With a little help from my friends…

December 2, 2010, 18:52 -05 by chris
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Rock the vote! Well, midtempo ethereal alternative atmosphere the vote, anyway. Please help give a couple deserving local bands a spin on the radio and bullet points for their press kits, and vote for our friends C’est la Mort and Fading Collection in KEXP radio’s Top 90.3 of 2010 countdown!

http://kexp.org/events/toplists/Default.aspx

Consume

August 27, 2010, 17:16 -05 by chris
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The new C’est la Mort, Empty Words Fill Lonely Spaces, is out. Three Imaginary Girls posted a review that contains words like “masterful”, “immaculate”, “ethereal”, and “angst”. Go buy it.

The other new C’est la Mort, In the Soft Focus Light of I Love You, is a remix disc featuring, among acts you’ve actually heard of like Jupe Jupe, “Among the Ruins (Doll Factory Mix)”. Go buy it.

A Sepiachord Passport, mastered by Chris from Doll Factory (aka “me”), comes out October 12 on Projekt Records. Wait, then go buy it.

The CIJ Jaguar Special HH has some new (OK, old, one is from around 1995 and the others are from around 1965, but still…) friends to keep it company, courtesy of extra summer-season moonlighting gig money from running live sound for Concerts in the Parks and various festivals:

…and thanks to an illustrious silent benefactor, inventor, acoustician, patron of the arts, and all-around audiovisual renaissance man, we’ve finally moved up to an Intel dual-dual-core Mac Pro with UAD-2, 16 gigs of RAM, and an embarrassment of terabytes of hard drives (two internal 2 TB drives, two internal 1.5 TB drives, an external 1TB, and a four-bay Drobo about to be filled with the rest of the hard drives stacked up in the corner…)

And now (drumroll please), back (once more) to actually working on music, instead of taking routers and soldering irons to funky Japanese guitars and poking at circuit boards with Phillips-head screwdrivers…stay tuned…

Weekend Update

June 21, 2010, 16:37 -05 by chris
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Another track in the can. 1 or 2 more and we’re considering posting a free EP while we finish up the rest of the album. http://j.mp/9DC39t

Should probably take the night off to try and wrap up work on the upcoming Sepiachord Passport compilation CD before getting back to our own material, though.

Also, new (to me) CIJ Fender Jaguar HH guitar and a laser-engraved neckplate for it arrived in the mail. Yeah, sure, every snotnosed kid within two hours of a Guitar Center has probably got one of the new imported-to-Fender-USA-dealers versions by now, but whatever. It’s pretty, and it sounds and plays great, and it’s one of the older 1994-95 versions from before they were sold Stateside. Earvana compensated nut upgrade and copper shielding tape and 12″ by 12″ copper-tape sheet are in the mail (as other online reviewers have noted, the humbuckers do a fine job of living up to their namesake, but the inadequately shielded internal wiring does not, which is not so cool when you’re sitting in a small room surrounded in every direction by computers and audio gear with big transformers). New strings, polish the frets, a little oil on the fretboard, a little tweak to the truss rod (understandable after a FedEx trek from Texas to the currently lame “Juneuary” Seattle weather), redo the intonation, and we’ll be golden. Or rather, black and chrome. Because “gold hardware” on any music equipment that’s not a Steinway or Bösendorfer is almost as stuffy and lame as sunburst finishes and “tortoise shell” pickguards.

I guess I just like gear to look vaguely machine-like and mysterious – like a piece of electrical equipment, and not so much like a piece of mobile-home furniture meant to hold recipe-card meatloaf and tater tot casseroles. “Airline” and “Danelectro” and “Vox Phantom” style guitars excepted, of course.

Maybe that’s just me.

Now if only Earvana and GraphTech would get together some sort of cross-licensing arrangement and offer the Earvana design nuts, but made out of the GraphTech Teflon-impregnated compound stuff, I’d be a seriously happy camper.

