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And The Grind Goes On

By nickm | Published November 16, 2012

Just wanted to drop a note that, yes, we are in fact still alive. Hooray!

The reality is that we are deep in the grind for Undercover. 14 songs with full recording, three need vocals or bass or both, two that are in the midst of production, and one left to be picked. This is easily the most ambition project any of us have worked on — pretty crazy stuff. And most crazy is that I actually think we’ll hit our release date of April 2013! On the mixing side of things, I find myself working much more efficiently, tossing out recipe production tricks and just going with what sounds good. I have a nice clear vision of what I expect each track to sound like, which is a bit different than what happens with our original work… Covers are so much easier since you already have a starting structure to work off of.

Given all of that, I will be excited to get back to Endless Blue music. Working with Scott on Undercover has helped to shape a bit of a derivative sound for us, a bit more of the organic “real band” vibe. At our last recording session we all recorded live in a single take rather than tracking separately, and it was pretty cool. Not sure if I heard any magic just yet, but I look forward to trying it again soon, and especially on our new music. I feel there is something to getting that more “bandy” vibe in our music that takes other artists like Zero 7 and Air out of the electronica genre and puts them firmly somewhere else. I’ve always felt trip-hop, at its soul, was always more organic than its cousins, and it’s really exciting to take it there more fundamentally in Endless Blue.

In other news, I’ve been dealing with ongoing shenanigans on YouTube, and the general feeling I’m getting is… Icky… We’re going to be trying out vimeo as an alternative hosting site. Granted visibility will not be as high there and we will not be cancelling at YouTube any time soon, but all the same, I feel vimeo is a bit more artist friendly.

All for now, cheers!

Posted in Musing, News, Recording | Tagged cover songs, endless blue, kickstarter, new cd, Next Endless Blue Album, recording, studio, undercover

Mosby: Mos Def vs. Moby in Endless Blue’s First Mashup Album

By nickm | Published March 16, 2012

So here’s a little something different. After spending a summer listening to dj BC’s awesome albums Another Jay On Earth (Jay-Z vs. Brian Eno) and Wu Orleans (Wu-Tang Clan vs. classic NOLA standards), I got really hooked on mashups. Problem was, in my eyes there were tons of great one-off ideas but very few fully realized concept albums like the ones BC delivered. There’s a real power and elegance in following a theme or thread for 30 minutes through an album compared to the ADD severity of someone like Girl Talk, who can’t seem to keep a concept going for 30 seconds…

When I finished production on Unfriend, I had a bit time to just goof off and try something new. I thought I might try my hand at doing a mashup. During a particularly long run I hit on the concept of Mosby, which was just that — mashing Mos Def and Moby. I had no idea if my cheesy idea would ever work, so I just sat down and tried it out. It took a while to find the tracks that “matched”, which seems to be the key to creating a good mashup. A few hours, some timestretching and EQing, and I had banged out The Beef After. I was pretty pleased with the results, so I kept going. Before I knew it I had eight mashes of Moby and Mos, and after a month of mixing, tweaking, and mastering, I had an album.

Now, this isn’t for everyone, and likely a lot of our trip-hop fans won’t like this. Rest assured this doesn’t mark some new direction for Endless Blue. I just had a lot of fun making some music that I really enjoy listening to. And since I can never sell it, I thought I’d share.

Mosby: A Mashup by Endless Blue (Mos Def vs. Moby) by Endless Blue (nickm)

You can download the entire album (38MB) for free at the following locations:

Mosby.zip on MediaFire
Mosby.zip on DropBox
Mosby.zip on RapidShare

Posted in Music, Musing, Recording |

Happy New Year and EB Rarities and Remixes

By nickm | Published January 1, 2012

So, first off, happy new year! We hope your reveries were wild but you hangovers are mild. But likely one does not follow the other, so YMMV.

2011 was a good year for Endless Blue. I feel like we’ve picked up a little momentum and that we’re getting back into the groove of writing and recording. We also started beating the internet promotion a bit more, and it’s nice to see a lot of fresh faces and names listening to our music from around the world. Here’s to 2012 being more of the same.

