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After getting back from 3 weeks off work I find myself thinking the same old cliche when I get back to work: “It would be nice to have some time off to do nothing right now!”. And now being back at the grind, and having the long task ‘setting up’ at our new rental home with mountains of junk everywhere, it seems like yet again it’s expected that we’re to run on empty. No rest for the wicked! (-Or some other saying that will help me cope with the denial) However, I have time to relate this adventure to you, in brief:

Heading back about 3 weeks to Easter both R, the animals and I set off for Brisbane to make temporary camp at R’s Mum’s place. Once prepared R and I headed out for a road trip in much the same intention as our Birdsville trip last year to see more of outback Queensland. After three days of driving up through Roma, Emerald, Longreach and Cloncurry we finally make it to Mount Isa. You have to see Mount Isa to truly believe it – it’s like something out of sci-fi movie crossed with suburban Australia plonked on Mars. As we were winding through the rocky semi-desert hills heading west toward the town, we could see plumes of heavy smoke rising. Getting really close to the town we rounded one last set of hill to see it all appear before us: massive chimneys and elaborate mining industry towering over a sprawling busy town, all surrounded by rocky red desert country hills. As we were going into the town the usual billboards were on the side of the road welcoming us. One stood out as humourously unforgettable: “Welcome to Mount Isa – Now you’re a REAL Aussie!”. In this we felt content.

We had a good stay over and enjoyed a few things like the swiming pool and seeing tropical birds we’ve never seen before. The following day we headed south west into more remote country and ended up at Boulia. Seeing that the country had recent rains it all felt abnormally ‘green’, and there were an excess of flies and locusts to add to the discomfort. We also found that the car had a flat tire. In the morning we found a local mechanic to patch it up for us, but later on the road to our surprise we found it flat again. Pulling into a tiny little place called Middleton we got a hand from a friendly old local which basically resulted in us putting the spare on and being done with it. Swealtering in the sun we needed a drink, so we followed the old bloke into the pub and got some icey drinks and had a yarn to young Brittish exchange worker as well as the old fella. Before recent rains they hadn’t seen rain for 8 years. Can you imagine that? I noticed a poster on the wall from Bird’s Australia asking ‘Have you seen this bird?’ showing the ever so rare Gray Falcon. I asked the old guy if he had seen any around. “Yeah, all the time!” He explained that we might see a few up the road a bit further nesting in one of those high thin communications towers. Sure enough he was right. Not only did we see one of these rare birds: we saw three – quite possibly a whole family of Gray Falcons and a nest. Satisfied with our twitch we kept on the road east until we finally rolled into Winton. By this point we were very tired of the whole camping thing and traveling huge distances just to get anywhere – we decided to treat ourselves to an airconditioned motel room and take it easy.

More adventuring had been pre-planned at that point but due to R coming down with a head cold we decided we had enough and to head back to Brisbane to relax. Of course it wasn’t that easy. It took two days of driving just to get there! The first day was epic, a sunrise to sunset slog from Winton all the way down to Roma. R’s cold had hit full on, and we were glad to be back in modernity of suburban Brisbane.

We spent the following week around the city, doing a lot of things but not enough ‘nothing’. One highligh was meeting none other than Hunz in the flesh for the first time, and had a good chin wag with him at Fundies in Paddington. It’s always good to put a ‘person’ to the ‘artist’ – very nice guy. If all goes to plan I might head up that way again on the 22nd and catch him live in The Valley. We also got to catch up with Jarrad and Bec for dinner and a day of bird watching up at Lamington NP. But by the time the end of the week was coming around my version of R’s cold was starting to manifest…

Heading back to freezing Armidale didn’t feel like fun. As soon as we got there we had to begin the ardous task of moving house. As I’ve explained before in this blog, we had to move due to the landlord wanting to move back into Galloway Street – so we found a new rental at Dorothy Avenue. With some great help from Dad and Simon (who also helped with my tape machine, more on that later) it took us the whole week to move just 3 blocks away. You can now probably see why I need a holiday. Moving sucks. Moving is worse when you have cold. There’s nothing nice about it and I won’t write about all the little problems and remaing issues. One thing I will say is that I’ve already set up the core parts of my new studio space – I’m already coming into some nasty RF interference problems with the power lines, and I have very ugly sounding bass response (probably due to the ceiling being lower). I’m not sure how to approach these problems just yet as we’ve barely started living in there, but I will speak of them again soon…

Ok now for some musical style updates:

A few posts back I said that Hunz’s new album Thoughts That Move (which I now have a lovely physical copy, ta Hunz) was up online for audio streaming at the RPM website. Well RPM took it down for some reason, so the link I provided would have seemed wrong. He’s since put it up at bandcamp and you can listen to the whole thing here! I’m really happy for him and I think the music deserves wide appreciation. The launch of the record will be on the 28th of May, so keep an eye on his website.

