Life

I’ve posted six blog posts so far and we’re getting close to the holidays. I’ve been saving up vacation and personal time at work all year so I could take a nice long break at the end of the year. Not sure whether I’ll get a chance to write a blog post while I’m on vacation. Just saying, no promises. I’m bringing the iPad but I’ve never written very long on it, so I’m not sure.

My grandma just passed away at 94, so my plans are a little in flux. Probably to keep things in balance, I also just found out today that I got a promotion at work. Perhaps grandma had one last prayer for me stored up that she put through as she passed the gates and saw grandpa. I owe a lot to her, she prayed for me to get this job, she prayed for me to get this house, she prayed for all the great things that have happened in my life. I love you so much grandma, thank you.

Continued… Giving this typing a blog post on the iPad a try. I know I’ve sort of lost the narrative thread of my posts. Vacation and constant attention to your kids can rot your brain. Not going to even try at this point. When I get back into the office and the studio maybe I can get my brain back on track. Speaking of tracks, I need to start remixing the seventh album.

This vacation marks the first time my wife and I have traveled long distance with two kids. More than that we traveled twelve hours by car driving through the night. I knew my son, the eldest, would be fine with driving through the night. He sleeps like a rock. Our youngest, my sixteen month old daughter, has never been very far from home. She did really well and she has enjoyed herself immensely. My kids love the beach and the water.

Sorry if this post has been a little too much “life” and not enough music. But I did finally finish a book I’ve been working through. Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space.” If you like science fiction and want to boggle your brain I would highly recommend it. The next book I have started is the latest Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. As always, I get sucked in immediately and just hold on for the ride. I can never get enough Reacher.

Stay tuned.

I was being too judgmental

The other part of getting back into music was cracking open my iPod and going on a quest to listen to all of it. That digital horde I had been saving and collecting for years. Why was I collecting it if I wasn’t going to listen to it? One of the great things about having kids is that you learn how to be a kid again. You learn about that suspension of judgement and disbelief. I was being too judgmental when it came to music. I don’t know if it was snobbery or what, I just wasn’t opening my mind to very much anymore. More than one guest on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast has basically said as much about kids. That’s what makes them so wonderful and as a parent that’s what you want and strive to preserve in them. I wanted to get that back in myself as well.

So I started at A. Which on my iPod means Alice In Chains. They had been my favorite band for a long time until Layne died. I had maybe only listened to their comeback album, “Black Gives Way To Blue” a few times. I was too judgmental, again. I dismissed it as too much Jerry. I don’t know why I thought that was a bad thing. I love Jerry. What the fuck was my problem? I needed to let go. To stop judging things by the past, to let go. And that’s what I did. I stopped judging and I just started listening. It didn’t happen right away. I moved through the A’s into the B’s, eventually listening all the way through to Z and into a few bands who’s names begin with numbers.

But the first time around I really didn’t go out of my comfort zone. I skipped over bands, I was still dismissive. A defining moment came about the third round through the alphabet when I put on the album “Four” by Blue Traveler. Everyone know those songs that broke that band and made them huge that are on that record. But part of my quest to listen to everything meant I started at the first track of an album and didn’t skip to the ones I knew and loved but staunchly listened to all the way through to the last second. And I was so glad I did. That Blue’s Traveler album is amazing! I think when it first came out I was interested in John’s harmonica playing but felt it was a novelty. Being a guitar man, I want guitar solos. I put that aside and listened to the songs and really loved the whole album and really wanted to buy more. Now that I’ve got some holiday Amazon.com cash in my virtual pocket I think I’m going to follow up with that.

Well that was the proverbial straw or the opening of the floodgates. I realized I could start and album and try to take it for what it was worth. That doesn’t necessarily mean I followed through with everything I put on though. Some music really is just bad. Without going into it too deeply, two bands I had to shut off and vow never to go back to: Breaking Benjamin and Mudvayne. The first because all their songs sounded the same to me, and no guitar solos. The second because how can you be a metal band and NOT HAVE ANY GUITAR SOLOS!!!! Seriously people. Metal was founded on the guitar, if all you can do is pound away on some power chords, go away and learn how to play that thing. Jeez.

