NaNoWriMo pt. 1

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) started today, and my wife and I decided to give it a go this year. The goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. That works out to between 1,600 and 1,700 words a day. So far she is kicking my ass.

I’m going to try and also continue working on some of the other stories I have been plugging away on as well, and I have Writers Workshop with Michael Knost II starting in about a week and a half. Hopefully though I will be able to keep up. Whatever happens it figures to be a productive month.

Spookatorium Podcast

Prof. Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium is a podcast I do that has produced 26 episodes in the last 3 years or so. I didn’t do any shows at all this past year, but I never officially canceled it. I had intended to do another Halloween episode this year, which would have been the 4th annual, and then hopefully revive it in some form going forward. Now it’s Devil’s Night (hello Detroit!!) and I don’t have anything ready. So, here are the last three years worth of Halloween episodes for you to check out should you be so inclined instead.

Professor Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium 007 – 2006

Professor Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium 017 – 2007

Professor Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium 026 – 2008

If there is any real interest, and I can make the time, I would like to continue the show in some form. It’s fun to do, obligations and other interests just sort of moved it to the back burner and the next thing I knew a year had passed. All of the past shows are still online through the link above so feel free to check those out too.

Wonkavision

so, so great…

where do your memories go?

Where do your memories go?

Snatched by rodents that creep in the night,
Or the bellies of cats that tame the rodent blight?
Down the hole at the creek where stones forever fall,
Or the pipe in the basement that peeks from the wall?
Do they hide beneath leaves when the eaves fill with rain,
Or slip out of view on a boxcar train?

Well, I made you a new one today at the lake
With a pebble, a toad and a green bellied snake.
I left it with you by the old porch swing,
But the drink in your hand may have clipped its wings.
It was good I think, as far as memories go,
Nearly as good as that pig with no nose.
But you lost that too as I now recall,
He was in the carnival tents that arrived last fall.

Where do your memories go?

Perhaps they are waiting for you out there,
In a stump, or a trunk or the cushion of your chair.
The one where you sit with a drink in your hand,
Sour on life and the ways of the land.
I think you will find them if you look one day,
Because none of mine have gone away.

-sec

***

I wrote that half asleep a few months ago over morning coffee and just stumbled across it again. Not sure where the undercurrent came from honestly. I was pleased with how it turned out though. I think I was inspired by watching Neil Gaiman read The Day The Saucers Came. Video/audio isn’t great, but the poem is.

old live show 6.10.00

I was digging through an old box of masters and various musical odds and ends and found this recording. It’s a live performance I did in June of 2000 in San Francisco. It was only my second performance as Gruntsplatter. The performance was part of Troniksfest I, other projects on the bill included Control, Petit Mal, and Sleeping With The Earth. Hmm, none of the Petit Mal’s on Myspace seem to be the right one.

Things definitely got better after I had played a few shows and figured out what I was doing. But I thought some of you might have an interest in hearing it. This is an edited version of the set that was going to be released as a split LP with the Control set from the same night. It was truncated for time so it would fit on an LP side, but it’s just as well. I don’t remember why it never came out, but the world seems to have gotten by just fine without it. The huge white void behind me in the attached picture was a video screen, but pic was taken with a flash that washed it out. Hopefully it was a little more entertaining than the picture would suggest.

Gruntsplatter Live in SF 6.10.00

sound and fear

Scientific American ran a story about a month ago regarding the brains reaction to “scary music” when paired with visuals and then without visuals. They looked the way music is used to heighten fear in movies and how the brain reacted when watching the scene, and when closing your eyes during the scene. The result was that those who closed their eyes had greater reactions in the emotional centers of their brains than those who didn’t. It was scarier not to see it.

Chalk one up for the imagination.

This was interesting to me with regards to listening habits of dark ambient and experimental music. I’ve always gotten so much more from a release when I dim the lights and just absorb it. It’s a canvas for the imagination. It’s something, probably the primary thing, I always hoped to achieve with Gruntsplatter and some of my other projects. It’s why I rarely use vocals or samples. I didn’t want anything that made the music too concrete.

Everything I have done has a theme or implied story behind it, but I hope that by leaving it abstract the listener has been able to fill in the blanks with their own ideas of what was going on. I’ve gotten some nice emails over the years that have related some of those visions, or from people who have used Gruntsplatter to augment their create processes while painting or writing. It’s about the best compliment I can think of.

I wonder with the way that ingesting music has evolved just how many of the secret stories hidden in atmospheric music will go untapped. Will people continue to turn out the lights and listen attentively or will it all just blend into the background din of life. Even I don’t do it as often as I used to.

Science has now documented the emotional charge the pure sounds can evoke without the distraction of other outside stimulus. Make a point to experience that with some of your favorite dark releases.

some of that book learnin’

I’m going to be taking an online writing course offered by Michael Knost. Knost edited the recent Writers Workshop Of Horror collection. You can find out more about the class and Michael at his blog here. There is apparently still a bit of room in the classes if anyone might be interested.

I’m still working my way through the Writers Workshop book, but the articles thus far have all been useful and well done. The collection is a similar approach to the Horror Writer’s Association’s (HWA’s) book On Writing Horror. A compilation of essays by various luminaries of the field dissecting a particular component of the craft.  I got a lot out of On Writing Horror, but the Knost collection thus far feels even more meat and potatoes than that did.

