Post Adolescent Burn Out

by TestTubeBaby

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1.
Fire in the Distance 03:34
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2.
Sister Mary 07:36
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3.
What If Lightning Strikes 03:25
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4.
What are You Dreaming There 04:33
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5.
Another Cow In Limbo 02:07
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6.
An Ordinary Dime 04:14
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7.
That's A Stupid Question 03:53
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8.
Without Me 03:34
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9.
I Look So Good in Yellow 06:07
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about

In 2017 I submitted songs to the Fraser Valley Music Awards, and was nominated in 3 categories: Electronic, Loud, and Queer. I don’t know how I ended up in those categories, but at least they make a fun phrase.

At the ceremony, I didn’t win any categories. Later I found I nonetheless was awarded a day in an art school’s recording studio.

I’d only recorded in a studio once. Across the 1991-1992 holidays, I “dated” a guy whose step-father was involved with a recording studio and offered me some time. The relationship culminated in the guy strangling me, then spending 2 weeks in a psychiatric hospital… while I spent those weeks intentionally “experimenting” with being high 24-7 (I was reading the Fassbinder biography, Love is Colder than Death).

I’d gotten involved with a collective of Los Angeles artists attempting to respond to the recent Riots/Uprising. Instead of using all the studio time myself, I offered it to the collective. The list of artists was a who’s who of the performance art scene (including Exene Cervanka, Robert Bedoya, Keith Antar Mason, Linda J. Albertano… and a band called Seven 1… me and two art friends: MiKelly and Ken Villa). The CD was in a special issue of High Performance Magazine, called The Verdict and the Violence.

Back to 2017… In my current artistic epoch (that I start in 2010), sometimes songs plop out into a pleasing recording in a couple hours, but usually I spend days, weeks or even months tweaking songs until I “don’t cringe” at anything anymore. Going into a studio for a day seemed counterintuitive.

Re-recording old songs, rather than creating new ones, seemed like a potentially palatable option. And I had a number of songs from my oeuvre of which I’d never made a satisfying recording.

I picked some songs out, learned to play them again, and started making what I thought might be “sound beds” to bring to the studio. But this turned into my usual recording process… with 100’s of hours of tweaking.

The emails to set a date with the art school kept coming. Eventually I stopped responding to them… uncharacteristic of me, but allowing this lapse in responsibility felt liberating… like being a teenager (when these songs were written, between 16 and 20) and, without letting anyone know, just not showing up again for a job.

credits

released February 24, 2019

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TestTubeBaby image

TestTubeBaby Vancouver, British Columbia

Just walked
On a long slab of concrete
Probably hundreds of metric tons
To the store
Thinking about the similarities
And differences
Between me and a squirrel

All proceeds from sales are donated to Matsqui-Abbotsford Impact Society. ... more

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