so, i spent the morning filing and tried to stop to nap before i ate, and then eat before i napped, and it ended up a confusing mess, but i think i got enough sleep to carry forward for the night, so long as the air quality in here doesn't degrade too badly.

the guy is supposed to be gone, but his replacement cop and/or daughter and/or mother seems to be up there instead, and she's the actual source of both the smoke and the other smells and the vicious a/c. i actually asked him to turn the a/c off before he left; so much for that, huh? it's freezing in here :(.

the guy i interface with is broadly reasonable, but this woman that fills in for him is a horrible, self-centered piece of shit that should be dragged through the streets attached to the back of a car.

i know this person is female because i can hear them and because i can smell them - they smell like a female, and not in a good way. but, they smoke, so they have no idea. again - it's the worst undercover cop in the history of the world, which i suppose is why she does these substitute roles.

i mean, we all remember how bad the substitute teachers were. imagine substitute stakeout cops. 

"officer malone is gone, parrrrtaaaayyyy!"

and, i'm only slightly exaggerating. she seems to be entirely retarded, and that seems to be roughly her level of operation.

so, because she cranked the air up as soon as he left (despite repeated requests to not do that and...why would somebody pay to run an a/c in an empty room? that alone makes it obvious somebody is up there.), i had to start filling in the baseboard cracks with sealer to stop the place from condensing up. i'm also going to go in the next few days and get some vinyl mats for that corner. and, we'll take it from there for the next round.

if i can potentially get through this stack of cds by the end of the night, i'd consider that massive progress.

it's not even a question of whether i'm getting paid or not.

i don't support the ad revenue model, and i don't want advertising for external products on my writing. you could write me a check for a million dollars in ad revenue, and i'd turn it down if it meant ruining the site with ads.

and, let's be clear: ads just ruin content. there's no subtle way to put it - your site is just flat out ruined, once the ads come up on it.

so, is blogger next for the enforced ads from google?

i'd suspect it's a matter of time, and then that's the end of this - i'm out.

web hosting costs seem to have come down a lot since i looked into this last....this is now a major site, and maybe it's time to take that step. it shouldn't be hard to essentially migrate it in tact.

do you really want to wait in line for an extra two hours while the security guards and border officers clunkily check everybody for covid papers? 

it's just a cold virus...the hysteria is absurd....

so, let's leave this in the hands of science, please, and not allow for ignorance fueled by media hysteria. we're going to eventually collectively realize that we have to live with this thing and look back and laugh at how stupid we all were.

the one reasonable exception is for the geriatric facilities, or general contact with the weak or elderly. and, i would have argued you should have needed a flu shot to get into an old folks home, too.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7876339/covid-vaccine-passports-canada-ipsos-poll/

there is no royal road to communism.

so, today's been a little weird. i fell asleep halfway through eating this morning around 9:00 and wasn't really awake until midway through the afternoon. so, i finished my eggs and spent the evening archiving the oxford posts (which i meant to do a while ago and didn't) and the night just kind of got away from me...

it actually seems that music is so bad nowadays that the kids consider mcr and other viciously bad 00s emo to be art rock from a better era.

listen, kids. i lived through that, and all the artists at the time thought we were living through the death of art - and seem to have been right.

i know it's harsh, and perhaps a little bit difficult, but you have to actually look at the music your grandparents and in truth even greatgrandparents liked if you want something substantive, as your parents went through basically the same feelings of dystopia and disgust at existence and modern "art" that you're going through, too.

today's post is the epic prog-folk track, 9:46 outside of the magenta box, reclaimed as the instrumental fuck boxes, and catalogued today as inri055.

it was actually sean's idea to move to a more acoustic-focused sound, out of apparent disinterest in the technology, which was my thing at the time. i've always had wide tastes, but the things in my cd changer at the time were along the lines of skinny puppy, tortoise, autechre, steve reich (specifically, a nonesuch remix collection), mike oldfield, syr period sonic youth - that's where my brain was, and wanted to be, this kind of overlap of lush electronic music with horizontally complex arrangements stemming from the jazz and classical worlds (and is heard, now, in the jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj sequence). so, i kind of got a little ambushed by the suggestion that we focus more on folk music, as a way to produce a more organic sound, for the sake of being less techy, less abstract and less complicated. that was not where my head was; "organic" and "simple" were the last things on my mind, at the time.....

that said, i had mentioned to him that his vocal tone was a little like michael stipe, who was a big influence on me growing up. years later, i would realize the similarity in tone with jordan dreyer, but this was still 2001/2002 and la dispute did not yet exist, i don't think - and i even think that sean would have had more in common with a jordan dreyer at that point in life than i would have or than we did with each other. i wanted to write abstract electronic noise, as i always had...but, if anything, i was actually the one to realize that it wasn't the best way to maximize use of his vocals, even if i sort of resisted my own realization. inri054 (clarity) is more like what i wanted rabit to be like, even if sean's vocals are maybe more suited for this presentation. so, it made sense to look in opposite directions, even if i ended up shifting gears entirely within a few months, myself.

