We had an entirely different post written to post up here but things change so fast these days that we’re going to have to hold off on that for a while.   These days are full of things that aren’t going to see the light of day for a while.  A lot of lab work.  In the era of Twitter and Facebook, etc etc, you do have to pay a little attention to the outside world so you aren’t forgotten in this awesome age of super-fast information and all that.  Besides, we’re too excited about these things going on to not talk about them a little bit.  Hopefully, you’ll find some of it interesting, too.

We’re working very hard on finishing the album but it looks like we won’t be releasing part two of FFFG until January since it’s just too hard to get through all the noise of the holiday season that will be here in just over eight weeks (!) ugh.  Our original intent was to squeeze it in and make it happen, but that reality – along with some other exciting developments – has convinced us that we should probably wait.  We are still planning on releasing a single from it this year, though.  With ‘b-sides’, or bonus tracks or whatever they’re called these days.

All five of the songs for part two of the album are basically done, except for vocals.  This is pretty much how we’ve always done things, but things are a little different this time since poor Rebecca is working on two albums at the same time (and doing a great job at both).  There’s a lot of singing happening.  So, it’s all coming along nicely and we’re very excited about finishing it up and getting it out as soon as possible.

It’s nice to be taking a little bit of time off from playing live, too, to rethink our approach a little bit.  On the technical side, we’re trying to put together more of a ’show’, which we haven’t been able to really focus on yet since we have been worrying up until now about just establishing the band.  So now, we have an idea what all that is going to sound and look like and it’s just going to take a while to put it all together .  It will probably be some time around January before that side of things is ready.

We have been talking a little bit about doing one or two shows in-between now and then, though, of non-Stripmall material.  There are a ton of logistics involved in those, though, so we’re still weighing whether they’ll be able to happen or not.  We’re totally in love with the ideas, but without the proper time and preparation, they won’t live up to our standards.  Plus, it’s just really hard to tell how many people will come out to shows these days.  It’s an unpredictable time, which has forced a lot of us bands and musicians to rethink a lot of things.

We’ve been asked A LOT to do another performance of the Music of This Mortal Coil show we did back in January.  I’m not sure I can adequately express how much work that took.  To do it again is an appealing idea, but it would really have to be the right scenario.  Since the last show, we have corresponded at length with both ‘members’ of This Mortal Coil (including John, who Rebecca is collaborating with on DarkDriveClinic) who have been incredibly supportive of the project and have even offered many ideas and suggestions should we do another.  I wish we had the resources to devote ourselves more fully to these kinds of things.  So challenging and so much fun.

The other show idea, slightly less work involved, would be to do a set of early Halou music.  Again, it’s hard to gauge interest in a show like this, but it seems like there might be enough to make it happen.  We’re looking into it.  Feel free to let us know your thoughts.  I’m sorry to say that our ambitions are seriously out of scale with our resources these days, and it’s important for us to be aware of that when taking on these sorts of plans.

Finally, we’re preparing to launch our Stripmall Architecture Broadcast page, which will host intermittent video updates and performances from us – hopefully on a regular basis.  You can bookmark that page now and sign up for a UStream account so that you’ll be set to go when we launch (maybe we’ll launch once we pass 1,000 likes on Facebook…).

Those are the big things we’re up to at the moment, with much more in the background:  We’ve been talking with some potential collaborators for projects next year, licensing and composing tracks for films and commercials, and even considering a new, very crazy Kickstarter campaign.

(Wrote this very quickly on the run, please forgive errors.  Thx!)

Talk to you soon…

R/R

It made me reflect on how, from a music fan’s standpoint, the game has obviously changed with digital distribution now in full effect. I don’t mean to sound overly sentimental, but here was the typical process of following my favorite bands before the digital revolution, and when I finally had a job to afford to buy music:

I used to go to Tower Records or, whatever indie record store within driving range, usually Aron’s Records in Hollywood. When I used to visit my brother in Berkeley, it always included trips to Rasputin and Amoeba. Always.

At the stores, I’d leaf through Melody Maker or NME. Strangely, it was the ads that excited me the most, rather than the editorial. I’d find out what releases were available or coming out, taking mental note of any limited editions. As these were UK newspapers I’d be browsing, the releases I’d anticipate were commonly UK imports. I would then check the store’s stock, or return later.

