…AND WE’RE LIVE. Yes, it’s the triple-pronged three-fisted trifecta of musical attack from the unique combination of Great Big Sea (courtesy their karaoke contest), Twelve Good Measures, and CRIME and the Forces of Evil, featuring the first-ever video directed by me, along with lots of good Criminal engineering, lyrics, and vocals. Muah ha ha, our plot is afoot!

(The winner of this contest gets guest-of-band backstage passes to the Vancouver show, so fuck yeah mudkips, I do wanna win!)

MINIONS! YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MUST DO! CHAERG TO IT!

The official VIDEO
The official free high-quality AUDIO (pick yer format)
The unofficial OUTTAKES video

Crime and the Forces of Evil, in cooperation with Twelve Good Measures, ask that all listeners and viewers please stand by for an important announcement coming very soon. If you have been following recent Criminal proceedings, you may have some idea of the nature of this upcoming announcement, but please be alarmed as the details of this attack announcement may have changed.

Stay tuned to this RSS feed for further bulletins as they are released.

(It’s all very exciting, isn’t it? We’re excited. Are you excited?)

Side project rolls along hardcore. We wrapped principal photography today; I’m ‘way tired so you can read Anna’s post here on it. But we shot 18 shots today (more than scheduled because of being about 2/3rds of the way rained out yesterday), and I’m even reasonably happy with most of them, given that I’ve never shot video before this project. I’m still quite happy with the audio, of course, but that hasn’t changed in days – not since the day after I was supposedly going back to working on Stars. But! I did do some work on Stars this past week as well. Just not all that much, because of all the video work I’ve been doing instead.

Yeah this isn’t the smartest thing in the world from a personal-music-progress standpoint but it’s been six kinds of fun.

Anyway. Next we edit the video together. I’ll link to it (and separately to the mp3) when it’s done. It’ll be a free download, of course, like all the contest entries, but I’ll have it on the bandcamp site just for convenience.

Tired now. Go read Anna’s post instead. ^_^

For the last several days, I’ve been working on a side project; an entry in a Great Big Sea karaoke contest that Anna wants to enter. The band released some instrumental tracks from the new CD and said ‘get creative’ with the audio and video; the only rule is no lip-synching, it has to be your voices on the recording; winner gets backstage passes and such.

Anna’s in charge of video, and I’m musical director for the project, my part of which just wrapped up tonight after several days of recording and engineering on a tight schedule. I’m not sure they were anticipating extra lyrics written for the bridge, a ten-voice choral harmony brick, or an added irish bouzouki track, but that’s what they’re getting. It’s embargoed until the video goes up – I’ve shot a bunch of video for Anna already, we’ll be shooting a lot more next weekend – but I’m really pleased with it.

I like these side projects because they’re fun, but also because they teach me things. This one taught me more things about timing, a fair bit about really precise level control, and some things about staging. They’re all recording talents, but I need those too. Working with other people’s material lets me learn how to match what they’re doing, which means I learn how to do things I don’t normally do. So if you’re trying to learn any of these skills, I recommend it. It’s educational.

I also got to get some idea about how I deal with other people in the studio. I was in charge here, and the buck does stop with me on the audio, but I really think I did a pretty good job at helping people get their best performances recorded, giving all these different people the levels of help and direction they needed. And I could tell that it helped having a clear artistic direction to communicate to them; I think I got it across most of the time, tho’ occasionally it took a few re-explanations to get it properly out of my head and into theirs.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited. Tomorrow I go back to working on Stars, and hopefully I can apply some more knowledge, like I did with Shout at the Desert after working on the Buckaroo Banzai fan project, “The Diesel-Driven Eight Dimensional Jet Car Blues.”

Next show on the 20th, Juanita Bay asking me back. Back to work!

I can has an official fan list! I’m working on something that’ll be a bonus track for listmembers, too, if I can make it work the way I want to. Not sayin’ what it is, ’cause that’d be telling! It’ll be a bit of fun, tho’. And evil. Like y’should!

Also, if you missed Leannan Sidhe’s first show Saturday night, you missed somebody new getting off to a good start. Shanti’s music is very much unlike mine in a deeply oldschool way and it’ll be very interesting to see what she does with it. Plus, unannounced mid-show bonus set by Alexander James Adams, who just felt like stopping by! And maybe yours truly threw in a bit in the afterparty. Hard to say. I been makin’ a habit of that lately, so it totally coulda happened. Totally.

Verizon has hardware problems right now affecting a very small number of people – meaning us – and it’s still not fixed going into the weekend. And it’s gotten much worse over the last hour! It’s fuckin’ awesome! So if you’re trying to reach me, it’s probably smart to forget email until Monday. (It’ll get queued up; there’s just no telling when it’ll get delivered.) If you’re trying to listen to songs on the band website and manage to catch us in a moment of connectivity, go to the bandcamp site (http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.bandcamp.com) and play stuff there. Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s all in Verizon’s hands, they have bad hardware at some sort of substation and it’s just getting worse.

So I’m bodging together improvements to the band website and I’m wondering: what would you want on it? I know I need a mailing list of some sort (eventually, anyway) but what else is missing?

