A while back @chasemacri said to me that he had the perfect title for my upcoming album: Cosmonautical. He was right of course, except for the fact he later pointed out that The Transmissionary Six had already used that name. Oops. So we got talking about album titles and @katiegiesbrecht and @katenetzler suggested some good ones, some of which I threw out. I threw them out partially on the basis that they didn’t line up with the aesthetic i was going for. This is completely subjective of course and I was actually comparing the titles to the music in my head, which I was comparing to a collection of images I had begun to assemble for album art.
So I’m no graphic artist, I’m no visual artist. None of that. It’s not my bag, I don’t know how to *make* something like that. That’s not to say I’m not affected by it quite a bit though. I really get inspired by great images. And I have to translate that feeling into music then. So I thought I’d share some of the images so you can see what I’m shooting for.
Mmmkay, first up: your standard Sci-Fi rag fare.
And a dose of retrofuture, courtesy of the legendary Syd Mead.
Throw in some strange, bizarre elements and you have something resembling magical realism.
Some ACTUAL realism:
(that picture is a thousand times better for the inclusion of the car in the shot)
Add the requisite gratuitous pulpy women & damsels:
(probably the sexiest thing about synesthesia I’ve ever seen)
And get back to your roots.
(Actually, this one could’ve fallen into the last category, too. Allison Hayes is, um, well-iillustrated, methinks)
There you have it. That’s what I’ve been all about visually lately. Hopefully that gives you an idea of the particular kind of beauty I’m after. If that didn’t work, just listen to Aimee Mann’s Lost In Space and try to remember your childhood.
I don’t own the rights to these image, I think that since i’m using them as a reference for further derivative works and this blog is noncommercial, this should be protected under fair use. If you own the rights to an image here and want me to remove it, I’ll be happy to oblige.
Caught my German Blue Rams spawning:
Check out what happens when one of the Cory’s gets too close. They are so oblivious to their surroundings sometimes… We had heard horror stories about Rams getting aggressive when mating and corys losing their eyes… Luckily none of that here.
I also got some stills.
I haven’t blogged in a while, even though I think I’ve been doing some cool stuff. So I am posting a life update.
First of all, I’ve had the overwhelming urge to build crap. I’m building a small whiny synth-thing, building an amp for it, and putting the whole assembly into one half of a coconut, strange as that may be. I’m also building a speaker-mic (a 6″ speaker, wired backwards to be used as a mic) for bass instruments and kick drums, as well as working on a fish-cam. I’m also continually considering building a vintage mic preamp in kit form, guitar pedals, and/or a tube guitar amp. Like I said, I’ve reaaaaaaaally been int he mood to build crap. I’ll post some before/during/after shots when stuff is done.
I just finished reading “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future.” It was sort of depressing. It’s talks about some of my favorite things: really great hopeful futuristic images of yesteryear. You can literally see the optimism for the future in some of these images or design concepts so strongly, that you can’t help but feel nostalgic for an era you perhaps were never a part of. But the book does a great job of explaining that all these hopeful fantasies without fail assumed that by some miracle of technology, human nature would change. They assumed that in the future, humans would be less greedy, that we would be content with “enough,” that we would be able to end the inequality and power struggles that cause social unrest even today. Of course, no amount of science or technology can change humanity’s underlying nature. It was more than a little depressing to see these really great naive and innocent ideas taken to the mat by these ugly and unfortunate truths.
I haven’t stopped making music, though I think the podcast is nearing an end. I’ve got several song demos that never mad it to the interwebs, but I am starting to shift my focus from writing to recording again. I’m still kinda holding out for one or two more particularly good songs (i.e. maybe a new good opener, and one to give the title track to), but I think more or less we’ll be working with what I’ve got.
I’ve started the long and boring process of taking the half-written acoustic demos that I did and finishing them and re-recording them to a click track to work from. This is boring stuff, but it eventually picks up. I’ve got some neat stuff going on in Fairy Tales now, for example.
