679

The more I do, see, and learn, the more it becomes clear that everything I become involved with becomes a disaster of heroic proportion.

I hate what I do to the world around me, and I hate myself for doing it. I feel like a clumsy child trying to repair painted eggshells and smashing them all in the process.

The world would be a better place if I weren’t involved. The eggshells might still be broken, but they wouldn’t be destroyed.

Tour Diary – Day 2 (Columbus, OH)

Due to an equipment failure (alarm clock), we were late getting on the road to our Columbus show. We’re all running on Very Little Sleep, so things are very smelly, scruffy, and twitchy.

We also got a speeding ticket, which was nice.

The venue itself was a little place called The High Five, and while the staff and manager were very nice, the sound was complete shit and the turnout was worse. As it turned out, the booking agent didn’t give them a tech rider beforehand, and I guess the sound man was ill-prepared for the type of music we’re playing.

So, after playing to a dozen people or so, we went down to Columbus’ big goth/industrial club (Why didn’t we play there, you ask? I’ll let you know after I yell at the booking agent some more), and did a bunch of Cyanotic giveaways, and made the DJ play a few tracks from the album. Given that the crowd went ballistic, I should expect we’ll play there next time around.

It was a surprisingly awesome venue, even if the music was mostly retro and/or EBM. There was a fetish section full of people who actually knew their stuff, and were’n into not fashion. Walls of floggers, very nice racks (with bolt cutters on the floor beside them), a number of electro-play items (TENS unit, violet wands, etc).

We chatted for a bit with a few people who’re really involved in the scene here (I think Flesh Field asked Sean to do breaks for their next album), and then headed off. We’re en route now to a hotel outside Pittsburgh, and we’re going to spend the day tomorrow doing promo at record stores and alt.clothing shops. That’s the idea, at least. I haven’t heard shit from the booking agent as to where the good stores in this town are, so it might make my idea a little difficult.

Today’s driving music: Ice Cube – The Predator, Lil Jon – Crunk Juice, Empusae – Error 404

Tour Diary: Day 1

Tour Diary: Day 1
Unlabeled pictures are in my Flickr acct)

Today’s plans began with a simple task: Pick up the minivan reserved for us at Enterprise.

This plan was complicated when Enterprise changed the terms of the rental agreement without notice. Originally, the requirements were that the primary driver has a license and a credit card, on which they will put a $200 hold until the car is returned.

When we attempted to rent the car, we discovered that they had changed the terms to require a hold being placed on the credit card for the full amount of the rental, plus $100.

Given that the full rental cost is well above the credit limit of anyone involved in this little adventure, this caused a few problems.

These problems were made even more pressing by the fact that I had spent an entire day on the phone earlier in the week, during which time I discovered that Enterprise was the only car rental company within 50 miles that had any vans available.

Not having a van would mean we would have to cancel the entire tour, 12 hours before we were scheduled to play our first show.

I ended up knocking on the door of every car rental company in the cities of South Bend and New Carlyle, hoping for some kind of miracle — and in an incredibly rare stroke of luck, the final car rental company in the area had just received an early van return.

It wasn’t just any crappy minivan, either. It was a fullsized touring van. The kind with reading lights, and blinds on the windows.

I am sitting in it right now. It is very nice indeed.

After somehow coming up with a massive cash deposit (which would not have been possible without the foresight and generosity of my leslie-bee), we rented the van and headed back to home base.

Almost as if by magic, a delivery van arrived at the same time we did. Suddenly, we were armed with all 1000 copies of the new compilation CD that we’re releasing, as well as an advance shipment of the new Cyanotic and Ad·ver·sary shirts.

My friends, let me tell you something. I was very worried about these adversary shirts. The design I submitted was complicated and difficult to screenprint, the inks I chose were unusual and exotic, and the base t-shirts I asked for were extraordinarily expensive (using sweatshop-free materials is a very costly thing). If I had gone with a standard white-ink-on-generic-black-material tshirt, I could have gotten four times the number of shirts I got for the same amount of money; and so I was very worried.

Until I actually saw them, that is. These are some fucking awesome shirts.

Seriously. Fucking awesome.

