Thanks to everyone who came to the Chapter House last night.  I had a great time playing for everyone.  I felt right at home playing for all of you.  There’s no place like home.

Why do I always feel the most inspired to work on music when I don’t have the time (i.e. endless schoolwork)?

A: I have already given up the possibility of social engagements that sometimes interfere with either

B: I consume more coffee than usual

C: Prochrastination impulses

D: Once I am forced to conjur the necessary inspiration for my studies it is available to be applied somewhere more exciting

E: Studying psychology is itself broadly inspiring

F: None of the above

Enlighten me…

I just posted a free EP to www.chrisfrank.org.

The Spring EP started with a challenge from Dana, on the last day of his visit: “Let’s record a song we haven’t written yet.”

I started with two short riffs on an electric guitar. He responded on an acoustic while I stepped into the other room to furiously write some lyrics. I came back, sang them, and stepped out to write a chorus while he had his way with a drum machine. We went on layering tracks until Dana had to catch his bus, and the result is “One by One”, the third song on the EP.

The other three original songs came together in much the same way. Each time I started with a sound I’d never made before, and built a song by talking to that sound. I worked 16 hour days because it felt important not to stop conversations midway through.

The goal was to make spaces, not necessarily to tell stories—though I did end up with stories of a sort. The EP is mostly about place, time, sex, and a train ride.

The last song, a cover, is a bookend. It’s the only song with just guitar and voice, and the only song I played and sang at the same time.

I tracked everything to my laptop in a dorm room. At the beginning of “The Weekend” (track 4), you can hear my broken heater contribute a few of its death rattles. The thing has made awful noises all winter, right next to my bed, but yesterday maintenance came to fix it—just in time for spring.

This is where I was this weekend.  I came for the biochemistry PhD program recruitment weekend at CU Boulder, and I stayed to ski.  Caught a hell of a sunburn though.

Atop Copper Mountain

Nice Bowls.

I hope you had a good weekend too.  Chris just showed me some new music that he’s been assembling for an EP he’s working on.  I’m really excited to work it all out with the band.  Maybe he’ll be nice enough to put it up for download/purchase sometime soon.  Be well,

-John

Hello,

I am glad to announce that our Sullivan Hall show went very well last friday.  I enjoyed every bit of it, and the Sim Redmond Band played beautifully.  Highlights included seeing new and old friends, jamming out to SRB, and playing in front of a smoke machine that made it look as though I was on fire!

SRB at Sullivan Hall

   I have decided to stay in the city for my spring break.  Last night Chris and I played an open Mic night at the Sidewalk Cafe.  I had no percussion instruments with me so I ended up playing piano and singing backup vocals.  Other than a few missed notes and a lack of confidence on the instrument, it went pretty OK.  Chris of course played and sang flawlessly.  

Take care all.  I will hopefully converse with you again soon.

I have, as of late become fascinated with the music of James Brown, in particular his drummer’s feel.  It’s all about touch. The lighter he plays, the funkier it feels.  Amazing.  As a rock drummer the “louder is better” mentality was drilled into my head early.  The fact that the motown drummers can get those heavy grooves going without barely touching the drums is unbelievably refreshing.  And lets face it, no one is funkier than the king of soul.  Hopefully I can start employing more of that light touch into my playing.

Also, I am borrowing an 18 inch floor tom from a good friend.  It screams to be hit hard, and I’m having trouble not kicking the crap out of it.  The harder I hit it, the better it sounds.  Only now with this addition am I complete as a man.

Great, now what do I do?  Play hard, play soft? Much thought is required to unravel this great mystery.

Thats enough geeky drumtalk for now.  I look forward to seeing some of you at Friday’s show.  Take Care.

Rock music will make you deaf. So, eventually, will New York City, and I have the privilege of spending almost every minute of my time involved with some combination of the two. A year or so ago I purchased a set of custom earplugs–not those $2.00 pharmacy-grade styrofoam uglies, but molded latex works of art that slide perfectly into my ears and not at all into anyone else’s. At least, no one’s I know. I’m not actually sure whether ear-canals are unique like fingerprints.

Foam plugs look silly and sound bad.  Very bad.  To hear music through foam plugs is like watching Star Wars on TV through very dark red sunglasses.  Both sound and light are just waves, each with a particular range of frequencies we can sense, and both sunglasses and foam diminish the top of the spectrum much more severely than the bottom.  Everything feels not just dimmer but wrong.  The waves lack life.

Custom plugs shift the entire audible spectrum evenly.  Like good hearing-aids—I hope!—only in reverse.  Everything about the sounds I hear with plugs is the same as without, except volume.

And one other thing I just noticed.

See, this winter I picked up a new habit.  Sometimes at night, only at night, I’ll go out in earplugs.  For protection.  I really, really don’t want to go deaf soon.  I would wear plugs during the day, too, but I’m far too self-conscious to appear like I’m wearing hearing-aids at 22.  Not many people know what custom plugs look like, but everyone’s seen hearing-aids.  I don’t want people thinking I’m deaf any more than I want to be deaf, so plugs are armor I allow myself only in darkness.

