Monday, June 9, 2008

How do you afford your Rock and Roll Lifestyle

It is HOT in Brooklyn today. Manhattan's not great either. It almost makes the fact that our hot water is inexplicably inoperable a non-issue. It's probably time to bite the bullet and try to afford a small air conditioner. It's a sticky New York summer, punctuated by the rattle of decades-old fans, adorned with every imaginable smell. I'm used to spending at least a month of the summer in a more southern direction where, even if it's hotter, its so much less dense. This will be my first all-New-York summer in some years. I was dripping sweat during breakfast. And it's only June. Oy vey.

It's been busy times in the music business over here. Maxwell's Demon's first full length LP, B-Sides and Rarities, came back from the mastering engineer on Friday. It was a pretty great scene, me, Jay and mattio jumping on our bicycles and riding out to Greenpoint where we met face to face for the first time with our mad scientist of a mastering engineer. He characterized our recordings / mix as "needing a lot of work", but recognized that that's sort of "what [we] were going for". We get that a lot. (function of recording in the 3'x3' of Hangover Studios)
Anyway, the master sounds pretty phenomenal. He primarily masters for vinyl, and, accordingly, much of the digital harshness of our pro-tools recording has been magically washed away. The instruments blend in a warm way, all audible without competing for attention. That night we had a show at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, and just killed.

This album is becoming a busy proposition. Tuesday we're gathering to have photos taken for our press-kit, and kibitzing about album art. (Tangentially, did you know that firefox v2.0 spell checks Yiddish? Neither did I until right now!) And now that we're approaching the completion of this year-long project, we're all getting the itch to start writing again. One of mattio's newest songs, "Love Song for Liam" has become a favorite at live shows, and there's this wave of momentum building to start jamming and writing again, all of us working on brand new songs out of the sound we forged over the past twelve months of recording and gigging. It's very exciting.

Kay left for Berlin yesterday, leaving me a care package of increasingly hilarious envelopes to open each day (she just finished the Raw Shark Texts). She also charged me with updating my resume while she's away so that we can embark on JobHunt 2k8 together when she returns. Along those lines, I started talking with my uncle and old employer last night, about the possibility of returning to a freelance position in Lower Manhattan. We'll see if i can juggle both jobs for a little while, but it'll be really nice to start reporting again.

3 comments:

mattio said...

don't break and buy an AC - just buy 2 or 3 box fans for like 20 each. seriously... put one in each window, and have them blowing so that one side of the house is blowing out and the other side is blowing in. it makes it totally bearable.

you'll have to combine with cool showers and damp t-shirts in the evening, but there are worse things than that.

especially if you're paying your energy bill, which you probably are.

De.Corday said...

the AC is free.
And I was sweating into breakfast.

So it's a tossup.

There are also some ideas that involve icewater, copper tubing and an aquarium pump. Plus my roommate having too much time on his hands.

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