Chasin shootin stars
06-22-2013
, 09:44 AM
06-26-2013
, 12:02 PM
10-07-2014
, 02:04 AM
When The Train Stops I Can't Get Off
Scent of a Wolf was an album recorded urgently. We didn't even finish the mixing at Electrical Audio. It was a key to the ignition. Sadly it felt like I was driving a horse on the highway, things were never going fast enough. It was time to record an album. I figured without booking studio time nothing was going to happen. As is so often the case you don't really realize how much you can get done until you absolutely must get it done. So we set up to record October 2013. Alexei Martov by Alexei Martov, with a few months to prepare in our space (my apartment). In July I headed out to Fuji Rock Festival. Study Japanese for a month, crystallize the vision. The vision didn't really get crystallized so much as grasped at. It was a bust. Too much drinking, too small apartment for my big body. I did some song writing, bought a sweet Kay guitar, saw a bunch of indie rock Japanese shows, and hung out with the Mouse On The Keys boys but it wasn't worth it.
More big changes or things weren't going to work out with recording in October, let alone transitioning from 80/20 poker / music to 80/20 music / poker. I figured it was back to the Altar, but there were no goats left, so it was the drinking that would have to go. I knew there would be a lot of escalating exceptions if I just tried to moderate, so I committed to stopping for good mentally.
(Well actually, after writing all that, I must say that I ended up bowling a game winning strike for my team at a Tokyo wedding reception held in the honour of Akira, drummer of Mouse On The Keys. This apparently won me a plate of premium Kobe beef (displayed on the score boards like one of those animations, SPARE, etc, except with beef). I was confused as to what that meant, but within minutes a larger platter of the steaming succulent beef was brought to our team, which was quite the feather in my cap. On balance, this experience may have made the overall EV of the japan trip 0.).
October 1-10
We recorded over 9 days at Electrical Audio. The band was a lot better and we were ready to go. Well, almost. We were well prepared, but some of the material hadn't even been performed. I was still re-writing some of the lyrics at 3 am in one of the live rooms the night before we were recording for one song. Strangely those ended up being some of the best on the album. In the end we didn't set out to make a concept album, but we'd gone in with the idea that 'The aliens have landed in Nashville'. A kind of psychedelic blues rock approach, set way out in the desert. Isolation. Walking through the desert at night. Walking through the desert during the day. Burning Man. Goggles. Visions and the stars. Getting it all out there. With that in mind i'd say the album was better than anything we'd done before, and we were starting to look more like an original band with it's own music/genre than something that easily fit into a mould like 'riff rock'. In hindsight the only issue with the process is we should have done it in 5 days and spent more time playing in Montreal. But we could have been writing the thing for years with that approach.
2014:
We played with some bigger bands, The Pack AD (now playing w/ Alice in Chains!) in January, then the Jim Jones Revue (in March). We did some weekenders out in the US, NY and Vermont mostly.
NY
Stress increased as working out how to keep it all together grew increasingly difficult. I'd have to keep booking the tours myself until we made some more progress. We also had to release our album, so I formed a record label to do that, Queen Mary Records. I figured we needed some vehicle help us get us from playing in New York to playing in France. Think of that. Playing music over in Europe. What an awesome thing to do. And I wanted to release a friends album that I was into as well, possibly more once I had a recording space setup that we could use. Build something bigger than just us.
MAY- I'd planned a US tour for May. The Visa situation was insanely stressful but in the end we made it work. There were some down points and some up points. Doing a live show at Russian Recording, home of Lil Bub was a lot of fun. The long drives listening to music as a band were surprisingly good. A down point was playing to the bar staff in North Carolina, although the sound that show was pretty good. An up point was them randomly playing some Jim Jones Revue tunes once we finished on stage. "Hey, we just played with them in Montreal! And they're randomly playing their music on the sound system!" I thought.
In the end touring this round cost us a little money but mostly due to our own inexperience booking tours (and also from having only been around a couple years obviously…). There were a few too many days without shows... It was definitely a success, I mean, why do any of it if it's not to play music in random cities continuously. Definitely the best part that makes it all worthwhile. Meanwhile bands in Montreal that we came up with were dropping like flies as people went about their lives, which was depressing.
