2010 Tour 3

I posted to Twitter that we played a house show in Arcata, CA on 7/18 and there was crowd surfing. Here is the proof. I didn't take the picture, someone at the show did. If you're that person, post a comment so I can give you credit.

Beginning in Los Angeles, I lost most of my hearing in one ear. I thought it was a wax impaction, but it turned out to be the beginnings of a respiratory virus or sinus infection of some kind. The problem was inside my ear, not in the canal. That put a damper on my mood and I lost motivation to take pictures for basically the rest of the tour. We finished and came home on 8/4 and I'm still recovering from whatever it is. It only took a few days to get my hearing mostly back, but the days I played without my right ear were pretty miserable (Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque probably deserve an apology from me, since I was about as engaged as a corpse at those shows). After that, the clog just switched sides a few times a day.

BJ and I shaved into mustaches in Arizona at Andrew Weiss's house, which lifted my mood a little. I don't think I'm cut out for facial hair; it itches too much. Before I got rid of the 'stache, though, we shot the very first Pitchfork Colonoscopy promotional photograph. It is probably also the last.

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I'm always moody after tour. This I now realize is due to not being able to communicate about the meaning of tour. When I say "the meaning" I'm referring to a particular interaction of creative output (performing daily) and the gigantic, terrifyingly beautiful landscapes in between. Lots of people have taken road trips, and lots of people have performed. So they think they know what it's like, but they don't. It's the combination, for long periods of time, that overwhelms me, and it is vastly different than either by itself. I see meaning everywhere. My physical body is at its limits, my social energy past gone, so it's just my eyes and ears inundated with raw beauty, unable to dwell on it the way I want to. I leave every place far too quickly to give each its due --- but trying to tacitly honor each landscape and community. I doubt even the friends with me on these trips could really relate, though I'm sure they'd understand cognitively. There's a paradox there too --- that it's so lonely in so much good company, which as I said above is a problem of articulation.

One of my professors in school said that I live "an extraordinarily bifurcated life." She's right, though probably not in the way she thinks. It's not about having multiple personae, but more a sense that I can't reconcile my deepest drives --- for warm intimacy and homeplace (satisfied belonging) on the one hand, and the sense of being everywhere out there in the land (abandoned to the mercy of great power) that I have when on tour.

Before, I called this the "tension between wanderlust and cuddles." Like everything, it's naturally more complicated than that. In reality I don't particularly care for travel in and of itself, especially not the cultural-connoiseurship kind. And I'm not naturally emotionally needy or relational either, rather I'm often overly-rational and unsympathetic. It would be easier to just anaesthetize against contradictory impulses, but I won't do it because --- again --- everything is just so &%@#!*^ meaningful.

2010 Tour 2

I don't really feel that I've reached the opposite coast until I swim in the ocean. This beach was near Arcata in far northern California (near the Redwood National Park, as seen above). It was cold but was a passable substitute for bathing. No showers yet on this tour.

In many respects, the fact that routing is largely non-negotiable on tour means that you see a lot of the landscape richness that most people never see. America is sublimely beautiful. I probably shouldn't even say that, because all of this was here long before there was ever anything called "America". The beauty owes nothing to the nation, except maybe its destruction.

The sights reframe in my mind the tired old antagonism between city and country. Country people have a (reality-based) stereotype of urbanites as insular, closed-minded, and unappreciative of the richness of the natural environment; in particular, coddled and unresourceful. A lot of the time, that's true. City people hate on country people for being uncultured yokels. And it's true that plenty of country people are more excited about the new Super Walmart outside of town than the fact that they live in a landscape which has enormous power and spiritual significance. The argument is moot anyway, because now everybody lives on the internet and their cell phone. The point of all this is that geography has basically nothing to do with anything (anymore).

"Experience" in and of itself is not enough. I've started understanding the landscape the way you understand a show in an art gallery that nobody goes to, or a rare musical recording. You get blown away and something inside you changes, once you realize that the stone and water and air was there long before the lame culture wars, and will be there long after our petty bickering is forgotten. It's not about cataloging endless stimuli, it's about being molded and humbled by a forceful confrontation with your own smallness and filthiness in the face of the sublime. You want everyone to see what you see, to be changed the way you're changed.

