It’s been a difficult week. I don’t talk about those, much, because that’s how you lose followers, but, well. There are a bunch of reasons, but talking about that has done me far more harm than good in the recent past, so there you aren’t.

I had a song recorded that I wanted to release to you guys this month. It’s a cover, sort of; one where I rewrote the traditional music the artist I’m covering used, but kept their (original) lyrics. But the copyright holder isn’t answering my mail. Maybe January.

So I’m going to do something I don’t usually do, since it seems a day for that. You’re getting a preview – lyrics to one of the new songs I’ve been writing.

The supervillains of CRIME and the Forces of Evil were superheroes, once. We lost; our world inverted, fell to villainy, who got to declare the new good. There’s nothing actually mystical about that – it wasn’t some sort of magic wand. As a rule, people follow authority.

Most of the old heroes switched right over, and are still thought of as heroes. “Thought You Knew” is written to one of them, in fact; the first song written after the fall.

We didn’t. Those of us who refused to yield, well – here we are. The new supervillains.

I’ve been writing the song about where we lost, or, at least, where the loss became inevitable. I haven’t played it out, yet – it has edits today – but I probably will, in February. And it seems fitting – with Congressional approval of the indefinite suspension of right to trial, and SOPA, the new Internet corporate censorship bill – to post it now.

“Scene from a Starship on Fire” (Working title only)
(C) 2009-2011 Dara Korra’ti/CRIME and the Forces of Evil
(There are bits I wrote in 2009, but didn’t finish; this is how I write.)

From the forthcoming album, Din of Thieves

intro rhythmic, like a siren, or alarm

What the hell?
What the hell are you doing?
Where the hell have you been?
Have you seen this disaster?
I don’t know where to begin

There’s a moment when I look at you and see the world ending
There’s a moment when I look at you and hope that you choke
There’s a moment when I think of you and run like the devil
There’s a moment when I look at you and simply cannot joke

What the hell?
What the hell are you doing?
What the hell does that mean?
Don’t you know what you’ve started?
Are you a part of this scene?

In the second that you turned around I knew it was over
In the second that you turned around I knew you were gone
In the second that you thought of it I blanched at the insight
In the second that you shifted weight the weapons were drawn

What the hell?
What the hell are you doing?
What’s got into your brain?
How could you do this on purpose?
Are you completely insane?

In the smallest crack of madness lurks a simple unwinding
In the smallest crack of crazy I see light in your eyes
In the smallest slip of costume there’s a clarity moment
In the smallest careless instant I see through your disguise

What the hell?
What the fuck were you hiding?
Just what have you become?
You know full well where this takes you?
You aren’t the first to succumb

Watching you change as though turned on a nickel the
Moulding takes shape as you’re spun on the stone
Is there even a thought that you’ll naught but betray me
Do you need, do you want, will you reap what you’ve sown?
Spinning so slowly as your angles assuage you
The steel and the sharpness stand in by your side
The cast of your shadows changes slowly to ember
But this time I’m ready; I know now that you lied

What the hell?
What the hell were you making?
Why have you gone for your knife?
Don’t you know I don’t love you?
But you do not own my life
What the hell?
What the fuck were you thinking?
We made a pretty good team
You made an awful decision
Only now
do I see it’s part of the scheme
What the hell?

Lifeboats, everyone;
Abandon ship.

Hey, guys, I posted earlier this week about hosting Annie Henry for a house concert – well, she’s come down with the flu! So we’re having to CANCEL THE SHOW. You don’t want flu germs anyway.

We’ll try to reschedule the show for January. Keep an eye out for that!

I’m going to round up the indie maker recommendations from the Recommendations Post, in a minute. But before that…

…I have another question! It doesn’t work as a poll, so let’s just go for answers-in-comments again. Specifically:

Who inspires you?