Another band I had been too judgmental about for the last decade or so has been Radiohead. I dubbed them on social media as being the best band of the 90’s and the worst of the 00’s. I’m a guitar guy through and through and while I’m not going to give that up, I at least need to put it aside for the bands that I love and just listen to the fucking album. I outright dismissed “In Rainbows.” When I got it I think I maybe listened to the first 5 to 10 seconds of each track. I think it was about the 6th time through the alphabet that I had listened to all the other Radiohead albums and Rainbows was the only one left. I loved it and I curse myself for not giving it a fair shake the first time around. I think they put out another one after that and I’ve heard about Atoms for Peace. I must get these albums soon.

That should about do it for now.

What this is

So why did I choose to start a blog? What kind of goal did I mean to accomplish by writing? Not that anyone has asked me these questions. I just had these questions for myself.

Back in the early part of 2012, February 26 through March 17 to be exact, I started to write. I called it “How did it all get to this?” It started as a letter to a friend, and then I thought maybe it was a book I was writing. It became very autobiographical and very personal, if those two things can exist side by side and not mean the same thing. I wrote about what it was like for me in high school, how I never got any sleep, how that affected me, how I spent my twenties, my move to New York, my job in New York, and how I got my friend Ross so paranoid that he quit his job and moved into the mountains of West Virginia. After I was done with it I realized that I could not really share it with the world. I sent it to a good friend of mine and his only reaction was something like, “If I had known you were doing that much drugs, I would have beaten you up.”

As I said, it was something I was originally writing to give to a friend, my aforementioned friend Ross. I thought about that document for a while and thought it still could be a book, thinking perhaps I could put in my love of music and my progression as a recording artist. Then I started really getting into music again and thought it would fit into a blog format better than trying to publish a book, which seems like such a daunting thing. I never really wanted to be a writer, but sometimes you have to write if you want people to get interested in other forms of art that you have created.

So I started with the music rather than going back and chopping up my biography thing, but I think I will eventually get around to taking that apart. That is part of the “Life” portion of the title of my blog that I will eventually get to. I never got around to sending the letter to Ross, and now it has been close to 10 months since I have spoken to him. I put my family first and that means, I feel like, I have let down my friends. I originally had an idea to start a podcast, a la WTF style but I really hate the sound of my voice. Just something I think runs in my family.

One of the last times I talked with Ross I mentioned the idea of a podcast and he said that he had been recording himself. He sent me the recordings and I listened to them and they were exactly as you would expect from someone who had isolated themselves from society into the mountains of West Virginia. I wanted to take his rantings and cut them into segments that resembled some sort of narrative interspersed with my introductions, some music, and read some of Ross’ poetry. My hatred of my own voice lead to fear of doing the podcast, that was my own invention, and I kept putting the needs of my family first. I’d like to post you some of Ross’ poetry, I don’t think he’ll mind. It’s really quite good, he is a very smart man, and the society that (he feels) has pushed him away is lesser for his absence.

The title of the blog refers to the other thing in my life that I love and would like to write about. Books. More specifically, science fiction. If you get the title now, good for us, if not I’ll get around to it later.

-For Ross

Getting back into music

I had stopped listening to old music. I was heavily into the WTF podcast. I was occasionally buying new music, but hardly giving more than one or two listens. I had stopped recording music but it was always on my mind that I wanted to go back the recording I had made and remix them. That would be around the early part of 2012. But let me rewind a bit to paint the picture of where I was.

October 2010 I was laid off from NPD. My son was 10 months old and my wife wanted to go back to South Korea to see family and show off our family and our son. I stayed in South Korea for two months and then left with our son, leaving my wife behind to have some more time with family and get rid of the stuff we had accumulated there. I was in college again to get my Bachelor’s degree and needed to get back to the states to pick up my books and accelerate my school schedule. My parents were ready to leave New York and my dad was making frequent trips to Charleston, South Carolina. I wanted to get out of my parent’s way so they could sell their house, so I thought I’d give Charleston a try for a while.

I finished my Bachelor’s degree and started to look for a job, I couldn’t find any near Charleston for IT. We moved back to New Jersey and I got the job I am in now. We moved to a teeny weenie itty bitty apartment in Clifton, NJ. No room for an office, let alone all my music making equipment. My wife got pregnant with our second and we started to look for houses. It took a lot of weekend house hunting and then more than three months to get the mortgage. It was a grueling process. We moved into the house just 3 days before the birth of my daughter.

