Band names are stupid.

I don't want to keep using the name Superzapper Recharge, but I feel like I'm stuck with it out of necessity. The name is plagued with a lot of failure, stylistic changes, and 3 years in the running now without having released a coherent LP. I have new material written for the band, am in the process of replacing EVERYBODY, but due to the fact that everyone else from my generation had the same bright idea of picking up a guitar, there's nothing else I can really call it.

I'm about to go on a tangent of divulging a trivial and mundane subject that's already exhausted by musicians, and probably unknown to regular people. Every noun is a band name already. It's true. My previous moniker for my control-freak-side-show-you're-all-expendable band was Rain Mirror. In spite of this name seeming to make no sense, there's a poetry book titled this, written after I thought of the name in 2001. Rain Mirror was supposed to be a progressive rock band, but degraded into this partial acoustic, Xanax/NyQuil influenced shoegazer slur that rarely blossomed into anything that made sense. This is actually what Superzapper Recharge started as before morphing into a progressive rock band, go figure. 

Anyway, Superzapper Recharge is a reference to an Atari game called Tempest, which was awesome when I was starting a meandering, for-fun noise band, but I don't think it artistically merits my attempt at building a serious rock group around my identity as a guitarist. I thought of a name that I thought was perfect: Brown Recluse. It's this awkward creature that lurks, lives alone, surfaces to hunt, hides, and if you get too close to it, it tries to kill you. I felt like this would be good imagery to associate with the kind of music I've been writing as of late.

Well, out of Philadelphia, a published indie rock band called Brown Recluse Sings has shortened their name simply to Brown Recluse. I listened to their EP and I absolutely hate it! In fact, it's everything I punish myself for having done in Rain Mirror except on a wider scale with a fanbase. Hoarsely whined indie rock with more band members than they need, further demonstrating that the vast majority of urban hipsters without any classical music training are usually tone deaf and self-important. And you know what? Bands like this are taking all the good names. This is why in this age, some of my favorite bands have names like Silversun Pickups, Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Them Crooked Vultures. All the easy to remember/say/to-the-point-names have been absorbed by useless, uninteresting bands destined to make 1-2 self published albums and then disappear off the radar forever, coming back to send you a cease and desist letter if they find out you used the name later on and people actually cared.

Modifying such a simple band name to make it usable winds up making things into an ongoing joke which I was just playing with. Brown Recluse started out as Brown Recluse Sings, so they basically went from one of the lamest band names I've ever heard to the one I wanted to use. If I were to call my group The Brown Recluse Band, we'd be country, but if I called it Brown Recluse Trio, we'd be avantgarde/nu-jazz. Brown Reclusive is a slight modifier which takes everything about the name that makes sense and just kills it. Moral Panic was another cool name that has 20 bands already using it on MySpace, so what if I stuck them together and formed Brown Recluse & the Moral Panic? At that point, I should make it an 8 member band with a xylophone player, we all dress like extras from The Andy Griffith Show, sing 7 part harmonies out of key and tour with The Polyphonic Spree. 

Realistically, I'm probably going to keep using Superzapper Recharge because it sounds cool, and nobody else on MySpace or Last.fm is using it. I even own the .com for it. I could beat this useless topic to death but, I'll just go out simply saying: WOULD CRAPPY BANDS STOP TAKING UP ALL THE GOOD BAND NAMES PLEASE?!

Click here to listen to Brown Recluse and then tell me I'm a crybaby.

Dear Apple, I'm breaking up with you.

It's ironic that Mac OS is built on top of a BSD kernel given that Apple has a serious problem with anything free. Apple's new social networking site, Ping, is a blatant rip off of Last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler), which is already fully compatible with Apple's iTunes, iPod, and iPhone (and probably other dumb Apple products which disregard proper English syntax in their names). Last.fm is a wonderful service for keeping track of the music you listen to on your portable player and at your computer, networking with people who have similar interests, and builds custom radio stations based on your taste in music which you can then modify via what you liked or didn't like. It also makes it easy for independent musicians to get their music on internet radio, advertise events, and keeps users up to date of when artists they like are playing in their city. All of the aforementioned features are totally free, with more that can be added with a pay subscription that I don't think anybody bothers to get, because the free package is just awesome.

So, if it's already 100% Apple friendly, why does Apple feel the need to compete with it? Well, if you go to an album's page on Last.fm, there's a “Buy” link with a drop down box of different online music vendors. Amazon MP3 is the default on that list over the iTunes music store. Apple would love to see Last.fm's user base crumble and migrate to a domain that they control. The quirk here is that, Ping is only supported by Apple's proprietary media application iTunes, whereas Last.fm supports just about every music application you can come across. Programs like Songbird support it right out of the box, fully integrating it's radio functionality and concert listings, and popular media applications like Winamp work by just adding a plugin. Essentially what this comes down to is, if you use Last.fm, you can network with anyone, but on Ping, you're restricted to your self-important Macintosh using circle that is favoring inferior software based on your need to have an alternative from the personal computer which, if I may digress, isn't an actual alternative anymore

From here on, I'm going to divulge a number of Apple's efforts against multimedia freedoms that aren't helping the computing experience for anyone.

