Comrades, I took down the previous “open thread” post, because although I’ve got nothin’, our man Black’s Art and Music Stack has something. So, so much something.
The Red Caesar Scenario is a real band now! Well, as real as AI can make it, anyway, and I will say, officially and for the record, that this is better than 90% of the crap that’s on the radio now. Very arty, but I like it.
And that’s not all! I’m going to let the man himself tell you about their Geocities page:
Check this out – an old school WORKING Geocities style site for the Red Caesar Scenario. Wear sunglasses. Not every button or link works, but a lot do.
Click the HELP button if you have any trouble. If you have trouble with the Guestbook page, reload it. Maybe reload it 7 to 10 times, even.
But whatever you do, do NOT click the BALTIC VICE BUTTON. Or the OTHER Baltic Vice Button. And definitely don’t click either Baltic Vice button 15 to 20 times. Nope, nope, don’t do it.
The MIDI files play, but they sound awful. Which is the point. Very 1990s.
I’m not often lost for words, comrades, but that does it. This is just incredible stuff.
I’m awed by you guys. This is the best clubhouse on the Internet, hands down.
Our musical homie Black sent in a description of what he’s working on, that he’s asked our help with. As this is a music blog, I’m going to assume he’s in Mexico, for kayfabe purposes
Everything between separators is Black’s.
First, thanks to you all for being a very entertaining group, and for supporting my work. I greatly appreciate it.
I’m working on a new album, this is one of my “real” albums, not something done as a riff on the discussion here, like The Red Caesar Scenario or 2Tonic. I am trying to capture the feel of traveling late at night, by car or otherwise, including the various stops along the way. I don’t really have the time or the opportunity to go out and get some of these sounds for myself, though. Also, they should not all sound like me.
I need audio of some spoken lines to include on the album. Some are in the style of a late night radio show, such as the intro, tag line, and a commercial, but some are just random lines you would hear at a restaurant or gas station while you are traveling. I could also use a few other things, but first here is the list of lines I need. And yes, you might recognize a name or two.
If you can record them at your computer, great. If you have to use your phone, great. Just try to be as clear as possible and try not to have any other sounds or background noise. Choose any of the lines listed below. You can do more than one section if you want, but only do as much as you want. I will take the best recordings and add them into the album.
***********************
RADIO SHOW INTRO –
Hello and welcome to Night Vistas. I’m your host, Thomas Porter. Tonight’s guests are –
– Digital Rights advocate Clayton Barnett.
– Coraline, the singer from “The Red Caesar Scenario”
– And R. C. Chesterfield, author of the self-help book “Dropkicked Into Reality.”
Phone lines are open, so stick around for a great show!
________________________
RADIO SHOW TAG LINES (Feel free to improvise one of your own) –
Night Vistas. After midnight, from the broadcast horizon.
After midnight, across the broadcast horizon, on the air — Night Vistas.
After midnight, across the broadcast horizon, on the air withNight Vistas.
________________________
RADIO SHOW AD –
Most people prepare for tomorrow. Some prepare for what comes after that.
Redline Preparedness offers long-term food storage, water systems, and emergency planning for people who prefer not to improvise when it matters.
It’s not about fear. It’s about options.
Redline Preparedness. Be ready — quietly.
________________________
RANDOM LINES AND SOUNDS (Feel free to improvise your own) –
Order Three, ready for pickup. Order Three, ready for pickup.
Pump Number Seven, diesel, thirty-one dollars and seventy-three cents.
Do you want onions on that?
Two packs of… let’s try those clove cigarettes over there, please.
Order Four, ready for pickup.
May I see your I.D. please?
Take the first exit, go about five miles down the road, and turn at the stoplight, by the old barn.
Have a good night!
***********************
There are a few other things I can use as well, but these are purely extras, and only if it’s convenient for you to get these.
Any sort of audio recording of street traffic (including on the interstate), audio from a gas station (inside or outside, or both), background sounds from a restaurant, trains passing by, bus station, and anything else of that nature. It’s fine if you use phone for these, that should be good enough quality.
