CD release show though!

Fri. April 18, 2008

The Death Set, Fake Fictions (“Krakatoa” release show), Coltrane Motion

at the Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western, Chicago)

9 PM, 21+

c u there

 oh wow. suddenly after the weekend we are almost done with the album and ready to send it off to be produced.

friday we went and hung out while our cd was mastered. it was interesting and boring at the same time. the masterer, who is a master of mastery, is mr. carl saff. he was cool and gave us coffee, which was a mistake in sarah’s case because she went insane and talked the whole time. he has an insane techno setup in his basement, complete with back issues of tape op, which is how you know he’s legit. the cd sounds really good now, nice and loud.

saturday i worked on some album art ideas that we didn’t end up using.

sunday we did SEEERIOUS work on the album cover. don’t want to give too much away but we scanned in some abstract stuff i had done for raw yang back in the day and then ben went all in-design on it, and it looks good.

here’s what’s left:

* officially approve the master and get the real master cd and the info track sheet for the pressers

* finish up the little fiddly parts of the album art like what goes on the spine etc.

* set up a cd release show and get to work on making people care about it and us

KRA

KA

TOA

FAKE

FIC

TION

S

Friday night we hung out in a fabulous little mixing room in the basement of a cute bungalow (Ben & I coveted the house and Nick the studio).  We wanted to be present for the mastering. So we sat side by side on a couch behind our wonderful Masterer, watching him turn dials around and push buttons on and off, pausing with each adjustment.  Should he go with A or B? A or B? It was a bit like observing an eye exam that way, a much more fun than usual eye exam.

On the sixth day, we rested.

Then Sunday was cover art day. We spent over four hours brainstorming and sketching and tooling around on the computer. We finally came up with something we could all agree on, so at least we have something to work with now.  It is the anti-RY cover, not that we didn’t love that one.  The consensus is that was the “girl” cover and this is the “boy” cover.  We have managed to stay secure in our own sexes during both recordings, none-the-less.  Also, despite said consensus, we all agree it’s sexist to say a cover has a sex.

I listened to the album on my ipod during my walk to work this morning.   It is a wonder of tape hiss, feedback, pop melodies, and break downs. Maybe I’ve just heard these songs too many times, but I think it might actually.. maybe just maybe… be good!

i decided to take a two-week break from the album prior to the mastering session. i deleted it off my ipod so that i wouldn’t give in to temptation and listen to it. i want to have fresh perceptions when we work on it. a tabula rasa, if you will.

the other thing we’re waiting on is album art. we don’t have any. a guy is working on a painting but we haven’t seen any evidence of it or really heard any ideas or concepts or anything. oh well.

so if anyone is artistically inclined and is inspired by the concept of krakatoa or volcanos or how great the fake fictions are, feel free to get in touch-ouch-uch-ch.

^^^ next album?

 ”Krakatoa” is still in suspended animation, but you have to plan for these unplanned delays. I remixed a couple of tracks yesterday, muscling up the fuzz bass on “No Attraction” and cutting off the dumb intro to “Which Eight” or whatever it’s called. Trying to get the rest of the FF cru to give me input on what else needs to be done but we’ve been too busy eating holiday foodz. If you have any ideas on track sequence, let me know.

Well, the initial mixes of Krakatoa were pretty much done on the cusp of December. I just pushed my way through it and put my head down and got it done. There were a couple of things that had to be delayed, namely the sound collage that was planned for the end of Soiree, which I ended up assembling digitally last week, and we also found that the bass on No Attraction cut out for about half the song. Not really sure why but I’m guessing someone stepped on a mic cable and unplugged it while we were recording.

So we took about a week or so to live with the initial mixes, and I think we ended up being pretty happy with most of them. We sent one track to a mastering guy who was recommended to us and he sent back a free sample that sounds LLLOOOUUUDDD (ie good). Then last night, I remixed Radical Movement to make the vocals a little quieter, then we rerecorded the missing bass part on No Attraction, but I had the genius brainstorm that it should be a fuzz bass part so we hooked the Danelectro up to the Rat and it sounds so sweet. Finally, Sarah and I put some last-minute vox on TV Snow, which she said sounds like Royal Trux somehow.

