Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

Sentence case in a title? God, I’m slipping.

Anyway, I mentioned it everywhere else, so I assume that most of the people interested in hearing about it have heard about it, but just in case (and because this is the only place I feel that talking about it doesn’t feel like me using something else I do to shamelessly self-promote), the fourth Midnight Brown album, “Deadly Electric,” is now available over at midnightbrown.com.

I wasn’t at all sure how it would be received. It’s definitely one of those cases where you work on something for a really long time and totally lose perspective on it. Was it funny? Too serious? Total garbage? People seem to be enjoying it more than I initially expected.

Also, I can still listen to it and enjoy it. I know a lot of bands are in that mindset where once they’ve finished something, they can’t listen to it anymore. But we wrote stuff that I enjoyed, stuff that we thought was funny at the time. So the entirety of the Midnight Brown catalog sort of sounds like one big, weird, coded diary to me. But the actions of the time when those songs were recorded get hazy over time. The specifics get replaced with general feelings. Makes the whole thing seem a bit more distant. Makes me realize that I’m a pretty different person than I was when we started writing this stuff back in 2004.

That might be the most whiny, self-important thing I’ve ever typed. Christ.

Anyway, here are some quick, short factoids about Midnight Brown songs.

- “So why did you do it? Dope? Revenge?” is something that a cop said to my current roommate after he got arrested. It was the funniest shit ever.

- “where were you on the night that your conscience caught up to you?” is a tribute to LL Cool J. If you’ve heard a fair amount of LL Cool J, that should actually be pretty obvious. Also, I had been drinking quite a bit when we recorded, which is why the rapped breakdown is so bad off-kilter. Also, that verse was poorly written and wasn’t practiced a lot beforehand. If I had wanted to do it “right,” I would have removed a few syllables here and there to make it flow better. But I actually like that it sounds like some kind of awful rap that some shitty poet would deliver when he was called in to “perform” in the middle of some bullshit New Age song about… hemp rights or something. Except it’s mostly comprised of LL Cool J lyrics/references.

- Chris bought that cat belt buckle off of eBay. It broke relatively quickly.

- “The Freezersuits” was originally meant to sound like a lost level from Rez. That’s why it’s so long and broken down into subsections.

- “Baristacratic” and “go! go! vietnam” are inspired by the same person.

- I was extremely pissed off/distraught about something I really had no right to be pissed off/distraught about when we wrote “FFF.” By the time we were done, I had come to terms with that. If you’re paying attention, “Summer of Angst” tells you what “FFF” stands for.

- “President of the Mall” contains a largely accurate description of the location of the shops in the Santa Rosa mall. Actually, I don’t know if the Great Steak is there anymore.

- The cover of Tommy february6’s “Kiss One More Time” is probably the longest I’ve ever spent on one song. It had to be right. It was also a fucking bitch to sing. Eventually I took part of it down an octave to make it easier on my voice. Also, I still don’t know what any of the words mean, but a Japanese friend told me that my pronunciation was pretty good, which was nice to hear. If you make a slight speed correction to the original video for the song, you can line our cover up directly with the video… which is fucking creepy as fuck. I tried uploading it to youtube, but it got automatically pegged with a copyright violation.

- “Intro (Dope)” has so few lyrics because I felt like anything I had to say over it would just take away from what I liked about it.

- The same is true for “RadiOIactive,” but in retrospect, we should have written actual lyrics for that.

- I don’t know why so many songs directly reference Ric Flair. I am not an especially big Ric Flair fan.

- I do know why so many songs directly reference Les Onaka. We think Les Onaka is awesome.

- I’m envious of rap guys that can tell a story in a song. “army of tom f. wilsons” is an attempt to do that. I’m not especially happy with it.

- “A Filthy Classic” is about Pat O’Brien. Well, the chorus is, anyway.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough for now. Thanks to those of you that are actually interested in this level of detail about those songs. I don’t think we ever thought there would be any sort of audience for the stuff we were making when we started making it. We’ve talked a bit about what to do next, and I think I want more live instruments. Maybe I’ll tune my guitar… aaaaand learn how to play it.

Let’s look back on 2008 and 2009 as the years when the mainstream world thought “man, maybe I should get a blog” and then followed it up in ‘09 with “and by blog I meant Facebook/Twitter account.”