We kept busy, made an acoustic video with some less screamy singing, etc:
Night Drive
JULY, AUGUST. SEPTEMBER- 3 months passed by suddenly and slowly at the same time. I put some serious work in on improving my Jazz piano chops. We played with some bands like Dead Rider, Dead Messenger, and We Are Wolves, at various venues around Montreal. Those shows were all pretty good, and one of my friends, Justin Wiley, started doing live sound for us using some of the gear in my studio which improved the audio quality live a lot. He's on his own path but it is nice that at the moment we are fighting the same fight.
My girlfriend understandably didn't want to live in my apartment / jam space / studio which had no walls. I couldn't get rid of it though without buying a place to put my equipment. So I kept it, intending to setup a base once a good location came up. Matt and Jonah moved into the living room. Still no walls and no working shower (we used the shower to store all the records etc we pressed, as they took up a surprising amount of space). We'd try to do it more like a startup and get everyone in the same room as often as possible. Well, more often. We were already meeting up to play music all the time. Unfortunately we couldn't tour over this period as Matt needed to learn French in 6 months so that he could extend his Quebec Visa. That meant a lot more French study. I slipped a half marathon in there somewhere, which made not drinking a lot easier.
Still, we had to tour again. We'd already played around 25 shows in 2014, which compared to 2011 might have been something, but for it being October it was pretty rough and I craved more random events, venues, shows, even six hour drives in the van listening to music, drinking dunkin donuts coffee out of a giant refillable thermos. 25 shows felt more like a month and a half tour in my ideal world.
November looked like the time to go, we had our album pressed and ready to unleash upon the world.
industrial revolution at the pressing planet.
Any day now. Out to Austin this time. Half way to LA, concentric circles from Montreal till we rippled out to the coast line. It didn't make sense to go so far, but if we didn't try to do more, we'd fall apart like all the other bands that fall apart. We could do the weekenders that made sense too, or just stay in Canada, but the longer tours made it feel like we were fighting for something that had value. To cross America on your own terms, playing music with your friends. The shows melding into each other but each one completely unique and memorable. They say half of succeeding is surviving long enough to do it. Whatever succeeding even means. Fighting the good fight, making music, meeting people, putting your own personal spin on it. Tough these days, but it was definitely worse in the 40s and 50s, and even back in the day classical musicians were just at the mercy of some barron who would give them handouts while they taught 20 students who were talentless upper crust baronesses.
When we made Bet Raise Fold, Ryan Firpo warned me to never say 'as an artist' in an interview, as I would sound ridiculously pretentious. But looking at the stuff i'm writing about, on some level a lot of the decisions you make in music are really helpfully informed by this kind of self identification. Why are we working our asses off to drive around in a van playing music all the way out in Middle America? I don't really know, but it doesn't feel like the kind of question you even need to or should ask yourself. Any attempt to explain it seems simultaneously overly wordy and inexplicit.
Anyway, this tour was booked with the same level of difficulty as the last, but with a little more competence. We also had a bunch more options of places to play that wouldn't work out for this trip but would for next time we set things up, places we'd wanted to play for a while, that I'd known many of my favourite bands had played at when they were coming up. That is to say I didn't feel like i was fighting a war of attrition trying to make it work simply by willpower... we had a few places we could return to to give us a better framework. Once again the Visa applications for touring the US were absolutely brutal, but my application is lodged and there should be enough time to collect it at the border for the first day of the tour. It's clear to me though that we are just on a path to grow enough so that we can get someone else to do the bookings for shows.
In other news I'm starting to notice some little oddities in the old ears which I assume is warning signs towards deafness. Sometimes when someone shouts (usually a group of girls screaming or something), not that loud, it will be like a washing machine roaring in my ears. I'll try to maintain balance. Get off my lawn! I try to yell but it's too late. They're already gone.
We just released the last song from our album we're going to release before we put the whole thing online. You can check it out here:
It's called Lights In The Sky.
https://soundcloud.com/alexeimartov/lightsinthesky
I couldn't resist using one of Steve's metal guitars for this track. Apparently one Kurt Cobain had used on In Utero. I'm not sure if that added any mojo (who am I kidding, obviously it did), but it sure was a sweet guitar.
