Remixes

Industrial act Blind With Rain just released a new free maxi-single. I did two of the remixes, get it here: http://blindwithrain.bandcamp.com/

Blurb!

"Right at the beginning of this album you already know this isn't your typical Doom/Stoner Metal band. The first song starts off with heavy amounts of Industrial influence, with some amazing electronic sounds mixed in with an amazing melody. Together they create a sound all their own. Even with the slow pace of the music, the riffs sound incredibly powerful." -- Unknown Metal Weekly Newsletter

Critique for an Art Student

This is a rant that was aimed at a friend but I decided not to send it to them. It's too harsh, too angry and wouldn't accomplish anything but make them feel bad and hate me. But I had to get it off my chest. This stuff just bothers me too much. I went to art school and it was one of the worst things I ever did. I'm still dealing with the load they shoveled me. I hate them for it. If you suspect this message was intended for you all I can say is, I'm sorry it's so harsh but this is how I feel. I could have tried to soften it but I'm just too angry.

I have a critique for you and your art. You won't like it though but here it goes:

It's clear you didn't actually learn to draw and paint any better in art school. Your figures are childish and awkward and show no improvement from the work you did four years ago. Installations are pure art school silliness. I suppose it's "art" in the modernist sense of the word but then, most modernist ideas about art are junk. Not only have they fueled the idea that making money off art is somehow lowly but they've made art a joke. People at one time looked up to artists as serious professionals, now we are a laughing stock. No one but pretentious "art" academics care about installations. I can see you were a great art student, you've fallen into line with those ideals perfectly, except for the occasional figure in your paintings (which as you mentioned in the past were too well done even for the art school morons you dealt with). Skill? Skill is for fascists! Art school doesn't teach skills. Anything can be art (except anything that is beautiful, skilful or you can make money from)! What do we need skills for?

Art school doesn't prepare students for making a living as artists. However, it does prepare them to make useless trash, like installations, and becoming art profs that teach the same useless trash. You say you're going to graduate school. Is your plan to become yet another art school prof teaching the same rubbish? You have a great future ahead of you teaching this garbage. Or working at Starbucks the rest of your life.

I'd like to say do whatever you want, as long as it makes you happy, as long as you're not hurting anyone. Except modern art is a poison. It's a poison in our culture and an intellectual poison.

Art school is a farce.

Knowing - Too Stupid to Save

I saw that Nicholas Cage movie Knowing last night. It was OK. Not fabulous but ok. It's not as good as Alex Proyas' other movies (The Crow, Dark City, I, Robot) but enjoyable enough I suppose. Anyway, it brought up a few things that bother me. The sad part of the message of the movie is that we need benevolent aliens to save our retarded asses from extinction. Why is this sad? BECAUSE WE'VE HAD THE FUCKING TECHNOLOGY TO SAVE OURSELVES FOR THE LAST 40 FUCKING YEARS!!! Yeah, we are a space-faring species. Or we would be if we weren't busy spending billions of dollars on stupid wars and squabbling over limited resources. In space there is literally, unlimited resources. If instead of these oil companies spending billions of dollars on increasingly complex and expensive ways to get a limited, polluting and inefficient resource on our planet, they could have spent billions on a space infrastructure and get ALL THE FUEL AND ENERGY WE WILL EVER NEED from the planets and moons in our solar system. We could have established colonies on the Moon back in the 1970's. However, the U.S. government thought the money would be put to better use fighting a pointless war in Vietnam and more nukes in the 80's. There were designs on the drawing boards to build self-sustaining massive space habitats. Instead we got Skylab and the International Space Station. Both utterly useless bits of junk floating around with no real purpose. We COULD have been on Mars by now. But instead, we sent a couple of RC cars. If we had colonies on Mars, in the Asteroid Belt and in orbit around Saturn, We could just be like "thanks for the offer weird aliens that like to stalk children but we can handle this ourselves, bye."

Speaking of the aliens, if I was them and took a look at our species I'd be like, "wait a second - why aren't these idiots doing anything to save themselves? They have the technology to do it. Sure, their spaceships aren't as awesome as ours but they work. Why should we save them if they make zero effort to save themselves? They are too stupid to bother with."