I do not expect anyone to have time or opportunity to record most of these, so don’t knock yourselves out – if I don’t get the soothing, melodic sounds of a fight at the Waffle House, it’s not a big deal. And don’t do anything that might get you in trouble – if you can’t just hit “Record” on your phone as you are walking by somewhere, don’t bother with it. Again, all of this stuff mentioned here is just extras.
When you have something recorded, save the file as either a WAV file or an MP3 file. If you aren’t sure what format your phone records in, send it anyway, odds are it’s fine. An Audacity file (.aup) doesn’t work if you email it to me, since it doesn’t have the necessary data folder.
There will of course be discounts for clubhouse members. Contributors will get a special discount code emailed to them, whether your audio is used or not.
Here is the first track from the album, to give you an idea what it will sound like –
I don’t know if Sev has a Wednesday Nerd Fight topic lined up or not, but if he didn’t have time to come up with one, let’s go with “Would Alanis or Sarah McLachlan be a better girlfriend for Sev?”
Thanks again to all of you, and thanks to Sev for letting me do this here.
My contributions will, of necessity, be minimal, but I urge everyone to help out if he can. I can suggest a line for somebody to read, with the added bonus that it’s a real quote. I can’t find the exact wording with a brief internet search, so this is from memory, but it’s real close:
After midnight comes the intoxication of forbidden thoughts.
That’s E.M. Cioran, who apparently was afflicted with serious insomnia. He’s basically Nietzsche 2.0; the Nietzsche fans among you should give him a go. Here’s a Wikiquote page of some of his greatest hits — be advised, he consciously aped Nietzsche’s style, too, so these aphorisms might well mean something quite different in context.
(An interesting guy, Cioran. He’d be a lot more popular with the clove cigarettes crowd if he hadn’t gotten mixed up with Codreanu’s boys. His wiki entry says nothing about what he did during the war, but he was in Paris at the time, so… well, whatever. One can only imagine a meeting between him and Ernst Junger, who was stationed there…)
Second contribution: I have to bow out of the “Alanis vs. Sarah” debate, for obvious reasons, but I’ve been with versions of both, because for whatever reason there’s a kind of girl I’m attracted to, and there’s a kind of girl who’s attracted to me, and they’re about 180 degrees apart. Youth has its own imperatives, so… there it is.
Because it’s the most random time of year. First, our man Black might could use some help from the member-ship:
I am working on a new album, it’s close to finished, it’s about driving late at night and things you see and hear on the trip. I was wondering if you or any of the NBCs would be interested in providing a few spoken lines for the album. There will be an intro to a fake radio show, and some lines like you would hear if you stopped in an interstate gas station at 2 in the morning. Also, if anyone wants to record background noise from a gas station or restaurant or anything like that and send it in, that would be cool too. I’m not asking for any major efforts, just a few spoken lines or some quick-and-dirty background noise recorded on the fly.
Everyone who contributes would be totally anonymous. If you think the NBCs would have fun with this, let me know and I’ll send you more details.
I can’t do it myself — I have a face made for radio, and a voice made for a Charterhouse. But it sounds like fun — if anyone wants to contribute, let me know and I’ll put y’all in touch.
Second, at least tangentially related item: If I could get the Left to grok just one thing, it’d have to be that Words Aren’t Magic… right?
I was thinking about that this morning — the concept of This One Simple Trick. It’s the Christmas season, so of course it’s Consumerism Uber Alles now; where once we were bombarded by five ads every time we turned something on, now it’s fifteen. And so many of them are in the form of This One Weird Trick; it’s one of the signature phrases of our age.
Which got me thinking about the whole concept. Perhaps “One Simple Trick” thinking is the curse of Modernity. Not that there haven’t been Reductionists in the past; the idea of the world being reducible to one fundamental thing is as old as man; but it has really taken off in the last few hundred years.
But then I thought: Let’s roll with that. Let’s say there’s One Simple Trick that would solve most of our problems. What would it be?
My initial thought, of course, was SAM: take the 20 who do 100, and send them to a Strafbattalion auf Madagaskar. But — fun as it would be — that wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem is the worldview, the mind-virus, whatever it is that causes people to believe that whatever is, is wrong.
