Joshua Van Tassel

So the past couple of days have been spent at Canterbury Studios mixing the Outlanders record with the band and Jeremy Darby, the fantastically talented, big hearted, and dirty minded engineer. It’s been a lot of fun, but also a a lot of work, more then some people realize. Over the course of a few hours we came up with this analogy to help anyone who hasn’t gone through the laborious process of listening to themselves over and over for 2 days straight understand what it’s all about.

So you’re about to go out for the evening with that special someone for possibly date number 2 or even 3. you’re excited, you’ve spent enough time together to know that it’s got the potential to be really good and long lasting. You want to look your best obviously. So, call up four of your friends and a make up specialist. Get a giant not only full length mirror, but one that magnifies your every blemish, mark, pimple, tiny scar, everything by 100 times. Next ask each person in the group what they think would help fix the blemishes, one by one. Now, chances are, they’re all going to have differing opinions about what to do. Some will make sense, some will be totally ridiculous, and chances are someone will have been on the phone or writing an email and need to have all the options repeated to them again. It can get messy, or sometimes everyone agrees on a little bit of cover up ( reverb), a little something to smooth out the skin (compression), and voila you look great.

Does that make any sense? Here’s a something that’s just been started yesterday, unmixed mind you. This is like going outside in your Budweiser t-shirt with no pants and cigarette hanging out of your mouth to get the paper on a Saturday morning.

These headphones cost more then my rent. For 2 months. They make me nervous.

I’m very lucky to have written some music for a great play called Norway Today, put on by everyone’s favorite independent theatre company Theatre SMASH. It’s a very affecting play revolving around the stories of two people who meet in a chat room and decide to kill themselves together by jumping off a very very large cliff in Norway.

Sound bleak? It’s not actually. The cast and direction bring out all the humility and humor the subject matter could offer, and the sound design and usage of video really sew things up. Anyway, enough with the commercial, go see it at the Tarragon Theatre at Bathurst and Dupont starting Tuesday the 9th. Here’s a clip of one of the pieces I wrote, and a shot from the first run I saw….

got married this weekend - (and yes I’m aware this picture is pretty bad, but it’s the only one I have….)

let me hang out with their babies -

….and fed me some cucumbers they grew in their garden.

I also spent some time producing a tune with the lovely Sarah Kurtis the other day, and we’re working on a sweet sounding little thing that goes like this so far….

[audio:

…to all the people who bought the album this weekend and sent such nice emails. I really appreciate it. It was the most comfortable cd release party in a while, wear as much or as little as you want, talk as loud as you want while the music’s happening, turn it off if you want, hear a tune over, whatever you wanted to do could be done without embarrassment or shame.

Here’s a tune that didn’t quite make the cut. I had posted some parts of it hear before, but here it is in a somewhat finished form, just so I can feel like we’ve had some closure, and don’t start calling it up in the middle of the night trying to figure out why things just didn’t work. Was it the song? Was it something I said? Who’s really to blame??

I’ll be out of town for the next few days and avoiding computers and cell phones like they were diseased infested monkeys, and I’m an explorer deep in the jungle with no hope of antidote if I get bit.

Here’s a piece of a tune from this album I keep talking about though - - I swear it’s almost done….in fact check back here next Friday May 23rd for the release of the first single from it on a shiny new webstore that will be going up very soon……until then have a great long weekend…..

……..will happen in June, sometime…….I’m not totally sure when…….but I’ll definitely let you know when it does. It’ll be a small thing with probably about thirty physical copies, and after that it’ll be banished to be only available here on the website…the tunes are coming along, just a few more little things to do and we’ll be set. Devon Henderson came by yesterday to do the last of the bass, and made some wonderful sounds for me. Here’s a bit -

Due to modern technology, all of us have now been given the gift of foresight, or in pop culture terms spidey sense. We know when our cell phones are about to ring. How? Any electronic device that we happen to be within 4 feet of that has speakers starts to buzz like a swarm of angry hornets, and we immediately look around at the people close to us and everyone makes a very overused and generally terrible joke about whose it is.

It really isn’t enough to put your phone on silent; I have a good friend not only turns his phone off at concerts/events, but actually takes the battery out. That’s dedication, or, a paranoid obsession. either way, I think it’s cool.

I however am not usually that clever, and while working on music this morning my phone began the pre ring which went directly into the track I was recording. As my homage to the phone gods and radio waves, here’s a short kind of annoying piece using that buzz. I’ve learned my lesson and have been listening to the same sound in various forms for about 45 minutes. Check it out for 1:30 and give yourself a reminder.

They’re in your phone and they want out.

Todays music maker is dish soap. Long have I gazed on the little bubbles it sometimes makes as I squeeze it just so to hear that sweet little whistling, and a slight pop. As I washed a mug this morning it cried out to me, ” I have a song in me!!! Take me!!!” I did the best I could to capture everything it was saying in it’s watery squeaky voice. I’ve also had too much coffee to early without anything to eat. I may be hallucinating.

Anyway, here it is. The goal with these things is to take just one otherwise “ignored” item and to try and milk it for all it’s interesting sounds, or at least enough to make some sort of music. Anything in the piece comes from that object specifically. It’s a lot of fun to try and do a few of these a week, it’s like doing push ups in morning. Geek push ups. If you have an something interesting sounding at home and you make something with it, send it to me and I’d be proud to post it here. Then again, I think everything sounds interesting, so just make music.

I spoke a while ago about releasing something that resembles a record, and even though I’ve been on a bit of a break from it, the plan still exists. Here’s a preview of a finished tune from said album that is forthcoming….hopefully…soon…..ish. Let me know what you think, in this case specific to the tune. Or any other really pressing issues you want to get off your chest.

One of the most interesting parts of being a musician that I’m constantly learning about over time is the whole process of making an album. Every single person you talk to has a different way to approach it. Some need a multi thousand dollar a day complex in Hawaii, others demand vocals done in a church bell tower, and some just want to drink tea and hide in their basement. It’s all relevant and it all works differently for different people.

I’ve been lucky enough lately to do some remixing with stop.die.resuscitate and myself for a few artists that I really respect and love. We were talking yesterday about the whole process, and on a purely geek level, I love doing them because you get a behind the scenes look at what the artist has done to put their song together. You get to hear the separate vocal track, complete with the foot shuffling and usually inaudible grunting of the singer, the creaking of drum stools, and dozens of other interesting sounds that get lost in a full mix of a band. The other crazy thing is that sometimes you listen to individual tracks and realize that alone they sound TERRIBLE, but through the magic combination of whatever each of those musicians do, it adds up to an amazing performance/song.

Here’s something I’m working on for the brave and the bold, Ronley Teper. She’s one of our most creative and interesting song writers, and she’s the only person that lets me use samples of my cat, bees, dolphins, and rusted cans all in the same set…..