2010 Tour 1

I'm posting from Lincoln, NE. We're a week in. So far, so good. Having had three years since the last tour, nobody knew what to expect this time around, but we've been surprised at the positive responses and the financial stability (so far... fingers crossed). I've been thinking a lot about the constant digital connectivity that we enjoy on the road. This tour is our first without any printed-paper directions. One time Sean Ingram of Coalesce told me that he used to spend hundreds of dollars on tour on long distance. To call home from pay phones! Now everyone has cell phones with Internet, text, GPS, Twitter... it's almost like you never leave home. Because home is, in fact, the Internet.

The Rosetta van broke down on the very first day, driving from Philadelphia to Detroit, but after getting that fixed we haven't had any more problems. Even though we showed up in Detroit at midnight, they still let us play.

I was happy to be back in Fargo, ND for a few days, for the first time in three years. We spend three nights with Rusty from Battlefields, who played six shows with us. Rusty actually booked the tour for us, and did a really good job too. I'm really looking forward to seeing new and old friends in the next couple weeks... Conor and our SLC friends, Jordan in Seattle, my in-laws in the Bay Area, the North dudes in AZ. Many people to see!

Every tour has dominant themes. Frisbee is one of this year's.

Summer 2010 US Tour

This has been posted on the Rosetta blog, but I figured I would put it here for good measure. Probably some of you who look at this don't follow Rosetta's activities. If you see a date where you're in the same city as me this summer, please get in touch and we can hang out. You might even see me with a mustache (bit of a gentlemanly wager within the band).

I'll most likely pick up the pace and blog through the tour too. 2010 so far has brought a lot of upheaval and change (in addition to what came before) and I haven't had the leisure time to write hyper-technical explanations or grumpy, abstract diatribes. And there's usually more happening on the road than can fit into 140 characters for the Twitter feed. I'll put crappy phone pictures there, and nice real-camera pictures here.

July 5th to July 10th are with Battlefields. All shows are with City of Ships.

July 3rd Detroit, MI @ Club 309
July 4th Fort Wayne, IN @ 1624 N Harrison St. (House show for 4th of July)
July 5th Chicago, Ill @ Metal Shaker
July 6th Wasau, WI @ Hangar Lounge
July 7th Minneapolis, MN @ Triple Rock Social Club
July 8th Fargo, ND @ The Aquarium
July 9th Moorhead, MN @ House of Wang (all ages)
July 10th Sioux Falls, SD @ Nutty’s North
July 11th Lincoln, NE @ Bourbon Theatre
July 12th Denver, CO @ High Dive
July 13th Salt Lake City, UT @ Burt’s Tiki Lounge
July 14th Boise, ID @ Gusto Bar
July 15th Spokane, WA @ The Boulevard
July 16th Portland, OR @ Plan B
July 17th Seattle, WA @ Rendezvous
July 18th Eureka, CA @ Little Red Lion
July 19th Santa Rosa, CA @ Northbay Film & Art Collective
July 20th San Francisco, CA @ The Knockout
July 21st Chico, CA @ Cafe Coda
July 22nd Pomona, CA @ Glass House
July 23rd Los Angeles, CA @ Vacation Vinyl (early: Rosetta at 7pm!)
July 23rd Los Angeles, CA @ The Blvd (all ages)
July 24th Phoenix, AZ @ Rogue Bar
July 25th Tucson, AZ @ Skrappy’s (with our buds in NORTH)
July 26th Albuquerque, NM @ The Fusion Factory
July 27th San Antonio, TX @ Nightrocker
July 28th Austin, TX @ Red 7
July 29th Oklahoma City, OK @ The Conservatory
July 30th Wichita, KS @ Eagles Lodge (ICT FEST)
July 31st Columbia, MO @ Cafe Berlinv
Aug 1st Saint Louis, MO @ Fubar
Aug 2nd Newport, KY @ Southgate House
Aug 3rd Columbus, OH @ Carabar
Aug 4th TBA

Tech: Pedals (2nd update)

Here's an update to the previous post. This is the setup I used to record Rosetta's new full-length, A Determinism of Morality, with a few tweaks. I'm touring with it now. It gets rid of the rack unit without any loss in functionality --- the RV-3 fills in, and now I use the DC-3 to add modulation on that wash effect, all of it fade-able via the volume pedal. I can patch other effects onto that loop with the patch bay.

