Month of September , 2006

Another cross-post from mog.com. Going to keep it all here. I swear this isn't an ad.

I just signed up with emusic.com. It’s $9.99 a month for 40 downloads - which is a positively wacky $0.25 a song. I also got fifty free for signing up.

This is good, because it will force me to listen to new music. It’s got jazz, hip-hop, ska, dub, blues, sikh devotional mantras, indie punk ska emo dub laser explosion. Whatever you want. As long as it isn’t Phil Collins… or any other major label stuff for that matter.

Picked up on emusic:

Voxtrot – Raised by Wolves EP
I like this very much. Damn the Belle & Sebastian comparisons, because I don’t like them very much. Don’t damn the Smiths comparisons because they are pretty transparent, but clearly I don’t care.

Tokyo Police Club – A Lesson In Crime EP
The jury’s stll out on this. I can’t tell if I’m annoyed/satisfied by the bouncy fuzzy bass and/or annoyed/satisfied by the brevity of the songs. Some songs are about robot masters. Score.

Beirut – Gulag Orkestar
This is extra tasty. Makes one want to run out and buy a ukelele. Requires repeat listens. More on this one later.

"Spirit"
Bauhaus
The Sky's Gone Out
1982 | Beggar's Banquet
Wikipedia Entry

Cross posted from a mog.com entry I made a while ago. Yes I have taken to writing just about anything these days:

“Spirit” is without a doubt the song that hooked me into Bauhaus I mean, the belt automatically fires in perfect synchro? These guys can’t be serious. The Sky’s Gone Out as an album also stylistically treads that fine line between perfect intent and the inanely silly, but does so with so much confidence and bombast it’s impossible to ignore.

“Spirit” is the big puffed-up theatrical centerpiece of that fine album – it prances around on harpsichord, and fades out to the repeated maddening yell “WE LOVE OUR AUDIENCE !” and D. Ash ripping the strings off. It’s the moment that makes me regret getting into them [over 20] years too late.

No, I'm not a goth. All other reasonable questions will be answered.

I've updated the version of drupal from 4.6.9 to 4.7.3. This means some changes in the interface for authors.

I had to turn off the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor as default until I can figure out what is causing it to be wonky. If you still want to use it, you can. Make sure you hit "enable rich text" below any text box (works in comments, too).

You'll also notice that in your "my account" page, if you go to the "edit" tab, you can upload a picture of yourself. This picture will show up on your account page and every time you make a comment. Onward to the 21st century!

Also, if you haven't already noticed... I've changed the default look of the site. I wanted to push things forward a notch.

If you liked the old look, don't worry! It's still available. All you have to do is create yourself an account over there on the left, log in, go to "my account" on the left, and click the "edit" tab on your account page. Scroll to the bottom, and you should be able to select the "friendselectric" theme, which was the old default look of the site.

Many thanks to Adam for all the great work you've done recovering our old content and putting the place back together!

So, just some quick notes while I'm being an aimless wanderer:

The excellent Zelda Pinwheel will be kicking it live at a BIG ART SHOW this very Saturday the 23rd at the Rotunda. Not a thing to miss if you're in the area, and it's only $5.

The wiley Tris McCall is going to be throwing down his grooves solo with a grand piano in a church tonight! Interviewed recently in the star ledger, Tris wants you to know that he's going to be playing this evening at Grace Church Van Vorst, in Jersey City. Here are the details I have:

39 Erie Street
Jersey City, NJ
8:30 PM
$5

Also happening this week (and this IS a happening week), Hub City Productions (Jarrett and friends who've been putting on those shows at 233 Hamilton Street in New Brunswick), are throwing an electroclash dance party this very Friday the 22nd in another basement in New Bruns. The details:

FRIDAY, SEPT 22nd
@ 8:00 pm
57 Ray St. Basement
WE ARE THE SEAHORSES
HUMAN HOST

I'm really interested in how this will go down -- you just never know with them crazy seahorses! I may not be able to make it, so I look forward to other's accounts of this ;-)

That's all I've got for now. Feel free to throw your own listings up in the comments for this article, or to provide addendums and other enticements!

Oh, one more thing. I'm very seriously considering make a one piece of paper zine like I mentioned recently. I think it should be comic-styled. I'm still hashing this idea around in my head. I think it requires someone who can draw. Or, I should just come up with some kind of cute and not-too-difficult-to-draw style that I can use myself in the execution. I went through the folding and scoring steps by E. Genco, and it's just too damn easy to not make one of these.

Handing people material things is really awesome. These one piece of paper (8 page) zines are so small you can easily and comfortably fit some 8 or 10 of them in the back pocket of your jeans. And you can just make a new one every month or so, and go to fun basement shows and just give them out when you meet people. What can you put in them? Well, anything you can think of....