I am a long time open source enthusiast. Before getting my first Macintosh computer in 2005, I was running FreeBSD as my home desktop operating system and only using free and open source software. I took an interest in Macintosh because I was starting to involve myself in professional audio and at this time, Windows was a terribly inferior platform for such and still to this day open source options are dramatically limited. So the first thing I do is try to copy my music library into this iTunes thing that it comes with, and find none of my Ogg Vorbis files will play. For those of you unfamiliar, Ogg Vorbis is a patent free alternative to MP3 with superior sound quality at lower bitrates. Its license does not in anyway conflict against being used in a proprietary application and has frequently been used in the development of video games and web applications where paying for an MP3 license (especially considering that it is an inferior format) just didn't seem worth it. Winamp and most other Windows music players supported Vorbis, so I was wondering why iTunes didn't implement it at all.

Well, the reason being is Apple's AAC codec which is an MPEG4 technology being the pet project of iTunes. They would probably ditch MP3 as well if it didn't already have a user base much larger than they were. Even though Apple's iTunes store is built around the DRM loaded AAC codec, they still find Vorbis to be a threat somehow. There's also no support for FLAC, a free lossless audio format which is becoming extremely popular amongst audiophiles and sound professionals who need to pass around unaltered audio with a smaller file size.

Things are about to get a lot uglier, however. Those of you who frequent my blog may have noticed a simple audio player spring up here and there if you're using a recent browser [not referring to the Bandcamp ones]. This is because the new HTML5 standard is attempting to build audio and video functionality directly into web browsers as opposed to relying on external plugins like Flash. This is a great idea as it could increase cross system compatibility and improve the performance of such content beyond the limitations of Flash. Mozilla, Chrome, and Opera have all introduced the Ogg Vorbis codec into their code for audio support, and the Ogg Theora codec for video support. Once again, they're completely free standards that any industry juggernaut can grab onto without the fear of royalties, lawsuits, or general mayhem. Apple and Nokia are taking every measure they can to stomp out the Ogg project and make sure it never becomes the HTML5 standard.

This is because Apple has a DRM encumbered, proprietary MPEG4 format that it wants all other web industries to pay them to use. Although on August 26^th, they changed the license to remain royalty-free for free downloadable content, they still require royalties from anyone building it into their software or hardware. This makes life complicated for open source projects like Mozilla, or any upcoming web enterprise looking to build an encoder into their website.

This isn't to say that H.264 isn't a good codec. In fact, it's the basis of the BluRay HD format. Theora's development as an HD rival is advancing quickly, with libtheora 1.1 showing relatively close quality at similar file sizes, and is still actively being developed.

Needless to say, Apple's Safari web browser has left the Ogg codecs out. I used Safari 4 the other day to go to my band's website, and I found that all the audio and video players were there, but stuck on an infinite loop that just said “Loading”. Now, I'm not saying H.264 should be done away with, I'm just saying Ogg should be embraced as an option. I've felt this way throughout my history as a Macintosh user. Google's Chrome browser does exactly what Apple's Safari should: it uses BOTH. Microsoft has stayed out of this whole mess, their always-two-steps-behind Internet Explorer not adopting either format. H.264 is a good codec and a lot of people are going to use it regardless of it's costly nature, but that's no reason to try to screw the worldwide internet community out of something freely available to everyone.

That's how Apple is though. They want to control your options for all media content. A rift between Apple and Adobe lead to Flash support being yanked from the iPhone and the iPad. Adobe in an attempt to keep their product alive, introduced in CS5 the ability to build a flash app into a static, binary application. To combat this, Apple changed the license agreement for developers so that the only acceptable programming languages are now C and C++. To put that in plain English, in order to get even with Adobe, Apple completely screwed out a huge development base of independent programmers who were writing apps for the iPhone. As a result, a lot of these developers have migrated to the Android platform, upon which Google has more or less given developers free reign to do whatever they want.

In 2005, Mac OS X was far more stable than Windows XP, and it's audio software didn't crash as often during recording sessions. This has lead me to being a long time Logic user for my audio work, which is a Mac only program that I know inside and out. Although I would hate to have to learn new software to meet my needs, I've test driven Windows 7 and find it to be just as solid of a product as Mac OS. There's no more defaulting to it just because it works better, because it doesn't. So when I go computer shopping again, I'm planning on building an AMD system running Windows 7 (which will save me about $2000 versus an equivalent Macintosh) and switching to Cubase for my professional audio work. I'm not looking forward to learning another dense program, but if I can be liberated from Apple's BS practices, as well as their overpriced Chinese manufactured hardware, I'll be happy.