EDIT 12/2010: I've moved the Digital Dimension off the board and now use it for Temet Nosce.

I'm using the Memory Toy (love this pedal) where my DD-6 used to be, to thicken up the standard delay on Loop B. The LPB-1 replaced my Boss Compressor, to boost clean tapping parts and to add some dirt when hard strumming on the clean channel. I don't use it when the amp is on either of the gain channels.

The Sonic Research ST-200 is by far the best guitar tuner I've ever used, stompbox or otherwise. Highly recommended.

Below you can see the family shot. The board to the upper right is the Valve Junior board, with stereo delay + tube booster + reverb + volume pedal. Earlier effects are mono. The upper left board is for the Model T, with a TS-808 knockoff by NuX (very good!) and the 10-band EQ, both for different levels of boost. That amp is pretty unruly without varying boosts to tighten things up.

Recording

Last weekend Rosetta started recording for the next full length. In two days we finished all the drum tracks and bass tracks for two songs. This coming weekend is going to be all guitar tracks (bass will resume later). BJ put up a video of some first weekend antics here.

It's a really different experience working with an actual producer, instead of just an engineer. I can see a lot of tradeoffs --- the performances are better because there's someone to provoke the best in you, but there's also less of the sense of "building" a record that you have when you do everything yourself. I think I've come to love having intimacy with the whole signal path in recording --- from fingers to pickup to pedals to amp to cab to mics to preamp to board to interface.... you get the idea. Now I'm only in control of the things that I control in a live situation. The benefit is more concentration on the performance, but it feels like we may be getting a bit more myopic about the process as a whole. It's hard to describe. There's certainly a sense that we aren't "vetting the authenticity" of the final product like we have in the past.

It's not that the producer has separate goals from the band. His job is to make sure that we're being true to our own goals. The question in my mind is to what degree it changes the authorial nature of the recording. That's not a question of real consequence, just something I wonder about. I'm having fun and learning, that's what matters.

If you're sick of the recent navel-gazing, I've got some more nerd-ball tech posts in the pipeline, since recording means that I'm fiddling with gear more than usual. There will be a TSL mods part 2, and a post on the new Electro Harmonix Memory Toy analog delay. There will also be Valve Juniors on this new record, with the Frankencaster and a gnarly vintage Russian Big Muff Pi. I will of course post all the nit-picky details.

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".

Dog days

Our friend Andrew has posted some of his pictures from the European tour. He ended up in the hospital in Belgium with a collapsed lung and it's a relief that he's safe and at home now. I have yet to go through my own pictures from the trip.

I continue to reflect on the tour and what it meant, personally and collectively. It's part of a larger nexus of upheavals this summer that have included buying a house, switching jobs, and my dad having surgery to remove cancer. I haven't tweeted or posted in a while because I'm living in the new house, and currently not working, but haven't been able to have an Internet connection installed. Mostly my days have been spent solitary; installing fixtures, moving furniture, setting up a new home. I did bike out to Wernersville, PA (~63 miles each way) with my dad to spend a couple days at a Jesuit monastery. Sustained silence is unnerving for people raised in the technological/Internet milieu, but it's a valuable exercise. I spend a lot of time craving quiet, living in the city. But when I finally achieve that quiet, I don't know what to do with it, and the noise in my head becomes louder than the usual noise outside.

I have also found that during times of stress and change, it is helpful to paint a room orange:

Euro tour recap

The Murphy's Law European Tour 2009, 6/15-7/1

"A disaster a day keeps the hubris away"


Seems like everyone else beat me to pictures and videos. I'll post some of my own pictures later, but for now you can find videos here, here, here, here, and here. Other people's pictures of the shows we're putting in a Myspace album.

