Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for September 2007

My Favorite Trio Tracks: #1 – Up & Down / So Hard (from Trio Season 3, #5)

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My favorite Trio tracks have documented many memorable musical moments from 2000 to 2004. Songs made their debut, found their fans, and were gradually refined or radically transformed.

However, sometimes the best part of Trio is playing a song – old or new, well known or obscure – and playing it very, very well. This became my mission throughout all of Season 5, with outstanding results, but up until then a specific pair of Season 3 tunes were the best example.

I remember very specifically burning them to CD and listening to them on the train ride to Elise’s house, and as soon as I arrived pushing the disc into her stereo, ignoring that one of the tunes was a touch explicit and Elise’s 10 year old brother was sitting on the floor playing video games. Not to mention that the cover in the middle of the two songs was “Untouchable Face.”

(Little did I suspect that years later I’d take him to a Dresden Dolls concert where backup dancers would pantomime giving each other back alley abortions, alternating the Charleston with pulling doll parts out from under their dresses. That made me feel so much better about blasting “Untouchable Face” in his living room.)

Check out “Up & Down” and the debut of “So Hard” from Trio Season 3, #5. And, tune in next week for the first Trio of Season 6.

Will I?

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I’ve been remastering seven-year-old audio and chipping away at installing WordPress 2.3 for twenty of the last twenty-four hours, and at this point I’ve lost track of which thing I’m doing for fun and which is the chore.

Oh, I’m sorry, they’re both supposed to be fun? I must have missed the memo, because at the moment I can’t wait to get to work in the morning to do some project management and be free of this insanity for eight or nine hours.

I’ve been in overdrive every since I spent all of a gorgeous yesterday sitting naked on the couch, eating an entire box of veggie chicken patties, watching inane commentary tracks on fucking Heroes just because that’s what I would watch if Elise was here, followed by wandering off to the bedroom for a three-hour nap while my audio project takes ten minutes to process.

Clearly some atonement had to occur for that seven-hour period of my life, which is what lead to the weeks-early install of WordPress 2.3, which at the moment fails to impress me in any way, shape, or form. So far it’s fucked up everything I liked about WordPress, resisted the installation of every theme that serves my esoteric organizational needs, and provided me with a useless little box to manually write tags in. They call that a feature? It helpfully suggests “cats, pet food, dogs.”

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing posts tagged as “you can shove those cats up your ass,” or similar.

On the plus side, now through almost three hours of archived audio I am getting uncannily good at making seven-year-old Real Audio sound reasonably listenable with 12-band parametric EQ and other assorted magic of GoldWave, which I’ve now been using for almost a decade and which is still hands-down the best audio editing tool you can purchase for under $100. If only it had a project history a la Photoshop it would be perfect…

(If I was really serious (re: masochistic) I would actually bring multiple tracks of each guitar vocal into my mixing software and tease out each one for a specific purpose, like guitar, vocals, room sound, et cetera, thus creating an artificial four- or eight-track version of something I’ve got on a dismally compressed single take. I’m pretty sure that’s what they do when they remaster old-school wall-of-sound stuff.)

I seem to have defeated the mid-mastering naps by heading into the hallway to sort laundry, and now that I’ve run out of laundry I just go do sit ups until I start to wheeze, which is usually a sign that my audio is done processing.

It’s a glamorous life, this pseudo-bachelorhood.

My Favorite Trio Tracks: #2 – Granted (from Trio Season 4, #2)

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While surveying my Trios for this list of favorites tracks I decided against including the fully-mixed songs from the middle of Season 4. Though they appeared in Trio they didn’t adhere to the spirit of Trio – I built them piece by piece from a click track rather than recording them live.

Except for “Granted.”

“Granted” came to me in the middle of the night. I awoke, bolt upright, crying, and reached for a piece of paper. The next thing I remember was crossing out a line in the final verse, and the next thing after that was getting through a guitar/vocal version of the song in a single take.

What could be more quintessentially Trio than that?

After hearing the guitar/vocal I realized that a lot more had come to me than just the basic structure of the song. Without even thinking about it I added a lattice of background vocals and guitars around the original demo, replacing some of them in the coming days with more polished versions. The end result was one of my most professional-sounding tracks of all time, which wound up as the opening track of Trio Season 4, #2.