Along those lines, we’re going to start adding some of our B-Side, remixes, and rarities to SoundCloud. Many of these have been around for a while, but they never had a real home. The first is a Drum & Bass remix of Broken Waters:

The other is a remix we did of Nine Inch Nail’s track Only off the album With Teeth:

Posted in Music, Musing, News |

Support Creative Commons

By nickm | Published November 5, 2011

Creative Commons is holding their annual fund drive at the moment and I encourage everyone to donate a little something. As monetary and corporate interests drive deeper and deeper into trying to control all media it’s imperative that organizations like CC exist and protect art as a human experience, not a merely profit center. Endless Blue puts its money where its mouth is — I just donated, and remember, all our music has been retroactively released under a CC license.

I think I got pushed over the edge a little this morning regarding the whole copyright topic… Allow me to explain. I’ve been borrowing an iPad lately to goof around with. I’ve been trying out a lot of music and synth apps to get the creative juices flowing. The moog app is friggin’ amazing, and it’s cool to have a mobile version of CamelAudio’s Alchemy Player. I found my way to Korg’s iELECTRIBE (being a former Electribe owner and former Korg fanboi) and started watching videos. I soon found the iELECTRIBE Gorillaz version, which got me really excited. It had this glitchy, lo-fi vibe to it which is right up my alley.

…and then I read the fine print. In the legalese on the manual for the app, it says that commercial use of the instrument requires copyright clearance. So lemme get this straight. I’m buying this instrument, a creative implement for me to use in my compositions, but I have to go to the record company, hat in hands, if I want to release any of my tracks? Seriously?

Crazy world, folks. This is why CC is so important.

Posted in Musing | Tagged copyleft, creative commons, donate, endless blue, ielectribe, wtf

Webber vs. Portishead

By nickm | Published October 2, 2011

Apart from being banished from home/studio for the last two weeks while I have asbestos removed from my attic, this was my first week on guitar for a local group doing Jesus Christ Superstar. I got recruited by long time Endless Blue friend Graham (you know him as the male singer on Low), who is playing Jesus. Now, I’m not a fan of musicals. I banned them from my iPod long ago. But after a week of rehearsals, I’m really enjoying myself.

First off, it’s very humbling to work with so many good musicians, folks that can just sit down with an instrument and sheet music and play songs. Just play. Sitting alone in the studio with only your own music can make you forget how important mastery of an instrument is. It also takes me back to Zen Guitar and the concept of actually being able to play a song, not just noodle around… It also blows my mind how effing hard this music is to play. Keys? Hah! 4/4 time? Puh-lease. And yet, with all craziness and weirdness in the music, it all stays highly musical. Therein lies the genius of it — pushing the limits of structure and convetion, but meticulously gluing it together so as to not lose the listener.

And at this point I feel the need to heap some criticism on an album I find extremely irritating, especially considering its “critical acclaim” — Portishead’s Third. That album totally loses me. Its amusical to the point of just being noise. Now, I recognize and respect an artist’s desire to do something different, to push boundaries and break out of ruts. Massive Attack has really done a good job of changing it up over the years — they haven’t released the same album over and over again like, say, AC/DC. And Portishead seemed to have already mastered the edgy, dissonant sound, so getting even stranger was the way forward for them. But Third never ties it together in any sort of way, the way that Webber does in Jesus Christ Superstar. It feels weak and half finished, and, quite frankly, you replace the name “Portishead” on that album with any other band name, and no one would have listened to it at all.

Ahem. Enough of that rant. My friends are all familiar with it, believe me.

Posted in Musing, Other Projects |

Lyrics and Leaving the Korg Fold

By nickm | Published April 24, 2011

I’ve become a big fan of pushing all of our content into the cloud rather than rolling it into our own website. I actually envision converting our entire website to WordPress at some point… At any rate, we had no permanent home for our lyrics, so I went in search of a viable site on which to post them. Wow, talk about a cesspool of sites. Yuck. After looking for some time, I settled on the least-worst option, which turned out to be lyrics.com. Only a few ads, nothing too dangerous, and a visually appealing site (in that I didn’t want to stab my eyes out with a rusty fork when I looked at it). There was also a pretty good amount of content already there, although it is not complete yet. Here’s the direct link: http://www.lyrics.com/endlessblue

