I started to write a blog entry to draw some attention to our posting of the recently recorded song, "Blueberries" but then realized that all these recording dates have occurred over the past year and thought I would chronicle them all and itemize all the output we have accomplished or attempted. So it became a slightly bigger task and what follows is somewhat of a longwinded rant. I have tried to break it up by category. As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, there is a bulk of recordings that have occurred off thebrotheregg radar from 1993-2007 as well that sort of went astray and appeared on a home produced cd called "oddities" that will slowly appear in this blog spot…maybe. That is a whole other can of worms regarding the studio experiences ranging from Chicago's King Size Sound Lab, Olympia's Moon Studio, Portland's Fresh Trax, Resistor, probably something I am forgetting. Items made for compilations, cover songs, demos…. Oddities. But that's for another day. For the purpose of this entry, everything included is within the last year or so and hints at some future events as well. Maybe it will serve to put a fire under my ass to get some of these mixes finished and bring some of these ideas to fruition. I'm very interested in discussing the process and if anyone is interested in reading it, we can have a nice tea party together. Anyhow…



* Dig Studios 6/30-7/1

We recently spent an entire weekend at Dig Studios in our beautiful downtown Portland, in the heart of it, actually, where we set out to record to the stage of completion three new songs. These three songs are totally complete except for one of which that is not complete at all but almost complete having wonderful possibilities none-the-less. The track listing is as follows,

1. Blueberries
2. Elevators
3. Daylight

and you can sample Blueberries right from the myspace thebrotheregg page, as mentioned above. All three songs are up-tempo and two have the unusual presence of guitar distortion! How wonderful and different. This recording sojourn was an excellent experience as we were able to work creatively with our new guitar player, Jairus, in addition to each other, myself (Adam), Tofer, and Sam. Jairus brings a whole new enthusiasm to the think tank of thebrotheregg, well we are becoming slightly less of a think tank these days and a little more of a do-tank, an operation in motion but not a medical operation, more of a process. Jairus is a great conversationalist and motivator. He is a natural talent and embodies thebrotheregg mentality. He enjoys the process. And for that matter, I for one have always been a big fan of processes or aesthetics which I consider to be a science of processes. Dictionary.com defines aesthetics as "1.
the branch of philosophy dealing with such notions as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc., as applicable to the fine arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of critical judgments concerning works of art, and the principles underlying or justifying such judgments." but I tend to view it as the favoring of a process, or as I said earlier, the science of the process. Perhaps in the past this was somewhat problematic in that when we do things like go into a recording studio, we are concerned with a product, and this is indeed true but we can be in the hypocritical denial that it is the process that matters to us as we are technicians of emotional outpouring and sonic layering. We can tell ourselves all sorts of lies to get us fired up about the process. I should, at this point, give props to silence as well because, as many have written before me, it is a crucial component to sound but you wouldn't know this listening to many bands these days. So, aesthetics, this is our tech talk but we are musicians somehow or creators of sound for the purposes of this blog and these thebrotheregg offerings. That is how and why thebrotheregg continues to endure because we love sound and if we were to call ourselves something different, other than thebrotheregg, as some have suggested that we give up and start all over under a different name, we would essentially still be technicians of sound concerned with the same ones and zeros that comprise the universe. So, thebrotheregg is a continuum and there is no need for us to pander to fashion pressures from the peripheral. What this means in practical translation is that you never know, we might throw a techno song at you some time and you wouldn't even see it coming. However, I am currently busy readying a new batch of songs that I consider furthering the agenda of the campfire pop song variety. But for now, I am here to mention and promote the current batch of songs that I sometimes flippantly refer to as skate rock songs (recorded at Dig), probably due to the fact that I think skate rock is the among the finest genre of rock music, but that's what I grew up with and I stand by that claim. Bands like early Dinosaur Jr. or the Faction or Sub Hum Ans, the Hard-Ons, and my beloved, the Dead Milkmen or any number of other high-energy greatness that came from the eighties that one can blissfully celebrate. Well, Tofer, Sam, Jairus, and I are very excited about the experience at Dig. We have one more mixing session over there to complete "Daylight" which is a serious rocker by our standards. Who knows what the next step will be for the upcoming batch.


