Brookah!

My long time friend Brookah (pictured in the middle) and I have recently reconnected. So here's the story. Brookah and I went to an elementary school together in San Francisco, known as Town School for Boys. TSB is basically just your typical preppy, all boys elementary school. The folks at TSB boast that it's the top elementary school in San Francisco, I don't really know what I'm saying...I can't think of anything funny to say about TSB at the moment. There is one for sure cool thing about TSB, both members of Two Gallants went there! Yeah, pretty rad.

Anyways, Brookah cut from San Francisco in roughly 1999 (I think?) and ultimately wound up in Chicago. It had been years since I talked to him, but this year we reconnect on Face Book. Hells yeah FB! We found we both have a common passion for electronic music. So we got to talking and as it turns out he writes for Hot Biscuits and runs a blog with his friends in the chi, entitled Squeegie. So here's a recent mix he did. Hit it up, download it, comment.

Brookah's "Let's Try This Out Mix" - 42 min

01. Renaissance Man – Haarlem
02. Count and Sinden – Hardcore Girls (ft. Rye Rye)
03. Hatiras – The New Jam
04. Bingo Players – Get Up (Diplo Remix)
05. Bart B More – Make Some Noise
06. Bumblebeez – Dr. Love (Crookers Remix)
07. Bart B More – Dubbin
08. Dem Slackers – The Joker (Edu K’s Bad Boy Stomp Remix feat. MC Gi)
09. DJ Ralph One – Soundz That Pop (Richi Jamz Remix)
10. Boltan – Creepy (Mightyfools Remix)
11. Digital Manges – Give Me A Reason (Douster Remix)
12. Lorcan Mak – Crack Shack (Mad Kids Remix)
13. The Yank – We Can’t Be Stop’d

http://www.myspace.com/brookahmusic

Boy, Oh Boy

If you follow me on Twitter (jstackills, follow me!), you would know that I worked in the studio last night. Overall, it was one of the most frustrating and emotionally draining experiences of my life. Despite the fact that not much actually went wrong and was just done wrong, the session overall just fell short of a complete failure.

The whole process started with me arriving to Josh Meer's house 45 minutes late. Josh is one of my co-producers and also an author on the Cut Division blog. Lunching with my mom in downtown San Francisco at Perbacco, an amazing restaurant by the way, held me up for a while. Even though I left at 2:30, with bus time and everything, I still somehow managed to show up at Josh's late. We spent quite a while trying to put a project of Josh's into Pro Tools from Reason. Once we finished that whole deal, which took like 2 hours or so, Josh and I walked to Divisadero Street and got some dinner.

After dinner we arrived at Benjamin Dossetter's house. Benji has been a long time friend of mine and he is really generous when I ask to use studio. He's got the place pretty decked out for an amateur. Benji has quite a few exceptionally nice guitars, a Korg synth, Pro Tools, a Digi 002, a Digi Command 8 mixer, and much more. If you ever need a demo recording stop, holler at me, I'll hook you up with Benji, he'll hook you up with a great deal. Anyways, I really came into the session totally unprepared. My song, unlike Josh's was not only not Pro Tools ready, but incomplete. So that in its self was a disaster. Jesus H. Christ...

I think Josh will give you guys the full DL on the whole session, but overall, for my first experience in the producer's chair, legitimately producing an artist, things went terribly. I was unprepared, I didn't get what I needed out of the artist, and I feel like I generally wasted everyone's time. But I guess any experience is a learning experience, right?

Recording Sesh

Christ.

Well there's no getting around it; putting music together is tough. Mr. Stack and I are hard at work on the first EP for Cut Division. Up until today things seemed to really be going swimmingly. This is of course why I am writing this post.

Let's blame the first gaffe of the day on Muni. Apparently, it's not that the 38 didn't come, it's just that "the route takes a while." Fair enough. Jimmy arrives at my residence 45 minutes later, but alas it's alright. Eli and I have been preparing beats, all is well.

Jimmy has this particular notion that recording audio into pro tools from reason is some sort of easy step in the process, though it turns out to be quite the opposite. What my man wants is each track of reason data (a track for drums, bass, synths, etc) on it's own track in pro tools. We spend a good two hours attempting to create different kinds of pro tools tracks while rerouting the hell out of our reason file and we are unable to record the audio into pro tools. In the end it ends up being quite a simple task; creating stereo wav files of each track and importing them into pro tools, no longer using a special module known as ReWire (Jimmy was a bit obsessed). Hallelujah: Jimmy is thrilled, the pro tools file is looking great, it's on his hard drive and we're on our way to Benji's.

Well that was only the beginning. We get to Benji's (a beautiful spot I must say, a great place to record) and we f*$# around for a while, but then get down to business and begin preparing to record. WAIT, hold the phone. Jimmy's not ready to record vocals on his track, he hasn't finished his track yet! Apparently, his "sketchy" Logic Pro isn't quite fulfilling his deepest desires, and that was a problem, especially tonight. What a marathon. We arrived at the studio around 7:30. I left the studio at 1:00. We were trying to record two songs. Only two. One of the tracks was already done, a form put together, ready to rock but our MC had issues writing the words so essentially, that track is now on the back burner. The wheels were coming off quickly. Whilst I write this, vocals are being recorded on the other track. I hope they are going well.