I’m also doing this sort of open collaboration with friends on this record. I’ve uploaded submixes (like groups, one track of drums, one of guitars, one of vocals, etc) of some of the songs to my site, and some of my co-conspirators can download them, play on them, and then send me their work. I will then choose what, if anything, to include in the final song. It’s a great way of getting inspiration for a track if you’re tired of it. Chase has already done some work on Any Happier (unfortunately destined for the b-sides, I think), and I’m trying to work it out where John can play on some too. Kordik, you want to make some bleeps and bloops on some songs? Heck, you could totally remix some of these tunes to pieces and back. Anyone else who would be interested in playing with some of the tunes and potentially contributing is welcome – just contact me for details. Chase, if you’re reading this, record some crap for “Please” already. I’ve got plenty more once you get done with that.
One cool thing of note: This album will have b-sides. lots of them. cool, huh?
I bought a Ukelele in Hawaii, and I’m itching for a chance to use it on the album, haven’t found a place…. yet. But I will.
So that’s what’s going on. You won’t hear too much on the music front until an album of some kind is ready. I’m just gonna hunker down and keep working. Could be a while, though… Thanks for (perhaps) caring.
It is likely unnecessary to note that Kristin and I had a great time in Hawaii.
The first week we were on Oahu, staying in a house with a bunch of people, doing group things, going to a wedding. Theft is rampant in Hawaii, we were on beeches a lot, and being in a group meant fewer things got done – so there aren’t as many pictures of the first half of the trip.
This is Waikiki. Never go to Waikiki. It is hell.
Independence day fireworks.
After we got to the Big Island, the photos picked up a bit. We saw sea turtles on TWO OCCASIONS!
You can apparently die a lot of ways watching lava.
Cuz it’s mean.
And glowing evil reds
And photogenic.
Here I am, practicing my “Barack Obama” pose.
Stocking up on food. We climbed a mountain. It was tall.
Very much tall.
Have I mentioned exactly how tall it was?????
13,796 ft, that’s how tall.
It was also cold. WICKED cold. And windy.
Anyway, that’s just a very small, non-representative sampling of the photos I’ve got posted on my gallery site. Check it out for more pictures of incredible natural beauty and me being ridiculous.
Listen to this description of the 1979 sensitive college student, penned by a man who had just bought a moped:
Occasionally crashing my Puch and throwing myself on the ground crying. Listening to My Aim is True and drinking cheap chianti as fast as I can so I can stick a candle in it to put on my board and concrete block bookshelves. Riding around on my moped and dressing like I was in a Wes Anderson movie.
Linked from a post on one of my favorite blogs, Dinosaurs and Robots.
Hello, everyone. Kristin and I are back from Hawaii. I’ve got a series of follow-up posts (with pictures) planned, so I’m not going to say much about it here. But while we were there, we spent all of one day hiking to the top of Mauna Kea. The Onion has, of course, already provided a wonderful bit of context for that trek with their recent article:
Going To Tops Of Things Still Favored By Nation’s Tourists
Soo true.
Well, tomorrow Kristin and I leave for Hawaii for two weeks. We’re going for her old roommate’s wedding, and then staying a while to see the place (and climb mountains). It’s going to be great, but I’m a little stressed out about it right now. We are staying on Oahu for the first week, and then jumping to the big island for the second week, and that leg of the trip doesn’t have any firm plans at this point. We have a pretty good idea of what we’ll do there and when, but as far as actual tickets or reservations…. I’ll feel better once those plans are firmed up a bit.
We’ve got some ambitious goals for this trip. The first week won’t have too much going on aside from the usual pre-wedding planning, beach-bumming, museum-going, and sight-seeing — Not to trivialize those things. I can’t imagine they will be anything less than spectacular.