But the thing I just noticed is this: my earplugs make every sound everywhere in the universe softer, except in one place.  The sounds of my bodily functions—my stomach, my heart, internal echoes of my feet on the pavement—are exactly the same volume with or without earplugs.  That’s because we detect the sounds of our bodies not with our ears, but with our vibrating jawbone, which connects to the cochlea.  I kid you not.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Walking the streets with earplugs is like always being 100 feet from someone’s underground dance party, and that simile is especially apt at night.  Where’s that beat coming from?  It’s distant, muffled, but it tracks you with eerie precision.  Then you begin to understand it’s tracking you from inside you, which is both terrifying and terribly exciting.  Exciting because we’re transporting a dance party by accident, all the time.  Terrifying because the sound comes from somewhere in you that doesn’t feel like you.  It feels like “I”.

You know what “I” feels like.  It’s that point somewhere between, just above, and about two inches back from the eyes, which seems like the location of our conscious experiences.  If someone asked you to point to your consciousness, that’s the place you’d point to.  Where are you?  Right there.  But most sense experiences–pain, pleasure, warmth, and so on–actually happen in two places.  They’re in the consciousness and in whichever specific part of the body is being stimulated.  Touching a hot stove feels like something in the head and the hand.

The sound of your own footsteps in earplugs, though, happens in just one place.  It happens directly in your consciousness.  The first time I noticed it I felt invaded, violated.  How did you get in here? I demanded.

The sound, of course, said nothing but boomed merrily along.  And as we became used to one another, or at least I to it, my opinion of it shifted.  Our relationship, mine and the sound’s, soon resembled something not entirely unlike intimacy.  (Read: intimacy.)  We’re two entities, alone together inside one consciousness.

So here we are. Welcome to www.newneighbors.info.

On Sunday, 8 February 2009, the four of us had a videoconference and, after much debate, officially changed the name of our band. We talked long enough that we were pretty sure we could vote unanimously. I made the motion, I think, and John provided a second. Then all in favor were to raise their hands, and this happened:

The Vote

You can ask any questions about anything you like, except Nate’s polka-dots.

cheers,

Chris

Remember that song-in-progress I posted a few months ago?

It grew.  And after hearing Henry Terepka’s newest recording, I decided to adopt his methodology and just keep adding tracks until a recording felt complete. I did most of the work in one eight-hour session on Thursday, but made a few changes yesterday and this morning too. Last night my brother Hayden came over and replaced a bad string line with fun whistling. Thanks, little brother.

If IY ever records this song it will come out completely differently, but let’s call this Version 1. Enjoy! Feel free to send this one around; it’s not for sale. Your feedback is welcome in the comments, of course.

Mistakes Were Made (MP3)

(PS — If you option-click (on a Mac), or right-click (on a PC), you can download that MP3.

Nate wrote a comment, in response to a comment from The Grey Eminence (comment 72), on our blog entry from January 6th.  In it he clarified our reasons for changing the name of this band, and he did so with such clarity that I want to make sure it’s got its own post.  Here’s what he wrote:

“The Grey Eminence: thank you for challenging us to be less vague with our fans.

While I am very grateful for the positive press, I must say was a bit displeased to be referred to as “the currently nameless band” in the journal. I suppose it is better than the “homeboy band”, whatever that meant. We are not and never will be nameless; we are still IY and will remain IY until the moment a new name is decided. Or as atrain pointed out, even then IY will somehow continue to be.

There are many reasons we want to change the name. The announcement may seem out of the blue, but we have been toying with it off and on for the last few years, only to drop the subject each time because it is a daunting task (as you mentioned). We finally realized though, it is only going to get harder if we continue to spread our music, and if we are unhappy with the name we should change it now or be stuck with it forever.

There are some problems inherent to the name IY. When told the name of band, I think the response ought be “oh, cool” or at least “oh”. Possibly “what does that mean”. It gets messy when the general response is “what? How do you spell that?” –and the confusion doesn’t ease up much when told “just the two letters, it doesn’t mean anything”. Furthermore, when read it is not clear how it’s pronounced. These characteristics are definitely problematic to some degree when it comes to spreading the word about a band…but I certainly don’t think accessibility should always be first priority in any endeavor. There are some elements of the strangeness of “IY” that I am quite fond of. My perception of these problems is undoubtedly colored by the fact that we fell into “IY” because we couldn’t come up with anything better at the time when we wanted to escape “Immature Youth”. I think this half-assed naming of the band combined with its confusing nature is a large part of the discontent that chris mentioned (and I share) in telling people the name of our project.

There are other reasons for changing the name that are more situational. I am proud of all the work we have done; each record we have made represents our very best effort in that point in time. That being said, I don’t connect to a lot of our older work anymore. I know…that is standard sentiment for artists of any kind, but it is magnified when the scope of work is created over the transition from childhood to adulthood. Our tastes and influences are completely different now than they were when we started writing and recording. I hope that we never stagnate, and we will grow and evolve as we continue to explore our music…but I think now in particular is a time when we are arriving at a sound that separates us from our past and will carry us into the future. A name change will solidify that and be a welcomed fresh breath into our project. It is all very tricky…IY has a lot of sentimental value to our fans and certainly for us as well.

If reinvention is possible without alienating or forgetting…ill take that.”