Scent of a Wolf was an album recorded urgently. We didn't even finish the mixing at Electrical Audio. It was a key to the ignition. Sadly it felt like I was driving a horse on the highway, things were never going fast enough. It was time to record an album. I figured without booking studio time nothing was going to happen. As is so often the case you don't really realize how much you can get done until you absolutely must get it done. So we set up to record October 2013. Alexei Martov by Alexei Martov, with a few months to prepare in our space (my apartment). In July I headed out to Fuji Rock Festival. Study Japanese for a month, crystallize the vision. The vision didn't really get crystallized so much as grasped at. It was a bust. Too much drinking, too small apartment for my big body. I did some song writing, bought a sweet Kay guitar, saw a bunch of indie rock Japanese shows, and hung out with the Mouse On The Keys boys but it wasn't worth it.
More big changes or things weren't going to work out with recording in October, let alone transitioning from 80/20 poker / music to 80/20 music / poker. I figured it was back to the Altar, but there were no goats left, so it was the drinking that would have to go. I knew there would be a lot of escalating exceptions if I just tried to moderate, so I committed to stopping for good mentally.
(Well actually, after writing all that, I must say that I ended up bowling a game winning strike for my team at a Tokyo wedding reception held in the honour of Akira, drummer of Mouse On The Keys. This apparently won me a plate of premium Kobe beef (displayed on the score boards like one of those animations, SPARE, etc, except with beef). I was confused as to what that meant, but within minutes a larger platter of the steaming succulent beef was brought to our team, which was quite the feather in my cap. On balance, this experience may have made the overall EV of the japan trip 0.).
October 1-10
We recorded over 9 days at Electrical Audio. The band was a lot better and we were ready to go. Well, almost. We were well prepared, but some of the material hadn't even been performed. I was still re-writing some of the lyrics at 3 am in one of the live rooms the night before we were recording for one song. Strangely those ended up being some of the best on the album. In the end we didn't set out to make a concept album, but we'd gone in with the idea that 'The aliens have landed in Nashville'. A kind of psychedelic blues rock approach, set way out in the desert. Isolation. Walking through the desert at night. Walking through the desert during the day. Burning Man. Goggles. Visions and the stars. Getting it all out there. With that in mind i'd say the album was better than anything we'd done before, and we were starting to look more like an original band with it's own music/genre than something that easily fit into a mould like 'riff rock'. In hindsight the only issue with the process is we should have done it in 5 days and spent more time playing in Montreal. But we could have been writing the thing for years with that approach.
2014:
We played with some bigger bands, The Pack AD (now playing w/ Alice in Chains!) in January, then the Jim Jones Revue (in March). We did some weekenders out in the US, NY and Vermont mostly.
NY
Stress increased as working out how to keep it all together grew increasingly difficult. I'd have to keep booking the tours myself until we made some more progress. We also had to release our album, so I formed a record label to do that, Queen Mary Records. I figured we needed some vehicle help us get us from playing in New York to playing in France. Think of that. Playing music over in Europe. What an awesome thing to do. And I wanted to release a friends album that I was into as well, possibly more once I had a recording space setup that we could use. Build something bigger than just us.
MAY- I'd planned a US tour for May. The Visa situation was insanely stressful but in the end we made it work. There were some down points and some up points. Doing a live show at Russian Recording, home of Lil Bub was a lot of fun. The long drives listening to music as a band were surprisingly good. A down point was playing to the bar staff in North Carolina, although the sound that show was pretty good. An up point was them randomly playing some Jim Jones Revue tunes once we finished on stage. "Hey, we just played with them in Montreal! And they're randomly playing their music on the sound system!" I thought.
In the end touring this round cost us a little money but mostly due to our own inexperience booking tours (and also from having only been around a couple years obviously…). There were a few too many days without shows... It was definitely a success, I mean, why do any of it if it's not to play music in random cities continuously. Definitely the best part that makes it all worthwhile. Meanwhile bands in Montreal that we came up with were dropping like flies as people went about their lives, which was depressing.
We kept busy, made an acoustic video with some less screamy singing, etc:
Night Drive
JULY, AUGUST. SEPTEMBER- 3 months passed by suddenly and slowly at the same time. I put some serious work in on improving my Jazz piano chops. We played with some bands like Dead Rider, Dead Messenger, and We Are Wolves, at various venues around Montreal. Those shows were all pretty good, and one of my friends, Justin Wiley, started doing live sound for us using some of the gear in my studio which improved the audio quality live a lot. He's on his own path but it is nice that at the moment we are fighting the same fight.