So, we somehow manage to tetris a thousand CDs, a hunded shirts, six people, five equipment rigs and four fullsized luggage cases into this van, and then it’s off to Allegan, Michigan.

The venue itself was fantastic, and reminded me a fair bit of The Haunt in Ithaca. (There was a local opening band which played a pretty fucked-up cross of metal, prog, and post-rock. It was pretty weird.)

The set went well, mostly. My laptop did a lot of very interesting things that it never did during practice (of course), so for our encore we played two songs that we fucked up the first time around. It was much more awesome than it sounds – the second time around, everyone knew how the songs went and were much more into it. There was even a mosh pit at one point, which was pretty impressive considering that it was a relatively small turnout.

The sound tech asked us for our contact info and a copy of our CD, as his friend is a guitarist for Rob Zombie and Ozzy Osbourne, and also happens to manage the booking for Ozzfest. He was of the opinion that we should join the tour next summer, which would indeed be awesome, but I’m not going to get my hopes up.

It would be pretty fucking cool, though.

…

Tour Diary – Day 2

Due to an equipment failure (alarm clock), we were late getting on the road to our Columbus show. We’re all running on Very Little Sleep, so things are very smelly, scruffy, and twitchy.

We also got a speeding ticket, which was nice.

674

Tour Diary updates will resume shortly.

It is with great regret that I must announce the cancellation of the following dates:

Charlotte, NC
Spartanburg, SC
Tampa, FL
Spring Hill, FL
Ft. Myers, FL
Atlanta, GA
Memphis, TN
St. Louis, MO

A number of logistical difficulties arose which made it impossible for us to play in those cities, on those dates.

More specifically, the booking agent is fucking useless.

We are in the process of booking a makeup tour to hit the cities we can’t make on this tour (and a few more in the area), which hopefully should happen around Fall/Winter. We put together a special merch bundle for people who live in one of the cities which had its show cancelled, so if you’re not able to see the show, at least we can get the new merch, compilations and tour album to you.

$20 + S&H
1 Cyanotic shirt
VA – Hordes of the Elite
VA – Modern Destruction 1.1
10 Cyanotic stickers
5 Adversary stickers

$40 + S&H
1 Cyanotic shirt
1 Adversary shirt
Cyanotic vs Adversary – Music for jerks
VA – Hordes of the elite
VA – Modern destruction 1.1
VA – dark sonus
10 Cyanotic stickers
10 Adversary stickers

Edit: Prices now obsolete. :)

Tour Diary, Day -4

Today, much like yesterday, was full of chaos. I’m managing this tour now, it seems, so I’m trying to get all the shit in order. Madness.

We tried to break the stress by taking a trip to IHOP to partake of their delicious iced tea, which is unlimited and flows like a river.

You iHip and you iHop

Sadly, their iced tea brewing dealie was broken, and we were denied its rejuvinating powers. So we went home. And then we slept.

Today was spent on the phone with every car rental place within 100 miles, looking to find a place that both has a full-size van for rent, and also lacks a 25-and-above age restriction. This is an impossible quest, of course, so we’re going to be forced to rent a minivan, which means we’re going to have to cut two people off the tour.

One of these two people is pretty angry, but fuck him. It’s just not possible, and he’s being a jerk.

After a morning on the phone, the afternoon was spent finalizing the two tour CD-R compilations that we’re bringing with us. Most of this was wasted time, as we later discovered that my laptop sound card was distorting the fuck out of everything.

So.

We spent another hour undoing the previous four hours work, and then we were off to Invisible Records to drop it off.

Guns 'n' Rosaries
You eat out of that?STUFF
Change!Psychadelic Nun

We were there for an hour or so (the fridge full of free Red Bull may have contributed to this), and he was kind enough to spend the majority of that time giving me advice on tour management. The man is a fucking wizard.

He asked if Leslie and I could write a story or two for a book that he’s putting together on the music industry. A promoter’s perspective on how-not-to-get-fucked. (Clearly, he’s a poor judge of character.)

Then, a mostly-uneventful walk home (which was filled with tasty italian lemonade), a brief stop at the grocery store, and here we are.