As a song “Granted” exists across opposing worlds – awake and asleep, alive and slipping away. Now you can hear it two different ways for the first time – fully polished and completely naked. At the core of each is my voice, hoarse at 3am from waking up crying, singing words straight from a legal pad pockmarked with arrows and crossouts.

I love this song so much that I’m afraid to hear it any other way.

Crawling Through Bars to Drown My Mopes

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As soon as I knew Elise was in the air for the first leg of her 24 hours of travel I was caught off guard by a rapid onset of moping.

I don’t usually mope when Elise is on vacation. Not right away, at least. Typically I spend a day or two delighting in my pseudo-bachelorhood, and by the end of day three I get bored and start to tidy things in anticipation of Elise’s eventual return. So, I was entirely surprised yesterday when the delight never began.

Maybe it’s because she’s nearly half the world away rather than in a known location like New Jersey or California. Or, maybe bachelorhood just isn’t as delightful as it used to be. In any event, as of three o’clock yesterday afternoon I was officially moping, which made it a perfect time for our friend Melon to send me an email to ask if I wanted to go to happy hour.

Between my need to drown my mopes in cocktails and the general never-ending stream of conversation that Melon and I effortlessly sustain, happy hour turned into a six-hour upscale bar crawl, which I periodically documented on film.

Mantra @ 122 S 18th St was dead when we arrived at 5:15 p.m. The bar looked cool, but their vodka selection was seriously lacking and they charged too much for basic drinks. Thumbs down.

It was at this point that we established our one-drink-per-bar rule, and crossed the street to Tria @ 123 S 18th St. Tria had a great wine list with very aptly categorized and described selections. I had a pinot noir with hints of strawberry and rhubarb. Now ever-so-slightly tipsy, we decided to initiate all subsequent center city bar crawls at Tria.

I don’t know how any Center City bar crawl could be complete without a visit to the Midtown Continental @ 1801 Chestnut St. We sat on the peculiarly stubby stools at the bar and nursed our martinis through a long and increasingly deep conversation.

At this point pleasantly inebriated, we headed to Alfa at 1709 Walnut St. Alfa had my favorite decor of the night, as well as our favorite waitress, but my rose martini smelled like dish detergent and their hummus and baba ganoush were bland. However, Our spirit were up, which leads me to believe we’ll give Alfa a second chance some other time.

Next we hit Monk’s Cafe @ 264 S 16th St. Per usual, Monk’s was crowded and armed with rude-to-the-max wait staff, both tolerable because they have the best selection of beers in the city. We split a bottle of one of my top drinks, Lindeman’s Framboise Lambic.

We ended up circling the same block a few times before settling on Tequila’s @ 1602 Locust St. Neither Melon or I thought very highly of Tequila’s when we ate there last November – it features plenty of over-expensive and under-impressive mexican food – but it had a fantastic drink menu.

Imagine our chagrin when after they sat us outside under giant metal air warmers we were informed that said list no longer exists. Strike one. Next, I was harassed by a waiter because I wanted a rum in my mojito rather than tequila, after which said waiter spilled Melon’s sangria over our entire table (and my camera) while trying to show off. Strike two. My mojito wound up great, but sangria-conneuseur Melon rebuffed her drink after one sip, which was a final strike for Tequila’s.

We were a little bummed to be ending with a poor showing, and almost headed to McGillin’s for some soul-soothing karoake, but decided to save that for our next crawl.

Speaking of our next crawl, we need five more bars to visit after our kickoff at Tria! Suggestions welcomed.

My Favorite Trio Tracks: #3 – Wings of the Ragman (from Trio Season 3, #6)

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Cover songs are a tricky business.

Many songs – especially pop songs – are distinct because of their arrangement, or their production, and when they’re stripped down to just an acoustic guitar they are entirely unarresting. As covers those sorts of songs are only as effective as you know how to make them; you have to bring your own strong sense of interpretation and inertia to the song to keep it interesting for the listener.

Peter Mulvey‘s “Wings of the Ragman” is a different creature, maybe because of its aerobic, alternately-tuned guitar or it’s rapid, flowing melody. Or, maybe it’s something else. No matter what, my version of it from Trio Season 3, #6 is very nearly my favorite Trio recording of all time.