Grub Brother

About one kilometer away from our apartment there’s a small park, so small it’s more a better meadow then a park, with a little brook right in the middle of it, and a small lake with ducks and such animals. It’s pretty nice there and at night, especially when it’s not warm, nobody is there.

So, I’ve told you this because I own a drum, and drumming at 1 a.m. at home isn’t possible if you have neighbours you are at least a bit considerate of. Way better then to establish oneself outside! E.g. in some nice, little park. Certainly, there are  people living near there, but the place is not as narrow and constricted as an apartment building where people are stuck together like ants in an anthill. Let alone the special atmosphere of a park at night …

Thus we took my laptop, the mic, the drums, a bottle of wine and went out for a little drum session. And our expectations were not deceived: It was really cool and very quiet out there, only the water rushing and chuckling besides us. After having had some sips of wine and configured the recording equipment, we started. It was a bit like being aboriginal people participating in some sort of strange ritual, and I think that’s why we’ve finally decided there must be some invisible monsters coming at us to eat our balls and stuff! Hidden monsters from the world of illusion!! OMG!! We ran like lightning, you can hear that at the end of the recording. Perhaps I’ll use this as the basis for a new track …

The real beasts almost got us when we finally packed all the equipment and walked home: The police, onoze! Obviously some narrow-minded resident of the park called them … this bourgeois spurner of the primitive rites! We’ve been lucky bastards that we decamped soon enough.

Drums in the park

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The name says it all, nomen est omen. At the left you can see what my computer screen looks like at the moment. So guess I’m not writing at my own system right now. But how did this happen?

First, I decided to reinstall my Windoze cause of certain bugs. And I did so, reinstalled drivers and stuff, downloaded tons of updates, same procedure as every year. Only this time my C:/ drive was to small. To fight this problem I’ve downloaded some ominious freeware partition resizing tool, resized the partition what actually took about 4 hours and finally ended up with a boot screen that looks like … u know. I guess I fucked up the MBR, perhaps not, I dunno. Anyway, I couldnt repair it and now I find me sitting here and writing stupid blog entries while Windoze is reinstalling. Arg!

And as if this wasn’t bad enough, I can’t continue producing the track I was working at before this whole crash thing happened. ARRRG!

Update, 20:13:

Everthing allright now. Pheeww!

After some days of work (in fact some days of waiting for the paint to dry), our wonderful table that looks better than every crap you can buy anywhere is finished! Yay! This morning we started with printing the vectorized scan of the chosen sketch (the toad man) on 4 DIN-A4 paper sheets, glued them together and copied the sketch on the tables surface. Afterwards we carved the lines, messing around with the lousy quality of the wood, and when this was finally done the whole thing was painted. Again the awesome stink of the paint pervades my room, only this time not as strong as when we painted the entire table.

Now we don’t have nothing more to do then waiting for the paint to dry – two or three days I think. Even the white paint we applied two or three days ago has still not dried, at least it has quit smelling. Woohoo! Continue reading

So here we go with the promised sketches, all done with a simple, black ink pen on printer paper. And as you can see (if you click the “More” link): Wicked stuff all over the place! Fat toad person without head eating at you! Frog man without arms! Embryo faced body with a penis! Altogether nothing for a delicate person … Continue reading

Two days ago we got us some wood, color, angle brackets, waste amounts of screws and a rasp. The goal: Building a table, instead of doing it the capitalist way and buying a capitalist one. And we thought it to be mighty more interesting than just rushing into the next IKEA and grabbing there the default stuff. And we did it! We manufactured our own table: Beautiful as hell! Massive and heavy as an elephant! Wooden as the rain forest! … uh, as a tree, and painted it white as an eggshell! Now my whole room stinks of thinner harder than the worst chemical plant you can imagine. I swear, no joke! My windows are gaping wide open to improve the air quality, freezing me to death (outdoor temperature must be two degrees above 0°C). I hope I won’t have to wait ages for the thinner to evaporate … Arrrg!

But there a still plans for this fine table. First it needs a second layer of paint. Second we plan to carve interesting patterns into the surface and paint them red, red as blood, omg. I will finally put some new pictures on the blog when it’s done.

Update, 21.3., 03:01:

The second layer is finished and the dreadful scent about to vanish. Sketches for the motive we will paint onto the tabletop also have been done and will be published tomorrow. And I tell you: They’re the real wicked stuff!

I’ve discovered an older track of mine I made at a friend about a year ago, using his Reason 3.0 audio system. It has different features than Ableton’s Live, for example no .wav audio track support, but very mighty synths. Here’s the result:

The Metaphorical Garden

Hope you like it! Anyway, I will not put it onto the upcoming Grub Brother album because it’s just to different, using no samples at all, but only synths and midi files.

This post should actually belong to the equipment page, but I post it here because it’s still news and stuff. So, here come the news, which are in fact older than one week, but delayed by the migration of my blog to another server and the provider-related mess coming along with it: I’ve bought a drum, rather a djembe. The former owner wasn’t really satisfied with its sounds telling me it was missing the “low vibrations”, and because I don’t bother if there is what he called so or not I handed him over 30 bucks and the djembe was mine. Now I just need  to record a few good samples of it. But you (who are you?) can be sure it’ll appear in the next track. Probably. Joke, sure! Joke, I dunno. Just wait for it …