rock song. i feel something valuable was lost in this process, if for no other reason that this is so dramatically different than anything else i was doing at the time.

thankfully, i still have the original drum files, and i remember how to play the guitar part, so it's simply a process of recreating it. the raw mix sounds exactly as the track did in 2001. the complete mix takes it to it's final conclusion.

written in the summer of 2001. remembered over july, 2014. completed august-september, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits
j - drum programming, orchestral sequencing, guitars, effects, synths, electric bass guitar, digital wave editing, sampling, loops, equalization, vocals (5), production

the rendered electronic orchestra includes tuba, saxophone, flute, clarinet, orchestra hit, piano, violin, viola, cello, contrabass and various full string sections.

sean - vocals (track 6)
jon - guitar (track 6)

released september 16, 2001

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/to-spin-inside-dull-aberrations

to spin inside dull aberrations (reprise)

the second half, split off, to make the first more attractive to certain people, but still allow for full listening pleasure.

created over a few days near the end of september, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/reprise-2
so, what's the problem with feminism, then? why is it so unpopular?

i think it's partly a branding issue that cuts to something in the core of the word. it's an "ism". all the "isms" are bad, because all the "isms" are bad. so, what is the way this ism is bad? well, it's femin-ism, so it therefore must unfairly promote "femin" at the expense of it's opposite, which is....hey, wait a minute! i'm all for equality, but what's with this "ism" against it? and who supports that ism? we should stop them before it spreads...

as asinine as this deconstruction is, it's comedy is in it's rough accuracy.

maybe, it's actually not such a bad point. i mean, you don't speak of "black-ism" when you want to speak of racial equality, and for good reason - that would scare some people. maybe the valid point is that the language is less than ideal; maybe re-branding feminism as gender equality would be a good move in continuing progress on the underlying ideals. it's what feminism actually argues for, anyway.

i think it's partly a cultural issue, but this speaks of something broader in the continuing divide between urban and rural cultures in north america. i think it's important to have a healthy level of respect for those cultural differences, up to the point of reaching out to people limited by restrictions put in place by cultural requirements. i'm trying to avoid making that point, actually - it's cursory. the point is there's a need to minimize the fear that comes with great change and foster more organic points of development through cultural sharing. you can't force cultural change on resistant populations - this is well-established. and, there are resistant populations. you have to slowly convince them that the cultural change is worthwhile. carefully. pushing them too hard in the wrong way may produce a reaction against the proposed change. i think this is a factor in the existing resistance.

most people in modern urban environments do want legitimate equality, though. maybe it's time to cede a few trivial points in order to not lose track of the more important ones.