So… eliminate that. But that too might be a symptom of an underlying disease. Belief that “whatever is, is wrong” seems to be 100% correlated with a belief in Word Magic. I can’t figure out just how they fit together, but where you find the one, you inevitably find the other. I just can’t help but feel they’re causally related, and that Word Magic is prior… but I have no real reason for that. Nothing I can articulate, anyway.
So I thought I’d open the floor. If you really could do this One Weird Trick to fix Clown World, what would it be?
[And before I get 300 iterations of “send a certain subset of haberdashers to the SAM,” let me say it here, so you don’t have to. Really: PLEASE DON’T. We don’t need the Eye of Sauron this late in the year. Thanks].
I can die a happy man, knowing that my blog about dick medals has inspired an entire compilation by imaginary Indie bands. The Internet is the tits, my friends. It’s just the tits.
Black has a few notes for us on this. First, the technical specs. As it’s long but fun (make your own jokes), everything between the end of this sentence and the next separator is his:
A couple things to know before getting the album, because I hit a couple of technical glitches. I’m not some Cable-Fixing Expert, after all, I’m totally winging all this as I go.
I downloaded a test copy for myself. Some of the file names were too long and couldn’t be extracted. This was for two reasons –
– Some of the file names were just too long. I got around this by changing the name of the Album Artist from “Recording Artists Collections” to “RAC.”
– It’s not the file names themselves, it’s the file PATH. If you download the album zip file to a folder like –
“My Computer / Music / Humor / Songs About Dick Medals / Recording Artists Collections – The Baltic Vice & Other Incidents”
This uses up a lot more characters than –
“My Computer / Music / RAC – The Baltic Vice & Other Incidents”
So when purchasing the album, they should download the zip file to My Music or even the C: drive, extract the files there, and then move the extracted non-zip folder to their Music folder.
I had no idea that was going to happen or I wouldn’t have used such long titles on some of the songs. But long ridiculous titles are part of the fun! If anyone has problems, leave a comment and I’ll help you out.
Also, when the files are extracted into a proper folder, the songs are not listed in numerical order like they are on the Bandcamp page. This is because all the songs have different Artist Names. So instead of –
My Band – My Album – 01 My song
My Band – My Album – 02 My song
My Band – My Album – 03 My song
My Band – My Album – 04 My song
And so on, we have –
My Band – My Album – 03 My song
Your Band – Your Album – 08 My song
Someone Else’s Band – This Album – 10 My song
Some Random Band – Their Album – 05 My song
Again, not something I was aware would happen. So now songs are grouped in the folder by Band Name instead of Track Number. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. If you like the EVC songs but don’t care for The Red Caesar Scenario, then they are all lined up nicely for you….
…although anyone who doesn’t like The Red Caesar Scenario is clearly a fool!
Hopefully no one will have problems with this, I had no idea any of this would crop up. But, it’s also just something for fun, not a serious album by a serious band, so hopefully no one will mind too much and just go along for the ride.
Also, for anyone who wants to buy a few individual tracks but not the entire album – like maybe they only want three songs – the File Path thing shouldn’t be an issue, since buying a single track leaves out a lot of info like Album Title and Track Number. If has a problem, I can help you with it.
You can listen to the album on the Bandcamp site for free. You can also read the lyrics along with the song, hover your mouse over the song title and a “Lyrics” button will appear next to it.
Next are some notes on the composition etc., and again, everything between the end of this sentence and the next separator comes from Black:
Two of the songs are live recordings from The Barrel House. I didn’t want to use the Viper Room because that’s a real place. Plus, The Barrel House is this super-chill awesome place where pants are optional and not all of the barrels have beer in them. Newbies are often given some safety pins or a stapler (or in one case, glue) and encouraged by older, crueler members to “Tie One On,” and they aren’t talking about getting drunk…
Second, while working on a pretentious, self-important progressive rock song’s lyrics with AI, the machine came up with “The Principle of Emergent Blame.” That sounded like SUCH a Sev thing I felt compelled to include all the lyrics complete with personnel, pompous chapter titles and overblown musical directions.
Also, I thought it was funny to have someone from a band called “Sonic Booty” performing on such a self-absorbed, pseudo-intellectual piece of music.
