just noticed the lj spelling checker suggestions for phasmatodea
are:

smarted, fasted, farmstead, feasted, smutted, formated, fascinated, formatted, decimated, fisted, summited

hmmm…

hmm, what have I been up to..

bought an mp3 jukebox, an iriver h140. Had
a couple requirements… first being useable as usb mass storage and
workable from linux. second was ability to record at a high quality (44kz/16bit/stereo wavs).
The other not quite as important was ogg support. This thing does
all three, so I bought it.

Been slowly ripping my cd collection. About 25% of the way though at the moment.

Bought some mics to go with it, but I think I made a mistake and bought
stuff geared for concert recording. It works, but the mics seem to have
way too much headroom for miking a single bass amp or so (aka, phasmatodea
practices). Direct line in seems to work nicely.

Phasmatodea practice sunday. Went okay, but I was kind of out of it.
Filling up on burgers at Chargrill seemed to help though.

Saw Shadow Of a Great Name at Kings. Very good as usual. The Frequency
was the headliner. The Frequency is Sebastian from Trans Am, and one
of the drummers from Squatweiller. Not really what I expected, but
surprisingly enjoyed it anyway. Very mid 80’s slightly post new wave
stuff (albeit, with the occasional dual harmonized guitar solo). Very
danceable. I don’t dance, but a couple drinks in me and I would of thought
about it.

Trivia monday night. Won. Had someone gripe at us for winning two much
(though, they were sitting in the team who wins almost as much…).

Last night went out to kings to see The Thrones. The Thrones is a
solo project by one of the former bassist for The Melvins. The combo
of the visuals and sonic aspects kept making me think of “Mike Watt
joins Godflesh”. aka, a middle aged guy with a 27 o’clock shadow,
a grungy plaid shirt, playing heavily distorted and effected bass
over prerecorded subsonic plodding industrial drum beats. Very
heavy. A bit of looping, and lots of volumes. Very cool.

mp3/oggs from yesterday

Some oggs/mp3’s of two of the pieces from yesterdays practice. Far from
the best recording (actually, aside from the enviromental noises getting
picked up, not horrible for a live recording…).

Give a listen if your bored.

We’re open for suggestions of titles as well.

I didn’t really do much over the weekend.

Went over to badger‘s place Sunday for
Phasmatodea practice.

Went pretty well overall. First piece was with clean sounds,
no effects. Kind of an interlocking, 80’s crimson kind of deal.

Second piece was an abuse of loopers in a vaguely granular
synthesis kind of way. I think perhaps my favorite, since
it morphed through a lot of weird and interesting sounds.

Third was me fiddling around with the “choir” sounds
on the guitar synth, mostly though a fuzz which is
kind of an interesting sound.

Fourth was a quite piece, kind of spacey and open, but with some
nice melodic bits.

I took over my minidv camera to see if it would do a decent
job with the sound. Levels were a bit low for 1&4, but 2&3
werent bad, though since it was just a stereo mike in the
room, it picked up a lot of “environmental” sounds (aka, the
clicking of footpedals can be clearly heard…)

I ripped wavs out the audio and encoded them, might post
them later for kicks.

Looks like Japan Air ran into some car problems and cancelled for tonight

The second Phasmatodea show was last night at Bickett Gallery.

Seemed to go pretty well. I enjoyed it. Whether or not
anyone did I’m not sure about ;-> But folks seems to
like it, so I’ve got no complaints.

Got there around 8pm, Birds In A Meadow and Projexorcism
were there, just starting setup. We setup in the back.
Got everything setup, sound check’ed, and tuned.

(thats marty from Birds In A Meadow in the back…)

Birds in a Meadow started up a little after 9:30pm. Jazzy
saxophone accompanying laptop based processor and what
sounded like graunular synths. Pretty cool.

We started up shortly after 10pm, which was cool since
it allowed a couple friends to make it out to show after
work.

We setup opposite the way we did last time (me on the
left, badger to the right.) The theory being that since
I spent most of the last show facing to the right staring
at a wall, this time I’d be more facing the crowd.

But the nerves and some unconscious habits caused me
to end up facing away from badger and the audience for
most of the crowd. I really need to get out of that
habit.

We decided on a vague theme for the first piece of “humidity”. So
lots of bubbly bits and whatnot. I’d describe what exactly we
played, but I can’t really remember it that well.

As far as I know, know one got a recording of the show. Normally
I don’t mind not recording anything, but I kind of feel like I
should at least listen to a recording of live shows to hear
what exactly it is I’m inflicting upon people.

I’m not sure I remember anything about the second piece
we did. But a couple of folks said it was there favorite.
Go figure.

Third piece I remember bits of. Mostly starting out with a very
minimal digital glitchy type loop over some drones badger had
setup. From there it eventually merged into me playing what
I at least thought was a nice melodic bit. It seemed to
me that we hadn’t been that melodic to that point, so I’d
figured that would be a good way to end stuff.

Overall, it went well. No one threw anything, and folks
seemed to applaud at least ;->

My only complaints were about my own playing. I felt if
I wasn’t being as interactive with badger’s playing as
I generally like to be. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine
when improvised groups seem to all be working independtly
of each other, so I try to avoid that. Last night however,
I wasn’t as pro active about that as I should be.

I also felt like I was having trouble coming up with interesting
parts. Not until the last piece was I happy with the melodic
bits I was coming up with. The other issue was I felt like
I was over playing a bit and dominating the mix. Part of
that I think was nervous warping my concept of time. Aka,
I’d play something for 10 seconds or so and my brain starts
telling “okay! enough! move onto something else!” when I
probabaly should of let stuff gel and develop a bit more.

Pretty good attendance at the show for this kind of
event, and I thank folks for coming out. Much appreciated.

And thanks to base10 for the photos via
saspenguin camera.

Tuesday: Tommy Gun, Maple Stave, Polyna at Local 506

Thursday: 919noise night at Bickett Gallery fetuating Birds In A Meadow, phasmatodea, and Projexorcism. Projexorcism is pretty cool. Phasmatodea ain’t bad either.

Friday: Dynamite Brothers, Japan Air
at Go! Room 4.

Japan Air article in ESP Magazine

Phasmatodea practice at badgers place
today.

Took over the two new toys, a Moog Moogerfooger Low Pass Filter and a Prohecysound
Infinitphase. Been coveting badgers Low Pass Filter for about a year, and saw one cheap
on ebay so picked it up. Through, hopefully it wont rip the universe apart as it’s the first
piece of gear in my large gear collection or badgers large gearcollection that we have in
common[1].

I managed to forget the power supply to the Infinitphase (and it’s a 16v ac power supply…
wacky Australians…), so it didn’t get used. Did make good use of the Low Pass though.
Even though I managed to hook it up incorrectly and was getting a very weird hard
to predict distortion for the first piece. Kind of had me disoriented a bit, but made
do anyway. Third piece started a nice pretty cm7-dm7 chord progression that
eventually ended with both of us playing low melodic bits underneath.

Also, looks like Phasmatodea is playing the 3rd 919noise
night this Thursay, the 17th. So come out and watch me and badger make
weird noises.