Artistically, musically, engineeringly, whatever. Shit is all fucked up and bullshit, as the sign said, but people keep going anyway. Some of that’s determined ignorance, but not all of it. So: who inspires you? Not what: who.

Leave comments. Others might take notes.

And as promised, indie recommendations-from-fans time! These are all from comments:

• From Christi, we have Qrafted by Queannah (http://www.etsy.com/people/QraftedByQueannah) – fun, whimsical stuff with Legos. She also has textile crafts and beadwork.
• From GlennS, we have two recommendations: Talis Kimberley (http://www.talis.net), green filky folk with a British accent and Morse code, and Jen VanBlargan’s Love Medusa Crafts (http://www.etsy.com/shop/lovemedusa?ref=si_shop), necklaces and bracelets with no clasp.
• From Shasta Willson, we have Jack Lewis’s small-press book, Nothing in Reserve (http://www.jaxworx.com/nothing-in-reserve/)
• From Angela Korra’ti, we have Repeating History, a mashup of time travel romance and Western! (http://mmjustus.com/fictionRepeatingHistory.html)
• From Dmitri, we have Tormented Artifacts (http://www.tormentedartifacts.com) – a wide mix of stuff from handmade leather pieces to props to found-art pieces, prints, digital artwork, and other items.
• From Eirewolf, we have their original leather masks and fantasy sculptures at http://eirewolf.artfire.com
• From Annie Henry, we have her Indiegogo project to fund her first album! It’s like Kickstarter, but a different website: http://www.indiegogo.com/traditions
• From Roger, we have handmade steampunk leather and accessories (http://www.steampunkedout.com)
• And finally, from Gear, who I’m pretty sure is Gifted, we have Beth Kinderman’s “pretty awesome prog-rock folk music” – http://bethkinderman.bandcamp.com/ and http://www.bethkinderman.com/buy.htm

And, of course, I recommend my own studio album, Dick Tracy Must Die, which is about as handmade as CDs and digital recordings can be. Buy the studio album for someone, or just for yourself! Short on cash, as so many people are right now? Download Cracksman Betty and/or Espionage: Live from Mars for anything you can afford, including free, and give as stocking stuffers.

G’wan, take a look. ^_^

Finally, I have SOLVED THE LINUX PROBLEM! o/ For details, see comments in the original post. Thanks go out to several people, but particularly to criacow on Twitter who pointed me at a sane explanation for how to swap out kernel images cleanly. I’m now running Linux kernel 3.1.5 underneath Ubuntu 10.4, which is vaguely hilarious, but which fixes the crash bug and gave me room enough to get the hardware running. Yay! My tiny studio is now somewhat less tiny! SIX CHANNEL RECORDING WOOOOOOOOOOOO! 😀

ARE YOU OR DO YOU KNOW A SERIOUSLY HARDCORE LINUX PERSON?

If so, I need their help. Please forward this around, I have a problem and I’d really like a workaround or fix.

THIS IS INTENSELY GEEKY. You have been warned.

I have a shiny new USB 2.0 Audio-compatible device, a TASCAM US-800. It validates as a generic USB 2.0 Audio device under OSX, and all the I/O ports are available. With drivers, it works also under Windows XP, to which my studio system can dual-boot. (Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L MB, BIOS version FI 2010/08/12.)

I plug it into my studio system when booted to Ubuntu (10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), 2.6.32-35-generic, all patches applied) and the Ubuntu machine falls over dead right after acknowledging the USB device. If I’m in Gnome the whole thing dies almost immediately; if I’m in a text console I have more time. The task queue fills because CPU0 soft-hangs.

Again, the exact same machine in exact same configuration, booted to Windows XP, works fine.

What appears to happen is some sort of interrupt fuckery (“ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)”) and the USB hub controller loses an interrupt and doesn’t realise it, or, looking at the call stack and audio.c, maybe has an extra interrupt mapped to it somehow? With predictably hilarious, by which I mean disastrous, results.

