Wow, look at this. Another diary entry from yours truly. Well, what can I say, I'm really bored right now.

Here I am working on a Saturday! For our other business, 7-bit Sound, I am scanning slides for a slideshow that we are doing. This woman had a reel-to-reel with an audio track of the boat cruise she took in the 50's. We have to match up all the slides with her talking.

This is a very large project, it is too much grunt work!! We need to get some machines that can do cheaper labor. Doing these slides, I cannot actually do other work, because they go too quickly. But, it is too slow to just sit there while it slowly scans and confirms. Hence, my second diary entry of the week! :)

I have to finish this today, because next week is just too busy to focus on this.

A week from Tuesday, we leave for a GrandCare pilot project install. It's actually pretty sweet - - the install is in Daytona Beach, FLA. YAY! I am going to stay a few days after the install to hang out with my sister, Katie and her hubby Tim.

This year so many things are happening and I think it's going to go quickly. We plan on releasing an album sometime at the end of this year or early next year. We really gotta get going on that. We also plan on playing a few shows again after summer. We have a few places that we wanted to play in Mpls/St Paul as well as our beloved Club Anything in Mke and how can we not play at the Binkery in the big bad bend, again?

We'll see how everything goes. We'll for sure keep y'all posted whatever happens.

So for the last few weeks, I have been crazily trying to get our condo organized and going through old stuff to give to goodwill, etc. So far, we have made some great progress, but there's still much to be done. This weekend's project is to turn the loft into my office/work space and to put the tv and entertainment center downstairs. well, we got all of the tv stuff down into the living room (it looks very nice), but I still have much work to do on changing the loft into a nice-looking office. i still have to get a table for my scrapbooking stuff. i have been meaning to do a scrapbook of my year spent in germany ('99-'00) for, well, 6 years now. somehow it's never happened. I just think if I set up a workspace and make it easy for me to just do one page at a time, I'll get into it and finally get all the germany pictures sorted. Man, scrapbooking is super expensive, though. I want to get all of the cool things to do it, but I don't want to spend $300 on this book. And let's face it, I'm not the visually artistic type. so - i have a hard time "making" things myself and making them look nice. it's just easier to buy pre-made things that are supposed to go together. And even then, it's a crap shoot as to whether i'll make it look nice....

oh well - it's worth a shot.

but, organizing and rearranging our condo makes me feel so good. it's getting there. it's really looking like a house and very welcoming. we're almost there. we still have to paint all of the downstairs and get some bedroom furniture and, of course, re-do the entire downstairs bedroom for our upcoming long-staying guest :).

well, better go. madison is coming over in about 5 minutes and i'm watching her until jess gets done with grad school.

byebye

hi it's laura. remember me? ya know - the girl in this band? right, starting to come back to you? i'm sorry that i have been neglecting you, my dear diary, for the past few months.

i guess you could say that i've had other things on my mind. i have been busy. work has been crazy busy and well, i was pretty sick for a while there.

so that's the end of my excuses. i am not that sorry, anyways! :)

a new album is "in the works" and by that, i mean, it's going to be a while, yet - - but we are thinking about it. this next one might be kind of a leap away from triphop, but i think the step comes pretty naturally at this point, for us. we are ready for something a little more lamb-y or baxter-ish. Perhaps a little higher BPM while staying downtempo. Does that make sense? I really enjoyed some of our jazzy pieces on the last album, so I'd like to pursue that influence a bit more on some of the upcoming songs. I must admit, I have been slacking.

Our last show was in November and as some of you may or may not know, we are taking a break from shows until summer. We just got a little burned out and it came to be too much. Things got hectic in our lives, so we decided to take a break and a step back. Now, I am getting excited about writing new music again. I cannot wait to jump in the recording booth and start pumping out some new tunes! This time off has given me time to feel inspired again. Sometimes when you push too hard, it's forced inspiration and just brings out cliches...at least that's what my experience has shown me. So, now I feel much better and much more passionate about our music.

I loved this last album "Smoke Through It" - I thought it was our best album to date. Of course, I hope that I always think that with each new album, because it's really depressing to take a step backwards with an album. It's easy to have a "sophomore slump" album after one or a few good albums, you really throw out a dud. A lot of great artists have done this, sometimes you just run out of creative juices and you push yourself anyways. This always leads to the "it's okay, but not spectacular" type of an album".

Anyways, where was I going with that whole thing? I am not sure, but I'm sure it was somewhere special.