I included a short fake essay written by a nonexistent 19th-century fatalist intellectual to illustrate just what kind of concept that the band The Red Caesar Scenario is rejecting. And I wanted to end the album on something at least a little bit positive and uplifting. It also bookends the opening track by the same band quite nicely.
Last, you may be wondering what “E.V.C. (Hokkaido Prefecture Affiliate Subsidiary Division)” is about. this is NOT a “Rare Japanese Import.” Sev and a few other longtime E.V.C. fans among you may recall back in the early 90s when E.V.C. was blowing up really big. They got so huge they had to open separate branches around the world. Not branch corporate offices – actual branch BANDS! There’s an actual entirely separate band in Hokkaido who operate as the local iteration of E.V.C. I don’t know why, the idea just came to me and I ran with it.
Personally, I love the idea of branch bands. It sounds like something a 90s Indie band would actually do — they’re “ironically” making fun of corporate sellout rock by a) selling out, and then b) selling out so hard that they actually license iterations of themselves in different areas. So, E.V.C. (Hokkaido Prefecture Affiliate Subsidiary Division) isn’t a tribute band, it IS the band… for accounting purposes.
(Kinda like there are (or at least were) three or four versions of the Harlem Globetrotters at one point — one plays big venues, another plays midsize venues, and so on).
Finally, inspiration apparently struck again yesterday:
I also have two new songs based on Clayton’s comment [yesterday] about “striking chickens.” I’m going to make that a separate single, not part of the album. I named the band Four Hours because anything longer than that and you should see your doctor. It’s uploaded and located here.
I particularly recommend the “Glorious Disco Mentalités Mix.”
I can’t say how absurdly flattered — I don’t think “honored” is too strong a word — to have had a hand in this. It’s awesome, comrades. Give them all a spin.
A reader who wishes to be credited as Black has used the miracle of AI to bring us the sound of our favorite Indie bands. He stresses that these are NOT for public consumption — clubhouse use only, please.
First up, the first “hit” (insofar as Indie has hits) from Exploding Vagina Candle, their debut single, “Lesbians in Borneo.”
Of this one, Black says:
The first song is E.V.C.’s big hit from late 1993, “Lesbians In Borneo” (shortened to “L.I.B.” to get the record into places like Wal-Mart). I wrote the lyrics to that one myself, so everyone can blame me instead of AI.
I’m not often lost for words, comrades, but this one did it. First, and above all, isn’t the Internet just the tits? It has enabled so, so much FNG… and yet, so much awesome. What would’ve been months of work by an actual band — four, five guys with instruments, rehearsal space, sound boards, and so on — is now being done by one guy with a laptop. It’s really impressive.
Second: That’s not what I initially imagined EVC would sound like, but having heard it… yeah, that’s exactly what EVC would sound like. There’s a strong early U2 vibe to it, with the jangly reverb guitar and especially the drums (say what you will about U2, their rhythm section kicks ass). The vocals are great too. They really capture that “American trying to sound English” thing from the mid-90s . You could easily say “I saw these guys open for the Stone Roses at [some Manchester club] in 1989” and nobody would bat an eye.
Next up, “A Red Velvet Curtain:”
This isn’t credited to an NBC house band, and now I’m trying to guess which one of them might have a chick singer. The possibility never occurred to me, but of course one of our Indie bands would’ve had a chick singer — they were everywhere on that scene in the 1990s — and she would’ve sounded exactly like that.
Black says:
The second song is based on a long-running NBC meme, curious to see if you figure it out. That one has mostly AI-generated lyrics, but they came out really well – very suggestive of something but never actually stating what. I plan to eventually use the second song on an actual album.
I’d give it a spin! And yeah, I caught it (there’s a transcript of the lyrics below the video at YouTube). And again, this song is perfect for it. It’s got that very sultry Weimar cabaret vibe… which is what you’d need, I imagine, if you were going to indulge. What a great piece.
Give them a listen, Kameraden. Great stuff. Of all the things I never thought I’d say, ”I’ve got a blog about dick medals, and it inspired AI-generated song” is way, way up there… but there it is, and it’s awesome.
Founding Questions 