* Recent Projects leading up to this one:

1. No Moving Parts

Well, Mark did a fine job with us at the Dig session and that's principally what I originally thought I was here to report. We had an excellent time and we're quite talented at cutting directly to the chase of straightforwardness in production, and anyone who is versed in thebrotheregg cannon would agree, simplicity straight and to the point is not our typicality. Yes, straightforwardness. Well, we are promising to incorporate more straightforwardness into the process form here on out, and incorporate it we will. So, we have a few batches of songs now that we have been collecting for some unknown end. There was a session that we did maybe a year ago at Mark's previous studio, No Moving Parts. That session yielded :

1. Simple Love
2. Simpleton (on the myspace page)
3. Blasted
4. Medusas (alternative full band take which can be found in acoustic format
on the Aortica Mor cd.)
5. There was also a song which was never finished but someday will
be..maybe… temporarily called "reggae song"

This session was very nice and Chris Kalani Gabriel was playing with us at the time and he is an interstellar guitarplayer/multi-instrumentalist whom has since moved on to work on his solo projects and his other band, Zeitgeist. He can be heard playing various instruments and singings on this session and the following one which took place the "Salon" studio which was conveniently located next to my house in a space that used to be a hair salon.

2. Salon



There we recorded:

1. Dancing Satan
2. Gravity

with Graham at the helm. Some of the details of this session are a bit hazy but I remember being drunk as hell when I recorded my vocals for Dancing Satan and thinking they were brilliant. We had to mix that one at home so it was a take that I had to live with brilliant or not, we didn't want to get too anal with that one. I had a great time mixing and we essentially redid most of it because my guitar had some intonation problems and a result we replaced It with a simplistic organ part played by Sam. I also added lots of sonic headphone candy. This mix is particularly glossy. Perhaps too much so. Oh well, It's still a good song. "Gravity" was another story, I think we kept the basic tracks and did the rest at home, too though. It's an old old song that I wrote when I had chicken pox at Evergreen. I retooled the lyrics a bit recently because I felt a bit juvenile reviving something that I felt more than ten years ago. It's currently being mixed for posterity. It's fun as hell to play live, though.


3. Dandelion Wine




Many of these songs recorded elsewhere we have opted to mix here at the house project studio that we call "Dandelion Wine". I typically don't know what people mean exactly when they call something a 'project' studio but I gather it's something like what we do over here. We work on projects! Like when I feel saucy, I sometimes whip out a 'gomads' offering which takes on any number of unusual forms lately. Elaborate demos are made here that recently we have gone and re-rerecorded elsewhere. We have recorded many official projects here at the Wine like The Bugs, Desert City Soundtrack, Amoree Lovell, Rosyvelt, the Human Genome Project, Wil-Ru, the Telling, and Michael Stirling to name most of them. We had the brilliant idea that we could do all this tracking elsewhere and bring it back to mix here and that was largely a success but it's been taking quite awhile so it was nice to go into the studio recently and just hammer out some quality performances to completion. We run off of a Mac G5 with Digital Performer and practically everything goes through locally made Hamptone tube and jfet preamps. We do this for economical reasons because, focusing on our aesthetics, we need unlimited accessibility to creativity and the codifying of ideas that we couldn't have if we had to book time at a proper studio and were on the clock every time. So, we sacrifice the 'quality' of a proper studio in a project studio where we often say what the F, and the result are often more interesting recordings at our fingertips. In addition to final mixes and projects for other bands, we have recently completed some covers or 'remakes' here that have been sent off to various compilations or the Bevis Frond one wound up on a single that we made a few years back.

1. I Think I Need a New Heart : Magnetic Fields Tribute (you might not
recognize this as a thebrotheregg song because Kaitlyn ni Donovan is
singing and 2. it is mostly electronic. Oh, and Amoree Lovell is playing
Rhodes piano, but beside that, it's 100% certified. (sctas)
2. Mimicry : Art of Flying tribute.
3. Wednesday Champagne: tribute to Club 21
4. Driven Away: Bevis Frond tribute, bonus track on Aortica Mor promo.

Well, I feel that this is an adequate overview of what's been going on, a comprehensive description. Naturally, there is no mentioning of all the debauchery and all the hilarity that went into each session. It is merely a historical document_ I am glad to sit down and merely recall what sessions occurred and am anxiously forecasting new and different odysseys for the band. Pretty soon, I foresee posting some of the aforementioned recordings at this blog space or perhaps there may be another thebrotheregg cd or ten inch on the horizon. Thanks for your academic interest !

Love,

Adam