Here is a syslog dump from a boot-through-dying session. It’s pretty typical. The adventures start at 15:41:29. Note the call stack. Note also “BUG: soft lockup – CPU#0 stuck for 61s! [khubd:29].”

This appears to be the most closely-related kernel bug report. It’s acknowledged as a bug but hasn’t been touched in a year. 🙁 I am not convinced it’s identical, in part because the workaround described down at the bottom (booting with noacpi) does not work for me.

I really, really, really want to be able to use this hardware on my Linux DAW. I can, yes, use it with my MacBook and Garage Band, or CUBASE on the same hardware as the Linux DAW, and shuffle files over. But both of those options kinda suck.

Anybody have a workaround? Or a dev machine that can analyse this? Pretty-please?

THREE TOPICS! ONE POST! Much less disturbing than implied by that phrasing!

ONE: On the last tour, people suggested that I should do a concert on Second Life. Apparently this is something people do:

Someone Else’s Gig in Second Life

And they do it with actual live performance fed in via Shoutcast servers. I am adventurous and want to try this. I have found this guide, which seems helpful. But the real trick – as always – is getting an inside contact.

Are you on Second Life? Do you know venues looking for an artist? Talk to me! And show them videos from the last tour, and point them to the band website. This sounds amusing and I want to try it if I find a good venue manager.

TWO: I can announce that we are hosting an Annie Henry house concert this Saturday, December 17^th! Doors open 6pm, show starts 7pm. We’ve had to CANCEL! Annie’s come down with the flu. You don’t want it. We’ll try again in January.

Live at Murkworks North

It’s funny; I’ve played house concerts, and been to other peoples’, but I’ve never hosted one before. If you are in Cascadia and want to trek to the Kenmore high lowlands, contact me! And if you’re on Facebook, Annie has put up an event page, here. Go RSVP!

THREE: The recommendations post has a bunch of recommendations in comments now, but you can still add more. I’ll recap on Wednesday, so if you know a local-ish to you crafter, musician, artist, writer, or whatever, and they have items for sale this gift-giving season, comment with info and URL before then!

And, of course, if you’re looking for a gift, I hope you’ll consider giving some of my music. I need ears, so if you want to download and burn some of the pay-what-you-like music as a stocking stuffer, please do! Just tell them where it came from. ^_^ And consider hosting a house concert! I’m trying to set up a February/March tour. 😀

I have some more things in process that I hope I can talk about soon, but that’s all for today.

So, if you’re like me, you still have gifts to buy. And while I hope some of you will buy something from me as gifts, I could use some suggestions. And I imagine some of you could, too!

A lot of you are indie artists or crafters or musicians, or have independent artists, crafters, or musicians you like. RECOMMEND THEM HERE! Or, if you’re the maker, link to your own stuff!

Click through and leave recommendations and suggestions in comments on the main band blog, please, so they’re all in the same place and easier to find. ^_^ Recommend away!

I had a hose clamp left over from another project, so came up with a new DIY pop filter design, and now I’ve made a howto video for it:

For those who don’t know, sounds like P and B and D are called “plosives,” and include a rush forward of air that shows up in recordings as kind of a low-frequency thunk. You can go buy a nice pop filter – which is basically just nylon stocking on a hoop – or you can make one yourself.

The difficult part tends to be attaching them to things so they stay in place. This one fits into a standard mic clip, which means no secondary noise transmission, and no futzing around with velco or whatever. Pop it into the clip, position it, and you’re done.

I’ve done some studio experiments with this new design, and it is dramatically better than my old version. I threw some intentionally super-severe popping of plosive sounds at it today (P-P-P-POW, P-P-P-POW, really punching those Ps as hard as I could), and where the old filter could only reduce them, this new design stopped three out of four outright. Under realistic conditions, it stopped everything. AND: it’s otherwise sonically transparent, so far.

So if you know anybody building their own equipment, well, here y’go, have a design. ^_^

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.