Next, we assemble all the tracks for one last listen-through, decide on an order and whether we want to cut anything, then send it all off for mastering. Meanwhile we work on getting our shit together re: packaging and design, which Ben has taken over, fortunately.

Krakatoa is tentatively scheduled for a spring 2008 release on Comptroller Records.

My least favorite FF song these days is Esperanto. (And my favorite, just so you know & just so we keep things cheery, is ALWAYS whatever song is newest. I’m so much more into creation than repetition.) I don’t hate on that song. It’s just that once you’ve played a song a certain number of times, at least for me anyway, it starts to become something else. It’s harder to remember creating it, harder to recognize your own input, harder to know WTF you (read: I) were thinking when you wrote those lyrics. Then one of two things happens. Either with distance and the ability to see the work as a song you decide the song is: a) OMG awesome! I wrote that! or b) not something you would want to listen to had someone else written it. (BOOOO)

So anyway, ESPERANTO. This is a song we wrote at the tail end of recording Raw Yang. We considered recording it then, but decided it still had some kinks to work out. Anyway, it’s the oldest song on this new recording. It’s so much faster than was intended initially, possibly out of boredom, possibly as an attempt to leave the RY pop sound.

I remember when we first played the song live, a visiting songwriter asked me to clarify some lyrics. When I told him “Running with scissors, dripping with charm…”, he looked disappointed. He thought I’d said “tripping with charm.” I made that change.

So last night I’m doing the vox for the recording, feeling totally disconnected from the lyrics, wondering how I came up with the melodies and what mood I’d intended… And I decided to just go for it, to just sing it as well as I could as best as I could reckon the me that wrote it would have wanted to hear it. Because in the end, I feel as though my goal is always to create songs I’d want to hear, even for slightly younger versions of myself. Then with Nick’s backups and guitar solos, it seemed to all come together.

While Nick was guitaring, Ben and I wandered around the building exploring. He found a hole in the wall that looked like a turtle plowing his way through. I found a baby bear cave. I also tested different areas of the building for zombie-proof levels, deciding the safest bet would be the area with its own huge metal sliding door, sadly on the complete opposite part of the building from our space.

I would like to rap about guitar solos though. I had two solos to record. The solo for Satisfaction is a fairly traditional rock and roll solo, split into two sections. The first section is pretty much planned out at this point and I usually play the same thing or a variation on the same thing. The second section isn’t quite as standardized, though I typically start it the same way. I had hoped that my saxophone solo idea (see below) would work and it would take the place of the second section, but as indicated, that plan fell through. For the solo sound, I run straight into Sarah’s old 10-watt Squier practice amp and turned the gain up to get that shitty practice amp distortion sound. I put a SM57 about a foot away from the speaker, then opened the door to our practice space and pointed one of our powered overhead mics out into the large lobby area outside our space, getting a pretty good natural reverb sound. Recording this solo was a pain in the ass, mainly due to the unplanned second section, and I did a ton of takes before I had a brain spasm and decided to double the solo on two different tracks. This ended up sounding pretty awesome, as the two solos mostly follow along with each other well but diverge in interesting ways at some points. Meanwhile, Sarah and Ben sat out in the lobby and sent text messages to each other.

The Esperanto solo is basically noise, kind of a mid-’90s “I don’t give a fuck about solos” guitar solo. I stuck with the Squier amp but ran my guitar through the Rat and the delay pedal. I tried a few takes doing weird stuff with the delay pedal, using a really short loop to make annoying siren sounds, but it wasn’t really working, so I went with what I normally do when we play the song live, which is basically just make as much noise as possible without playing any actual notes. A hammer was involved. It’s pretty dense.

That is how you record guitar solos.