So yeah, that's the message of the movie, we are too stupid to save ourselves, despite having the ability to. I guess it's not too far off from the message of my song cycle The Fall of Man but, idk, I guess it's just a bit too depressing when seeing it from another viewpoint. Actually no, what really bothers me about the film's position is "we are fucked and only an outside force (God, angles, aliens) can save us. Which I think is bullshit. We CAN save ourselves, we are just too caught up in our petty bullshit to see the big picture. The Fall of Man is a WARNING. Knowing's position is one of acquiescence, which is just lame.

My Music is Real

I can count the number of concerts I've been to on one hand. And you know what, it doesn't matter. To me, music is purely the audio experience. I don't even know what alot of the bands look like that I listen to. So why is it so important to so many people that music has to be connected to a band, image or record label? I'm not sure but it doesn't make the music any more real to me. Music is the sound. It's the emotion - how it make me feel when I hear it. The music is what is real.

I record music and unfortunately for me, most people don't view music the same way I do. I don't have a band, image or label to make my music more "real." My music is audio only. You don't need me prancing about in a music video or stumbling around on a stage in a crowded, smoky bar to prove it's validity. You don't need a shrink wrapped, over priced CD or a download from iTunes. The music is all there for you to hear. Why don't you have a listen: http://shadowjack.bandcamp.com/

Good News

I got an older machine set up with Windows XP and an old version of Cakewalk. I'm going to try doing some recording on it , possibly today. If it goes well, I'll be able to finish up the album!

Final Update (For Now)

Several years ago, the monitors I used to mix my music blew. I had a very difficult time mixing and mastering my audio after that. So much so, I messed with the same few tracks over and over for 2 years and never really finished them. My output slowed to a crawl. Last year I had a jolt of inspiration and finally decided to ignore my lack of adequate monitoring and take a more lo-fi approach and not worry about perfect audio fidelity. Then, my trusty old Darla 20 audio card, the heart of my recording studio, finally died. Despite that, I decided to push on with a crummy old mini-jack hobbled Ensoniq AudioPCI card. Then more problems cropped up - my hard drive became unstable AND my video card died.

And then yet more problems arose... to make a long story short, I had a string of hardware failures. Expensive hardware failures. Hardware I can't afford to buy. And I'm still dealing with them. We (my wife and I) managed to scrape together enough to replace my motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card so I could rebuild my PC. However, I'm still lacking a usable audio card (built in audio simply doesn't work with some of my software). To top it all off, because of a bad power cable when building the new PC, things have become unstable. USB isn't functioning properly now so I have to send all the parts back for replacement.

These hardware failures coupled with the inability to purchase critical hardware like an audio card and an external storage solution for backups gives me little choice but to put Shadowjack on hold indefinitely.

I'd like to thank the few of you who cared. Your encouragement kept me going. Unfortunately, encouragement and caring doesn't buy expensive hardware. I can't record music on good vibes.

Dreams are cheap, making them reality isn't.

Computer Update

For those of you who don't follow me on Twitter, I have ordered the parts for my computer. We were able to scrape together €345,32 for an AMD Athlon X2 7750 CPU,mobo, 2GB RAM,GeForce 9600 GT,and 580w modular PSU. I'm reusing the case (which I like and is in good condition), HDDs and card reader from a fried Compaq. All I can do for now is wait until the parts arrive.

I only had 3 or 4 songs to go before I called the album complete. The computer broke down at a bad time. It actually stopped functioning at the exact moment I worked out the direction I was going to take on the final version of I'm a Man (On the Moon) and begin recording it. Which, as you can imagine, was beyond frustrating. As soon as I get the PC rebuilt, that is the first thing I plan on finishing.

Since I haven't been able to work on any music, I've been working on concepts for 2d racing game reminiscent of the original F-Zero for the SNES. It's been rough with this crummy laptop, the GIMP just runs. Trying to do multiple things at once often results in the laptop freezing up. Despite that, I've managed to get quite a bit of artwork done. I'll post some of the images on my art blog soon. I'm going to seek out programmers once I get a bit more of the concept work done. If anyone knows someone that might be interested, please have them contact me via email: shanesemler (at) gmail.com.

