Venus Euphoric: The Journal

I Have Bread, And I Have Penut Butter...

2011-11-12T18:48:00.000-08:00

I only now require the jam. Yes, there has been a shortage of jam lately for the band, although we have been communing telepathically about new songs. I even halfway learned one on the bass that I sometimes play. Jam is necessary to keep a band going, even if we're the only three people who hear the songs and I'm the only one ever to read this journal. Our hopes remain high for a great new album. Maybe we'll finally have things in line to spread it far and wide in this crazy internet age. What we need is a Ve pyramid scheme where people have to share the album with five people, then each of those people have to share it with five people, etc., etc., etc. ...And by "share" I mean tie down the person in a dark room, place sound-cancelling headphones on their heads, and play them the album at full volume - possibly also slipping them some experience-enhancing drugs. ...Hey, it worked for me with U2's Achtung Baby back in high school. ...And Tuatara's second album. ...And Failure's Fantastic Planet. ...And definitely Death Cab's Something About Airplanes. Damn, what were we talking about?

Seven Songs Strong

2011-08-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

Matt shared another song with me the other night. He probably wrote part of it and recorded all of it after a very scratchy fashion. Altogether that makes seven potential new songs for a potential album. Not that that means anything by itself, of course, but it's good to have some tunes marinating in the musical fridge. I hear Gomez had over 50 songs in the running for Split the Difference. That's crazy. Crazy insane. Crazy insanely delicious. Because I love that album.

Sometimes th Up's Outnumber the Down's. But Not in Nottingham.

2011-07-22T06:57:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so I forget what font I used last time every time I write an entry. I guess I could look back to last time to remember, but I'm just too lazy.

Finally went back to the Berg yesterday for more songconstruction. We have roughly seven hugely undeveloped and incomplete songs now, which will probably end up being two or three one day on a final album. But it feels good to say we have so many. Matt and Charles even discovered that they had almost the same idea for a song yesterday. I was happy and thought it would be cool to put them in the same song, but it turns out they were even too alike for that. So instead, Matt and Charles will go to the shirtless mud-wrestling pit again, just like always happens in this situation: two ideas enter, only one will leave.

Charles has plans this week to forsake work and all other obligations to stay up in the studio/jamspace/house where he grew up. He's going to get away from it all and just write some tunes. That sounds pretty fantastic to me, and I wish him well. Perhaps he'll finally write that sequel to Sleeper we've all been waiting for.

Matt seems ready to invest even more money in the home studio. I wonder if he realizes that he will never get a return on his investment. Never! Especially if we keep paying people to take our discs and come to our shows.

A Report On Things That Are Jammy

2011-06-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday we met in the morningish hours at lovely Blue Boots as is customary on days that are jammy. I walked in the unlocked door with my stuff and was ambushed by Matt, as often happens on days that are jammy. I descended the stairs to find Charles playing some Radiohead on the old piano, as frequently happens on days that are jammy. I snapped some fotos because I was holding a camera in my hand (and later deleted all but one to salvage space on the memory card).

Speaking of cameras, I had two present, actually. Both capable of some minor videoing. The room is too small for good video of jammage, but such video is necessary for our Secret Plan. We'd like to have some sort of crazy rotating or oscillating video camera stand so as to not have video footage centered in one spot the whole time. Maybe we need some coloured lights or something to make it more interesting. But the thing that will make this project cool is not our professional video skillz -- since we don't really have any. (Well, Matt does, but he's a busy gent.) The best part will be the epic live audio. Every time we've recorded ourselves playing a show or anything, it's sounded like complete garbage. This is going to sound great because Matt is busting out all of the recording studio action, which he will then feed into his giant soundeating machine.

Stay tuned for the finished product. Oh yeah, and buy some t-shirts. I think there's a link over there to the right. We will make exactly zero dollars in profit; we wanted to keep costs low and let people plaster themselves with Ve just because they want to, dammit.

Manly Things

2011-05-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

Tonight was a night of manly things for the band. Charles and Matt were already camped up at their Wallsburg estate, so they went out to shoot guns. Loud and proud. Here at home, I put together my first charcoal bbq, so that I may char meat to my heart's content as soon as tomorrow. Except tomorrow there will be more jamming. We may even do some recording. But that is a secret project.

Most Good Jammings

2011-05-20T23:40:00.000-07:00

The dayjam yesterday went quite well. Quite well indeed. Except for the part when my finger almost started to bleed. And when I was trying to play Motor Oil in the wrong tuning. We discussed plans to do some more online collaboration, so we can get the new song ideas wriggling inside each other's heads. Also, how to take over the world via the internet.

Important Update

2011-05-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

Hey, I remembered how to sign in here. I apologize, dear readers, for the lapse in important Ve updates. I shall try to not let it happen again.

Tomorrow we have a dayjam scheduled (not to be confused with the more common nightjam). It will be good to get together and work some more on new material for the upcoming album. Yes, you heard it here first: there will be a third Ve album. It will be called "Roughing It in the Lunar Psychosomatic Badlands" and will be released some time in 2013. Maybe on a Friday the 13th.