If you follow us on the twitter machine (and you should, BTW) you might have noticed that I picked up a Roland Juno-G. Now, the last time I owned a Roland was back in 1999 when I had a gray SH-101 with the nifty keytar handle. Since I bought my Triton classic in 2000 I’ve been solidly a Korg man, having owned a pretty wide slice of their gear (minus the insane classics like the MS-20, of course, I ain’t rich here, folks). I still own said Triton as my live board, plus an X5, PolyEnsamble, Legacy Collection with the mini MS-20, and a busted up old PolySix. But in honesty the Korg sound had started to get a little dull for me. I mean, my newest board was over twelve years old — so much has changed in synthesis in that time… So I started looking for a new Korg. And… Well… It just didn’t take. Maybe I still had a bad taste in my mouth after the microPAD that died after only 5 months, or maybe it was just what seemed to be the endless regurgitation and repackaging of the Triton architecture… Regardless, I broke from the streak, looking for a little inspiration and change. I haven’t had a huge amount of time with the Juno-G, and I have no illusions about it in that it’s a bit of a “value” board. But change is always good for a little inspiration. And I don’t imagine I’ll look back — the next board will likely be something else entirely.

Posted in Musing, News |

Boo-friggity-hoo

By nickm | Published March 25, 2011

A follow up to my little Rebecca Black pity party…

Yeah. She’s crying all the way to the bank. And all the way to Good Morning America. And to the Tonight Show. You get the picture, turned out pretty good for her after all…

Ahem. I declare this meme officially dead.

Posted in Musing |

The goggles, they are useless!

By nickm | Published March 15, 2011

Alright, so I finally watched the Rebecca Black video of “Friday”. If you haven’t also partaken in this particular experience, you can do so here.

So, obviously, the first reaction is: The awfulness, it burns!

My second reaction is: Who the hell produced this? I mean, the production values in both the track and the video are not amateur level stuff. This was really a shot at making legit product. I did a little googling around, eventually ran across this bog post. Apparently Rebecca Black, or more aptly her parents, were the victim of a cast call hit factory scam:

The formula is simple: They’ll fly your child between the specified ages of 13-17 to Los Angeles, write her a “hit,” record it in super-compressed Autotuned production, shoot an edge detection-overlay video and BAM! Maybe your kid can notch up a couple thousand YouTube views while you watch your dreams of being a pop-star parent percolate.

…and all the while Mom and Dad footing the bill.

But is this so wrong? That’s what has been nagging me all afternoon. I mean, the producers delivered pretty decent product for what they had. I bet 13 year old Rebecca had a blast getting to be a pop star for a while, I mean, look at the video (not the edge-detection overlay, that will likely make you scream). And, hey, I bet the Blacks had plenty of cash to blow on their daughter’s dream.

The real tragedy here is that you can’t buy talent and ability. You couldn’t drop $5 million and get to be an NBA star. Music is the closest to being able to do so with the extreme production these days. You still can’t buy a hit, though, and the Internet’s pretty much unanimous panning of Friday puts the truth to this. So many people should have known better through this entire process, it’s sad that this poor girl is going to have to live with this for the rest of her life.

Because, say it with me, the Internet is forever.

Posted in Music, Musing |

New EB blog

By nickm | Published March 14, 2011

Hey-di-ho! We decided to move to a “real” blogging website. We may still only post once a year, but at least we’ll be posting in style…

Heh.

In all seriousness, it’s kind of the next logical step. You may have noticed that our website has been stripping down, moving content to other services. Seeing as how I maintain the website (and happen to do that all day as a real job), the last thing I want to do at the end of my day is deal with boring maintenance and development issues. Much better for everyone if I spend it writing music or musing about music.

We’re using a canned template at the moment that I hope to tweak up in the coming weeks. I wanted to get the new blog live ASAP, though, hopefully to encourage some posts… Maybe, just maybe, Laura will post something someday… That’s a big maybe…

Posted in Musing, News | Tagged blog, meta, new and improved, news

Back in Business

By nickm | Published November 9, 2010

And here we are, over a year since our last blog post… The fact of the matter is that Endless Blue hasn’t moved a whole lot in that time. A show here and there, adding a little video, but nothing major. We’ve been pursuing other artistic outlets and dealing with the day-to-day grind of real life in a crap economy. I can attest to getting to the end of my day and not wanting to do much beyond sinking into the couch and watching South Park. I know that Laura feels the same (except she curls up with her trashy mag Us Weekly, but it’s not my place to judge).

Posted in Musing |

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