05.30.2011 - Terrence Marks:

So, what have we been up to the last few days? A lot, but not much that bears reporting on. We hung out, watched movies, watched TV, played games....Comics take up a lot of our free time, and I've long thought that we'd be a lot like Brisbane and Kimberly if it weren't for that. Turns out I was right, more or less. Except I can't cook.

All of our donors have been given an extra three weeks to make up for the time we took off as well as the general

One of the things I've been doing is...back when I was in college, I was in a band. We called ourselves the Modern Lizard Quartet, a name I borrowed from Daniel Pinkwater's book, "Lizard Music". We never actually had four people. It went through a lot of iterations but it was mainly me (bass, keyboard) and David (guitar, drum machine). Depending on whether we were playing my songs or his songs, it sounded either like Elvis Costello playing Syd Barrett songs or Syd Barrett playing Elvis Costello songs.

We recorded a few things. Not in a studio. By ourselves. On four-track tapes. It's wonderful how technology moves so fast. I listen to a lot of obscure psychedelic music; the also-rans of the 60s. There were so many bands that recorded one amazing single then disappeared. Maybe that one single was all they had in them. Maybe they had more great music but broke up before they could put together the money to record it. The affordable multi-track recorder meant that wouldn't happen again.

It does, however, mean that you can record things and leave them in a box for ten years. I've decided to digitize my old tapes. They don't make four-track recorders any more. I can't hardly buy a tape deck any more. My choices are a $40 walkman that will distort the music if I'm lucky, or eat the tape if I'm not. Or I can get a high-end stereo system for around $200. Or I can get a $10 tape deck at the local thrift shop. It starts making this horrible screeching sound after about twenty minutes. I think that it runs just a little faster after it's had time to warm up. I went with the third option.

If I'm lucky, I mixed things down and can just copy the final mix from the tape to my computer. If not, I have to manually sync up the tracks. Two tracks are on the a-side of the tape. The other two are on the b-side. Backwards. We didn't, of course, count in. My playing could, charitably, be described as loose.

Anyhow, it's wonderful how technology moves so fast. Nowadays, you can get a variety of digital recorders. You can properly label and sync tracks if you know what you're doing.

I just wonder what bands will be doing ten years from now.