(White noise in a white room…)

June 7, 2010, 14:31 -05 by chris
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Mix revision number don’twannatalkaboutit in the can. Overdubs on the next song, need to pick up the pace on the rest of the tracks so we don’t end up spilling into 2011 and almost certain spontaneous studio seppuku. Live sound for someone else’s band over the weekend. Subwoofers, compact line arrays, and amp racks are heavy – even when they have wheels – when you have to push them a block and a half uphill both ways. Calves still a bit sore from that. More work on the next song tonight, mastering session for the next Sepiachord comp tomorrow, back to work on next song the rest of the week. Trying to avoid coveting a black-n-chrome Jaguar HH, Korg Monotron, Moog Voyager, and rumored upcoming Oberheim Two-Voice reissue. (I hear some talk of guns and butter…) 90% sure we’re gonna give an outside party a go at the whole mastering thing this time around for the upcoming Doll Factory tracks; as mastering other people gets easier and easier, mastering ourselves gets more difficult. Or at least less fun. We’ve done the fun part, now how about you make it loud. Onwards. (Hearing talk of joy in labour…)

Of Art, Coldly

May 20, 2010, 14:34 -05 by chris
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Local Dot Fry
Doctoral Fly
Dactyl Floor
Daftly Color
Draft Coolly
Cad Folly Rot
Talc Odor Fly
Clad Fry Tool
Card Fly Loot
Calf Toy Lord
Cool Dry Flat
Focal Old Try
Fact Droll Yo
Try Call Food
Cat Drool Fly
Lacy Rod Loft
Taco Doll Fry
Cool Dart Fly
Try Cold Loaf
Coy Troll Fad
Old Cry, Aloft!
Old Fart Cloy

Dude, is that Soundcheck Rock?

April 22, 2010, 18:54 -05 by chris
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How many times have you been out on the town and thought to yourself “you know what the fans at this experimental / IDM / glitch / ambient electronica show would really like to hear over the PA system? Some Skynrd, man!”? Well, it’s time to stop thinking and pick up the phone. Call our toll-free number and order Soundcheck Rock today!

You could spend countless hours, not to mention hundreds of dollars on Ticketmaster convenience fees, to track down these classic tracks. But now D-Fac Records has done the work for you! Featuring the original tracks from the original artists, Soundcheck Rock gathers front-of-house soundguys’ favorite tracks in one collection for three easy payments of only $19.95. Just one listen to how the pristine recording quality and excellent isolation of the hi-hat parts on Aja show off the clarity of your phase-corrected line-array system and time-aligned delay clusters, and you won’t care that you’re doing sound for a hardcore punk show!

Steely Dan

…and Steely Dan.

Order Soundcheck Rock today, and we’ll also include a bonus disc of generic, unidentifiable reggae instrumentals, perfect for warming up the crowd at No Depression / alt-country / Americana shows! Why just listen to music when every waking moment can be a captive-audience demo of the capabilities of your ‘rig’ for other sound dudes?

Soundcheck Rock. Because pristine recording quality always trumps artistic sensitivity and musical relevancy, so call now! Operators are standing by.

Did the Doll Factory totally ‘scoop’ the ‘Hipster runoffs’?

April 22, 2010, 15:34 -05 by chris
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Authentic indie meme / altbro blog ‘The Hipster Runoffs’ started an alt meme today comparing the personal brands of alt celebrities and P4k album covers, as an alternative ‘take’ on the mainstream ‘Totally Looks Like’ blog (run by the rich mainstream bro who owns ‘May I please have a cheeseburger?’ LOLcats and ‘This is an illustrative example of a failure!’ blogs and pays employees minimum wage, like an ‘Internet meme sweatshop’).

Kinda feel like ‘The Doll Factory’ did this authentic indie meme ‘Kinda Looks Like’ parody like three wks ago.

Are the ‘Doll Factory’ altbros ‘more authentic’ than ‘The Hipster Runoffs’?

Did the Doll Factories ‘scoop’ The Hipster Run Offs or is it ‘a total coincidence’ / ‘synchronicity’ like The Karl Jungs psychology-major college bro?

Is it more important to try to be ‘silly’ / ‘irreverent’ or should indie bands / music blogs be ‘serious’ like ‘the xx’ and work on cultivating their personal brand?

Should ‘The Doll Factories’ call a relevant ‘band meeting’? Is it more authentic / meaningful to have a band meeting at an ‘authentic Irish-bro pub’ or a ‘local microbrewery’?

Is sipping expensive beer on tap at a ‘brewpub’ in Ballard ‘authentic’ or do we have to ‘slam’ ‘PBR’ and ‘Sparks’ at ‘The Unicorns’ in ‘Capitol Hill’?

One C’est la Mort remix down…

April 19, 2010, 16:45 -05 by chris
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