Tour 2

Thanks to Hernease for the above (6/23 Philly kickoff).

Portland was pretty amazing. Both in terms of the show/response and in terms of the general atmosphere of the place. I'm in Boston right now, at some strange person's apartment, stealing internet access from her downstairs neighbor. I can't sleep. Tomorrow is a day off, which is irritating, but we played less than the best tonight, so maybe we could use it. I get to spend a few nights in Philly July 2nd-5th, since the shows around that time are nearby, and there are two days off.

Tour 1

Allegany, NY, 6/24
Indoor skatepark/venue

This is proving to be much harder than I expected. It's only three days in right now, but the overwhelming amount of time to kill has made me restless and homesick. I still enjoy playing, but that's about it. It's overwhelming to think that there are almost seven weeks of this ahead. I'd rather just go home right now.

Masts

These things become invested with the personal, the sublime. In daylight hours they menace, Babelian in their silent and sinister imposition, beautiful yet somehow poisonous. But in the night they glow with a warm and comforting light, and play in counterpoint with stars. Though silent, they are alive, and they watch.

It becomes apparent that this is an obsession with the "soft places," where boundaries are blurred: sky and earth, water and land, space and the terrestrial. Introduction of a penetrating element to bridge the domains gives rise to the ethereal Middle, invested with a memory that cannot possibly be ours, yet resides in us nonetheless. Maybe it was a dream, maybe it was something seen from a window as a child. The experience of these places is wholly alien to our categorical structures, but familiar to our hearts.


:
Breezes
Signals
Distant jet engines
Grass
Hum
Pulse
Twilight

TMA-1 / General bummed-ness

"Intention alone is sufficient to give noise the value of signal."
-Umberto Eco, The Poetics of Open Work

Here is a really terrible-sounding rough mix of the more experimental new Rosetta track, which will appear in a much better sounding state on the upcoming split with Balboa.

I leave for tour in three days, which is completely surreal. The unifying theme of the last two months has been piling total environmental changes one on top of the other, until the continuous transitioning becomes its own sort of stasis. I'm a little sick of it really. The road may actually provide a semblance of settled routine, which would be a novelty. I will post here as regularly as I can while we're out.

Orange

I painted my room orange. Now everything is truly surreal. This room has looked the same since I moved into it at age 8, in 1991. Along with the loss of everything else concrete in life, now the homeplace becomes foreign. The color's nice and everything (I picked it, I painted it), but the space no longer bears any resemblance to the comforting refuge of childhood. In that sense I suppose this is a proxy for life change, sort of like when girls cut their hair off after a bad breakup.