It’s sort of funny, now, looking back on the time when I was setting this page up and a lot of other people I know were setting up something similar. Then I got employed again, some people moved to other parts of the country, other people stayed in their respective parts of the country, and life continued forward. Still, there was something almost magical about that time, and I’ll always remember it. Now, posting full entries to a personal blog feels archaic and pointless, especially when I consider how many other places I can use to get the sort of info I’d save up for this blog out there in shorter forms.

But back in… I don’t know, late 2006 or something, me and Chris started work on what will soon become Midnight Brown’s fourth album, which is still called Deadly Electric. We started making music immediately after releasing the previous album, Dope/Revenge. But after writing around two or three songs, everything pretty much went bad in our respective lives for entirely different reasons. Well, maybe “bad” is a harsh way of putting it. Everything went “angsty.” There.

There’s actually a lot of stuff about that time in my life that I don’t want to get into. That made it pretty hard to sit down and write a bunch of songs, because any time I tried, they were coming out… well… mad emo, or something. We did some writing here and there, but I mostly just started writing instrumental tracks and never putting vocals to them. During the creation of Deadly Electric, I’ve probably written around 250 half-songs, either a few lyrics that got typed up and forgotten or tracks that vary from just dumb, four-bar drum loops to tracks that just need lyrics.

We haven’t really revisited any of that stuff lately. Things are much better all around these days, and when we sit down to write, we start from scratch. I feel like I’ve got a few good creative outlets and I’ve surrounded myself with people I really enjoy spending time with. Some of that’s a matter of public record, but despite whatever weird pictures I may post on Twitter of me in bars with friends, I enjoy a little privacy, too.

That’s why Deadly Electric is still so weird to me. Even though the songs aren’t actually about the things and the people that were around when they were written, a lot of those songs remind me of really specific things. Some of them make me feel pretty stupid, sort of like writing about it right now does. Some of them make me feel relieved that all that stuff is so far behind me now. And some of them are influenced by knives and horse racing, just like most of the older stuff was.

Actually… most of the songs on the new “record” are totally dumb, similar to how the ones on the last three were. The real difference is that they just make me think of very different stuff than those older songs do. I don’t know if any of that will come across when other people are listening to it. It certainly doesn’t mean that the songs are any “deeper” and “realer” than they’ve been in the past. There’s certainly some production on it that I’m proud of, though. Right now Cop Knife, Roll Them Shakers, and LNS are probably my favorite songs. We’ve got 13 finished tracks, and we probably just need one or two more before I feel like it’s long enough to call an “album.” Some people piped up and said we should sell it, but that doesn’t sound like an especially great idea.

Though not as weird as the notion that we’ve already got a good name for a fifth album.

Considering the fast-paced world in which we live and the entertainment medium that I choose to follow, it’s probably no surprise that I’m not much of a reader. Actually, I’m not much of a viewer anymore, either. My television viewing has gone down to maybe one or two shows that I follow religiously, and one of those–Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job–is edited like a well-considered ode to ADD.

But I do still buy a couple of books a year, like the occasional wrestling autobiography (which I usually forget to read) or books about Japanese graphic design (which are notable for their pictures). I am, however, always a sucker for a good non-fiction book about various aspects of hip-hop. But I guess I never knew why I had this thirst for hip-hop knowledge. I started listening to it sometime in the early-to-mid-’80s, when a relative exposed me to some sort of K-Tel breakdancing compilation. My love for the music would be solidified a couple of years later when I picked up Raising Hell and Licensed to Ill and made completely unbreakable when, as an 8th-grader, I got my hands on Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It.

Jason Tanz, a Brooklyn-based writer, has done his share of thinking about hip-hop, and the place of white people in it, with his book, Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America. While I don’t really expect most readers to feel as I do, many pages of this book felt more like a mirror in my hands. Tanz relates stories of his own induction into the world of hip-hop and backs it up with plenty of interviews, some inspiring, some (like the time he spends with a bunch of confused wannabe gangsters from Canada) downright embarrassing. The book also briefly touches on the marketing forces at work behind hip-hop, how they subvert it for their own twisted needs, and how the artists are more than happy to oblige–which taps into the scary culture-bending science behind marketing, another topic that has my clicking the BUY BOOK NOW button once or twice a year. So anyway, yeah, loved the book.

