Music.
I've been a drummer my whole life. I've played in a bunch of bands and studied with a bunch of teachers. I enjoy many styles of music and have recorded in a number of different genres.
Here are some of my recordings...
Everyday - This is a Scott Helfrich song. Like Mike Criscione (below), he played all the parts except the drums, sang and also recorded / mixed the song. This one is a somewhat frantic prog excusrion that I recorded after all the other parts were already finished. That was tough.
Ugly Friends - NSS. The one and only. This is a tongue-in-cheek Northern style Southern rock ditty about a real-life episode, although the characters are animated.
Regular Day - This is a Mike Criscione song. He did everything on this one except (play) the drums. He even bought some new microphones just so he could get a decent floor tom sound. Mike is planning to re-mix this one and most of the feedback from people who've heard it is that the drums are too prominent. But hey - I'm the drummer! I like the big drum sound.
Boot in the Face - Major Healy. Fun band that played rock/ska and every song seemed to have more energy than the last. Real horns. This is one of the few songs I've recorded without a "click" that I think really benefitted from it. The song flows through so many feels that a bit of tempo adjustment seems to work. I LOVE the way my 22" ping ride bell cuts through at the end. I stole that from a lot of drummers but mostly Myron Grombacher. Down to the cymbal itself.
The Light on the Corner of Breckingway - Eden (edn). One of my favorites from the "Buy It. Burn It. Pave It." CD. There are REAL STRINGS on this track and they still get to me. I picked this track because it's got so many odd sounds like the wind chimes and 6" splash cymbal (thanks to Bob Price).
Something About This Attic - Eden (edn). Another from "Buy It. Burn It. Pave It." I really like the energy level on this one and the arrangement stuff in the last 1/4 of the song.
Widely attributed to R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the Geodesic dome and generally the kind of naive, well-meaning idealist I tend to admire. In my mind, the phrase is a bit dated now sounding retro-futurist and self-important. The more I think about it though, the more I realize how significant the semantic setting is for the placement of our one and only planet in the context of our language.
We are living on a space ship. To us, a mind-bendingly large and impossibly diverse World, full of just about everything we'll ever know or care about. But it's a speck. A chunk of rock spinning around in a vast and frighteningly dangerous Cosmos. We all know that, but we forget.
I wonder if we'll ever be spread out among other such space ships. Planets, vessels, some other construct yet to be imagined... I really hope so, because all it takes is a big asteroid or a few extra billion of us to empty this one of everything I care about.
I've had it with "spin". Why can't we just get some straight answers? There seems to be no end to the semantic convolutions I am bombarded with. It drips down the walls of my world like an ooze... Leaching from the maw of some agenda-driven pundit and delivered in person again and again by sickened zombies who can't help but regurgitate the poison.
The truth has a certain "ring" to it. I miss it. I need to engage with minds who are interested in the objective reality of things - not skilled in twisting interpretations to fit convenient models.