Some references:

http://www.xiph.org/ - Xiph, homepage for the Ogg project.

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/playogg/ - Play Ogg, a movement advocating free media.

http://www.last.fm/ - Last.fm, what Ping wants to be when it grows up.

http://www.getsongbird.com/ - Songbird, an iTunes-like free, open-source, cross-platform music player which supports just about every audio format that exists. Also has last.fm built in and supports a number of portable music players including Android phones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264 – Info on the H.264 codec.

http://www.google.com/chrome – Google Chrome, what I would suggest you replace Safari with.


* Edits (probably more to come):
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is going to support H.264, as well as WebM which is a similar open source format to Theora which Google introduced in May of this year. Bleeding edge versions of Chrome and Firefox support WebM, but release versions only feature Theora.

Nostalgia Review: Sundown - Glimmer (1999)

I was totally that teenage boy that hated everyone, moreso being that my classmates at my junior high school started a rumor about me that got me expelled and arrested. This lead to the obvious teen angst habits of dressing in black, listening to rock music that was simple and angry, and identifying with any immature concept of hating everyone.

Enter today's nostalgia record review: Glimmer by Sundown. In the rare instance you might find something written about this album elsewhere, it'll waste time connecting dots between Sundown and related projects, I'm not going to do that. Let's just say that Sundown was a temporary creative outlet for a Swedish musician named Matthias Lodmalm who wants to write pop music but revels in cocaine fueled misanthropy too much to sell out to a mainstream audience. As it is, his 3 minute chorus driven sing-alongs about hate were published by metal label Century Media, who at the time, didn't care about anybody but Iced Earth, Emperor or Nevermore.

So, why does a loud mouthed music snob like me have this incredibly obscure Swedish goth rock album? Because it made so much sense when I was 15. This was the rise of Napster, and as I tried to discover more of this goth thing on my own (Bauhaus and The Cure were loaded on me by my flamboyant step brother), I crossed streams with my metal searches and found what at the time seemed like pure gold that baffled me was so far underground. I had downloaded a single off this album and spent months trying to find mp3s of the whole thing as it didn't have US distribution (and 15 year old kids from where I'm from didn't have credit cards or bank accounts).

A friend of mine found this for me and sent it to me a week ago. The nostalgia is mind boggling. I'd probably hate this album if I'd just discovered it this week, but as it is, I love every silly note of it. The synth lines are all doing that farting and beeping thing, the guitars are super compressed, and Lodmalm's vocals are often whispered into the mic through his nose. Somehow, it's impressively catchy.

Lyrically this record portrays Lodmalm's life of that year, mainly being the massive usage of cocaine in dance clubs across Sweden and sex with prostitutes who are treated as soulless trash. The incredibly good “Halo”, which was the album's single, gives us the simple imagery of a woman with a face-full of coke glimmering off a mirror ball, wandering back into the club, wondering who's going to treat her like the garbage she is that evening. There's also “Star”, describing the hollow life of a porn star, and “Silencer” where he sings about his complete indifference to the sorrow of others, which samples a quote from the film Braincandy, “It's just like my mother always told me: life is short, life is shit, and soon it will be over.” Aside from that, a number of the tracks pick up the goth rock tendency of meaningless sex in the club.

Balancing out the farting synthesizers are actually some catchy little guitar riffs. I should stop at this point to mention Sundown had another album called Design 19, and it absolutely sucks. But “Divine” has a cutting guitar riff that's more jackhammer than most of Lodmalm's Cemetary work (oops, there's that back reference), and Halo's cascading, heavy electric guitar chord progression backs a completely obvious vocal chorus that works so well, Lady GaGa will probably stumble on it within the next couple albums. Actually, now that I think about it, the same compositions could work today by changing the style containing the substance. Melodically and honestly, even lyrically, it functions well enough as a dark pop-rock album, it's just that it's short distance from Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals clearly dates it at 1999. I don't care though; rediscovering this album has been amazing. I'd even call it my favorite out of Lodmalm's body of work which includes an evolving brand of Swedish death metal, and less cynical forms of heavy goth-rock. 

Anyway, I'm not going to do that Russian blogspot thing where I upload the album somewhere myself and tell you where to get it. I will however drop a couple Youtube links for someone who already did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQU-UQQ5lag Sundown - Halo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfNegdOYCCI Sundown - Lifetime

Superzapper Recharge Mk II

This is the LAST of the effort I'm putting into past SZR projects. I made a bandcamp page, there's a collection of scattered live/garage recordings that weren't available on album before, and our old looping EPs will be available when I find physical copies of them. You can download it for free in whatever format you so desire. Streaming player below that's linked.