Another tid bit that has surfaced is some noisy guitar work I did for the artist Vivace (formally known as BotB) – he’s just release a new album called Polderdub which you can get here. You can hear some of my ‘off the rails guitar’ in the song Test Results. Not for the faint hearted…

Ghost Inputs (Iain MacKay and myself live) will be playing at the Get Off Your Arts Black Friday Dance Party, which is this coming Friday. We have a few more practices to go to make sure we’re playing up to the same level of energy we had last year. This is straight off the back of a ‘warm up gig’ we did last Friday at a private party in Armidale…

With every gig I come away thinking “now I’ve seen it all” but I keep getting surprised with new random insanities. This last gig hosted all the usual madness of having no run-order, no sound check, and random people everywhere on all sorts of substances. But the cheery on top was undeniably the stage set-up: “erected” in a back yard on uneven ground causing the whole thing to slope forward in differing degrees. To add to the odd situation there was a tarp above the stage which was so low that when you stood up your head disappeared up into it, meaning that the audience couldn’t see who you were! The combination of a sloping stage and the low hanging tarp meant that I had to stoop over to play, which ended up making my back a bit sore. The whole PA and lighting was run off just one power point and there were weird glitches and blips causing the whole thing to feel like it was going to fall over at any second. Iain had no power to his laptop so that decided to make a problem of itself mid set – nothing like a recalcitrant computer to make you feel helpless on stage. Despite all the above we had some ok moments where things came together. I couldn’t help but feel a little numb to everything, perhaps out of self preservation. Yet again I’m scratching my head thinking is it worth it at all, but I have hopes that the gig we have next Friday will be a little better. I’m kinda missing time to work on my own albums…

I’ve been running on empty a little bit lately, hence not much posting here.

Hunz’s RPM Challenge mixing was a lot of time consuming work but also a lot of fun: it’s now all finished and shall be released soon! The album is called “Thoughts That Move”. I will let everyone know when it goes public – you have a good one to look forward to!

Other than that, work has been insanely busy and time consuming due to the teaching semester starting (meaning I’m running around again recording all these lectures). To top it all off R and I have been doing a lot of ‘house hunting’ and ‘property hunting’ in the last couple of weeks. That can be enough to totally do your head in with all the options and possibilities. At this point we’re leaning toward buying land and getting something build for us (not by us), possibly using new green technology and ideas. And of course, we must include somehow a new space for my studio! I’d miss the old roomy acoustics at Galloway Street, but our time here is now limited, and it’s now the moment to commit the ghastly act of conformity and join the property investment game. Part of me feel icky about this, but part of me accepts the inevitability of it all, perhaps looking forward to the quiet modest commitment. I’ll let you know when the decision has been made.

Other parts of me yearn for travel. Sometimes I get cabin fever from being locked in studios all the time, and the cooling crisp air of an approaching autumn beckons me to be on the road. Some new ideas are entering my head either way, but all I have to do is reclaim my time to enact them…

I’ve been keeping an eye on all things Hunz in the last year or so. I’ve been listening to his music since the old tracker days in the 90s and I no doubt learned a thing or two about making music by looking at his modules. Last year he released a fabulous come-back album called “When Victims Fight” which caused me to buy a copy and confirm my fanboy status. Do go have a look.

He’s recently taken it upon himself to have a crack at the RPM Challenge, which is roughly attempting the impossibility of writing 10 songs or 38mins of music within the 28 days of February. Apart from thinking it is utter madness and a complete stress-out I actually got excited at the thought of Hunz attempting to do this. Some great music has got to come out of it, at least, right? What’s even more interesting is that Hunz is documenting the entire process on his blog making the drama really transparent. He’s sharing his works in progress and it’s fascinating to see how the ideas mutate and germinate into fully formed songs. He intends to release not only a CD from the project, but also to make free the XRNS source files for free playback in Renoise.

I made an offer via the comments section to give him a hand with the mixing of the songs if he was struggling against the deadline. Amazingly, he accepted the offer and I’ve been on mix duties since. And because of the deadline I’ve had to work fast and hard at adding polish and sparkle to his already beautiful tunes. I’ve already worked through three songs, with more to go. I’ve also done ‘mix notes’ to keep up with the transparent theme of the project – all of which you can find at his website.

I’ll post back when the project is complete. Will he make it in time? Let’s see…