POWER!Lights + Camera = Action

Tomorrow I advance all the venues, and we drive up to South Bend to spend the rest of the week practicing and getting to know the gear. Martin wants me to give him a ring to fill him in on what’s happening with the venues, as he’s just as concerned as I am about the fact that the booking agent is a completely useless douche of colossal proportions. I am afraid of what we will learn.

…but now the time for Demolition Man draws near.

Update: We went with Robocop.

uh huh

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE CHICAGO/ROMEOVILLE IL
403 AM CDT MON JUL 17 2006

HOT AND HUMID CONDITIONS WILL PERSIST TODAY WITH AFTERNOON HIGH TEMPERATURES IN THE MIDDLE 90S. THE COMBINATION OF THE HOT TEMPERATURES AND THE HIGH HUMIDITY WILL ALLOW FOR PEAK AFTERNOON HEAT INDICES UP TO 105. A COLD FRONT WILL APPROACH NORTHERN ILLINOIS THIS EVENING…BRINGING SOME RELIEF FROM THE HEAT.

AN EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING MEANS THAT A PROLONGED PERIOD OF DANGEROUSLY HIGH TEMPERATURES WILL OCCUR. THE COMBINATION OF HIGH TEMPERATURES AND HUMIDITY WILL COMBINE TO CREATE A DANGEROUS SITUATION IN WHICH HEAT ILLNESSES ARE LIKELY. DRINK PLENTY OF FLUIDS…STAY IN AN AIR-CONDITIONED ROOM…AND CHECK UP ON RELATIVES AND NEIGHBORS…PARTICULARLY THE ELDERLY AND CHILDREN.

DIAL 311 FOR THE LOCATIONS OF COOLING SHELTERS AND TO REPORT HEAT RELATED PROBLEMS.

EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 PM CDT THIS EVENING.

ILZ014-171715-
/O.CON.KLOT.EH.W.0001.000000T0000Z-060718T0000Z/

Music for Jerks

Anyone who knows me knows exactly how I feel about what’s going on, so I’m not going to waste anyone’s time by writing it all out.

…

I’m off to Chicago in 12 hours, and then we spend a week writing and practicing together before we hit the road.

Between work, this tour and The Bride of Dark Carnival, I’ve been pushing 80-hour weeks for at least month and a half.

I can’t fucking wait until shit is done, and we can just get on stage and play.

That will be like a thousand vacations, all at once.

…

Love you, sexy baby.

This town needs an enema.

For those of you who will be seeing Cyanotic and Ion tour, here’s a sneak preview of one of the 3 (three!) new compilations we’ve put together for this little outing:

Rabbit Junk – Industrial is Dead (Demo)

like some girl in a snuff video
with a chord around her neck
and her veins full of blow
she’s dancing like she doesn’t know
that she’s hanging in the morgue with industrial
so gothed out like “black number 1”
She’d rather slit her wrists than have some fun
Shaking her corpse to the same old shit
Playing it safe is boring, isn’t it!?

Oi! Mr. DJ, what records are ya playin’ today
Oi! Mr. DJ, are you gonna play the same damn thing that you did yesterday

This ghetto
abysmal
like gangstas
in limbo
creation
invasion
a fortress
a mission
arrested
infested
this corpse has been re-animated
pale embrace in a sick romance
it’s dead and gone but still they all dance

Every day is Halloween
but it’s Halloween stuck in ’93
And it makes me think of the good old days
of skinny puppy and ministry
combat boots and pvc
Dressing up like a scary drag queen
It’s dead and gone, so let’s move on
Industrial R.I.P.