I had to upload the last few videos at standard definition instead of HD. I have no idea why, they’re HD resolution on my machine, but the web interface insisted. Still, they’re up!

I’ve got enough videos up there for an entire set at this point. 😀

I’m making a new, nicer pop filter for my studio mic mostly because working with the coathanger one is kind of annoying. So of course I’m making a DIY video of the process. I didn’t start out making a video, but realised after the first round of gluing that I should. That’ll be up in a day or two.

(Assuming I fight off whatever this is. I feel like six kinds of ass today. Blick.)

Boost this musician! Second-disc shipping is free right now on Bandcamp, and multi-disc orders are discounted 30% on CD Baby. Or download Cracksman Betty or Espionage and burn them to CDs as stocking-stuffer gifts!

Okay, yeah, definitely time for more meds. I hope this is just a 24-hour thing, because I feel like I’ve been hit by a car, and having been hit by a car, I know what I’m talking about. G’night!

I’ve been on a video-uploading rampage. I’m currently trying to upload even more (“Shout at the Desert,” specifically) but YouTube is balking. Hopefully it’ll be up by the time you read this; check out the channel:

CRIME and the Forces of Evil YouTube Channel

Most have more stage banter than this one does. I really want to give venue managers a better look at what I do right now.

So hopefully this is a pretty good look. Some of you have been to at least one of these shows – what do you think?

PS: Wednesday’s post was a bit TL;DR, but support your artists and musicians, directly. It’s the opposite of the we-own-your-stuff-forever system.

Self-promotion is the downside of trying to be an independent musician. I don’t have VH-1, I don’t have VEVO, I don’t have Billboard Magazine, I don’t have radio stations, I don’t have record stores.

I have you guys, and I have my website. And the website is useless without you guys. You who like the album, who think it’s worth hearing, who think its themes are relevant and interesting?

You’re the ones who make this work, or not.

I need ears. Am I in this for the money? That’s hilarious. I want to make a living at this, of course, but I’d make literally orders of magnitude more money consulting part-time. And it’d be less work.

But this is my art. And what I really want is for my music to find its listeners.

So I’m asking you to help.

• Order a copy, play it for people. Order the studio album as a gift, if you have a copy already. I have free shipping on second/third/fourth CDs on Bandcamp. On CD Baby, second/third/fourth copies are discounted by $3 each.
• If you like Cracksman Betty or Espionage, the free/pay-what-you-want albums, download and burn them for someone else as a stocking-stuffer.
   
• Just tell people. Like the band page on Facebook, point people at Bandcamp, leave a review or just Like the album on on Amazon or iTunes Music Store, or on your own blog or Livejournal or Facebook or Google+ page.

I may joke about buying in to the whole Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday noise – and I do, believe me – but it really does matter. I care about my art, and I want it to be heard. There are endless numbers of good reasons to slam the record companies – and I do – but what you cannot deny is their ability to promote. They can sell anything, and do.

And then take all your money and leave you bankrupt. That’s the downside. Their way sucks.

Some of us – more and more of us – are trying to find other ways. I’m patterning after people like Marian Call, Leannan Sidhe, SJ Tucker, Ultraklystron, Rai Kamishiro, dozens if not hundreds of others. We’re all indie musicians, doing exactly the opposite of the Big Record Label Model. We’re relying on your ability, and willingness, to share what you like, rather than screwing you down as tightly as possible to their ideas about how they should own everything you hear and see.

It’s their way, vs. your ability to share. I don’t want their way. I want yours. That’s why there’s no DRM on any of my work.

So support your artists – musical, visual, whatever – directly, whoever they are. Not just through money, tho’ that’s good, but through sharing stuff, and through talking about what you like.

Including, I hope, me. Thank you.

PS: I’ve been going through the video and audio from the show on the 18th. I’ll be dropping at least one of those on the YouTube channel by the end of the week. Keep an eye out.