I still wasn’t listening to much music, I had 300 WTF podcasts to go through as well as ones that were coming in at either 2 or 3 per week. Once I got caught up with the podcasts and listened to a few books on tape I decided it was time to get back to the editing room. I finally had a desk once again and the computer was freshly upgraded and just raring to go. I started to remix the first album, my self titled piece “Nilentropy”, but I didn’t think it was an improvement. I was just muddying things up. So I started to listen to music again, but in a way a mixer or production might listen to music. I asked myself, “What makes this so good?” I was listening to a lot of my favorite music produced by my favorite producers. Mainly Rick Rubin and his work with the Chili Peppers.

If you listen with a pair of headphones you will discover something about music if you can shut out things like the lyrics and filler stuff like strings and noises. The rhythm is the backbone of the music. For the Chili Pepper’s is it Chad and Flea and they are right smack dab in the heart, the center of the aural sound field. The backbone. As much as I like the production of The Beatles, they don’t stick with this kind of musical philosophy. Ringo’s drums are sometimes relegated to only one side of the stereo field. While this might work for the psychedelia, it wasn’t the way I wanted to go with my music.

So I remixed my first album again with that approach. Drums and Bass in the center holding up the house. I put the rhythm guitar on the left and lead on the right and bam, I had my formula. The filler stuff I put where I felt it filled voids and added. Overall my goals was that everything was heard, nothing was muddy sounding and nothing was too overpowering. I think I did alright with the first album. Later we’ll talk about the progression of the mixing of subsequent albums.

About my music

I’ll try to keep this one quick. Sort of an addendum to the running commentary I’ve started on the blog.

I started writing music in 2001 when my best friend Charles asked me to join his band and hammer out his songs into something we could record. I had a classes in college about music theory so approached the process in a very structured and mathematical way. I broke his songs down and I add lead guitar to compliment his chord progressions. It was my Renaissance. It opened up new paths in my mind and I started to write a lot of stuff on guitar every day. Charles and I would get together every weekend and Jam on, mostly acoustic, his songs and some of mine. We jammed out for a couple years until we thought we had the songs down real tight and Charles decided to put up some money to record at a local studio. We recruited Charles’ cousin, Chris for bass guitar and borrowed Bob Buckley to sit in on drums. We did two major marathon recording sessions, and then Charles and I went back, over and over again for tracking, vocals and a bit of mixing.

While we (Charles and I) were recording the first album, “Transmission” for our band Soldiers of the Constellation Q, he wrote some lyrics to a track I composed. At that point though I had probably 30 music tracks that were “on the back-burner”. I kept them there and recorded some on a tape recorder and some primitive stuff on my Mac. We finished up the album but the mixing was horrible, in my opinion. I wanted to learn to mix them myself but I really had no idea where to begin.

During this period of my life I had gotten married to my first wife, gone back to school, and started along a new life/career path. My first wife bankrupted us, and we split up. Things were going nowhere with the band, we never officially released the album. I left my wife and moved into an apartment with a guy named Chops that I had met at my then current job. He was also into music and we bonded over sharing new musical experiences. I bought my first recording software, a mixing board and we recorded some sessions under the name “Meth Lincoln and the Proverbial Teet.” While it was a very creative time for me I was mired in depression and heavy drug use. I wasn’t making a lot of money at my job to be on my own. I needed to get out of Michigan and start over.

I fucked off my job and had my dad come out to Michigan to pick me and my stuff up and bring it out to New York, where most of my family were. I found a good paying job and started to settle into life in New York. Those musical pieces I had written in 2001 were on my mind still, but I needed to get over my past. So I fucked it out on a co-worker (not the best idea, but you know…) and that really didn’t last long as I’m sure most people will know how a rebound fuck works. Once I got that out of my system I buckled down hard. Recording a track or more a night.

I recorded almost 4 albums worth of material but i still had no idea how to mix it. I decided to tackle it after divorcing my ex and going to South Korea to marry my current wife. I came back and mixed it, it was okay but instead of trying to do a better job I decided to push on with recording and get more ideas nailed down. I recorded another 3 albums worth of material and while mixing that I decided to go back and try to make sense of the Meth Lincoln stuff. I was getting better at mixing. I put all my material out into the world on Bandcamp.com and recorded anther two albums after that to round out my complete catalog at 13 albums.