But I think the 2nd week will be where it really starts getting crazy. The big island has practically all ecological environments in the world, in a very small amount of space. It’s got desert, rainforest, mountains, snow, coral reefs… We plan on seeing a LOT of those. It also is home to the world’s largest mountain, which we hope to climb. It’s not the tallest, mind you, but from the base of the sea floor to the summit, it dwarfs mount everest by quite a bit, I think. Luckily, most of it being beneath the sea makes our jobs much easier, and it actually only qualifies as a pretty hardcore day hike. Kristin and I have bought more outdoor gear than I ever thought I would in preparation for it… As a very nerdy computer programming bookworm, I still don’t really know how I feel about that. I think its good. I like being active, but all the accouterments that come with still confuse me. There was a lot of “what is this? why do I need that?” going on while we were walking around various outdoors stores…
This trip will be heavily documented, to say the least. Kristin and I are now the proud owners of a very nice Nikon outfit. I don’t plan on bringing a computer along, so I stocked up on CF cards before we left, and we’ve got 10 gigs now. We’ll weed out the bad shots as we go, and hopefully that will be enough. Kristin’s dad also got me a few photographic toys for my birthday. He got me a Holga – a cheap, fun, unique medium format camera that takes really cool pictures. I’ve only got one roll of film for that right now, so we’ll have to conserve. But that should offer a whole new perspective on the trip. On top of that, Kristin’s dad also got us a pinhole attachment for the Nikon. Which is really crazy. Pinhole cameras do not use lenses. They “focus” the light by making it pass through a very small hole in an opaque medium of some sort. Light is weird, and this works, and you don’t have “focus” or “depth of field” like you would with a traditional lens. The pics (I think) tend to be a bit softer, and you have to use super-long exposures on them (the pinhole only lets a small amount of light through), but they’re a really interesting idea that I haven’t explored yet.
We’ll be screwing around with the lo-fi panorama technique that I was working on in Mexico and Paris. We want to get a good one like this that we can print and mount on gatorboard and hang in our living room. The beauty of the lo-fi collage is that you can get HUGE prints from stitched-together 10.2 megapixel images. HUGE.
I’m also curious to see what kind of stuff the Holga kicks out. Medium-format film can theoretically be blown up larger than 35mm, but when you’re shooting something like a Holga, image quality is typically pretty far back in your mind. You’re just worried about getting something fun and unique instead. We’re shooting 120-size t-max at 100 speed.
We should have internet the first week and then off-and-on the 2nd week, so I will probably post a few blogs on the run down there, hopefully I’ll be able to upload some photos while I’m down there, too.
If anyone has ever been to Hawaii and has travel tips, leave them in the comments. Or if you want me to take a particular kind of picture or something, leave it in the comments. Thanks for reading!
I broke down and decided to start twittering. I’ll be looking into ways to coordinate all my “status”-type apps, so if anyone has any suggestions for a WinXP/Windows Mobile 5 user who prefers desktop apps to webapps for this sort of thing, let me know. In the mean time, fellow twitterers who like me can follow me @:
http://twitter.com/matthewgood
That is all for now.
It’s about that time again, where I recap the past few weeks of my life in a hurried and cursory manner, but this time, I’ve got PICTURES.
First up, Chase (college roomie) and Caitlin (college buddy) got hitched in Greenville.
[click to see the full album]
As you will note, the wedding was otherwise well-photographed, so I laid low and served as meta-photographer.
Then last weekend, we went to Atlanta for a weekend trip. We checked out the Georgia Aquarium:
[click for the full gallery]
[also, we love fish]
We then went to the Atlanta Zoo:
[photos not available yet - I was too busy to upload them yet...]
Apparently, there is a whole World of Coke:
[click for the full gallery]
Who knew? We discovered it online, and were sortof confused/intruiged, so we decided to check it out. It. Was. Really. Cool. Very much had a Willy-Wonka-Meets-Jurrassic-Park feel to it.
And now for a few random highlights…
—
There you have it! A few pretty good weekends there.
I just did a quick and dirty redesign of the blog to make it match the pedalboy.net home page. Its alright, I guess. Allison, I changed the color of the text a little and cleaned up some details here and there, so hopefully this is easier to read. If anyone notices anything that’s not working / really ugly, leave a comment and I’ll fix it.
In other life news, Chase and Caitlin get married Saturday. Kristin and I are heading over to the ‘ville tonight. I’ve already burned a cd full of This American Life, Radiolab, and Sound Opinions episodes for the trip. The past few weeks have been non-stop. Kristin graduated, parents were in town. Immediately following that, Sarah Detzner, our mutual well-traveled and storied friend came to visit. Kristin went to DC to go visit some other friends with her, and just got back yesterday. Today, we leave for Greenville. I’m kinda ready to settle back in for a week or so of being normal again. Not too far in the future, there’s a wedding in Hawaii we’re headed to. Goodness me.
Well, there’s that. Oh, I also bought a book about collecting Russian wristwatches.