so, maybe he (i?) was right, but it didn't make me more excited about it, and if what he really wanted was to start a folk band then i probably wasn't his most ideal collaborator in the long run, either. and, as mentioned previously, he was supposed to be the weird goth kid, not me. i was just an all around total nerd. as pragmatic as it was, it seems to have also been a fairly substantive change in identity for sean, as well. i think he would have laughed at the idea of himself singing folk music, five years earlier....and i probably wouldn't have walked down this path if i knew it would end up as a folk duo, in the end.

it wasn't long after that he showed up with a neutral milk hotel cd that i found to be pretty unspectacular and undeveloped, but he got a lot out of. like, they just sounded like half-finished pumpkins demos or something - i flat out thought it was boring. so, i didn't follow his lead into that, but i got the point and made the mental adjustments. in later years, sean would become your kind of standard indie rock loser, big into pretentious garbage like the animal collective - and we haven't talked much, since.

as apprehensive as i may have been, i realized the logic in the idea, as well. i mean, this is 2001/2002. how were we going to play these songs in public? neither of us had laptops, let alone cell phones, and sean wasn't useful to me as an actual performing musician. there was really only one way to do this, and it was to haul the entire pc tower into the bar, run it out in parallel with a single guitar part and then let sean be the focus of attention on stage. it would essentially reduce to sean doing karaoke over backing tracks i had written and pre-recorded, while i sat in the shadows and diddled around with things. i still don't think that this kind of thing is palatable as live music, but it certainly wasn't at all in 2002. so, if we were going to do this, we would have to find a more presentable format.

it never got off the ground as intended, but that's how this happened - he wanted to play in front of actual people (something i've never cared much for, myself) so we had to find a way to make music that could be performed in public.

the magenta box is a reference to the hmv that sean worked at, and not a reference to female sexual organs or records by sunny day real estate, which is something i was into (there's a borrowed guitar part from 8 on my first demo, from 1996) and never heard sean or jon talk about.

unfortunately, i don't think either of us found the new direction of the project to be appealing enough to be pragmatic about it, at least not at first. so, it kind of dispersed due to my own preference for electronic music and studio musicianship and sean's need to find a way to actually perform in front of actual people. in hindsight, though, after finishing this as an instrumental recording, i'm definitely proud of it.

so, this is a pivot and that pivot finishes the project and closes the project down, but it also kills it off. 

====

my memory is a little fuzzy with this track, other than that it was constructed all at once in the middle of the night on a cold february morning in a basement that wasn't well heated. 

i believe that sean initially brought in the a capella vocal that is heard in the acoustic demo under the request that it be developed in a folky style, and the track was built from there. we seem to have done the live version the next week, meaning i must have written it over the week. 

there was some hard drive corruption as the demo was being recorded. i was in a glitchy mindset at the time and decided the skips ought to be interpreted musically. i'm not sure i'd make the same choice now, but i'm not willing to second guess myself, either. so, i skittered up the bass and organ parts to make the entire track sound glitchy to compensate for the skips. i also ran the vocal file through a musical algorithm that involved slowing it down and pasting it over itself to create a collage of voices somewhat similar to a robotic choir. as the track is otherwise rather pastoral, all of this glitch provides for an unusual juxtaposition. 

as mentioned, the track was built up quickly, but it was always meant as a demo. that is to say that the vocal-driven 2002 version of the track was not complete, and was never completed. 

i came around to completing it as an instrumental work in mid october, 2014. the removal of sean's vocals required some mild rethinks in terms of melodic content, but the real additions are threefold. first, it is substantially remixed to make it sound thicker. second, some sound design or soundscaping was constructed, mostly for the beginning of the track, but some guitar parts were also added throughout. third, drums were added. this converts the track out of folk (a genre i spend almost no time in) and back into psychedelic pop (my usual home) with hints of fusion, prog and idm. as it is, this can be viewed as the definitive (if non-comprehensive) third incarnation of rabit is wolf, which was being torn between freak folk and folk punk tendencies in it's general tumbling towards "folk". 

written in early 2002 and recorded and mixed in early 2002 and late 2014. released on nov 15, 2014. expanded, re-released & finalized on nov 1, 2017. as always, please use headphones. 

the 2014 instrumental version appears on my sixth record, jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj^2 (inri063): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj-2 

the 2002 vocal mix appears on the rabit is wolf demo (inri057): 

jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/rabit-is-wolf 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2002, 2014, 2015, 2017). 

released february 20, 2002 

j - guitars, effects, bass, electric air reed organ, electronic drum kit, voice (1, 5, 6, 8), sampling, sound design, vocal manipulations, digital wave editing, production 

sean - vocals/lyrics (2,3,4)