We have one song pretty much locked in. Except for lyrics. Charles and I both sing, and neither of us know what the other sings. Mine are sort of placeholder lyrics, but they might stick around. The song is not named yet, but you'll know it when you hear it because it's the one that starts with us playing a B together. Or it probably starts with Matt doing some sort of cool drum thing, then us playing a B together. Matt often does cool drum things. In the dark. With his hands. Both of them.

Actually, that is not the first song for the new album. Those of you who attended our last couple of high-potency gigs will remember a super-smash new hit called Musicians and Magicians, which is the best song we've ever written in D tuning. Or one of the best. Easily top 25 ever. I don't sing on it; I play bass. Loudly. With a yellow overdrive pedal. Yeah, it's some good songage.

In addition to those two songs for the new album, Matt has suggested a couple that we're working on, and Charles has at least one more we're trying to flesh out. We all like it, but haven't quite pieced it together. The latest rendition featured Charles playing the old piano in the basement, with Matt on acoustic guitar, and me singing quietly to myself in mostly the wrong places. We had a rather disgusting working title for the song, but now we've forgotten it.

2010-07-27T23:24:00.000-07:00

Well, tonight was easily the best jam session in a couple of years. It's good to be at peak form again just in time for a show. Over the years I've become more comfortable with what we are and are not as a band. I know our strengths and our limitations. I look forward to providing a special brand of rock for the handful of interested people next week. As has almost become a tradition (we don't play shows enough to really have traditions...), we will be having a pre-show bbq at Charles' house, where people can come, hang out, socialize, catch up, eat food, pass around tickets, "prep" themselves (assuming there's an ample number of designated drivers), then caravan up to Joe's en masse and storm the place.

Soon, the show will be over, and our biggest challenge will be to keep going and not get rusty again. it's hard to have a weekly jam, but two or three times a month certainly isn't unreasonable. The next quest will be a new album. With so many miles between the three of us (we all live in different cities now, and our jamspot/studio is in a fourth city...well, more of a small town, really...), we would be unwise to at least look into the possibilities of putting parts down on computers and sending them back and forth to collaborate and write new stuff without spending so much on gas. But we've never tried that before, so who can say how well it would work.

Our hopes remain high.

2010-07-10T23:11:00.001-07:00

Working on multiple computers over a span of years is hard and frustrating. The best thing about a new album will be having everything all in one place.

2010-07-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

Had a most productive jam session last week, with another one scheduled for tomorrow. The blisters are gone, and hardened skin remains in their place. We're hoping to be much less rusty tomorrow.

I salvaged a bunch of old files from an old hard drive this week too, including all of our files from when we recorded Re-Entry. I'm getting them to Matt tomorrow so he can re-master the whole album, and I've polished up the artwork to finally make CD's. Hopefully they will be available at our upcoming show.

Speaking of CD's, we're hoping to make not one, but two in the next few months or years. One will be brand spanking new, top of the line. Probably the best album ever made. The other one will be significantly worse. It will collect the songs left behind over the years, with dust removed and broken parts fixed. A partial list would have to include: Dialing Mother, Your Tourniquet (re-titled "Your World"), Suffocate, Green, and Left Behind.

2010-06-24T23:16:00.000-07:00

I want to be a graphic designer. Again. Well, a web designer. ...Okay, so I actually just wish I could manipulate HTML enough to make this goofy journal look how I want. Oh well...

Looks like we will be playing a show the first week of August. I dusted off and unzipped my bass today, just to see if I remember anything. We'll need much practice in order to be ready. It's nice to have something for which to prepare though. Can't say "ah, we'll jam next week" so much when there's a show in a month. ...Is it really just a month? Man, I really gotta start cranking out the bassage...

2010-06-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

This is merely a test, done on the computer at work as I sit and eat my microwaved garlic bread. I stole this idea from my favourite band, and since it seems like a better place to put these ramblings than the "news" page (since most of it isn't really newsworthy), we're going to give it a shot.

I've been trying to reclaim Ve's place on the ol' internet. I had a hard drive crash on me not long ago, and lost most of my band photos and multimedia projects and all that sort of stuff. It's rather depressing to think about, so I'm trying to push forward and see if we can get some new pictures from new shows and new art for new albums. Then we can call the past ten years of Ve "water under the bridge" and forge fearlessly ahead.

In addition to that setback, we've also been having trouble jamming recently. It's hard for me to find someone to watch little Sleeper (my daughter), and on days when I don't work, my wife usually has our only car all day at her job. And Charles and Matt are busy on different days and have their own complicated lives. Top this off by the fact that we three live in three different cities, and our Preferred Basement o' Jamming is in a fourth city, and one can understand the difficulty.

But all complaining aside, we do wish to play a show or three again soon, and would love to have a brand new 2011 album.