Here are the links to my projects on bandcamp:

Nilentropy> http://nilentropy.bandcamp.com

Meth Lincoln and the Proverbial Teet> http://methlincoln.bandcamp.com

And now back to the other narrative that brings us back to the recent past…

Where was I?

In looking to start a blog I had originally had my first post on blog . com but the day after I put up my first post the site was down for two days. Not good. That certainly did not bode well with me. I had a bunch of ideas to get down and the blog I had just created was nowhere to be found. Anyway, I copied my first post over here on WordPress and now I can try to pick up the pieces of my thoughts and start over.

I am a musician and I listen to a lot of music. Besides music I am an avid fan of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast and NPR’s “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”. Besides those two podcasts, I have a 160GB iPod Classic full of music that I have been rotating through lately. I spent most of my teens and twenties buying CDs. Then when the iPod came along I spent a lot of time importing those CDs into iTunes and then later on I supplemented that library with the collections of my friends. We all have those kind of friends, the digital hoarders. A good chunk of my library came from Ryan when I worked in Chester, NY for NPD. A bit more came recently in the form of classic rock from my current co-worker, Bob.

I didn’t always listen to all of the music I had. I tended to be fixated on a few albums. Then I would get new releases from my favorite artists and only focus on that for a while. To put it plainly, I was in a music rut. That was near the end of 2011. That was when I found the WTF podcast. I heard Marc on my other favorite podcast, Wait Wait. It was a cool interview and Peter Sagal spoke very highly of Marc’s work on WTF. I had vaguely remembered Marc as a comedian, I tended to watch a lot of comedy central and stand up specials when I was stoned as a teen/twenty-something.

If you don’t know WTF, when you subscribe you get the most recent 50 episodes. So I got episodes 198-248 on my first download. I decided to start from the earlier episode and work my way up, but 198 turned out to be a “road diary” and I wanted to hear a normal interview episode so I skipped to 199. And wow, was I blown away. It is a great interview with Aubrey Plaza, and I was hooked. I listened through the fifty I had while accumulating the new ones as they came in until I was caught up. Listening to them all throughout work and my drive to and from. After I caught up, I bought Marc’s WTF app and subscribed to get all the archive episodes. All the while catching up and keeping up with new episodes. Needless to say at this point but I had given up on using my iPod for anything other than WTF. I stopped listening to old music. I only would listen to new releasing by my favorite artists and WTF (and Wait Wait of course).

More to come.

To start off with…

Hi there,

I’m Brendan. In the music and digital/Internet world I go by the name Nilentropy. That’s two words mashed into one. It’s not Nile N trOPy as most stupid clerks at retail stores try to pronounce it. It’s Nil Entropy. Nil meaning the absence of. Entropy being the force which causes all matter and energy in the universe to revert to a state of inert uniformity. I guess after reading that and you aren’t a geek, nerd or generally quick person you should stop reading.

OK, now that the idiots have gone we can get down to business. I generally have only one thing on my mind at all times, Music. I love music, it consumes my life. If there isn’t a song running through my brain, I guess I must be dead. I wonder If zombies like music?

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of internet radio, thanks to my wife buying us a Bluetooth speaker, and Pandora. Maybe to back up a second I should also say this: I love guitar.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was 13, and since I’m now 35, I’ve been playing guitar for…..wait for it. Shit, what was I saying? Oh yea, whatever. You do the math, what am I your fucking math teacher?

I’ve always listened to music as long as I can remember. I’ve been around for all of it: records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, Audio Galaxy, LimeWire, Amazon MP3, friends, wherever you get music from. My two favorite 8-tracks were Sesame Street (C is for Cookie) and The Beatles (for you ignoramuses out there it was more commonly referred to as the White Album). It really pissed me off when I inserted “The Beatles” CD1 into my computer and CDDB had identified the disk as “The Beatles – The White Album (disc 1)”. Just because the album was white does not mean it is “the white album.” I digest.

Whatever.

Sick of me yet? I am. More tomorrow I guess.