Initially I'm thinking I want something that says things like "these are my friends, check out the cool stuff they're all doing! and check out my stuff, too! isn't that neat??"

But as I started to lay it out/script it, I started thinking I'd really love for it to contain writing beyond my own, small illustrations beyond my own. Andrew Morgan, you up to the task? You don't get much room on the page for this one! Anybody else? E-mail me: billy @ tankcrash.com

Oh, and finally, for real this time, do sign back up for Sceneless, and do let me know by e-mail if you'd like to be an author so I can flip your bit. I would love for you to contribute to our site, and I thank you for continuing to stop by and read and comment!

2:00pm

Reminding self to set up automatic backups of this site from now on. 

1:30pm

Up to 45 pieces of content. Much better than zero. I'm going to stop for a little while, as this may be as much content that I can recover. There are new categories in the Articles section for News and Interviews, and I'm starting to follow the convention that each article gets a mention of the article type in the header (eg. [Albums]). It makes things much more clear for our RSS users. I've disabled the WYSIWYG editor from loading on default, but you can still use it if you hit "enable rich text" below any text box. It was messing up YouTube stuff : )

1:00pm

I've saved 20 articles (albums, singles, concerts, interviews) and probably just as many blog entries so far and I'm still going. Hooray for google cache!

12:00pm

Note: Until some folks sign back up (Mr. Notte, Mr. Testa, I'm lookin' at you : ) ), some articles are going to reappear with their original titles, but with incorrect authors. Once they sign back up, I'll modify the records to hold the right author name. Blog entries and older content are going to be the most difficult to reconstruct, so patience is requested - and I may not get them all.
 

11:15am

Got clean URLs working!
Looks like the old content I can pull out of my RSS aggregator is only the first half of many of the articles. Anything that was beyond the "read more" link is not there. However, we are fortunate that a number of articles we wrote, we forced the read more link away by using a <!--break-->. Some album reviews coming back now. Will move on to other content in a bit.

10:30am

Got the WYSIWYG editor for content creation working. I found, much to my surprise, that a great deal of the content of this site I have cached in my RSS reader. If I can copy some of it out and modify the node number on the post, a decent amount of the old material may resurface before your very eyes. Before I can start working on getting any new material on the site, I have to get the some bugs with user friendly stuff worked out (links bar at top, title graphic, clean URLs,etc). I'll keep this space posted as things develop.

CLOSED!

Sceneless is officially closed for business and we're not accepting submissions anymore. Thanks for stopping by! ~Billy

The whole point of Sceneless is to participate. We want you to feel like this is a place where you can read AND write about music that you love. Sure, you can write about your favorite new record on your blog, that's great, but here you have the opportunity to be reading and writing amongst other people who also love music and are reading what you write and writing back to you. Sceneless is an online and interactive zine that you can be a part of.

If you've signed up for a Sceneless account to comment on articles, you're already halfway there (please, someone cue the Bon Jovi - "woaaah"). If you haven't yet gotten yourself a Sceneless account, go here to get that taken care of, and then come back.

Now that you've got that account, and you've got the burning passion to write about music, send an e-mail to [OMITTED] and ask us to activate your account for writing articles. Be sure to tell us who you are and why you want to write with us!

Shortly, we the Sceneless editors will read your e-mail, and then we will flip the bit on your account, making you an author, and we'll send you a message back letting you know.

Then, you should start seeing a 'create content' link. Go there to start writing your stories.

There's a process for writing articles on Sceneless and getting them published.
You write the story the way you think it ought to be. You might want to write it on your computer first, so that you can easily save and spell check it. Then when you are ready, enter the article and Submit it.

The article is now in the submission queue, where you can continue to work on it if you so desire. If you think the article is ready for publication, send another electronic mail to [OMITTED] to let us know that your article is ready for editing.

At that point the Sceneless Editors (currently myself and Adam) will check your article over for spelling errors, typos, fix any small problems, add hyperlinks, and either publish it right away to the front page or make any recommendations for tuning that we'd like you to address.

This process assumes that if you want to write for us, you'll take the time to write us a nice short note asking please. It also puts the onus on we the editors to ensure a certain level of quality in the articles that are submitted.

Copyright Stuff:

We're not difficult people. We think you should own your words. At the same
time, if you write something for our site, we'd like to know that you're not
going to set up us the bomb.

When you publish articles on Sceneless, the copyright remains your own, but you are granting us the right to reprint your article in whole or in part on this
site until the internets explode. Re-publishing your article somewhere else is
fine as long as you let them know that you've already granted us the right to
print your article.

Thanks and make the most of it,
Billy Gray
Sceneless Editors

[Ed. Fixed the mail server. You should actually get the notification email now. - Adam ]

The server that sceneless was hosted on has been destroyed, courtesy of the fine folks at unixshell. If you want to yell at someone about it, you can email me at copelanda[at]gmail.com - because I didn't keep a good persistent backup of the site. For the time being, it looks like I'm not going to be able to recover any of the data and we'll have to start over from scratch.