First, what went wrong:
-My amp was overweight for the airline, had to pay $150 to get it to Poland
-None of the requested equipment rented, had to play first show with reduced backline
-Spent a whole day looking for power converters, which don’t seem to exist in Poland
-Buses switched to vans, have to wait four hours to figure out rental trailer at last second because gear won’t fit
-Not enough seats left for my sister to join up with tour in Brno despite assurances to contrary, even though she bought her plane ticket specifically for the tour back in February.
-Athens show rental amp has blown tube and nonworking footswitch
-Athens show doesn’t break even, John gets hassled for money
-Two people have to sleep in the van in Brno to allow my sister and her friend a place to stay, since it turned out they weren’t even budgeted for at all
-All tour cash gets “lost” after Brno show (no one seems to care…?)
-My wife loses her wedding band in Budapest
-Rainy and freezing cold for 48 hours, clothes won’t dry
-Roof of Vienna venue leaks during bands’ sets, equipment gets wet
-3 people get sick (respiratory virus)
-After two straight 9 hour drives, van starts leaking fuel in Belgium, sprays the trailer
-Poor organization/curfew in Berchem means Rosetta only plays one song, lots of angry people demand their money back for the show
-Had to sleep in venue in Berchem, air mattresses deflate during the night & mosquitoes bite everyone; my wife's face swells so badly her right eye shuts
-Fest in Knokke is in a warehouse with no bathrooms and no electricity, amps buzz wildly because of the gas generator used for power
-Had to cancel Hamburg show because the routing is impossible --- not enough time to actually drive nine hours from Belgium to Germany and then turn around and make it back to Belgium for next show
-“Secret show” was actually not a show at all, it was just never booked to begin with
-On morning of canceled show day in Belgium, Andrew’s lung collapses and he has to have surgery to repair it, leaves tour, stays in the hospital for a week
-Berlin show falls through
-Last minute replacement for “secret show” draws precisely zero people, no money and only one shirt sold
-GPS goes crazy multiple times, takes us around in circles
-Driving from Holland to Poland, second van has a wreck, possibly totaled
-At final show in Gdynia, no hospitality, no sound check, and Sepultura’s drum set takes up so much of the stage that Rosetta can’t fit on it, and we almost didn’t play.
-GPS goes crazy on the way to the airport causing us to almost miss our flight home

Regular old dislikes:
-Too much drinking and not enough exploring
-Group is too big to go anywhere expediently
-Final tour routing didn’t make sense, unreasonable drives
-Would prefer reliable equipment and tight logistics to cushy accommodations and hot food
-Cocaine?? Really?!

Positives:
-Encores almost every night, including some double encores
-Sold a ton of merch
-People drove to see us from all over:

Latvia/Ukraine/Sweden/Russia >> Poland
Bulgaria/Macedonia >> Athens
Moscow >> Prague
Croatia/Romania >> Budapest
and probably lots of other places I'm not aware of.

-Went on a 24-hour “date” with the wife to Amsterdam
-Cathedrals are awesome
-Post-soviet Europe is full of super nice people
-Glad to count Mojo, Jon, Milan, Davy, and the Blindead guys as new friends.
-Got to meet some internet friends in person for the first time
-Beautiful countryside
-Incredible food and hospitality from basically everyone
-Goregrind and black metal jokes
-Insane crowds who know the words and go crazy
-Learning about cultural differences between white people. White people are not all the same!
-Coming to appreciate some ways that America really is unique in a positive way
-Got to play after Sepultura (can't believe they agreed to this) in Gdynia to a sweet audience who stayed way too late to see us play, now I can say that "Sepultura opened for Rosetta"

I'm sure I'll be able to reflect more on this with time. It's not the kind of experience that I can say was good or bad by some scalar measure. It's not even primarily an experience (which implies a kind of consumption). Touring is work --- which is to say, production --- with particular hardships and particular perks.

Tech: Pedals (update)

An update on pedals, since the last time I posted my layout was in December 2006. The Ibanez WD-7 wah pedal from my previous setup is now for sale ($45, contact me if you're interested).

Over time this has started to look more and more like a Boss product display. That's mainly because of a subconscious feeling that Boss pedals "sound better" --- which is in fact because they play well together. Tone suckage is minimized when all the pedals have the same output impedance and line level characteristics --- which generally only happens when they're all from the same manufacturer. "True bypass" minimizes this problem and lets you mix and match. None of these are "true bypass," but there are no impedance mismatches, so it doesn't matter. All the non-Boss stuff is on loop A of the Line Selector. I had tried an MXR 10-band EQ to get more control than the GE-7, but it didn't play well with the Boss gear. It is now on my other board.