I’m definitely looking forward to it, I haven’t taken a formal course in a very long time. I guess I took a class on Adobe Illustrator that my work paid for about 12 years ago, but before that it was college about 18 years ago.

settling in and books aplenty

We are getting settled into the new place and making pretty good headway against the walls of cardboard boxes. I’m finding stuff I haven’t seen in years. There has been a lot of moving in the last 5 years and it’s good to finally be someplace that I don’t feel unpacking will be a waste of time. As I mentioned before this will be the first time I’ll have my full studio set up since I finished recording “The Aberrant Laboratory” in 2006. There will no doubt be some new music in the works before too long. Whether it’s Gruntsplatter or something else I don’t know yet.

It has been a beautiful thing setting up the new bookshelves and loading them up. I went on a bit of a bender and picked up several new titles to get me through the looming Oregon winter.

Omens by Richard Gavin
The Everlasting by Tim Lebbon
The Book Of Days by Steve Rasnic Tem
Poe’s Progengy Anthology edited by Gary Fry
Tales Of Terror by Guy De Maupassant
Stories from A Lost Anthology by Rhys Hughes
Sesta & Other Strange Stories by Edward Lucas White
Edgeworks I: Over The Edge, An Edge In My Voice by Harlan Ellison
The Complete Stories of JG Ballard by JG Ballard
Writers Workshop Of Horror edited by Michael Knost

Most of those were acquired from The Horror Mall, everything except the Ballard book I think… It will be a long, gray winter of weird tales around here.

Offline for a few

I’m in between houses and internet connections this week so I’ll be away from email and posting and such. Posting from my phone at the moment so hopefully this works.

Cinder Skin

It occurred to me I probably haven’t posted about music as much as I should. So, here is a long story that ends with some MP3’s of a demo few heard.

Cinder Skin was the first solo project I did.

I had a project in Michigan called Grinch with my brother in arms, Marty Rytkonen (Worm Gear, Bindrune, Charnel Valley etc…) for a few years. There was no drummer, towards the end Bob Green (now creating Alien Devices) joined up on drum machine. Grinch wasn’t a band really, but it was all we had in Northern Michigan in the late 8o’s. I left Michigan in 1991 headed for San Diego. Once there I tried to get into a couple of band situations. Here’s my favorite of those stories…

This guy would come into the record store I worked at talking up a bunch of  songs he needed bass and vocals for. Bass and vocals were what I did. He assured me the influences of bands like Godflesh, Voivod, Neurosis, Scorn (that I was mentioning to him) had been woven by their deft hands into Obituary, Morbid Angel etc.  style Death Metal. I was skeptical.  His enthusiasm and an actual a drummer eventually convinced me to give it a go.

When I showed up for my first and only practice, the drums were in the bedroom closet, the guitar amp was on one side of the bed, and I set my amp up on the other. I think the mic was plugged into a Peavy Audition. The guitarist and drummer launched into their repertoire enthusiastic that I might be the last piece of the puzzle. Each of the 8 or so songs they played sounded exactly like Bad Religion. Crap.

We practiced a couple tracks and I tried to get some vocals arranged. The call to break out the boom box and record was sounded. The room was too small to record and not have it sound like Incapacitants. So they opened the bedroom window and set the boom box on the hood of the car in the driveway. One of the resident girlfriends was tasked with hitting record when we were ready to bring the hammer down!

I wish I had a copy of that tape but alas the magic captured on that day has been dispersed in the ether.

That was the last straw for me, and I decided to go it alone. I bought a 4 track, sequestered myself in my sweatbox studio apartment, tried to figure out gear I had no idea how to use and started writing. At the same time I also started experimenting with noise and found sounds. This was in 1993 I believe. The first track I recorded (Memory Scars) I used a toolbox,  a plastic pitcher and some other crap from around the house for drums. It sort of works, but I decided I needed to shell out for a drum machine. I bought an Alesis SR-16 from this guy and set to figuring it out. I got a couple of tracks recorded with it before it crapped out on me.

Some of those tracks ended up on the first Gruntsplatter release, and “Irritation Hive” ended up on the Cinder Skin release. While I was trying to save up the cash for a second drum machine I continued to work on the experimental stuff figuring I would mix the noise tracks in with the “regular” tracks. I ended up with more noise tracks and Gruntsplatter was born. The first Gruntsplatter release came out in 1995 and was made up of stuff recorded either originally for Cinder Skin or during the down time between drum machines.

I scraped together the money for a Boss DR-5 which I chose because it some synth sounds. I continued to work on Gruntsplatter but also needed to finish this Cinder Skin project. In 1996, 3 years after it started, it was released on cassette. The original mixes of the tracks sound better than what ended up on the tape. It was mastered by someone whom I found out later mostly worked with church groups on spoken word recordings and aspiring mariachi bands. He muddied it up real good. I made him do it over, the second time was a little better, but at that point he was done with me. These MP3’s were taken from the release, the original masters are in a box somewhere. I tried to re-eq it a bit. So, culled from a 13 year old cassette that sat in a number of dank basements and miserably hot apartments over the years is the Cinder Skin “Sunken” demo.

Cinder Skin – “Sunken” Demo

1) Cadaver Man
2) Congeal
3) Memory Scars
4) Introspection
5) Blood Gutter I
6) Irritation Hive

There are some reviews on the Cinder Skin page I linked above. I still have a bunch of these tapes, without covers. They are sitting in my dank basement.

I always intended to come back to do something in this vein with proper equipment.  It never happened. I’m finally going to have a my studio set up again in the next few weeks as the wife and I are moving to some place with more room. It will be the first time I’ve had my full studio set up since I finished “The Aberrant Laboratory” that Gruntsplatter released on Dark Vinyl in 2006.  So who knows…