It's been a while. More nerdy songs about sci-fi shit.







Really, though, this has a personal story behind it.
Just before the pandemic, I had been planning a bunch of Cartographer stuff. We were supposed to record in spring 2020 and do some light touring in summer 2020; hoping to do the BBQ. Of course, that didn't happen, so I used the next year to start to get more material together. Then Chris, my long time friend and Cartographer/Replicator drummer, died in 2021. It hit me harder than I realized. I was already de-motivated from the pandemic. Now the process of creating music filled me with sadness and guilt. I just ground to a halt, creatively. The only thing I was ever enthusiastic about was bike riding and traveling.

So, Claudia saw that I was pretty fucked up. She put an ad on Nextdoor that was like "is your husband a middle-aged rock dude into weirdo music with a steady job and doesn't want to make it?" it got a ton of replies and I met a dude named Greg who just moved here from Austin. He's a killer bassist, programs audio chips for Cirrus Logic, builds basses and amps, and is into esoteric music shit. It's been great. I've slowly been able to come out of my shell and we wrote and developed a bunch of songs.

Finally, after lots of indecision and issues getting started, we finally got some music released. This is just a stop-gap, a classic "demo" to announce that we exist, get some shows, and see how we want the band to operate. Mainly, though, it just feels good to be proud of making music again.

Filmed and recorded at the practice space.
Super fun to do an 8 mic recording, and then try to extract as much as I can out of the mix.

Sounds really great.

Sounds crisp as hell, Ben, especially for a practice space recording! How did you mic everything up? FKCN has no video anything and part of me wants to rectify that in the future…

defendyachtrock wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2024 2:10 pm Sounds crisp as hell, Ben, especially for a practice space recording! How did you mic everything up? FKCN has no video anything and part of me wants to rectify that in the future…

Kick - Beta 52
Snare - Oktava 012
OH - AKG 414
Bass - some mic the bassist brought
Guitar - 57
Room - some mic the bassist brought placed on a shelf
Vox - two 58s

I brought my RME interface and laptop. The RME had two mic pres but a bunch of line ins. So the bassist brought his API lunchbox with 6 CAPI mic preamps. Kinda overkill, but it was pretty easy. Once we got the levels let, we just hit record on everything and ran through our songs.

Mixing was pretty heavy handed. Lots of subtractive EQ to get out rumble and shitty bleed and stuff. Also, I tried to let the drum overhead carry more than the close snare mic, because I didn't want the toms to get lost. The close snare mic is almost more to be the signal that feeds some reverb. The kick mic was a bit of a challenge, too. I had to do some crazy EQ, gating, and some intentional distortion.
For guitar, I've been leaning on a "room mic" method recently that also shows up on the recent Shellac album. Basically, dry guitar tone a bit to one side and the room mic a bit to the other. However, since I don't have a room mic, I just duplicate the dry guitar to another track and apply a "small room" reverb at 100% wet. EQ and level to taste. This is also the early Van Halen trick, but with hard panning and a more stupid reverb.

When I saw the first cut I was a bit shocked. I mixed at my house, and just made small changes until it seemed good enough. When I heard the very tweaked mix with the visual of the wide angle gopro in a crappy little room, it was very incongruous. It almost looked like we were miming.

Another two minute blast of "music".

It is inspiring to see you rebound from the effects of the pandemic, your friend passing away and continuing to do music in your mid-life!

Sounds sick and I love that you made 8 tracks work (with some effort)!

Live show in Los Angeles with real, live, human drummer!

The Redwood Bar & Grill
Wednesday, September 18, 2024. 8:00 pm
with Cinder Cone and Fox Medicine.