Plutonian tacos

My brother had a folder in 5th grade on which he had drawn a lemonade type stand advertising “plutonian tacos” for 3 cents. I decided it would only be fitting to name a song after it. I was trying to play and sample basslines here. There might need to be a little more variation, but it’s a starting place.

Tambourine Ensemble – Plutonian Tacos

Ride Around Shining

2 years after this song dropped on “Hell Hath No Fury” it’s still one of my faves. Although I’m still also disappointed that they had to drop the completely regrettable f*****t word in it. For a person who mostly listens to melodies and beats that word is like the sound of someone stabbing the song in the neck, slipped in to an otherwise awesome trip. Get over your bullshit, but also continue making otherwise amazing music. This sounds like it could have sampled john cage, but more likely chad hugo is just equally hip to some sweet shit. And for Clipse’s sake they have an amazing gift for turning something so simple into something brilliant, minus regrettable word-choices.

R.I.P. My Mind

In explaining my process, I’d like to try to show the random paths my songs take in their formation. Almost every song starts in an entirely different place and usually involves some recombination of older ideas. To demonstrate this, a few days after I was done with Drawing Lines I went and took a look at my initial ideas. I pretty much took all of my deas and placed them back to back and exported all the audio as a document of the process. But, After a week of listening to both of these songs, they really hardly even seem related, and both seem pretty cool.

Tambourine Ensemble – R.i.p. my mind

The reason I gave up on these original ideas was that at some point (maybe the 10th hour) the whole thing started to sound stale so I decided to drop in a guitar track out of an old song. This led to a mostly complete departure (minus tempo and drum sounds) from the old idea. The following track is what I stole the “guitar” part out of. Really, it’s the amorphous melodic rhythm that’s playing along with the drums at the beginning or “drawing lines” (and throughout the song), but it started life as a loop I recorded on a gibson echoplex. Here is the part in its original context.

Tambourine Ensemble – Smallest Steps

Ghost Dance

One day I realized my warbley old record player made some neat noises when you tapped it. From there these made their way into a Kaoss pad and then on down the line to Ableton. But I’m pretty sure there was little editing done on the computer. I’m blanking a little cause I think I made this in June.

Tambourine Ensemble – Ghost Dance

Got till it’s gone (instrumental)

Admittedly my brother pointed me towards donuts about a month after dilla passed, which is precisely when the entire pop/indie world started to kiss his posthumous ass, deservedly. As the dust settled, though, it was apparent this guy had his hands in just about everything cool since the mid-90’s (I feel like michael said that verbatim, but I’m repeating it cause it’s true). In particular I was pleased to find out that he had produced this awesome Janet Jackson/Q-tip song from middle school. At the time I thought this along w/ Aaliyah, Brandy and a few others were merely guilty pleasures, now I realize the songs were just 20x better than anything else I was listening to besides Radiohead/Beck.

Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Co.

Questionably, one of the first live synthesizer groups. The video explains they lived down the road from the Moog factory and he leant them the key, unbelievable. In those days you probably couldn’t just walk out with any of the gear which was sort of an anti-theft thing, But all respect for that company aside, I don’t know if I could resist stealing a voyager and the crazy guitars if I were in that factory unsupervised. Back to Mother Mallard, I’m searching for their Lp Like a Duck to Water, the song “Oleo Strut” has been a jam of mine forever.

Bear Suite

This definitely typifies the “mid-life crisis” phase of Pompeii. Song fragments were being recorded by myself and Mike fairly regularly and then I was aggressively editing and re-editing them with samples of Ahmed playing drums. Sadly, this editing heavy process hasn’t stopped, and I’m still working some of these old ideas into new songs. Some of the following tracks provide the groundwork for Rooftops. Maybe this will offer some history on these ideas? In re-listening to these tracks, it’s nice to see I’ve gotten a little better at mixing. Grab all 3 ! (Full disclosure: I think there is a 4th floating somewhere, but it is eluding me, if anyone has it?)

Pompeii, This Morning – Bear Traps , Boulder Bear , Builder Bear

Love Me Tender

This was the second Pompeii this morning song Ahmed and I wrote. I think after we wrote a few more we phased it out pretty quickly. At some point, my friend Kate (I believe) told me it was one of her favorites. I think I told her that I would try and find a recording of the song. We definitely never even entertained spending any time recording this song, so all I have left is the computer file (which has missing components) and an mp3. So for the first time in about 4 years the 20 people who ever heard this song, will only be getting the backing tracks. But in re-listening, this track was more interesting than I remember, though hindsight leaves me wishing we had filled out the mix. I guarantee Ahmed remembers his part if not mine as well, I sadly forget these kinds of things very quickly when I don’t practice every few days.

Pompeii, This Morning – Love Me Tender

Pompeii, This Morning

I had been thinking about putting some finishing touches on some old Pompeii ideas and posting them here as a tribute to the huge amount of work invested by Ahmed, Michael, and myself in 2005-6 into a project which got too bloated with ideas by about the second rehearsal to ever function properly.

There were some good shows (when the drunk redneck took the mic in SC and sang Led Zeppelin over top of our set), a lot of supportive friends/fans, and no releases or finished songs.

Someday I may get around to mixing this stuff properly, but more likely I’ll just keep slowly aping parts, and turning Mike’s guitar parts into individual hit sample libraries. So without further ado I’m going to forgo this editing and begin sharing some of these older ideas in super raw form. I’m going to categorize these as Follows

In our short existence Pompeii really functioned as two entities, most of 2005 was spent with Ahmed and I writing songs we could play very quickly so we could continue playing shows as our prior band was breaking up. I’m going to tag these songs as “Early Ideas.” A lot of this stuff is fragmentary and a good chunk of the ideas never got recorded, but some of the computer exports are worth a listen still.

The second group of songs is going to be called “Mid-life Crisis.” These songs will see the addition of Michael Howard as a creative partner and his polemic influence on our ideas. Here the songs, though still unfinished were getting flushed out to about 60% on the computer, and we wussed out of trying to figure out how to do them live.

Philip Glass Documentary

This Documentary is a really nice look into Philip’s sound world, and his history as a composer and a performer. I hate searching around for all the videos in a series so I made a playlist of all the videos, but then it seemed to be harder to embed this than I would have thought. So the videos probably won’t continue in succession, but here is a link to the complete documentary, that should play one after another if you want to see more.

Philip Glass Documentary