Yes, that’s right.
The piece of news you’ve been looking for for the past 2 years and a half.

A new Voluntary Mother Earth album “Space Elephant” (working title) was mastered just now and is ready for you to absorb into the right hemisphere of your brain.

Man, it took me forever to get this done. But it’s done. And it’s done tight.

More news coming soon.

Much love,
Aki
Voluntary Mother Earth

Well, sort of.

As I wrote in my last post, I finally managed to start working on the mix of “Cheeseburger Baby” (America’s Favorite) a few days back.

Got the first verse and the mid section mixed, and I’ll get down to the latter half of the song and the prelude tomorrow, and hopefully it’ll get done sometime during this weekend. Yes, I’m spending a whole week just for the mixing of one song. Call me crazy, and you might be right.

Music aside,,,
Since I’ve moved recently I have to hand in some paperwork to the local government office. So today I went back to Yokohama to fill out a move-out form.

On my way there, I stopped at Shibuya, Tokyo, which is like Tokyo’s equivalent of Times Square, New York, except nastier and more plastic and with full of shit music blasting out of every fucking store and huge screen mounted on buildings and loud speaker in street corners. (3 years ago it was all Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”, and our then-drummer Sean and I used to have good laughs poking fun at this particular piece of noise, busting out this little tune in the middle of our songs at rehearsals. God bless Seans. Both of ‘em)

Anyhow, I stopped by there and got a few second-hand CDs. For those of you who somehow are curious about what the fuck I’m listening to right now, here they are, except I haven’t listened to ‘em juschet.

As you can see, they are two Radioheads and a Thom Yorke, and a Kraftwerk. I got into Radiohead last year. It takes me a long time before I have enough balls to purchase recordings of bands that are still around. I’m mostly strictly religiously a dead-person-music/disbanded-band-music kind of guy.

Yes, I still buy CDs, but almost only used ones. I like to own stuff. I don’t like owning something intangible like a downloaded MP3. MP3’s not even stuff. Just give me some stuff. I want STUFF!
It ain’t no stuff if you can’t touch it, and you can’t own it if it ain’t no stuff. Stuff’s good.

But at the same time, I can’t afford to keep buying $25-30 albums (which is the standard price of albums sold in Japan).

Out of this particular circumstance, I developed a habit of buying old CDs and records. These days lots of people seem to like digital download and it’s cool. It just ain’t my cuppa tea.

While in Shibuya, I also picked this thing up. I’m a big fan of Krishna and Indian art.

Aigh, so that’s what I’m up to.
Still not Dre, but taking my time to perfect my mix, nonetheless.
What are you up to?

Hugs,
Aki
Voluntary Mother Earth

Finally got it under control!
A whole weekend taken!

So I just spent this whole weekend prepping to mix this song called Cheeseburger Baby. It had so many tracks it literally took 10 minutes just to load. So I waited.

I start to move things around, turning on effects and cutting out noise, and all of a sudden, after about 3 minutes of work, it freezes and erase all the 3-minute work.

I try to reopen the file and it wouldn’t open. So I restart my Mac, cool it down, and attempt to repeat all of the above.

That was my Friday evening and the whole Saturday… Oh how I love my life!

So today, which is Sunday, I trimmed some unimportant parts off the mix, cut off some effects, combined some tracks into one which I didn’t want to do if I didn’t have to, erased a bunch of tracks which I didn’t really want to do, and FINALLY lightened it up enough for it to load in 3 minutes and to not freeze or crash.

And I started the mix from the scratch just about an hour ago. And now I got this poop.

I spent my whole weekend waiting, and FINALLY I get to start to get it started. And it’s sounding fucking great.

PS. Last night I was so immensely frustrated I had to make onion rings. And a lot of em. Here they are. I got a heartburn.

Aigh, time to go.
Talk to ya later.

BIG Hugs,
Aki
Voluntary Mother Earth