Of course, it also helps that the author, like myself, found himself recording and releasing rap albums in the mid-90s. As I transitioned out of Headboard and started the Suburban All-Stars, Tanz and his posse were probably already thinking about how best to shout rhymes into a Mac’s internal microphone as they formed a group called Commodore 64 and released an album that still has some beats on it that I wish I had made called K-Minus Initiative.

Three tracks, which I’m guessing must be long-lost tracks from some never-completed second album, recently got posted onto last.fm. Sounds like they did the right thing and got something that more closely resembled a real microphone. You know, there’s a reference or two in the tracks that make them sound a bit newer than the typical “long-long track” would be.

…it’s stuff like this that makes me want to hook up my mic.

We both agree that the movie Go is impossible to watch in this day and age. Don’t watch Go.

We also agree that Clerks ain’t all that anymore, either. I love Clerks, but dude!

Also, we’re split on the topic of an Anchorman sequel. He’s all “whatevs.” I’m all “they’ve been making Anchorman sequels for the past few years, haven’t they?”

I still need to unwrap and watch my copy of Clerks II at some point. It’s on HD-DVD, so it’ll surely have The Look And Sound Of Perfect on its side.

Also, Big Audio Dynamite. Pro or con?

Not to bore you all with more talk about things I do to my computer, but I ditched that D-Link hunk of junk today and put an AirPort Extreme in its place. That raises the number of Apple products in my home up by one and it’s starting to really freak me out. Am I becoming one of those people? Am I going to suddenly start wearing turtlenecks and hanging out at Starbucks? Will I be the ass telling people about my screenplay every chance I get?

Hell, I even work in an all-Apple office now. Madness!

Jason Ocampo, you were right all along. There, I said it. If I didn’t use this PC for playing games, and if it wasn’t the only computer I own that is fully equipped with music-making stuff that I enjoy using (most of which could probably be replaced with Mac equivalents, if I really wanted to learn some new software), I wouldn’t need a PC at all.

It’s starting to feel like the summer I spent transitioning from using an Amiga to using a 486.

…

It’s sad to watch, but my poor lonely blog here has seen better days. Traffic is dwindling, though I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not posting here very often or because people have stopped checking it in favor of checking giantbomb.com instead. It’s probably a bit of both. Once my life stabilizes a bit and I’m not spending every waking hour thinking about the new site, I expect things around here will pick up a bit.

…

In music news, the new Goldie Lookin’ Chain album is out in UK stores next week. I’m pretty excited about that, already have a copy pre-ordered.

…

One more nice thing about switching network devices… the AirPort only has one fairly dim light on it. The D-Link was full of those PlayStation-style super-bright blue lights. If you’re throwing that in a closet, that’s no biggie. Mine sat right in the middle of my sightline from bed, making the room too bright, even when my eyes were closed. I felt like some kind of old man/crazy person, putting black tape over lights at 3AM while muttering curses under my breath. Now if I could just get those TiVo hard drive fans to quiet down… that’s my fault, though, the thing was plenty quiet until I threw a second hard drive in it. How else could I keep the entire run of Cheap Seats a couple of button presses away?

…

Oh, and it’s about two guys driving cross-country who catch wind of a plot by evil Germans to kidnap UK super-girl-group, Shampoo, and how they decide to take matters into their own hands to save the girls and stop the terrorists.

So, now that Giant Bomb has launched in blog form, I’m not 100% sure what to do with this blog. I’ll keep it going as best I can, but that sort of depends on how many non-gaming things that happen to me. Anything gaming-related probably belongs on the other site. With a site to launch and a game blog to keep up, I’m not sure what sort of non-gaming things will actually happen to me, but I’ll drum something up.

- I’m currently in the process of making my way through the Human Giant Season 1 DVD, which was released last week. I missed most of the episodes when they were on originally, and I’m pretty surprised by it. It’s better than “sketch show on MTV that isn’t The State” sounds. And, unlike The State, they were thinking ahead when they made this stuff and properly licensed the music for the DVD release. I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Xbox Live Marketplace or iTunes versions of The State because they went in and replaced all the music with generic-sounding stuff for licensing reasons. The music was a significant part of The State’s comedy, so… I don’t know, maybe it’s just nostalgia, but it isn’t the same without it. I guess I’ll have to stick with my 80th generation VHS tapes.

