Coming this week, hopefully.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
How to flatten a warped record
I finally got around to replacing my long lost copy of The Stun Guns' And There Was Nothing We Could Do About it recently. You can imagine my dismay when I got it home and found it unplayably warped.
I stuck it between two pieces of glass - in this case a storm window and the front of a picture frame - and weighted it down with my change jar, leaving it in the sun for a couple of hours.
It worked! At least enough that I can listen to the whole album now. I got much better results with this than some of the other methods I've tried - the oven trick is too hard to predict, the wood stove was too hard to get to a steady low temperature, etc. Science!
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Kerosene Dreams (2004)
“For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.” -Luke 12:2
"You know what you get when you play Twisted Sister's 'Burn in Hell' backwards? 'Go to church and pray on Sunday.' " -Jay Leno
The kerosene heater had scorched the ceiling and faux wood paneling black, and the carpet was already a deep gray from years of cigarette burns and spilt beverages. Pentagrams appeared daily on every flat surface, graffitied with ashy fingers, mostly because the ceiling was caked in soot and we were stir-crazy and restless. All these fumes, which had not only blackened my walls and ceiling but also my body and soul, seem to have also redirected this downward trajectory into darkness.
Years of heavy immersion in all kinds of unsavory music had caught up with me; I began to write about it again after a five-year boycott. Everyday sounds started to take on anthropomorphized qualities- even when no record was spinning on the turntable, the tactile humming of the Kero-Sun heater, the static of decaying appliances, the roar of passing cars driven by crazed and twisted meth heads…they became an entropic choir in my increasingly unreliable brain, a backbeat to my hallucinations. Armies of steel-booted dwarves danced frenzied circles on the base of my skull. The fumes were getting to me.
I also began exploring other esoteric aspects of the music that surrounded me constantly. Developing a fascination with bogus rock artists, con men, and hacks, I sought out the no man’s land where petty crime, psychology, and music overlapped; I also started a band in tribute to my favorite musical hoax…but that’s another story, too. Let’s get down to business, and light the black candles…
"You know what you get when you play Twisted Sister's 'Burn in Hell' backwards? 'Go to church and pray on Sunday.' " -Jay Leno
The kerosene heater had scorched the ceiling and faux wood paneling black, and the carpet was already a deep gray from years of cigarette burns and spilt beverages. Pentagrams appeared daily on every flat surface, graffitied with ashy fingers, mostly because the ceiling was caked in soot and we were stir-crazy and restless. All these fumes, which had not only blackened my walls and ceiling but also my body and soul, seem to have also redirected this downward trajectory into darkness.
Years of heavy immersion in all kinds of unsavory music had caught up with me; I began to write about it again after a five-year boycott. Everyday sounds started to take on anthropomorphized qualities- even when no record was spinning on the turntable, the tactile humming of the Kero-Sun heater, the static of decaying appliances, the roar of passing cars driven by crazed and twisted meth heads…they became an entropic choir in my increasingly unreliable brain, a backbeat to my hallucinations. Armies of steel-booted dwarves danced frenzied circles on the base of my skull. The fumes were getting to me.
I also began exploring other esoteric aspects of the music that surrounded me constantly. Developing a fascination with bogus rock artists, con men, and hacks, I sought out the no man’s land where petty crime, psychology, and music overlapped; I also started a band in tribute to my favorite musical hoax…but that’s another story, too. Let’s get down to business, and light the black candles…
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