Did you know that Captain Beefheart made some cool stuff in the 80s? Don made some really cool looking paintings too.
This one's a difficult thing to reconcile with. I never got permission for the sample, but I threw it on Bandcamp for free so it's not like I planned to profit or ever did. I've only ever gotten permission for one sample, and that was on the the ambient song at the end of Internal Diplomacy. It's awkward for me to ask people that stuff. And I didn't have a job.
But yeah, it's like a big self hate spiral for trying to chase critical acclaim. I like the drums on it. I'm kinda surprised that they sync up with the sample more often than not, but I guess that's like syncing Dark Side Of The Moon with The Wizard Of Oz or something.
I recorded the drums with a Zoom H4n Pro propped on a trash can to my back left. I duplicated the stereo track, panned half of it stereo with a highpass filter and then panned half of it mono with a lowpass filter. Ever since I figured out that trick I've been doing that all the time. It's all over Owen's Lake.
Guitar is a single pickup Fender Squier with a Hello Kitty pickguard ran through a Fender Champion recorded with an Sm57 plugged into a Focusrite Scarlett 3rd Generation. I think I had the amp on British? Can't be too sure.
Anyways, yeah... Like an irony poisoned sound as one big preemptive criticism in case I met people that never came. If I did the beating the shit out of myself first then they'd get sad and go somewhere else I guess. Or I'd get callouses and it'd feel like being thwacked by mittens. Remastering it was a doozy because I had to rename every single file in the Audacity project with a command that it took me two hours to realize I could have googled instead of renaming everything manually. I ran every stem through a cassette tape simulator and then I tossed the whole thing into eMastered like the rest of the stuff I was doing around that time. Anyways, uh- kinda sounds like a bootleg of a noise rock show where some slam poet talks over it about music that isn't currently playing. A descent into madness that leaves you feeling demented for even engaging with it. The voice in my head that I hear talking about everything that I make while I'm making it- that's a figure of speech by the way. All kinds of people say they have a voice and all but it's really this... looming idea. Not just while I'd be playing music but while I'd be doing anything. At least while feeling manic and all. The idea of someone reading into every one of my movements, pouring into every single detail... I only have a frame of reference for people doing that to other people's works and not my own. Shit, if I saw people doing that to my own works I'd probably shrink and never make anything they could see again. Maybe. I don't know. I see people that remind me of myself and sometimes I think they're playing parodies of me so I can be aware of everything wrong with me. Then I imagine there being a lot of those kinds of people I've seen and didn't know they were playing those characters and the jokes just went right over my head every time, like I'm Chris Chan or something (minus the mom fuckery) but with a huge budget behind the trolls. Like I'm seeing my character assassination in progress right before my very eyes while not even knowing I was a character in the public consciousness to begin with until that very point. After I freak out like that I just... I just try to imagine them saying nice things. That I did a good job. That I made a masterpiece or something. That would be nice, I guess.
It was almost like that was the last step to me, that making something really good was all I really wanted to do. Or being acknowledged for a job well done. Something. Then the next day happened, and nothing. Figures. I was trying to make something most people would hate listening to, posted it to an obscure Bandcamp account, and... Man, am I a narcissist? Am I actually a narcissist because if I am then I really shouldn't exist... I have this idea in my head that my ideas or something I put in an interesting way saves someone's life. Or that life is actual Hell, that I'm a baby that popped out of my mother's womb and rolled into a ball of flames before I could walk. Now I'm scarred, grown up, and I'm in a world of flames. And I've got zero recollection of anything I could have done before I existed as a baby on fire. That's what it's like being a narcissist, right? Or I'm just unconventional about how I self love... I mean, I see those kinds of people as like people that need saving from themselves the way that dementia patients do. Better a narcissist than a pedophile though.
Why is it that every story I could make that's good is a story where people or things go through duress and overcome it? Am I being a demon torturing spirits without knowing it? Can't I just write a story where everything goes nicely and nobody gets stressed out at all? What if Hell is corrupting The Aether wherever our stories take place, like chaos coming to corrupt the common good? There's an indefinitely long perfect good either before or after that's just... missing here. Nobody wants to read some Mary Sue story. It's like the demon gets tortured if they don't do their job right... They get called cringe, they request to see suffering rather than see people talking about their suffering. It's easier to lie than to go through it... Show don't tell... Make them sad, and don't let them be able to lie and say "I'm sad."
None of this second half is to do with the album by the way, I'm just going through some stuff. If it tortures you, then good! Some people like torture. I'm a bit of a masochist too, so I mostly have to be tortured by ideas rather than physical stuff because it makes me laugh and sing. Hey, you know what? Fuck you. I'm writing a story where only good stuff happens.
Good Story
Everyone in the world is happy today. They're all well fed, they all give eachother consensual hugs that they enjoy every time. Uh... They woke up this morning with everything they needed and never had to suffer through anything at all, not even preparing their food. They instantaneously feel the pleasure of everything they could choose to do. Everyone is ridiculously attractive and happy all the time. All the time they feel a flow state where the perfect amount of effort relative to output is dialed in at every single moment for every single thing they could choose to do. Everyone in the entire world, and I mean infinite people, are going through this specific thing right at this very moment. Instead of them suffering through anything at all it's the writer and their projected audience suffering a bitter melancholy and envy for something seemingly infinitely far away from anything they could ever reach from their plane of existence. Maybe one day they construct a portal? Should they construct a portal? Even the writer isn't sure. The idea of it alone made the story better for their projected audience... It stung like a thousand suns that they could never know if that's even possible. That they could try their entire existence and only suffer themselves for it. They feel a bitter anger. They want those people in the other world to suffer instead. They never did anything wrong because they never could do anything wrong. They should be made examples of, many think. The writer concludes that this is either the worst or the best story ever told. It all depends on whether or not that portal happens. Fingers are crossed either way. Either way...