After some work, http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com is now slightly less provisional. Check it.

So the Oregon trip went mostly really well, with one major fail moment which was not my own. But as a whole? Awesome. A girl could get used to that lifestyle. Seriously used to it.

I drove down to Eugene on Sunday to spend the night with internet friends there, since the whole show thing was so far away. Passing the 45th parallel in a car was a first, and conceptually kind of amazing; I tried to get a photo of the sign, but missed both times. I stopped in a rest stop to make a peanut better sammich and eat fruit rolls and ended up having a hot dog from racecar driver Ed and his partner Nancy going up from an event in Oregon to another event in Washington. It’s some sort of sub-NASCAR circuit and they don’t make a lot of money but they have fun, and it was really just nice meeting them!

I’d never been to the Willamette Valley before, and damn that thing is wide and flat. I expected flat – it’s farming country – but I didn’t know you lost site of the edges. I kept thinking MOUNTAINS I MISS YOU! and eventually they came back, and I got down to Andra’s house and met her partner Sandra and housemate Jana and ended up geeking about her music theory work and we had all sorts of fun. Thanks for dinner and crash space! And brownies! Yum. ^_^

I set out to Redmond in the morning, forgetting to get gas before leaving Eugene because why would I buy gasoline? I just bought gasoline yesterday. How could I need more? It hasn’t even been three weeks! So I stopped at a store on the way which had all the hallmarks of an updated 1920s/1930s general store and gas station, complete with antique coolers with huge wooden doors. I love those.

The mountain passes had these amazing stripes of silver trees – there’d been a forest fire, which is sad, but everything left behind kind of shone and glittered. I tried to take pictures while driving because I didn’t have time to stop, and you can see a little of it in a couple of the shots. It was both sad and gorgeous.

Redmond’s a nice town. I like the new park, and the 1940 late-nouveau city hall, and the amphitheatre is pretty big, really, for a three-teir theatre. Sadly – and this is the big fail – the event I was playing got cancelled after I got there, due to high winds. But I looked around and realised that neither the amphitheatre nor those kids playing in the amphitheatre’s fountain were blowing away, so decided that, well, y’know what? The event can be cancelled; I’m not. So even though most people left before I even started, I played anyway, and made the 8-10 kids and their parents who stayed behind very happy, and all the kids came up with their quarters and pennies, and I gave them stickers, and we all had a good time.

An archeologist named Fred out in Burns gave me crash space for the night, so out into the badlands I went! And I’m so glad I did. I had no idea the Oregon high desert was so… astonishing. I thought the valley was wide? No. This was akin to another planet. I have photos that look like moon photos. I got eyestrain from the hours of focus-on-infinity the trip entails.

The whole trip out to Burns was just hypnotic. The strange low ecosphere hiding out in one metre above the ground? Crazytalk amazing. The deep violet colours with the greens and the yellows? Completely unexpected. I wish I could photograph it. I tried again, even knowing it never works. Stupid cameras. And, pleasantly, not as hot as I’d expected. Then I got there and met up with Fred for the Mexican dinner and conversation and better directions and a little obsidian arrowhead! I have it upstairs. Thanks, Fred! (He made it himself. ^_^ )

The next morning, I went to Glass Butte. I wanted a piece of volcanic glass, and… it was just lying out there waiting for me. Glass Butte DOES NOT LIE. It was everywhere. I got there at the wrong time of day to see the reported glitter effect, but on the other hand, everything kind of glittered out there – even the plants – so I doubt I missed too much. I also saw elk tracks, and a strange little lizard visited for about two seconds too long – I spotted it before it noticed I’d seen it, and then it ran like hell.

I went north the dry way, through the pass at Mt. Hood, looking at ancient river canyons and listening to tribal radio while rolling through Road Runner cartoon-style buttes down side roads and old highways and parts of 99. I’m pretty sure I spotted the pass of Caradhras on Mt. Hood. Someday I want to trace the old 99 route out as much as it survives in Cascadia, and travel it as best it can be travelled, but that’s for a later time.

Then yesterday, I had my final show of this long June/July set, at Juanita Bay, and now I go back into the studio for a big push on Dick Tracy. This man’s needed killin’ too long. It’s time for a reckoning.

Hey, I’m on the front page! Of the Juanita Beach Friday Market webpage, where I’m playing Friday from 5-7pm. They’ve had to move over a bit to get out of the way of construction, so I’ll be getting to test out my SUPERS BATTERY AMP OMG, and I’ll probably be one of the few acts there this year with a PA at all! Yay, experiments! I hope some of you can come.

Normally they have a nice grassy seating area, but I don’t know whether that’s true this year. I suspect it is – it’s still at the beach park and there’s a lot of grass and beach and it’s nice. Directions are at the website, or you can just map 9703 NE Juanita Drive, Kirkland, Washington.

And I meant to write up more about the Oregon trip – I’m still shaking desert dust out of everything – but it’s after midnight and I’ve been going nonstop last night and all day today, so it’s bedtime for now. More later for sure!