PC Out of Commision

My PC (i.e. recording studio) is not usable ATM. Backup solutions are also a no go. An old college friend suggested I "get a Mac." That's a rather annoying suggestion. While it would be nice to be a shiny, happy Mac person, the cost is prohibitive. Actually, that's not quite correct - the cost is simply impossible. There is a difference between being cheap and being poor. Cheap is when you have the money but don't want to spend it. Poor is when the moolah simply isn't there. I fall into the poor camp. I may be able to get the parts for a new PC but I don't know how soon. Certainly not this week, perhaps not even next. We'll see. In the meantime, there will be no new music. Sorry. :(

Marginally Music Related Linux Nerd Post

Turbo Linux was the very first but only lasted on my PC for a few hours. Then I picked up RedHat 6.1 or 6.2, I don't remember which but I have the disks around here somewhere. I bought it in a box! I didn't do much with it though. I complained about what a PITA Linux was to a CS major friend of mine. He told me I shouldn't bother with it. I didn't listen. The first distro I used somewhat regularly was SuSE (also boxed). Then I moved to Mandrake and I loved it. It was the first somewhat easy to use Linux I used and I used it regularly. I got especially easy to use once I switched to broadband and didn't have to screw with winmodems anymore. Mandrake stumbled though. They slowed their releases and that made it harder to get new software updates. Plus RPM was always a pain. Then Ubuntu hit the scene and I've been using it and it derivatives (like Mint) ever since. Now Linux is a pleasure to use and even easier to install and update than Windows. I use it for pretty much everything except audio recording and a few games.

Speaking of audio, one of the few things in Linux that has lagged behind Windows is audio tools. That has just recently started to change as a few of the best audio tools available for Linux have matured to the point of usability versus hair-pulling. Ardour, for example, always looked attractive but used JACK. And early versions of JACK, at least for me, were impossible to get working. Now it's alot more automated and stable and usable versions are (more or less) available in various repositories. Though for whatever reason, the official Ubuntu repositories seems to have alot of fubar'd software that I want to use. I had to get the current version of Ardour from getdeb.net because of an impossible to get around bug in the file open dialog in the official Ubuntu version. However, I used it to remix a few songs for Blind With Rain and it worked well. I still had to use software on Windows to master the remixes though. Anyway, audio on Linux is slowly getting there. It's usable but I seriously doubt it will ever have the polish and presentation and support that the proprietary audio software companies can provide. The demand for Linux enterprise solutions is there and so is the need for cheap servers. The same can't be said for high-end audio recording and editing software. It's a niche market.

There's no point to any of this really, I'm just babbling.

Doesn't Play Well With Others

Asperger's Syndrome has become a big joke on the internet. This is unfortunate as I really do suffer from it. I have an official diagnoses and everything. It has caused me alot of problems in my life. It's made the simplest interactions with people incredibly stressful and has been a very large component in the severity of my problems with depression.

Basically, I can't work with others.

It's highly unlikely I'll ever be able to have a band to play my material live. I still want to play live though. When I played in SL all the parts except the guitar were prerecorded. However, this new material has alot more guitar parts and I think it would sound really weird to have guitars coming out of nowhere. Playback of electronic parts like drum machines and synths are one thing but I believe live instruments should be played live. What I will have to do is rework my material so I can play it all by myself. I'll have to strip the music down to it's basics. I have some ideas about how to get a really big, full guitar sound and I can probably emulate a bass with an octave pedal.

I don't know what else to do.

Music Now Hosted on Bandcamp

Thanks goes to Dan from Life Toward Twilight for suggesting this site to me. There are several big advantages to bandcamp.com - first is that it's free. Second is that it automatically creates just about any audio format you could possibly want - mp3, FLAC, Ogg, AAC and more. The page is easy to set up, no fugly clutter like on MySpace, iMeem and other such sites. The only down side is the lack of options to set more details in the tags, like the genre for example. But they are still working on it, adding feature and such. Plus, I think it's much nicer than MediaFire and it saves me alot of hassle and lowers the chance that I screw up the tags again. You will have to give me your email though (I promise not to sell it or give it to any nasty spammers). And I'd appreciate your real email. I think that's a fair trade though, don't you? You can even get a nice, simple, clean-looking player to put on your website, MySpace page, blog, etc. Check it out: http://shadowjack.bandcamp.com/

Tags FUBAR'd

I had to fix the tags on both "The Last Ballad" and "Cloud Keep" so you might want to re-download them if screwed up tags bug you as much as they do me.

Track 09 - Cloud Keep

"Cloud Keep" is now available:

DOWNLOAD


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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