"Tape Speed!"

It's been a little while since my last post...I wanted to let you know, dear reader, that you may be hearing from me a little more often in January, though perhaps not in this particular rarely-updated blog.

I will cover most aspects of the "Sound" role on the set of The Mountain, The River and The Road, a film by Michael Harring, throughout the month of January 2008. Mike has set the crew up with access to the film's blog. We'll all be working long days on the film but we're going to try to keep the blog updated with our progress, musings, picures (perhaps some sounds, even) from the locations.

This produciton will be the second time I've covered the Sound role on an independent film. My first real dance in this role was on the set of Jason Ryan's film trailer, Ugly (Is A Movie). I've leared quite a bit so far doing this kind of work, and I am excited to learn more on the MRR production. In between these projects I've worked sound on training videos for my cancer research day-job and for my wife's non-profit org. I've gotten more comfortable setting up lavaliere mics, setting up and tearing down gear between shots, troubleshooting malfunctioning mixers, etc...I am looking forward to getting into the rhythm working on a set again.

I've done this kind of work gratis so far, or for a day-job (and therefore folded into the day-job's wages)...as I type this I am reminded of things that I've put off and need to get to, like setting up a business license so I can start writing off mic purchases, as opposed to renting mics all the time. I will not make a New Year's Resolution to do this licensing bit, as I never keep such sentimental promises. Instead I will blog about this self-imposed dilemma...the thought of the shame of looking at this post months later without being licensed will get me to the Chamber of Commerce! :)

I hope this post finds you all well, hopefully free from fires and floods on our warming planet. I will spend January working to get good audio for MRR. One of these days you'll get to see the finished film, if all goes well. I will also work to get some Sun Vow recordings mastered...more to come (tm The Tonight Show).

Feliz Navidad,
Jason

An Old Mix-Tape Obsession... (reposted from last.fm)

I lived in a house south-east of the University of Washington during the 1994-95 school year, in a punk rock house that we affectionately called The Goat House, with eleven roommates spread throughout the three floors of the house. The house was a crumbling fixer...some of us were UW students. Most of us were just friends, living on our own in Seattle for the first time. We were doing things you might expect: starting bands, booking shows in our basement/practice space, throwing loud parties in the living room, etc. Murder City Devils, Modest Mouse and Red Stars Theory, among others, came out of this place. The house had been a band house before us...I remember hearing rumors that an old Seattle punk band, The Scalywags, had lived there before us. A couple members of The Walkabouts lived next door, and were quite patient with all of our noise...

Anyway, I was a junior Creative Writing major at this point, and the Goat House was the first place I'd lived outside of a UW dorm or my parents' house. I was a habitual mix-tape maker, and I was obsessed with buying vinyl at Fallout Records, about a mile & a half south-west on Capitol Hill. I picked up a 12" copy of the Smitten Love Song Compilation there, maybe during the first month it was released. The lifelikeweeds track "The House Is Between The Porch And The Barbeque On Mouth Speed" became a huge obsession for me, probably for much of the rest of that year. I recorded it off the turntable on to some crappy cassette that we'd stolen out of the dumpster of some Muzak-like corporation on Capitol Hill (I can't recall their name now)...I had an alarm clock radio that had a cassette deck wired to the alarm. I made my roommates (one of whom was literally living in my closet at the time) sick to death of this tune, ha ha...

I like the images that the title suggests, of a small town or the "bad side" of a suburb, maybe some remote part of Anchorage, AK (my hometown until age 15). I have often wondered exactly what "mouth speed" is. The volume of the song's lyrics are low in the mix, and are mostly incomphrehensible. The drumming and guitar playing throughout feels lazy, stoned, but not altogether "depressed," to me. This is one of those songs that I'll hear in my head walking down the street, even if it has been years since I last spun up a disc or tape that it's on. I suppose someone might call it "soundtracky," and I suppose that soundtrack-like music is what I tend to dig. I was reading Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son a lot that school year...I still haven't gotten around to seeing the movie adaptation. I have often imagined this song in the soundtrack of the Jesus' Son adaptation in my head.