My puppy is lying on my feet as I type here. She is so precious! ;) Sydney "she's a puppy, lovepaws, queen of stretch". Whatta gal!

Well, sheyat - - it's time to go and I've worked sooo hard!!

Talk to you sooner than later! I promise.

L OUT

[np: The Jon Sencer Blues Explosion - Extra Width]

Heh. I haven't listened to this album in probably five or six years. And yet it still cracks me up with its utter bizarreness. In this first listening in such a long time I notice the production values of the album, or rather the absolute lack thereof. I've recorded punk albums in my living room that ended up sounding more polished than this album. But that's the whole point of the indie rock movement, at least at it's inception -- dirty and gritty was king. See Liz Phair's Exhile in Guyville for further listening.

Anyhow. On the music front, I'm in the middle of a remix of Minneapolis's electropunk band Stellar Vector. So far, it's turned into something a little different -- I've gone back to my Drum'n'Bass days a little. It's a welcome change to write something that is potentially danceable. And yet, oddly enough, I haven't changed all that much in my production style to accomplish this. It's gotten my creative juices flowing, and I think it may have potential in shaping our sound a bit moving forward... We shall see...

I'm putting the final touches to the "Blue Room", what I've dubbed my new studio space. Mostly just getting everything completely connected up and setting up the PC to run it all. Huh. I was going to expand on this, but I find myself falling asleep just thinking about typing it all. So I'll spare everyone.

Nick out.

[np: Tori Amos - Under the Pink]

Ouch.

This week finds me starting up my much needed workout / weight training schedule. And my parts hurt. Yes, nothing says suburban Wisconsin like drinking beer and getting fat. So as the year turned, I decided to up my relatively inactive lifestyle to shed a couple of pounds. I also realize that I'm at that somewhat critical age -- that age where if I don't get in a good groove now, I'm doomed to wear the label "husky" for the rest of my days. So it's up at 6am four days a week for a two hour session of moving heavy crap around. Ah, but I jest, 'casue I've actually started to get into it. Nice natural high for the rest of the day.

Also on the docket, I've been waist deep in CDs and MP3s. Since I got an iPod for Xmas (yay Gaytha), I've been working up my music library to epic proportions. I've already filled the damn thing, yep, all 30GB. Now come proper genre tags and album art for all 500 albums... I am a man obsessed!

So, between working out, work, my MP3 collection, and TiVo (evil, evil TiVo), I haven't had much time to hang in the studio. I've putzed around with a couple of tracks, but nothing is really gelling. I need to get off the couch and get away from TiVo. I always hated TV because of advertising... Now that I can click it away, I'm watching a bit too much.

There's more to it than that, though. Musically, I'm having a tough time with songwriting. While Smoke Through It was very good in that department, I think we can do better. I almost want to sit down and pound out some new songs on the accoustic guitar... From there it's all deconstruct, deconstruct, reconstruct with the studio shizzle. I feel this may lead to a very non-trip-hop vibe, but, in a lot of ways, I'm not opposed to progressing into a post-trip-hop phase...

But, ah, screw it. It's nearly impossible to "decide" ahead of time what your music is going to sound like. You just do it, and let the peices fall where they fall.

[np: The Avalanches - Since I Left You]

So it's been a while since my last diary entry. Seems to be a symptom of the holidays -- Endless Blue takes a month to month-and-a-half break to, well, cope. And travel. And all that holiday like jazz.

Looking back at 2005, I can say it was certainly an interesting year for the band -- we lost some members, we moved south, we released a new CD, we cancelled our tour... All in all, the hard work paid off -- we ended up with a lot of internet and college radio play, and with it a wider audience exposure. Plus at the end of the year our Myspace presence really got a boost for some odd reason... Go figure... Well, I was very pleased with Smoke Through It -- it turned out to be our best work to date.

Looking forward to 2006, I see a lot of the same, but a lesser focus on live performance. A lot more studio work is in the cards. One of my resolutions is to get my instrumentation skills back on track. I feel like my guitar playing has slouched a little in the past few years, and I'd like to sharpen my "mad skillz". On top of that, there are a number of instruments I've been toying with for years but have never taken the time to master, and I want to really get them up to par. Well, here's to trying at least...

Music-wise, I've already started sketching out new songs... Who knows, a new album may not be all that far off... I have a definite vibe going, we'll see how it turns out.

At any rate, it's back to work tomorrow... Wish me luck... ;)