Cucumber Wire Boat [2:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (31)

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I watched a hilarious movie called, Super High Me. The basis of the movie is that a comedian goes 30 days in row without smoking any marijuana. Then after experiencing 30 days sober, he smokes constantly for 30 straight days in a row.
In one of the scenes, the comedian has to undergo a memory test in which he is given 3 words at the beginning of the test that he needs to remember by the end of the session. While sober, he has trouble remembering the words by the end of the session, so during the period in which he smokes, he’s obsessed with the 3 words, cucumber, wire, and boat.
This was a hilarious scene and I just liked the words “cucumber”, “wire” and “boat” together. It sounded like an interesting surrealistic idea to start off writing a song with. So after the film, I wrote down these words quickly to describe a little surrealistic scene of the “Cucumber Wire Boat”.
Jeremy happened to have just written the music so when we got together that Sunday, I just ad-libbed the words I’d written over his production work.

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 Reinvent Ourselves [3:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (29)

Reinvent Ourselves actually started lyrically from two different scraps of writings that I had.

The first part, I was obviously in a really dark mood and started framing an almost dystopian kind of situation. I guess the idea of a police state or a warlike situation was in my mind at the time. I wasn’t really quite sure where to take it after the first couple of lines, however, and just left it the way it was in my notepad to revisit at some other time.

The second part of the song was drastically different, focusing on brighter days. The idea of escaping from an unhappy situation and “getting away” to someplace nicer and more enjoyable.

When Beavis, Jeremy and I got together the following Sunday, Jeremy had written the base music production for us to work from and I noticed how drastically the music changed as it progressed, especially with the introduction of the deep bass line about halfway through. Beavis laid down some sweet guitar to bootstrap a lot of the sound together in a tighter fashion and I started playing around with using some of these lyrics and noticed that the two scripts actually went together in a story-like fashion so I went with it.

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 Promise [4:03m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (21)

Working on some of the ideas for our most recent project has required a lot of focus on very dark progressions a lot of really heavy sounds. So, just as a light diversion, I wanted to write something a brighter and more lighthearted.

To be honest, I didn’t really start with any idea in particular. I’ve been listening to a lot of Faunt’s work lately and am enamored with their “video game”-style production sounds. I love how lighthearted everything sounds, even though their lyrical content may be focusing on some intense subject matter. It makes listening to a sad song a happy experience.

So basically, that’s where I started and I just played around the most lighthearted sounds I could find in my collection and just assembled them together in a fun way.

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 Thugs [1:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (18)

Over the last couple of weeks, things have been incredibly busy for us as we’ve just been getting over all the obligations life throws at us in the new year. Because of this, getting together to play in a simultaneously collaborative environment has been difficult. So, instead, we’ve been producing material individually. In as many cases as possible, we’re working on doing some asynchronous projects where we can each record aspects individually and then pass it along to the next person.

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For something a little different this week, we played a bit over at Jeremy’s house and I brought my camera along to try taking some video of the band. We’re planning some future work with video and I wanted to capture some stuff while we were all playing.
I hadn’t really planning on keeping any of the audio along with the video, however, this particular video came across pretty decently so I thought it’d be a good one to share on the site.
Now, I don’t think we really planned on having any vocals while we played and didn’t set up anything to capture vocal work but I just felt like singing so I just pretty much sang/yelled as loud as I could control over the instruments. Surprisingly the mic picked it up ok and this is what we ended up with.
Hope everyone enjoys it.

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 Creepjacker [5:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (20)

Creepjacker starts abruptly with a crash of disjointed noise loosely connected for moments with syncronized stops. However, after some drunken chaos, the song finds it’s way into a lighthearted stroll underlined with distortion and tension.

 

 Seahorse [2:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (15)

A note a warning to listeners, Seahorse isn’t exactly a song; it’s a short collection of noise from one of our sessions.
The end result is a strange collection of saw-like reversed signal instruments in an open and non-rhythmic atmosphere. I found the sounds to be an interesting and complex arrangement of noise and just wanted to post it up as another example of the strange things that can come from our jam sessions.

 

 Statistical Energy [7:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (18)

Here’s my first experiment with GarageBand.  I added some distortion to the rhodes and some nice chorus to the guitar.  The drum effects also added some crispness to the snare and some fullness to the kick drum. Then, I added several synth pads over top of everything to even out the sound.

 

 Happy and Low [5:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (14)

Happy and Low is just a bright little jam we did at the beginning of a session a couple of weeks ago. I love playing little arpeggiated chord structures on the bass sometimes to warm up. I think I’d actually used the basic chord structure in a song years ago but it’s long been forgotten so it works to approach it from a fresh point of view again. Suddenly the other guys jumped in and the next thing I knew, we were off.
Along the lines of Austin and Slow Like Fish, this song is another happy ditty to listen to on a cold Tuesday morning.