EDIT 11/16/09:
A few things have changed since the European tour. I got tired of patching the MidiVerb into the loop for the fade-in delay, so I am using an EH Memory Toy (9.6v, wall wart #1) in that spot now. Lots more character, a lot less flexibility --- more in this in another post. The patchbay is still hooked up so I can throw other things in that loop. The MidiVerb is hooked up between my master and slave heads, running a short delay and a little reverb, so that the live sound is now true stereo. The tremolo unit went to my other board for use with Valve Juniors (I haven't used it in Rosetta since TGS), and the MXR EQ (18v, wall wart #2) is now on board for use with the 8-string --- as a low-cut and boost.

This is also technically a new board, since I had to warranty the previous one after Europe (the handle broke off). Furman was really cool about replacing it. Notice the upgraded industrial velcro for the mat... big plus.

In praise of metal: gender

Metal, as I experience it, seems to contain part silly histrionics and part genuine heroism. The proportion of those parts depends on the context. I'm beginning to frame this experience in terms of gender --- as I've tried to understand why metal as a genre and subculture is so male-dominated, I've concluded that it's not because of a "club" mentality or intentional exclusion of women. (There are plenty of examples, such as Arch Enemy's Angela Gossow, of women who equal and outdo their male counterparts in both skill and presence. These women are accorded enormous respect in the community --- probably more than men, from an acknowledgment that their climb is steeper.) I'm beginning to think that the overwhelming male composition has to do with the activity/identity function that metal provides: the opportunity for a non-destructive expression of traditionally "masculine" activities and values.

In other words, the demands of the music --- technical virtuosity, group coordination, extreme stamina, harsh environment, and risk --- form a fairly complete surrogate for soldiery. Participants are afforded the opportunity to "train" both individually and in groups, then engage in a public "test" (performance) that involves some degree of courage and/or risk, where they must prove themselves to a critical audience which judges skill, innovation, and authenticity simultaneously. If they can do this well and repeatedly, they get to be "heroes" --- achievers in the most concrete sense, physically doing things which seem at least marginally super-human.

This is probably why almost all metal fans have at one time or another been in a metal band. You can't really say this about fans of other genres. This culture of participation and production-imperative is actually quite at odds with the prevailing norms of spectatorship and entertainment consumption. It's one more dimension of the outsider nature of metal and its devotees (that's a separate discussion, though).

Neo-luddites would probably call this kind of subculture a "surrogate activity" which is a result of our daily work's total abstraction from the struggle for biological survival. I don't wholly buy that explanation, but the concept works here in a gender sense. Whatever your opinion of the nature or value of gender, the opportunity for heroism that metal provides is irresistable to many males whose gendered valuation of strength, stoicism, manual skill, and stamina has been declared obsolete or pathological by a post-modern, post-feminist society.

I absolutely do not blame feminism itself for this. I blame the industrialization of killing and the broader mistakes of the 20th century for creating a backlash. In that backlash we have erroneously conflated the masculine ideal with aggression. Even the most grossly patriarchal societies have codes of honor designed to elevate masculinity and contain aggression. What I am saying is that "masculine" ideals which formerly found their expression in conflict and battle must now have other outlets, both because of the inevitable and appropriate obsolescence of honor-governed warfare and because of new ways of living. The problem is that we threw the baby out with the bathwater and disenfranchised a large segment of society -- men who usually have no problem at all with women as their full equals and superiors, but whose very personalities have been inadvertently declared toxic waste by the cultural establishment, because they happen to value traditionally masculine traits and roles in themselves.

This environment will necessarily create the context for outsider subcultures. In our society, the males who feel disenfranchised by gender erasure and least able to adapt to it are also usually the ones least able to mount an intellectual critique against it. This is not because they're stupid, it's because the academy usually finds this type of person unsuitable for intellectual training. These males turn to other outlets, which fall at various places on a continuum from destructive (violence) to valueless (frat-boy antics) to potentially constructive (endurance/survival sports, exploration, etc.). The fact that apathy and destruction are often associated with this venting is probably only a confirmation that there is an underlying feeling of wholesale rejection, or at least a sense that society will never ascribe true importance to these people or their characteristics.

All of this is to say that I think metal often gets placed in the "destructive" or "valueless" categories, because it is seen as either morally detrimental and anarchic or simply immature and crass. While that can be true, I would argue that it is equally often a highly constructive pursuit, particularly for disenfranchised men.

