Joshua Van Tassel

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(on facebook? go to www.joshuavt.com for the full post)

In super beautiful Twin butte alberta, only have a minute. Had an amazing hike, a great show, then the largest fire I’ve ever seen. Our host dug a 12 foot deep pit in the ground and loaded in the wood that once belonged to his grandfathers barn. Amazing. Lethbridge tonight.

Left Winnipeg this morning and have been rocking it through the praries. Lots of van time, what have we been doing today you ask?
- almost done reading “Freedom”. Lots of messed up characters that you feel sad for, angry at, and still somehow like as well good sign of a good book. A lot of time spent discussing US politics, not my forte.
- listened to some Morrisey, hadnt really ever done that, kind of liked it.
- worked on some new music for about 30 minutes because i desperately need a new laptop battery and our power adaptor doesnt seem to want to help me out.
- now listening to Okervill River and watching rain get closer to us. Not much excitement here friends, sleepy.

Spent last night in a beautiful log house of outside of thunder bay. Our amazing host Anthea schooled us in hard to find 60′s r and b, and then provided some of the best coffee I’ve ever had upon us getting up. Happy.

In the van enroute to Manitoba, surpisingly still getting cell reception, listening to Cass McCombs. After tonight we head straight out to calgary for a couple days off, where Im going to hook up for some quick recording with my good friend and keyboard slayer Joanna Borromeo. We’re tracking at the banff centre which I havent been to in years, should be fun.
On a side note, i caught the end of a metal band called Arsonists get all the Girls, and it was crazy. It’s kind of refeshing to hear music that’s completely not like what we’re playing every night or listening to in the van. I have a serious healthy respect for metal drummers too, holy cow they can do crazy things. hey how about a dirt road picture? Ok

Day one so far, enroute to Sault ste. Marie
- we brought our own kettle,coffee, and bodum to be free of the monopoly of Tim Hortons the kettle doesn’t work, and Devon broke the bodum.
- listened to an amazing Radio lab podcast about human/machine interaction
- i started reading “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen, and had a listen to a beautiful Olympic Symphonium tune I’m remixing.
- took a picture of this truck

Also using the wordpress app for my iphone for the first time in a long time, and its great so far.

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so relaxing.

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Sooooo mastering next week on the new record, which means it’s time for another project! In the land of the label-less, there are no deadlines or expectations or marketing plan, or unfortunately plan at all, so the best thing for me to do is just keep on creating.

NEW PROJECT TIME

I had a great time making a record of songs based on the idea that they were actually pieces playable by minimum 2 humans on 2 acoustic guitars. I think the next logical step for me is to take the production knowledge I’ve gained from the last record and do something bigger, more aggressive this time. Be less worried about being able to play it live or re-create in any form, and take advantage of the recorded medium. I want to experiment, I want to make something loud, and I want to be weirder.
To make music that sounds this way, I want to take some sonic cues from a big aggressive environment, which lucky me I live in, Toronto. I mentioned earlier that I got the new Zoom H4N which is a handy portable recording buddy, and I think it’s capable of capturing really great sounds. From now it’s never leaving my side, whereas with so many different kinds of people and machinery and activity, there’s an overwhelming number of sounds happening all the time that could be the seed of a really interesting composition. Twyla Tharp tells a story about a writer who met a hero of his after years of fandom, and lost his chance to get an autograph because he didn’t have a pen on him. I want to be sure to have my own form of pen at the ready.I’m not sure if any of these sounds would even end up being discernible in the end result, but you can’t see the seeds on the out of a cucumber now can you? What’s important is the start to me right now.

Anyway, S.I.T. now stands for Sounds In Toronto, and I’ll be trying to S.I.T. a lot in the next little while. Some touring coming up to, so I’ll extend the collecting to various cities across the country in case something great comes up. First off, corner of Dovercourt and Hallam, the sounds I can never escape in my studio, the bus.

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For even more Toronto sound experience, I’ll be regularly posting sound walks on Urban Sound Ecology’s website. Great project, have a look.

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If I were releasing a single, it would be this tune. it’s called Double Tooth, featuring –

Burke Carroll on pedal steel, Bret Higgins on acoustic bass, Robbie Grunwald on fender rhodes, and myself on electronics, acoustic guitar, drums, and percussion. I wrote it for my dog, Samwise Gamgee.

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So my new record is mixed and going to be delivered to be mastered this week. This is a good thing, right? I’ve been working the past couple months on it, listened to it hundred of times, freaked out over it, pulled my hairs out over it wondering if it’s good enough at all for any type of human consumption, so you’d assume that I’d be ecstatic that it’s done. The problem as I discovered today is that now is when the real work begins.

To me, the fun part of about recording is recording. I get do things at the pace I want them to happen at, and I get to see immediate results. The pressure is relatively low if I’m by myself, so I can feel free to experiment and push and pull sounds until I feel like I have something interesting. The next steps in the process of making a physical album is nothing like that unfortunately, and for me especially it’s where it gets expensive.

When I started recording this music I knew that the end goal was for once to release something physical and tangible, either on vinyl or cd form. I love to buy records, and I buy a lot of them. It’s been a real dream of mine to have one of my own in my hand, and to maybe have another human feel the same excitement I feel when opening up a freshly bought album, putting it on the player for the first time, and hearing that 2 seconds or so of silence before the first tune comes on. Anticipation is actually a pretty great thing (unless you’re waiting for a tax refund cheque during a rolling postal strike, then it’s terrible and useless). So, now I’m ready to take the leap into the plastic disc world, and there’s a few hurdles to get over.

1) Doing vinyl is prohibitively expensive. For a guy like me with no label assistance and completely self funded, making instrumental electro folk, I have very little chance of ever recouping the costs of manufacturing a record in the black 12″ disc sense. It means getting a mastering job of the album done specifically for vinyl, getting all your layout and art work done specifically for the record sleeve. All of this = not cheap.

2) Getting 1000 cd’s printed is a little excessive for me. Let’s face reality – I doubt I’ll ever tour with this music. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s again the pricey reality of what kind of world I make music in. There’s not a lot of clubs in northern Ontario that would be into my style. (Believe me, I’ve played them, and they don’t like much of anything actually. Except ACDC, they love ACDC) I‘ll definitely do some form of cd release party, but if even 500 people came to the show I’d probably have a heart attack and all this would be in vain anyway. The problem with small run stuff and why people don’t do it as much is because it’s still an expensive process. You’re looking at an average of about $500 to get even 200 cds done, and that’s without taking into account your art work and layout costs.

Anyway, I’ll stop this post now because I don’t mean to sound whiny about the process, I’m just explaining it a little for those who don’t know what kind of work goes into making a cd. Regardless if it’ll sell at all and if people just download your music anyway, it still takes money to make, and a lot of it. Speaking of downloads, bandcamp is completely awesome and I love it.