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Writing for the next album, we have achieved Mall Rock. yay!

The next album we're working on had the working title 'Love song of the midwest' but no one other than me liked that title.

Still, the name 'the mid west album' has stuck.

There is quite some discussion about the concept of this next work.

Along the way we've followed different concepts for each recording.

1. Whiskey Talking - setting us in the middle of Blues/Roots, with styles from Straight Blues to Jazz.

2. Spacejunk - All analogue, tape speed wobbles and all. Blues, blues rock

3. Nuevo Retro - Fusions of Zydeco beats and shuffles (Can't tax love) to Pacific Island Styles (Island Time) to Colonial Australian Celtic Bushranger songs.

4. Carl's Chair - 'Dirt Music' style roots to country with jazzy blues, recorded live, on location, in the country, on a porch. This was the album that got us chucked out of the Blues Club for TRAITOROUS USE OF MANDOLINS!!! Also, singing in tune without rough growly voice was a no-no. Sorry 'bout that.

5. Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory - Recorded on location, big hall sound, once again a complete mix of styles. Ross Fear, a Learned and Esteemed DJ and mate says some pretty crazy things about this album and views it in a way that we view other peoples Great Work. good on ya Ross. I still think my harp in Even In A lifetime is very iffy.

6. The Curious assembly. Each track recorded at a different studio/location, in different ways, from Big money tape units and fancy shmancy studios to iPad in backyard. Styles from Reggae with Harmonica to Blues/Japanese Pop to Who Knows What This Is.

7. Everywhere Feels Like Home - our soundtrack album, featuring our first instrumentals and tracking our musical progress around the midwest, from Folk to Mid west rock to Blues. Also Mongolian Throat Singing and Cello. Why not.

8. The KC Album - Blues. soul, funk and Country tinged gospel, recorded with Living Legend players. Recorded in 5 days whilst trapped in KC. Still in mixing.

and now...SC9...the midwest album.

So the discussion is, what exactly is the Midwest Album about?

I think the scene has been set by Better Off Without You.

We've have absorbed and been influenced by everywhere we've been, the people we've played with and the stories of the folks we've met.

Over the course of time we've written songs from 'inspiration' and then there are a number where we have had a specific goal in mind, such as our tribute to the Aussie Wrestlers, 'Return of the king', where we wanted a straight ahead bar-room rocker.

The more comfortable we have become producing our own material, the more we have started to achieve the outcomes we have intended. Or. sort of. Sometimes the output isn't what you wanted but better, gooder or OMG WTF and then you wince and move on.

There is always the other way too, which is to call any result victory, which I think saves a lot of time.

Mr Wizard observed that the Mid West album isn't so much about the styles that originated there, but the styles that are well received there. that gives us quite the latitude.

Bill had suggested we needed to add a few more fast numbers to the set, so we sat down to write a straight forward banger, much in the frame of 'Drink you off my mind', 'give me something I want' or a few of the other Aussie Pub Rock mutants we've produced.

Regular 'cellar dwellers may recall my most recent post was about working with the poetry of Rick Lyon in a new song, talking about metaphor and words.

Well, stuff all that, we produced a solid no-deep-thoughts-required, short words, not too many syllables, piece of MALL ROCK.

Yeah baby. I am stoked. Throw the horns Stephen!

Of course you'll have to come to a gig to hear it, until we get it recorded.

Oh and that assumes it survives the testing phase. You just never know.

Stormcellar + Bec Henry @ the Coast Hotel Budgewoi, sat 14 May

Apols folks I'm slow on the art this week. Been writing.

Just because I got distracted doesn't mean that I'm not totally into this next gig.

Jo's back with us for the first time in ages. OMG we have missed her. Also Bec's with us again and she's top.

There are a lot of new songs popping in and out of our stuff, having Jo there has shifted the setlist again so some old faves get a run.

I'm look forward to this and will post art soon.

Re-added 'making of carl's chair' blog to site

Calvin just got into Carl's chair and rather than explaining what a trip it was, I re-added the blog in chronological order, over there on the left under the Carls Chair Blog. All the articles are still here in the main blog chronologically but this rounds'em up.

It was a truly special time and a great memory :-)

A shout out to poet Rick Lyons for being awesome, plus some thoughts on our bands creative process

Howdy Folks.

Rick wrote back to me the other day. I was a bit apprehensive, it'd been two months since I wrote to him to say that I used his poem 'Burning the Meadows' as a metaphor within a new song.

A meta-metaphor if you will.

Ricks creative generosity is such that he approved of being 'sampled'. Thank you Rick. Wow. No really. Thank you. It's a beautiful piece of work and it seemed to say what was in my head.

For me, this is a complex concept. I didn't quote his poem, I condensed my own interpretation / rephrasing of the meaning of the poem into 2 lines. Ouch. Then added my own stuff to it to talk about the subject of the song, for which his poem, or the gist of it, became my new metaphor.

Far out.

It begs the question, at what point is it Sampling, at what point is it influence?

I sent what I'd written and asked if he was cool with it. he was. I'm stoked.

I'm kind of reminded of the two versions of Ozymandias. If Googling serves me correctly, Shelley and his mate Horace Smith had a comp going to work on poems about the same subject. It begat two quite different but similar poems.

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Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

and Smith:

IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

I like the Shelley version but...anyway. BTW I am totally going to try writing a hard core heavy metal song with that Shelly poem. It's dying for something Bonkers. Just see if I don't :-)

Anyway...Back to...

Thoughts On Band Creative Process.

I had a chorus, I was looking for a way to talk about a very difficult and personal song subject. Yeah I know, we can't write all our songs about space monsters and genetically modified cows. Well...now that I think about it...

Space Cow.

I digress.