Things might sound like they're in the s*@#ter but honestly, this is a part of the process. I'm having a ball. I love being in studio environments and I'm loving every minute of this. We're learning a lot of new things (tonight was my night to bear witness to Jimmy's ridiculous flatulence) and I see a bright future ahead. Up until this point there had been no road blocks. Now we have come across some, and that's totally okay. We shall regroup. Nothing has gone to waste, we are still in utero, still carving out our space. Absolutely not a vaginal or hysterectomy reference, sorry Mom. That being said, the world will know when we burst from the womb.

The beats are saucy and the music is pumping. Tonight we just decided to play a record with a lot of scratches on it. It happens, it's going to happen again, and I have no issue with that. This is all a part of the process, and I look forward to more; much more.

St. More

"Indie" "bands" tend to end up on "sound-tracks" for "indie" "films", but if St. Mawr got into the pictures they would probably end up backing up something a lot more interesting than Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. Movies suck. Your friends rule. Your friends should be in movies because movies should be about them. I'm more upset about my friend/bandmate having mono than I am about never actually seeing Nick and Norah. I'd rather watch my friend tune his guitar than watch Michael Cera in an uncomfortable sex scene.

So, real shit: St. Mawr is a great band with guys I've good enough friends with to have strangely unflattering photos of them.

Josh Meer plays guitar and sings on most of the songs we've put up here. He's been writing songs as long as I've known him, which goes back to some really excellent pop-punk demos in freshman year. I was in a sort of "youth crew" (oriented more toward blunts and beer than baseball bats and beatdowns) called Wiener Section in the first half of high school, and Josh Meer was a tight enough homie to run with the fourteen of us. I think we also went to Hebrew school together at Temple Emanu-El. By the time we saw Star Wars Episode III together, he was already a matured and disciplined songwriter/musician/producer, and that shows in these spring 2008 demos.

Andrew Hine plays drums and sings on one track, the blackout rager that is "Turning Into Nothing". I could go on and on about all the cutty things this man has done, how deep he mobs, etc. etc., but it should suffice for today to say that he's a classmate of Josh (Drew College Prep, SF, 2008).

This recording, Sweaty Palms, also enlists Jim Garrison, a music teacher who enjoyed working with the band so much that he joined them after their tenure at Drew to keep playing music with them. You can hear him hear playing bass, sax, accordion and probably a few other things I haven't even noticed yet. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting him, but someone told me that he and I were at the same Shellac show a couple weeks ago, which I consider a good sign.

It's nice how this band covers so much ground in just the four or five songs we've put up here and still manages to maintain its own energy, despite the influence of hanging out with the same crowd of punkers and taggers and assorted high school d-bags that surrounded the rest of us. This is a band that's worth following and more than worth listening to.

TL;DR version: St. Mawr rules and I'd rather listen to them than get fingered by Michael Cera.

Recollection - St. Mawr

Turning Into Nothing - St. Mawr

St. Mawr

One of our good friends, a friend who will soon write for the Freak Mode blog, has this band St. Mawr. To tell you the truth I don't know much about them, I just know they're from San Francisco. They've definitely got a pretty indie thing going. Other than that, all I really have to say is that their music is genuinely enjoyable. I feel their music would be perfect for indie movies for some reason. So check 'em out. Leave some comments. Tell us what you think.

Tim - St. Mawr

WIllful - St. Mawr

Chamomile - St. Mawr

Thug, Nastier

A very cutty thing got dropped into the Box recently. The track is by a cutty who refers to himself by "Tre-Fuck".

I'd love to throw a lil bio at all you faithful readers but the truth and realness is that I actually don't know a thing about Tre-Fuck aside from some rumors and hear-say humming around the Dolores Park scene. Basically I've been able to paste together some drunken homeless ramblings of him being the sole survivor of Christmas Castle or being the latest incarnation of Prophet Elijah—not the Hebrew, but the muscley shirtless black man that used to hang around DP and offer my friends meth. It's also said that this Tre-Fuck has something to do with another figure, known as Kongo Rock—not to be confused with the Italian House Congorock. The hype is that Tre-Fuck has to lay low due to a mile-long rap sheet for disturbing the peace, amplified noise without a permit, noise vandalism, vandal vandalism, impersonating a judge, impersonating clergy, and otherwise going too hard.

That's why I was so surprised to see this character turn up, if not in the flesh than at least in the pulse of one-zeroes that goes into our "Sound Cloud" box. They say you're innocent until proven guilty, but this track makes it clear that if he stands accused of going too hard, he's guilty as charged. He told us that vocals need some remastering, and that could be the case. It does sound like Sticky Simple, the talented local who drops an epic bus-hopping/getting-up narrative of a flow, recorded his rap through the plexiglass window of a county jail, like Mac Dre's In Motion and so many other Bay rap classics.

Hear it yourself: you be the judge.

Thug Nastier - Tre Fuck

King Kraken

I just got sent some music by this band King Kraken. I think they've got a pretty unique vibe. It's like ska (modern ska?) type stuff but with a kind of indie influence. Or at least that's what it sounds like to me. Give "Wax Moon" a listen. It's hard not to like.

Wax Moon - King Kraken