The guitar part and the melody+lyrics came to  me in a flash! On the interstate. And I envisioned them as being like the Fall, sounding like a cacophony sort of.
Well, that didn't work out well at all. Shows what I know, right? The guitars sounded much too thin and not at all what I was going for. I may have really needed a sloppy drummer all along, but that idea came much too late and without the means to act on it (just as I was writing this in fact).
Anyway, I decided to fill it out a bit and I'm pretty happy with how that turned out. And you are happy, too.
I suppose a brief introduction is in order, this being my maiden Hellagems voyage and all. Some here already know me through my various jaunts to Atlanta to visit billjings, good friend and Cake or Death cohort. I currently reside in Jacksonville, Fla., although I'm in the process of moving to Mississippi (fortunately, my landlord/tenant luck has been better than Rob's).Â
Anyway, to the song. Back in January, myself and three friends in Jacksonville began a project by the name of The Monroe Doctrine. Our initial "sessions" consisted of us filling up one half of a 60 minute tape each time we met...we didn't care about the sound quality, we just wanted to fill it up. Over the past four months, we've gone back and re-recorded our favorites (about 10 so far) for an album. I decided to tackle one myself for Hellagems - a song called Steno Steno.
The droning sound in the background is piano recorded on a micro-cassette tape recorder. I chopped up the sounds in a wave editor and matched them up with a simple 4/4 beat from my drum machine (I fiddled with the EQ on the drum track to give it a more muffled sound). For each chord, I paired the original sound with a compressed version of the same sound, one after the other. After stringing it all together, I went back on top with acoustic guitar and vocals. I added the little tape button stop noise at the end for kicks.
Anyway, hope you like. As far as lyrical content goes, it's an ode to steno notepads. I'm a big fan. If anyone wants to hear the original demo from six months back, I'll gladly send it.
This is NSFW (and definitely rated R for language).
In the spirit of Felix, I quickly recorded this with voice and ukulele using the Voice Memo function on my iPhone while I tried to clean up my old place hastily so my landlord could start getting the house ready for the new tenants. I was not happy about this, one reason being that it might force me to skip posting a Hella Gem for the 2nd week in a row, so I made up the lyrics and music on the spot, ruminating on my situation while inserting a copious amount of expletives. Hold out to the 2nd verse, when the lyrics start getting pretty good as I recall all of the things my landlord never fixed in my old place.
This song is somewhat reflective of the sorts of things I'll make up on the spot while strumming idly away on the ukulele or other random instruments. Most of these songs are lost to time... but not this one. Yes, indeed, I can be quite the potty mouth.
For this, I was thinking of one of those haunted mansion, point-and-click games like those old NES/Mac games that include Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and uninvited.
Currently I'm trying to learn actionscript to further my web programming expertise. I'm going to try to implement my own knock-off, which I've been thinking about for awhile. It's called Uncle Charlie's Fun House. I'll post the link when there's something to see.
I'm jumping on board the weekly train. Let's see if I can keep up.
This song doesn't really successfully convey my feelings about how I'm not too keen on tattoos but everyone I know has one, and I like the people I know a lot. Still, I don't want any.
There's a bit of anomie in this song.
Anyway, I hope everyone likes it. Rob's on the drums here again - although in chill capacity. This song also features a fan.
