"Infamous!
Butcher!
ANGEL OF DEAAATTTHHH!"
It's never too early for thrash metal.
What's been happening? Well, quite a lot. Not stuff that is fun to read about or take photos of, but stuff, indeed has been happening.
Let's start with the band. Thrall (Tom plays guitar and 'sings', I play drums, and Rob is/was our live bass player) has been really busy. First, we decided to get the album that has been "being finished" for over two years mastered. Once it's mastered it can not be "finished" any more. It is completed! Ready to send to labels and see if anyone will pick it up. Thank goodness, because I was really starting to get sick to the teeth of that album constantly hanging over us. It's not just being mastered, mind you. It's being mastered at one of the best mastering studios in Australia, Turtle Rock Studios, and it's costing us a truck load of money (even though we got a discount, it's a lot for a bunch of independent musicians to come at) and so Tom's finances have taken a major blow on that front.
A friend of ours from college, Jansen Herr, has been working on a bit of a film clip for us in his spare time. He's quite the film maker these days and is based in Sweden. So, when we send out our little package to labels with our mastered album, we might also be able to include a little DVD of Jansen's wonderful film clip. He's a real artist, that Jansen, and he's made something really haunting and amazing to accompany the song.
We also decided that after over two years of playing that our band needed some kind of merchandise. The last merch we had was some little button badges that said "Thy Plagues" back in 2006-2007! So we bit the bullet and forked out for some t-shirts to be printed in the hope that someone (nay, anyone) might buy one at the live shows that we had been doing. We've not sold enough to cover the cost of printing them yet. We know, we have to be patient, but being patient requires patience, and sometimes supplies of patience run low. You could help by ordering one... :)
Now, you might have noticed from my interesting verb tenses above that we've decided to stop playing live shows. Thrall played the gig on the 21st of October at Socio. And it was abysmal. Socio kept giving us gigs after that first one, and we were quite pleased to be invited back so quickly, until we realised what was happening. Socio was using us as spac-filler on amateur nights. First gigs - all your friends turn up to show support - because they're your friends. It was a Sunday night, everyone could make it. Then we are given a bunch of Wednesday night gigs. No one turns up for us except my mate Glenn. We play to hostile crowds for two gigs that look like they wish we would just die. So we decided that the experiment of playing live with me on drums was a success, that it would work if we did it back in Hob's, and so, there was no point in continuing live shows on amateur night bills. Time to go back to songwriting for the second album.
The deal that we had made with Rob (wherein I play in his pop band, and he plays in my black metal band) had begun to run us both ragged (particularly me, as I was finding it really hard to play soft, poncy drums in one band, and BM, power-striking drums in the other). I try to practice drums at least 3 times a week to keep my double kick training in check, and ultimately, I'd like to play BM drums every day. The feel of one band was polluting the other band, and the time commitments were meaning I was spending even less time with Tom (and I wasn't enjoying that!), so Rob and I have come to an agreement that we will finish up playing in each other's bands at the end of this year. Thrall will do one more live show with Rob on the 15th of December, I will do some session work on Sister Ray's recording, and then we will amicably part ways. It's a great relief for me, because I was feeling really stretched and thin, and as one polluted the other, I had Thrall demanding me to play louder and harder, and Sister Ray demanding I play quieter and more poppily. You try to please all the people, you end up pleasing no-one.
Now I can return to my single focus: to be the most slamming, thrashy, speed-blasting, evil, kvlt, BM drummer I can be. Dave Lombardo, Philthy Animal Taylor, Horgh, Frost, and Daniel from Craft will be back on high rotation as I return to black metal mania!
So, that's all the news about the band. Hopefully soon I will be able to let you all know about which label has picked us up. Wouldn't that be nice?
Either way, in other news, the weather has started to go cold. I'm keen to get out and take as many photos as possible of the changing seasons. Last weekend I caught up with Leila, who I know from Hobart, in Kyoto, and we took a couple of photos of the start of the autumnal leaves. They'll just get redder and more intense over the next couple of weeks, and by the start of December they'll have disappeared. Just like the cherry blossom, so beautiful when you can see them, so transitory, so ephemeral. Haiku like burblings spring to mind.
My teeth decided to stop working the other day, so I'm currently having some quite extensive dental work done. Finally this extortionate hell-th insurance is coming in handy. The excess for my last dental visit was ¥1490 (about $15 AU). I'm jogging and swimming occasionally at the moment, and my fitness level is still pretty good, even considering that I've not been able to do much exercise in the Japanese summer. So health wise, pretty good. Tom's well too.
Work, we had our Halloween lessons last week, which meant we were obliged to dress up. We both managed to spend less than ¥2000 on our costumes. Teaching is somewhere between fun and a drag. Work. What can I say? It's always depressingly work-esque.
For Christmas holidays we're coming up with a list of things we want to do that can be done as daytrips from Osaka. Tottori, Hikone, Nagoya, Ise, and Wakayama seem to be the front runners for our 5 days of Seishun Ju Hachi Kippu fun. Maybe we'll do one or two overnights, but nothing too drastic. Financially we're hoping to keep the spend quite low. Send back some cash for a car when we get back, and save some yen for our grand finale. Yakushima looks like a definite, Kyuushu, definitely, Okinawa, maaaybe... I'm really keen to get to the Japan Sea for a bit of a look at the Hokurikyu region, and to get back to Tokyo for one last, and very fond visit to that city. I will always wonder how different our lives would have been had we been able to station ourselves in Tokyo. It's just so much bigger. So different to Osaka. I feel like I'm visiting a different country whenever I am there. Who knows... maybe Tokyo would have chewed us up and spat us out far sooner, but maybe, maybe we wouldn't be heading home if we had been able to take the Tokyo route.
Well, we'll never know now.
Hoping you're all well, feel free to let us know how you've been and the like. 24th of April we'll be flying out, so it's not long now and we'll be back in Australia. Then the next question is where will we settle? I'm hoping the employment situation in Tassie will have loosened up a little by the time I get back, but if not, it's Melbourne or Sydney. Any of the above will be fine. We were also looking at the possibility of emigrating from Australia permanently, but that's another music in a different kitchen. More on that later.