If a particular item was in stock, I’d buy it. I’d take it home. Listen to it. Commit it to cassette (for my car). Usually I’d make a mix tape with with some tracks from that release (especially if it was a single or EP with “b-sides,” and then I’d make a cassette cover (I’ve designed well over 100). Then, maybe I’d get bored with that release after a while and trade it in at an indie record store. And with store credit, I’d buy something else. Repeat cycle. This was my “ceremony.” While it’s not totally gone, it’s certainly diminished.

Other ways I’d find out about new music might’ve been from watching 120 Minutes on MTV. Or, perhaps enjoying an opening band at a live show (a pre-4AD Red House Painters, opening for Pale Saints, was not one of them). Back then, though, bands selling merch at shows usually just meant t-shirts. Selling actual recorded material was unusual. After all, isn’t that what record stores were for?

Nowadays, I don’t follow music as obsessively as I used to. I mostly rely on friends’ recommendations. I usually can’t be bothered to browse 30-second samples on the iTunes store. The old music-buying process has now been reduced to: hear about it and download it. Done.

These shapeless, intangible MP3s are visually represented by a small JPEG and is made up of binary ones and zeroes on some type of device. And when you fall out of love with it, you can’t take it to a used record store to trade it in. You either ignore it or delete it. And even if you delete it, it’s fairly easy to reacquire. It has no smell, like that cocktail scent of vinyl and its sleeve with the faint smell of ink, or that fragrant and undoubtedly toxic smell of the new cassettes (What? You don’t know what I’m talking about?).

Is there really is no “emotional attachment” to MP3? If anything, that emotional attachment has transferred to my hard drive. I couldn’t begin to put a dollar value on it, with all the months of non-stop music on there, accumulated over many years. Perish the thought if that thing ever craps out on me.

Hmmm…

Excuse me while I go back up my hard drive.

Apart from the album, we’ve got a finished 2-track single and another nearly-finished non-album track that we hope to release soon. We hope to have some information soon about how we’ll release these but we don’t have all that finalized just yet. I know, I wish we had more solid info at the moment, but we will soon. Excited to put some new music out there. It’s been…weeks!

We have been posting some clips of these tracks on Facebook so hop on there to listen if you haven’t already.

More soon…

- Ryan

I guess the right way to start this post is to say that a lot of unexpected things have come up that have prevented us from really getting down to work on part two of the Feathersongs album. Though we can’t get into most of that here (yet), we can say that the second-half of this year should see some interesting SMA-related releases. Even though we’ve been slightly derailed for the past few weeks, we have kept one eye on the album and have definitely made some progress.

The “Feathersongs Part Two” folder on our audio drive has seven works-in-progress inside, most of which are fully-formed songs that just need some focused work from us to finish up. Part two will only have five tracks, of course, but all the tracks we finish will be released in some way or other (as downloads or EP tracks, probably).

Ppart two will definitely be a much more uptempo group of songs than part one. It’s still pretty early on, but these tracks are sounding great at faster tempos. Rebecca already has some great vocals recorded and the construction we’re doing in the studio will help us to get a still better-sounding final release. I’ve really gotten back into my synths in a pretty big way lately and I’m certain that will also color the final product.

The main thing we’ve been really pleased about is that it feels like we’re finally starting to relax into being Stripmall Architecture. We’re not reacting against, or building on Halou anymore (I’m not sure we ever were, but even having those thoughts was a little distracting). These days we’re getting a little more into refining the details of relatively simple arrangements instead of layering massive amounts of texture (The Droplet Sounds, etc) or simply rushing to finish songs so the world can begin to figure out that we are even here making noise. Again, it’s still early on, but we’re really excited and looking forward to releasing the second half of the album.

In the meantime, the Pripyat EP drops this week. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you still have time to do so and have it shipped with the first batch of packages. Of course, we’ll also have it at the upcoming performances. We should have some photographs of the final package online,as well, in the next couple of days.

Hope you’re enjoying the summer so far. It’s really beautiful here in sunny San Rafael.

Best,
Ryan & Rebecca
July, 2010

Everything included, there were a total of nine custom songs ‘ordered.’ Nine! Yes, that’s as many tracks as were on our first album. To date, we have finished writing five of these, with two of them having been delivered and the other three in the final stages of recording and/or mixing. The other four are well on their way and we’re working on finishing those up soon, as well. It’s been great to experiment with different production and styles, but we’ve been careful to deliver only finished-quality tracks and not demos or half-finished ideas.