So there I was, at a band get together, trying to show the guys this fragment of an idea, grasping at how to approach this song concept.

Mr Wizard very wisely told me to pay attention to even fragmentary ideas.

Bill found something for it and I could fit the Chorus. Mr Wizard found a space in it. Great. Melody? Check. Emotional content versus sonic 'feel'? Check.

Good to go.

Now for the verses. Make wit' da woids, kid.

I had nothing.

So, taking some inspiration from a story about Phillip K Dick using the I-Ching when writing 'man in the high castle' (meta reference, the characters also used the i-ching), I went in search of something to do the same thing with.

Fortunately for me, Ricks book 'Bell 8' was on my worktable. I picked it up, random'ed open a page and blow me down, his poem seemed to say all the stuff I was thinking. or was it?

I'm sure he had some pretty specific stuff in mind when he wrote it, but it seemed amenable to my misinterpretation.

But there are some constraints in Lyric Land that Poets Don't have.

Now don't be down on Rhyming. It's not obligatory but it's Mnemonic.

Also: Space. We don't have much.

This isn't the first run in between poetry and our stuff. 'Country Radio' describes the scene of a long haul trucker reading Robert Frost and ruminating on Country Music (LOL) and 'The Flood' is heavily influenced by the worlds described by Banjo Patterson and Dorothea McKellar. Arguably, that's 'Influence'

In this case, I started by compressing the two stanzas of Rick's poem into 2 lines. Also, during the transliteration process I got the last word wrong and realised I liked it more because it was a freudian slip. It better expressed what I meant. At that point I'd gone way off script. Yikes.

But also, to tie it back into the pre existing chorus, close the loop and make sense of it all, I added More Words. Oh dear. So what is this beast? A quote? an Influence? An interpretation?

I haven't asked yet, whether Rick's intent or concept was the same as mine. I'm curious but afraid to ask. Heh.

I think Rick's right. It is both new and old, it is a 'sample'.

I wonder if he meant what I mean. Maybe I'll pluck up the courage to ask.

The only thing I can do to better allow you to form an opinion is to show both Ricks excellent poem and Teh-Thing-I-Did-With-Ricks-Excellent-Poem and stuff I wanted to say.

'Burning the Meadows' (C) Rick Lyons

You know these flames the way you know a face

and that's the surprise now,

not the flames, not the face, but the reappearance.

There's a fire on the meadows at the far end of the night,

so far that the flames seem like a memory,

like something further back, flaring up again,

some winter night, some fall night,

beyond cove and marsh, in another wind.

And then the waves of flame are through.

Maybe there's something wrong with us, some small thing,

which might surge up like fire,

leaving next to nothing of the life that was -

a cleansing fire, sometimes.

Maybe there's something we can do to keep it from happening,

something we can do once it does.

Maybe there's nothing we can do.

With us, I mean, my friend,

of whom you'd always warned me.

'Let me go down easy' (Me)

Until it fades like a memory

There's a fire in the memory

of the far end of the night

Flames across the meadows

like a face you can't reprise

When vanity at last deserts you

find at last that nothing hurts you

but I can see it written in your eyes

let me go down easy

let me go down free.

Maybe something's wrong with us

some immortal kink

that surges, cleansing, leaving nothing

of the life that's been.

But I still feel you walk beside me,

skipping over ocean's boundary,

Tiny hand, the firm rough hand within.

let me go down easy

let me go down free.

Optimisation complete-ish, Calendar integration meh. I'm in a band. How are you? Also we're on facebook.

Howdy Folks.

Tech Support Here. Meh.

Other bands have people for this. I am those people for this band.

So anyway. For those that care, we've optimised the site as best we can, added some new social media links to our actual social media, removed the old 'hey tell everyone you know about everything we do ' buttons, and patched, and patched and updated.

I've also noticed a trend amongst the Open Sourcers and i can't blame'em, but many of the widgets we used to get for free now have a small price tag on them. It's worth it, but by the time you add a few widgets, well, Open Source don't mean Free :-)

I baulked at spending on one more widget to better integrate Google Calendar. It's embedded, it should work fine. But it seems slow. Sorry. Still working on that. Maybe I oughta buy that widget.

Oh right I almost forgot. the Marketing Department wants me to remind you that We're On Facebook and Twitter.

Yeah I know. I picked myspace too, but what the heck. Sorry JT

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So, I mention it because:

- I mobile blog random stuff when we're on the move to FB because it's easier

- If we don't have your likes on FB we will simply cease to exist. No I mean it, we will just frickin vanish. Poof.

- I am not passively aggressively resisting the marketing department, I am resisting the concept that there should be 1 website that represents the world web experience. Besides which, I AM the Marketing Department

- If you follow us on Twitter you're just gonna see a shorter version of the stuff I post to FB because I Auto Linked them cos I am Lazy/Clever.

I should point out that no matter what daft barmy stuff I might say on this site, we aren't likely to get censored. Although to be fair, Rosie occasionally tweaks some of my more..interesting posts. But that's not the point.

We get that FB is what passes for mass single point communication in this age, but we don't discriminate based on what tribe you belong to on the web, tumblrs, grindrs, snapchatters, whatevs

No matter what tribe you belong to online, we're your friends in the stormcellar. If you hang out with us, then we're part of your tribe too :-)

Meanwhile I have to get back to optimising images and so forth.

Regular website refresh underway - anything broke is my doing

Howdy Folks.

With a few weeks off we've been working on various other things, and for me, it's time to once again do a refresh and update on the site.

That makes 8 years of maintaining this site, so 3 cheers for Open Source software & Joomla - they have enabled us to do our stuff online for years, with only the occasional disaster.

I'm going to be tweaking the site for the next few days and may break things a bit. Stand by!

MJEB

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