If yer lookin for a zombie fuck
then get your kicks at the “club noc noc” (Seattle, WA.)
dancing all ro-bot-ic
120 bpm goin tic toc tic toc

un-dead posers drinking at the bar
and broken pretty things that can’t get very far
and the 3 legged dogs that are on the the prance
I say step aside bitches I’m here to dance

Let’s fucking dance

655

Friends and foes, I am happy to announce that I will be joining Cyanotic for their upcoming HAIL THE GLITCH tour. These are the cities/dates we’ll be hitting:

Jul 21 - Grounds Sphere Rhythm - Allegan, MI
Jul 22 - High Five - Columbus, OH
Jul 23 - Garfield Artworks - Pittsburgh, PA
Jul 24 - The Penny Arcade - Rochester, NY
Jul 26 - TBA - Boston, MA
Jul 27 - Bottom's Up - Flushing/Queens - New York, NY
Jul 28 - The Sterling [Rock Room] - Allentown, PA
Jul 29 - TBA - Baltimore, MD
Jul 30 - Wetlands - Chapel Hill, NC
Jul 31 - TBA - Charlotte, NC
Aug 02 - Ground Zero - Spartanburg, SC
Aug 03 - TBA - Tampa, FL
Aug 04 - Saints & Sinners - Spring Hill, FL
Aug 05 - TBA - Atlanta, GA
Aug 06 - TBA - Nashville, TN
Aug 08 - Creepy Crawl - St. Louis, MO
Aug 09 - Double Door - Chicago, IL
Aug 10 - TBA - South Bend, IN

Additionally, I have taken the liberty of slightly modifying the tour poster to indicate the change in lineup.

If you live in one of these lovely cities, please come say hi. I promise not to suck.*

* not actually a promise

Labtobs

My friends,

Does anyone have a fairly recent laptop that they would be willing to rent to me for a month? I promise to treat it as if it were my own child. Better, in all likelyhood, as a Jairus Jr. would probably freak me out pretty bad.

I’ll happily pay you in dollars, cookies, web design, hardware, recreational chemicals, or whatever else you’d like.

Please hope me, internets!

652

To start my day today, I stumbled across a right-wing message board (full of people I’ve never talked to) that had a thread dedicated to the purpose of insulting me, my education, and my politics.

It’s like I never left high school.

…

This has been a shit month. (A shit year, perhaps, but who’s counting?)

Months and months of work on a show thrown out the window, when 4 of 6 bands and 1 of 2 venues back out, leading to the most stressful event I’ve ever been involved with. It was a great show in the end, but that doesn’t make the hair that fell out grow back, nor does it replace the absolutely retarded amount of money we lost on the show. So much money, in fact, that it’s time to start selling things.

After the financial disaster that was The Bride of Dark Carnival, unless FLA offer us a significantly more favourable contract with their make-up date, I don’t expect we’ll be able bring them to town.

…

I’m fed up with everything, today. There is nothing good in my life that is not also a source of unhappiness, frustration, or stress. Nothing at all. Not my social life, not my family, not Adversary, not my house, not my computer.

I am so deeply unhappy with my life that I hesitate to even speak it aloud, for fear that it might somehow make things worse.

And I expect it will.

Boney shallow

As you may know, every person on earth share common living ancestors. What you may not know is that ancestor may have lived as recently as 2000 years ago:

When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from thetime of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors — every statue, every hieroglyph, every goldnecklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.

It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right.

“No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, weshare ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giantsloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu,” Olson and his colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.

646

September 30th, Toronto: “PLAY! A Video Game Symphony is a Symphony world-tour featuring music from blockbuster video games. The music is performed by some of the finest, world-class orchestras and choirs. Graphics on large screens suspended above the orchestra accompany the scores, highlighting memorable moments from the video games.”

A typical program:

Uematsu Play! A Video Game Symphony Fanfare
Uematsu Final Fantasy
Kondo Super Mario Bros.
Mitsuyoshi Shenmue
Eriksson Battlefield 1942
Uematsu Aerith’s Theme ur Final Fantasy VII
Nakamura Sonic the Hedgehog
Iwase Metal Gear Solid
Hülsbeck Apidya
Shimomura Kingdom Hearts
Soule The Elder Scrolls III
Uematsu Swing de Chocobo ur Final Fantasy
Grefberg The Chronicles of Riddick
Mitsuda Chrono Cross-Chrono Trigger
Hayes World of Warcraft
Yamaoka Silent Hill
O’Donnell/Salvatori Halo
Kondo The Legend of Zelda
Uematsu One Winged Angel ur Final Fantasy VII

Mike/Oni T, you guys down for a roadtrip? The tickets are, unfortunately, orchestra priced, but there are some fantastic seats available.