I still like the idea of offering these songs and we’ll probably do it (or something similar) again.

(Below are the first five covers. 1,2 & 3 by SMA. 4 and 5 by The Mystery Parade.)

A bit later than planned, our version of LCD Soundsystem’s “Drunk Girls” is available now as a free download from our Bandcamp site. You’ll probably notice immediately that this is a big departure for us, which is pretty much the main reason we did it.

This track is the first entry in our “Weekender” series of intermittent, spontaneous cover versions (though this one was derailed and set aside several times). Like several of our other one-offs, this as a free download (including high-quality FLAC), though, in this case, it’s mainly because we’re not really interested in making any money on LCD’s track.

Grab it here.

- Ryan

Last week, Rebecca and I spent some little time recording a couple tracks with Josh Varnedore, a new signing to Dynamophone. Josh’s tracks are beautiful organic things that were perfect to work on during the early days of summer. On just the first day of working, we recorded a ton of different things including leaves, children, glockenspiels, suitcases, VSS, Rebecca, and sleeping bags. People are often tempted to make records like this one using nothing but software, but this has some vitality from the different sources of sound that have already been recorded.

I’ll be sure to post more updates about this project as it’s being put together. In the meantime, here’s a video (shot by David Altobelli) for “Leawood,” a track that Josh made with Amman Abbasi last year from their EP, “Places.”

Well, if anyone, music collectors do. As a former semi-obsessed music collector myself, I used to follow these catalogue numbers. It was Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s UK releases on ZTT Records that first got my attention. The label had a system that assigned every artist’s release to either “The Action Series” or “The Incidental Series“. Frankie’s most famous and notorious release, the “Relax” single, for example was assigned the number ZTAS1–the first in The Action Series. The 7″ single was 7ZTAS1, the regular 12″ single (there were a few different ones) was 12ZTAS1. Logical, right? Not quite. The “Relax” cassette single somehow got assigned the number CTIS102, suggesting it was the 102nd entry in The Incidental Series.

I later found out just how esoteric ZTT’s system was: even Claudia Brücken, singer of Propaganda, got a catalogue number for her unusual lips. A ZTT night of performances got a catalogue number. I gave up after a while and, apparently, so did ZTT–I checked in a few years after and found they had revised their system into something more logical. Factory Records, I learned later, also had a habit of adding non-releases to their catalogue (such as founder Tony Wilson’s coffin, Fac 501).

4AD Records‘ system included an esoteric mention of each release’s year in their numbers–this came in handy for fans in pinpointing what year the Pixies first came out. The mini-album Come On Pilgrim carries the number MAD 709: the “M” in MAD denotes mini-album, “AD” is presumably derived from the label name, and 709 means it’s the ninth release in 4AD’s seventh year, 1987. Obviously you’d have to know the label launched in 1980, but most of 4AD’s hardcore fans know that fact. Although I could, I’m not going to go into explaining the whole system.

I also realized that it was generally indie labels that had such catalogue systems, which makes sense since the indies tend to have much fewer releases than the majors (thus, more manageable). But even bands like Nine Inch Nails gave their releases unofficial catalogue numbers (the Halo series, in NIN’s case).

A good catalogue system helps fill in the gaps in your collection–kind of doubling as a subtle marketing tool, as it did for the aforementioned labels. Hey, why not?

The MC-4 looks rather clinical next to the synth, but the simple design of this line of Roland gear grabs me visually in a kind of seventies sci-fi way. It’s impractical with today’s technology but modular systems like this still appeal to me in a weird way. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, everything moved toward the ‘workstation’ where a few buttons made up the whole of the interface and a whole range of features lurked under the hood, accessible via a particular combination of key-presses (like the Yamaha SY77, a beast of a machine that I owned long ago and used on the first Halou album. A synthesizer with almost no charm, whatsoever). Here’s another, sexier, shot of the MC-4 showing off like a prop in a Kubrick film:

The combination of the sequencer and the MTR100 tape storage machine looks so sweet but I like the idea of cassettes much more than the reality that comes with using them. The MTR100 was probably no exception. I had my share of cassette storage devices (not to mention Walkmen) back in the day and I’m not missing them at all. Of course, I’d be willing to try out one of these setups for a weekend, just to be sure.

- Ryan