This means I'm going to have to go through all the configuration one by one again, and everyone is going to have to re-register their usernames. I'll keep this spot filled with information once I have anything, but if you did have a username here at sceneless, please take the time now to register again and post a comment here.

AUTHORS and RIGHTEOUS users please let me know that you are back so I can restore your priviledges.

Elizabeth Genco has posted this nifty tutorial via Flickr on how one can make a zine out of one sheet of paper. Is anybody out there still making their own zine (as in, a phyiscal thing one can hold) or contemplating doing so? Anyway, check it out here.

Cross-posted from bitphonic.com 

Good show last night in Asbury Park at The Saint (although I think I scared the shit out of the crowd… should we stop playing that song…? the keyboard is heavy and The People are terrified of me. the silence was deafening. ). It was about time. Lloyd was on the mark all night, and I felt in sync with him. I had a little trouble here and there but was able to mask it by not making faces. Billy pealed eyelids with his solos [ note: I probably should have asked the sound guy to bring Billy up in my monitor after he turned down ]. Morgan sounded strong, but I would still like her to roam the stage a little more, and stop turning her back to the audience.

Out of the last nine shows we have played, two have been good, one was a birthday party, and the rest have been atrocious - playing to almost nobody, all of us not being available, playing poorly, getting less than 25 minutes to play, etc.

The last decent show we played was also in Asbury Park. I have a prediction: The next decent show we are going to play will be in Asbury Park, as will many to come in the future. It’s pretty simple: It is a town with at least four (Pony, Saint, Lanes, Deep) music venues that people actually show up to. It is a town where even those four venues aren’t good enough for the crazy ambitious kids who put their on their own shows in a hotel ballroom. Most importantly, people who live down by Asbury are young people who like to drink and listen to punk rock indie emo ska garage noise metal surf music.

Let’s compare that to the other major spots in Jersey: Hoboken has 1 (albeit excellent) venue on the far end of town from NYC, Jersey City has ???, Newark has um.. Q’s, ok that doesn’t count, Brunswick has 1 really but basement shows seem to pick up the slack there, Clifton has taken a nosedive in recent times and is really more for the metal crowd anyway, the entirety of Somerset area has the one place in Bound Brook.

New Jersey is mostly nullified by its status as the limp piece of Lettuce stuffed between the Juicy Roast Beef of Philadelphia and Smooth and Rich Havarti of NYC on the triple decker sandwich of the East Coast. Towns near NYC get their bands and shows gobbled up by NYC, towns near Philly get their shows eaten up by Philly - and rightfully so. NYC is infinitely more interesting than Montclair (read also: Philly … Mount Holly) . Asbury’s location makes it almost ideal in that it’s an hour away from NYC and more from PA. That large Jersey Shore population would be stranded without it. Now all they have to do is drive five or ten minutes up or down the Parkway for two dollar pints and a shit load of original music. Because bands like the one I’m in will travel an hour or more to come down to Asbury to play to people who appreciate it.

(Ed. Here’s where I lost my mind.) Take the following into consideration. The drag of counties on the East Coast, accessible within half an hour to Asbury Park via the Parkway: Middlesex (pop 789,516. ) + Monmouth (635,952) + Ocean (558,341) = 1,983,809. If that were considered a separate official “Metropolitan Area” around Asbury Park, it would be the 26th largest in the country. Throw in the dangerously close Union county (531,457) and (2,515,266) it moves past Pittsburgh to 21st. That’s over 1 million (!) more people than the metro areas around Austin, TX and New Orleans (pre-flood). Where are all these people going to get their RDA of Rock Music?

Granted in Asbury, you will still wind up with a night where nobody is present and you are playing to the other bands and the four walls. These things cannot be avoided sometimes, as we’ve had our fair share of that in NYC. Yet, Asbury is more of a niche market, if you can get on a weekend you are almost guaranteed to play in front of human beings who aren’t related to you. This also makes it easier to market to, and easier to become a familiar face in the area - even if you sound like a Bud Light commercial.

[ Tangent: For the same reasons, look to Sussex County in the coming years. Fairly isolated, but growing in population at twice the rate of the rest of the state. 150 thousand may not seem like a lot, but when you’ve only got two or three venues to fill (and young families who beget isolated and sexually frustrated teenagers) you have the potential to reach a lot of people quick. The Passaic/Bergen/Hudson/Essex kids are too close so they are pulled in by NYC’s tractor beam. Likewise for Camden/Gloucester/West Burlington to Philly. It makes me wonder how many pockets of insanity are emerging around the country as urban sprawl oozes across the countryside. ]