- It’s daylight savings time now, which has me way excited, because I’m due to start commuting to an office again as of, well, later today. Driving home in the dark always sort of leaves me depressed.

- I dislike the wireless router I picked up. While it’s easy to configure and everything, it’s still a router. My ISP provides me with 8 static IP addresses, so I don’t have to put up with port forwarding and internal IP addresses and all that crap, but I am now. So far, it’s been mostly smooth, but it pops up and gets totally irritating just enough to make me remember/regret my decision. Like when an AIM file transfer seems to not work. Or when, for whatever reason, I can only upload files to the Giant Bomb media server from my Mac when it’s got a wired connection. That makes blogging from the bathroom (the American dream, maybe you’ve heard of it) totally impossible. Not cool.

- The long-awaited album from Crystal Castles is only a little over a week away. If you haven’t heard of them, it often sounds like a girl singing/shrieking over an NES, an Atari 2600, a Game Boy, and/or a Commodore 64, all of which are running through distortion pedals, including (especially) the girl. That’s a bit of an over-simplification, but whatevs. I like their sound, and the songwriting is good, too. Take a listen on their myspace page if you haven’t heard of them already. It fits my criteria in that it occasionally sounds like they’re playing dancey music on a device that is about to break or catch on fire.

- Speaking of music, I haven’t had a whole lot of time lately to work on new Midnight Brown material, but I’m hoping to find some time for more of that in the near future. With a Mac available to make recording vocals easy and portable (before I had another desktop set up in a spare bedroom), it’s all a little easier to deal with now. Now I just need to find a decent host/sequencing application for OSX and see if I can find anything I like more than FL Studio. I doubt I will, but I should at least give it a shot.

- OK, fine, one little gaming thing before I remember to post about it in greater detail. You should check out Nexuiz if you haven’t seen it before. It’s a free, open-source update of the Quake 1 engine that makes for a decent online first-person shooter. You’re not going to confuse it for Crysis or anything, but it’s very playable, and the price is definitely right.

Just noticed this (click for a full-size image) and wanted to say thanks to all of you for making the Arrow Pointing Down podcast the #2 video-game-related podcast on iTunes today. We have some exciting and dangerous ideas kicking around for the future, so stay tuned!

Someone needs to come up with an internet-friendly equivalent to “stay tuned.”

Stay bookmarked! No.
Stay down with RSS! Nah.

OK, well, I don’t have anything good enough to replace that. But that’s beside the point.

Also, while I have you here, do yourself a favor and go over to Street Carnage to listen to Bobby Brown reciting every number and letter he can think of after busting into someone’s studio space and demanding to drop hot rhymes over their beats. Just listen to the one marked “Brown Bomber” if you’re in a hurry. I’ve been wandering around the house, often in my underwear, shouting “BROWN BOMBER! A, B, C, D, E, F, G!” for a couple of days now.

After spending a few hours setting up microphones and yelling at a laptop, we’ve recorded another installment of the Ryan Davis Weekly Podcast Classic, the Arrow Pointing Down podcast.

Sounds like there’s a bit of echo, primarily from mic bleed if I had to guess, but the high ceiling in my living room probably didn’t help matters much. Either way, it sounds way better than the Skype-based test we did last week, and is probably more scattered and insane than last week’s, too! So check that out!

Good news, Audiosurf is coming out this week through Steam. If you pre-order, you save a dollar and get it for $8.95. On top of that, the game comes with Valve’s soundtrack for The Orange Box, which is a pretty cool addition.

Apparently it’s using those new Steamworks tools, too. The game will have achievements, much like the games in The Orange Box do. Very cool. I look forward to dusting all of you on various MSTRKRFT songs.

Quick one here before I step out for the evening, but you might want to head over to the official site for Audiosurf and sign up to take part in its beta weekend… that’s this weekend!

It’s an IGF finalist that reads your music and makes levels out of it. Apparently you can play along with the songs in a variety of modes. Check out this video for an idea of what it does. I haven’t played it, but it looks totally rad.

(h/t to "Gage" for pointing this out to "me.")