Its constructive nature lies in the heroism I mentioned above. Of course there are myriad examples of the merely-entertaining and the outright lowbrow in metal, just as there are in society at large. These include the silly histrionics mentioned above --- guitar solos for the sake of showing off, shocking stage shows just for stimulus' sake --- that make the genre seem artistically irrelevant. But when a confluence of artistic, intellectual, and especially technical skills and energies are poured holistically into it, metal --- arguably more than other forms of musical expression --- becomes a vehicle for the explosive and the sublime, a collective experience of enormous power. It requires a "heroic" effort and skill to make such an experience possible.

That experience goes beyond entertainment into identification and ritual, which may be the real reason that "mainstreamers" often find metal threatening, though they can't articulate a specific offense. The relationship between performer and listener is reciprocal and vital, which might also explain the imperative of authenticity, and aversion to "poseurs" and hangers-on. If the experience is exclusive, it is only exclusive of those whose personal motives are suspect --- in other words, simply those who do not have the "community's" best interests in mind, because their involvement doesn't have to do with music participation, but rather with image or money. It is almost never exclusive on the basis of identity.

Returning to the point: this experience is not for males only, nor is it about masculinity. I think the form simply attracts a disproportionate number of males because it provides a uniquely suitable outlet for otherwise unvalued "masculine" traits.

These thoughts were forcefully brought home to me while I watched Buried Inside play on Saturday and Sunday night. Their music is technically, lyrically, and emotionally complex, and their performance instantiated and affirmed those qualities. Nick's and Andrew's shouted choruses over the pounding drums and guitars had a tragic melancholy that still contained defiance. It was masculine, but not macho --- a measured sadness about important things expressed with subtlety, yet at earshattering volume. To be so vulnerable, yet so imposing and so skilled, weaving a heart-and-mind narrative in rumble, pounding, and screaming, is truly heroic. It took a very long time for this level of seriousness and complexity to emerge in the form, but here it is. Metal might simply have been growing up all this time, with all the attendant growing pains.

There may come a day when it is no longer so male-dominated, but that would require a mainstreaming of the values and priorities of a "new masculinity" --- probably still very far off, if it is possible at all. Then, either the functions and uses of the form would shift to other areas or it would simply disappear. It's hard to say.

(And to end with a conceited, discriminatory, and completely unfounded assertion: the extraverts gave birth to metal in its histrionic infancy, but the introverts have inherited it in its more heroic maturity. Thus the shedding of the sex-drugs-rocknroll archetype for the crusty, brooding dirge-writer. Natural progression from cocky Achilles to strong-silent George Washington? Ha!)

Tech: "The red guitar"

This has been my main stage instrument since Spring of 2007, and I used it to record all tracks on Wake/Lift except Temet Nosce. It's a 2005 Gibson Les Paul Studio, finished in wine red. It had gold/black hardware when I got it, which I swapped for cream almost immediately. Originally it had EMGs in it --- taken from the destroyed cream Les Paul that I used to record Galilean Satellites --- but after having been off the active-pickup kool aid for almost a year in Spring '07, I got tired of the sound quickly.

I went hunting for something that would sound closer to the Velvet Brick pickup in my Sonex-180 (used to record Au Pays Natal and Absent... more on this guitar in another post), but higher output. Since the Sonex is made of "resinwood", the Velvet Brick sounds much less thrilling (more compressed and middy) when moved to a mahogany Les Paul. The closest thing I could find to what I was looking for was the Gibson Dirty Fingers bridge pickup, which I combined with an uncovered 490R in the neck position. I recorded Wake/Lift with this configuration, and the guitar served this way until this past Winter.

I'm now using a Bare Knuckle Pickups Painkiller set. On strong recommendations, I got in touch with Tim Mills from BKP and picked his brain about what I was looking for, and he recommended this. It's the closest I've ever heard to the open tonal character of the Velvet Brick, but with even less compression, more volume, and vastly more clarity in the low end. It's extremely flattering to downtuned mahogany guitars, especially with really heavy strings. My bridge pickup is F-spaced, since this is one of the few guitars where Gibson used a 53mm string spacing at the bridge instead of 50mm. The saddle cuts look strange this way, since the replacement Tune-o-matic bridge I installed is a standard 50mm spacing, but the stock pickup on the guitar was 53mm and the saddles were cut accordingly off-center on the original bridge. In practice it makes no difference, but it's nice to have the polepieces lined up properly.

