crafting craft night

Final mixing sessions are planned for "PALM YARD - CRAFT NIGHT" every afternoon this week, hopefully 2-3 songs a day, or as many as we can before all the knobs start to look the same.

The album was recorded on a Fostex Pro four-track, and must be routed through several mixers, pedals, black reverb boxes, amplifiers, and bathrooms before ending up on my laptop. The first attempt at mixing yielding a high pitched distortion/feedback hiss on every track because I was either using FX loops incorrectly or I patched a DS-1 back into itself and then into the board.
whoops.

Anxiously awaiting the 2010 album of the year,
-PALM YARD

shit-fi

Shitgaze, as a neologism and a novum, is, of course, a gag. Minimal Western cultural experience is required to decode shitgaze as a joke at the expense of the musical subgenre of shoegaze, which is in itself a joke at the expense of the performance shortcomings of the bands that made up the shortlived Scene That Celebrates Itself — bands featuring guitarists who appeared to be gazing at their shoes while trying to replicate Kevin Shields sonic effects.

But these places are where the future leaks in. And, in fact, it took a science fiction writer of sorts to define the essential nature of the field and the correct response to those who maybe can’t really be bothered to step up to it and its needs: fuck you if you can’t take a joke.

-Warren Ellis

Shitgaze goes mainstream neo-liberal

For informed counsel, I turned to a colleague whose taste I abhor, and he pointed me to a new genre of intolerable noise constructed either electronically, with computers, or with electrified instruments. Its purpose, he said, is to challenge prevailing standards of normalcy by "sounding as awful as possible." Its early advocates have given it a name, derived from the rock genre "shoegaze." It is called "shitgaze." I tend to doubt that it will blossom to become the dominant music of the coming years, though music critics for publications such as The New Republic felt the same way about blues a hundred years ago. For now, I am kind of tickled by the idea of shitgaze, as much as I am maddened by the sound of it. Maybe Neil Young is onto something. Perhaps the music appropriate to this shitty time should properly sound like shit.

from David Hajdu, The New Republic