Fall docket

Rosetta is less than a month away from beginning the sessions for our next full length, which is as yet untitled. It may end up staying untitled, along with all the songs. We'll see what happens. Our working titles for the songs are:

1. The Hardcore Song (yes, really!)
2. Barack Obama: Change We Can Believe In
3. Untitled
4. Blue Day for Croatoa
5. Sexultura
6. Crazy Eights (the 8-string song)
7. Why Sempei?

There's also another song we're working on for a split with Restorations for next year.

We used to refer to all of our songs by numbers ("Wake" = 10, "Lift" = 8, "Monument" = 11, etc.), but that was getting unmanageable. Everyone got tired of asking things like "Is this 14 or 15?" at practice. These songs are in general quite a bit shorter than our previous work. It's strange, though; they don't feel underdeveloped. I think they have the same number of notes we normally put into songs, they're just much faster.

Andrew Schneider is engineering this recording for us, and he and I are mixing it together. He has worked with Unsane, Pelican, The Ocean, and a bunch of other bands that are much bigger than we are. Given that it's the first time that we've made a whole recording start-to-finish with someone outside the band, it necessarily creates some anxiety. I'm used to being able to goof off in the studio and do 85 takes if I feel like it, without costing anyone a dime. There's more pressure in this situation to meet deadlines and bottom lines. The upside is that this record will actually come out on time (mixing is in December, with definite time constraints).

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People who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed my months-long stream of disgusting all-caps song titles, usually made up of a medical procedure + a farm tool, and tagged with "#brutalgoregrind". I've finally created an official outlet for this crass and immature material: Pitchfork Colonoscopy. It is an intentionally lowest-common-denominator goregrind project. It's really more about coming up with funny song titles and making lots of money than it is about music (expression of the shadow self?). I had been thinking about this for a while, but hearing the newest Throatplunger recording (thanks Mahesh!) really tipped the scales for me, as far as motivation for making it a practical reality. I'm doing the "vo-kills" and all instruments except drums. BJ is contributing blast beats... since he actually plays drums (triggered or otherwise) and I don't feel like clicking the mouse 10000000 times to make digital MIDI blast tracks. Everything will be recorded through my PODxt into my computer, and I plan to cheat in every way possible.

PFC will be the Diet Coke of grindcore: "the drinking of nothing in the semblance of something" (Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute).

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I'm selling my test-pressing of Rosetta/Balboa's Project Mercury 2xLP on Ebay. I can't ever justify spending joint "family" money on musical pursuits, so I have to come up with personal cash for Rosetta through other means --- often by selling things on Ebay. This is the first time I've let something with sentimental value go... yet I find that it doesn't actually have any sentimental value. I don't listen to my own recordings. I have the Project Mercury vinyl in triplicate on both gold and silver vinyl anyway. Who needs a test pressing? Someone else out there will value it more than I can.

I've also got a Fender '72 reissue Wide Range pickup on the block.

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It's cold and rainy in Philly, prematurely. My house has no heat (we knew the boiler didn't work when we moved in, but I'm only getting around to getting it checked out now). So it's about 48 degrees in here right now (that's 9 degrees Celsius for you non-USA types). Yeah, I know, "waahhh".