Album review: Summer of Glaciers - Concentric (2010)

If you were to only listen to the record without reading too much into it, you would probably assume that Summer of Glaciers is a 5-piece band, milking San Francisco's post-rock fan boys and being the obvious choice to open for God Is An Astronaut when they spring up on tour. You'd probably think they rehearse like crazy in order to pull off this material live without slipping up. With its massive layers of sound and carefully integrated guitar parts, this would be a safe assumption to make.

But you'd be wrong. Summer of Glaciers is a one-man-band. Ryan Wasterlain, who looks like your company's IT guy, goes on stage with an understated demeanor, adorned with a Gibson guitar and more complex machinery than most guitar players would ever want to keep track of. Using a drum machine, a mixing console, and a heavy amount of computer software, Ryan performs each guitar part, manipulates it after the fact, and then continues layering, all while maintaining a conventional progressive-rock structure to the music without ever sounding like he's compensating somehow. The slightest mistake could wreck a reasonable portion of the set, and with a metronome in his ear piece, he maintains patience and perseverance throughout the performance.

This brings us back around to Concentric, his latest record released through SF collective Ascender Descender records. The record features a sharp production and sounds impossible to pull off live through the method I just described. The use of drum machine works out nicely as it doesn't do much impersonation of real drums, but rather relies on it's own digital personality. The guitars roll in and out with razor sharp hooks at every turn, sometimes kicking 3 of them up at once, then descending into stuttering noise. It also doesn't hinder to too many of the “post-rock” stereotypes that linger around these days, by maintaining quick paced tempos, rarely staying in place for too long, and bringing a well directed energy that makes it into get-on-the-freeway-and-do-90 music.

It's hard to pick stand out tracks from the album, since most of it is daisy chained together to flow as one dynamic prog-rock epic. Although never meandering, you're hard pressed to find an obvious end to anything on the record. There is one obvious track however in Touching Down, featuring Emil Rapstine on guest vocals. His performance almost sounds like a more Americanized take on Dead Can Dance, and lends desert imagery and a slight psychedelic feel to the juxtaposing futuristic musical foundation in place by Wasterlain. The production efforts on his voice also have more of a lo-fi sound amidst the ultra-clarity of the instruments, giving his voice a bit of a surreal presence. As it sweeps to its chorus toward the center, it is quite epic.

This track is followed by the album's eerie closer, Ceremonial Ghosts, which carefully moves out of a simple arpeggio into an eerie keyboard percussion piece, then shifts gears all at once to a quiet chugging guitar. It in a way stands as a dark reflection of the album's first 9 tracks, setting the sun on the journey.

Concentric has been one of my main walkman albums of late. Summer of Glaciers is presently on tour (dates listed below), check them out if you can. Due to Bandcamp's very liberal sharing policy, you can listen to the player below, and if you so enjoy it, follow it to put money in Mr Wasterlain's tank by buying a copy.

07.07.2010: pa's lounge. boston, ma. w/ rob byrd, lazar house.
08.07.2010: rebel sound records. pittsfield, ma. w/ cabinet of natural curiosities.
09.07.2010: green line cafe. philly, pa. #
11.07.2010: loft show. toronto, on. w/ valley of the shadow of death.∍
12.07.2010: pat's in the flats. cleveland, oh. w/ presque vu, two left ears (france).
13.07.2010: no fun house. kalamazoo, mi.
14.07.2010: turf club. st. paul, mn. w/ gerald prokop, telepathos.
16.07.2010: day show - independent records. denver, co.
16.07.2010: night show - astroland. boulder, co.
17.07.2010: sweatfest. grand junction, co. - thepanthernaut.com/sweatfest/
18.07.2010: necropolis. sacramento, ca. w/ (waning), noisepsalm.
19.07.2010: mama buzz. oakland, ca. w/ james & evander, posted.
20.07.2010: johnny v's. san jose, ca. w/ lady lazarus.
21.07.2010: tba. san francisco, ca. w/ lady lazarus, sarah june.
22.07.2010: tba. oakland, ca. w/ lady lazarus, sarah june

Happy birthday, Sly.

Sylvester Stallone turned 64 today. You know what that means? Of course you do.

DON'T PUSH IT! I'LL GIVE YOU A WAR YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE!

(waning) - Her Eyes Open

The first track I ever recorded for (waning), Her Eyes Open, is 11 minutes of On Land-era Eno/Laswell-esque drone with hints of modern post-metal rumble. They were still finding their sound and ultimately, it didn't fit in on Always Ending. They've now released it as a single for $1, or free with the purchase of Always Ending. I went back and polished off the mix/master a little bit, and for audiophiles, Bandcamp even offers a 24-bit/96khz version of the track (and I have no idea what, if any, dithering algorithm they used for the 16-bit versions.... </technobabble>).

Anyway, have a listen. Best with a subwoofer and a glass of wine.