37 CRUELLA DE ILL/DONNER PASS TUXEDO [091709]

Download 37_Cruella_De_Ill_091709.mp3

Welcome to the Doldrums.

For me, at least. Fighting fatigue and lack of direction right now. How do you fight "lack of direction," you ask? Same way you fight any broadly-defined concept: with guns and bombs, tempered by debates on cable television.

In other news, I was always jealous that a car and a tollbooth just showed up in Milo's room.

You'll notice that I posted links to all of my blog clippings in the right sidebar. It's a bit out of the way, but I couldn't think of what to move. Suggestions?

Welcome to The First Annual Everything Break-a-thon, starring The Things I Own

You are in two places at once.

This week's installment: my Alesis M1 Active Mk2 Worst Speakers Ever Don't Ever Buy These Speakers. Here is a picture. If you ever see them, swallow your arsenic tablet immediately:


I purchased these lovely speakers from a town-leaving Berklee student for $200. They were irredeemably terrible even before a few days ago, when the right one started on fire for no reason at all. Now I can't even pawn them off on the next idiot for pennies on the dollar.

I know that Alesis often makes fine gear, and I also know that not all of their monitor speakers spontaneously shoot sparks and smoke when you turn them on. My left speaker, for instance, has been fire-free for the entire time that I have owned it. Still, there is no excuse for these monitors to exist. During the time that I owned them, they performed so miserably that I opted to listen to mixes almost exclusively on a pair of consumer-level Optimus Nova 71 headphones. For those of you who are not familiar with Optimus as a brand - that includes me, since I have no idea where I got these headphones and I cannot find evidence of their existence on the internet - they make headphones that endeavor to minimize damage to your ears by forcing you to take them off after five minutes because they are excruciatingly painful to wear. These are not they, but I have provided a picture of headphones for context:

Can you tell I found a cheap photo editor online?

Here are interesting facts about this song:

1. Drums and mandolin come straight from my Casio DG-10 digital guitar (scroll down to comments and see the discussion re: the strings being made from "unobtanium" - great word!), known to most as the Stupidest Instrument Ever Made. I did a fair amount of stacking for my drum sounds - maybe too much - those digital drum sounds are pretty thick to begin with.

2. That's me rocking back in my chair at the beginning of the song. I have a small space, and I wanted to take some time to try to un-digitize the drums by letting them bounce around the space a bit before I took them back in through my API. Unfortunately I was never able to get out of my own way, so I decided to leave the chair-creak in the song.

3. Those dogs are from a tape for an audio book of 101 Dalmatians. I found the tape when I was helping my dad move out of his place a few months back - it must have been from when my brother was little. I had plans to find a "turn the tape over" sample and plop it down at the end of Superhero in week 26 - you know, as a halfway there sort of thing - but the tape was old and snapped before I could grab the sample. Luckily, I had already committed the dogs to my hard disk. And here we are, older but no wiser.

4. Disney - as Disney had been known to do - pulls some bullshit:

5. It would appear that this song is about making clothes out of humans.

6. Wouldn't it.

The Blogs They Are In So Many Love Near Me

Repeat offender blogs. Both have covered me before and both are coming back for a second helping. Delicious.

I did a cool back-and-forth, to-and-fro piece with Neil from Music Like Dirt. It's a two parter: Enjoy, and enjoy.

Surviving the Golden Age picked up on how fantastically awesome last week's song was.

There. A long post. Are you happy now? Of course not, because it's not Angela's Fucking Ashes. What is it with you people?

Song details: Mixed by Phil Gorey. Mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East, Cambridge MA.