The guitar is tuned Bb F Bb Eb G C, or four semitones detuned with a dropped low string. The gauges used are .013/.017/.026/.036/.046/.062. The overall tension here is actually higher than in standard tuning with a set of .010-.046 strings. Even with the large jump from the F to Bb strings, the lowest string is still lower tension than the others. I also had to flip the bridge backwards to get extra intonation adjustment to compensate for the low tuning, regardless of the different core/wrap ratios I tried. The nut is now a Graphtec Trem-nut, which helps make tuning slicker with big strings.

All controls except the neck pickup volume pot are disconnected. I have no need for tone controls, and rather than waste time trying to find a 1-megohm long-shaft pot for a Les Paul, I opted to hardwire the bridge pickup directly to the switch. I love running pickups wide-open (see the post on the Frankencaster). I can still roll back the neck pickup volume for more mellow tones.

After playing an 8-string for a while, this guitar feels like a miniature. But it's still the instrument I use the most often, and it has the most reliably-good tone in the widest variety of situations. It's also the easiest to play, which is why I generally don't use it to practice with at home. I haven't toured with anything else since early 2007.

Australia 3

All finished; going home in 18 hours. It's nearly impossible to reflect on such relentless sensory stimulation (even in the quiet at the end) without some distance from the events. I don't think I'll understand what happened here for a while.

In a tangible plane, this has been a very successful tour. Every show has had higher attendance and sales than we normally expect in the U.S., and four of them had higher sales than any show we've ever played in our own country. That being said, it's going to take a lot longer to evaluate the emotional and spiritual impact of the trip. In reaching so many people in such a short time, I can't tell who's giving and who's receiving, or to what degree it's an exchange. I'm stretched thin and exhausted, but vaguely satisfied, for the moment.

Australia 2

I'm in Adelaide now. I don't know what to say.

Australia

Byron Bay, Australia, at sunrise on 6/20 (on a long drive from Brisbane to Newcastle). I should add that I'm having a wonderful time, both internally and externally.

Southern Hemisphere

I'm in Australia!

Ugly men in vans

Engineer / Giant / Rosetta, 5/23-6/1

Since a lot of you have been asking, I'll be in Australia from 6/15 to 7/1. I have no idea what to expect. If it's half as fun as the Engineer/Giant tour, I'll be happy.

I'm getting old

I never used to complain about weird hours, no sleep, or long drives. I don't know if it's because I got married or because my inner crusty old guy is starting to become my normal outer self.

I also find myself becoming tired of travel in general, mostly because the more I think about it the more selfish it seems. This is less true of touring (where you're supposedly "giving" people something wherever you go, creating value, etc.) than normal post-college travel, but still applies. As I begin to accept my limitations and realize that I will not go everywhere in the world before I die, I also begin to see more clearly the consumptive nature of travel. Of what value is all this "experience capital" anyway, especially to anyone other than myself? Am I really going to bring home some wonderful knowledge from far away that will improve my local community? That's a pretty Platonic idea and one which is all but obsolete in contemporary globalism.

It's more likely that by traveling I'm only spreading the gospel of consumptive late capitalism. It forces a weighing of the potential benefits (to me) of worldly experience, versus the potential benefits (to my community) of staying and investing in a real home. Some might claim that their enlightened transience allows them to be "citizens of the world" and have a community that spans the globe, but I contend that most of those people simply have no real community at all, and are stretched too thin to be much more than cultural leeches to the localities they come in contact with. Their "doctrine of placelessness" is also often accompanied by virulent delusions of their own importance.

I suspect many of these people are trying to escape what they perceive to be a kind of determinism in placefulness --- whereby your homeplace becomes inextricable from your identity, and therefore limits how much of your self you can intentionally construct. Having a local connection is a block to the long-held elite-white-people value of culturelessness (unless the "local" connection is New York or London, which are just nodes in the Space of Flows). I think that's actually a good thing. If that makes me "provincial" or a "yokel," I don't really care.