My girlfriend understandably didn't want to live in my apartment / jam space / studio which had no walls. I couldn't get rid of it though without buying a place to put my equipment. So I kept it, intending to setup a base once a good location came up. Matt and Jonah moved into the living room. Still no walls and no working shower (we used the shower to store all the records etc we pressed, as they took up a surprising amount of space). We'd try to do it more like a startup and get everyone in the same room as often as possible. Well, more often. We were already meeting up to play music all the time. Unfortunately we couldn't tour over this period as Matt needed to learn French in 6 months so that he could extend his Quebec Visa. That meant a lot more French study. I slipped a half marathon in there somewhere, which made not drinking a lot easier.
Still, we had to tour again. We'd already played around 25 shows in 2014, which compared to 2011 might have been something, but for it being October it was pretty rough and I craved more random events, venues, shows, even six hour drives in the van listening to music, drinking dunkin donuts coffee out of a giant refillable thermos. 25 shows felt more like a month and a half tour in my ideal world.
November looked like the time to go, we had our album pressed and ready to unleash upon the world.
industrial revolution at the pressing planet.
Any day now. Out to Austin this time. Half way to LA, concentric circles from Montreal till we rippled out to the coast line. It didn't make sense to go so far, but if we didn't try to do more, we'd fall apart like all the other bands that fall apart. We could do the weekenders that made sense too, or just stay in Canada, but the longer tours made it feel like we were fighting for something that had value. To cross America on your own terms, playing music with your friends. The shows melding into each other but each one completely unique and memorable. They say half of succeeding is surviving long enough to do it. Whatever succeeding even means. Fighting the good fight, making music, meeting people, putting your own personal spin on it. Tough these days, but it was definitely worse in the 40s and 50s, and even back in the day classical musicians were just at the mercy of some barron who would give them handouts while they taught 20 students who were talentless upper crust baronesses.
When we made Bet Raise Fold, Ryan Firpo warned me to never say 'as an artist' in an interview, as I would sound ridiculously pretentious. But looking at the stuff i'm writing about, on some level a lot of the decisions you make in music are really helpfully informed by this kind of self identification. Why are we working our asses off to drive around in a van playing music all the way out in Middle America? I don't really know, but it doesn't feel like the kind of question you even need to or should ask yourself. Any attempt to explain it seems simultaneously overly wordy and inexplicit.
Anyway, this tour was booked with the same level of difficulty as the last, but with a little more competence. We also had a bunch more options of places to play that wouldn't work out for this trip but would for next time we set things up, places we'd wanted to play for a while, that I'd known many of my favourite bands had played at when they were coming up. That is to say I didn't feel like i was fighting a war of attrition trying to make it work simply by willpower... we had a few places we could return to to give us a better framework. Once again the Visa applications for touring the US were absolutely brutal, but my application is lodged and there should be enough time to collect it at the border for the first day of the tour. It's clear to me though that we are just on a path to grow enough so that we can get someone else to do the bookings for shows.
In other news I'm starting to notice some little oddities in the old ears which I assume is warning signs towards deafness. Sometimes when someone shouts (usually a group of girls screaming or something), not that loud, it will be like a washing machine roaring in my ears. I'll try to maintain balance. Get off my lawn! I try to yell but it's too late. They're already gone.
We just released the last song from our album we're going to release before we put the whole thing online. You can check it out here:
It's called Lights In The Sky.
https://soundcloud.com/alexeimartov/lightsinthesky
I couldn't resist using one of Steve's metal guitars for this track. Apparently one Kurt Cobain had used on In Utero. I'm not sure if that added any mojo (who am I kidding, obviously it did), but it sure was a sweet guitar.
Last edited by alexeimartov; 10-07-2014 at 02:26 AM.
10-07-2014
, 08:09 AM
10-07-2014
, 12:08 PM
damn thanks! 
vid 1, When The Train Stops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWwyJ1SDPTE
vid 2, Night Drive (Acoustic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6YibwuCaFE
looks like the soundcloud link at the bottom worked.
vid 1, When The Train Stops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWwyJ1SDPTE
vid 2, Night Drive (Acoustic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6YibwuCaFE
looks like the soundcloud link at the bottom worked.
10-07-2014
, 02:14 PM
10-11-2014
, 07:02 PM
10-20-2014
, 10:01 PM
01-10-2015
, 07:02 AM