Fuzz box

I built this for Jess. The switch at the top is the only control-- down for overdrive, up for fuzz. Bottom switch is power, right eye input, left eye output.

Maths as waveshaper

Pictures of People Taking Pictures

Travel photos, pt. 3: "Taking Pictures of People Taking Pictures." An old hobby of mine, resurrected for international hi jinx!

Graf Misc. East Coast

Travel photos, pt.2: graffiti from Montreal to New York.

In Montreal, outside the cemetery:


In Burlington, VT. Good one, hippies:


Down the block from our old place in Bay Ridge (er, "Bay Radge"):


On Broadway, north of Canal. An ad, maybe (?), but still the largest paste-up I've ever seen:

Graf BCN

Not entirely sure how best to post our travel photos from December, so I'm starting with the "Graffiti in Barcelona" section. Enjoy:

Photos from Saturday's show

Running with the "Lightness & Darkness" theme, Jess and I played Thingamagoops on Saturday through the following pedals:

Jess:


Peter:


(I used the 4-track as a looper (there's a tape loop in a cassette in there))

This guy (AJ Cesena) built a tent out of thin cloth and mic stands before his set, which looked great:


...and these nice people wrestled around on the floor while we played, which happened some three and a half hours after it was scheduled to:



We recorded the set, but something went a little haywire and what we got was 25 minutes of silence. A shame!

Holy shit we're playing a show tonight!

We're playing at a book release party tonight for Lightness & Darkness at the Happy Dog (1542 N. Milwaukee, Second Floor). We'll be backing up readings by Taleen Kalenderian and Nicki Yowell. Starts 9ish, we go on second.



See you there!

Speers tape in the wild

We've been on the road for the past couple of weeks, and before we put up a travel Mega-Post, I thought I'd mention first that the Speers cassette can now be found at the following record stores (there are two copies in each):

Montreal:
Phonopolis

Brooklyn:
Academy Annex
Desert Island

Barcelona:
Discos Paradiso
Luchador Records (no website yet-- NEW STORE!-- but it's next door to Discos Paradiso)

We'll be stopping by shops here in Chicago this week as well (Logan Hardware and Permanent for sure) and with any luck they'll carry them too. UPDATE: Logan Hardware now has one. These are the only Colonial tapes to be sold in a store ever, aside from the one time our pal Lucas found a copy of the first Iran Contras album in an Oakland Salvation Army. What a score!!

Anyway, if you're near any of the above and are looking for a copy, stop on by. We're pretty much out all 50 at this point, but will have a couple of new tapes out in the coming weeks. Details soon...

Pagan Feelings live in New York!

Everyone's favorite Summertime Fun Band of 2011, Pagan Feelings, will be playing at Cameo in Brooklyn on Thursday, December 22nd.  Also on the bill:

Blood Revenge (Ben of The New Colossus)
Face Blindness (Chris and Lindsay of Radical Dads)
and... mystery band... still figuring that one out...

Anyway, ours is the late show, doors at 9pm.  93 N. 6th St., Brookyln.  Cheap entry, good vibes aplenty.

Also, there will be copies of the Speers cassette and an even rarer CD-edition (10 copies) of the upcoming Pagan Feelings tape (Colonial Recordings USA #105).  Be there and get your beautiful hands on them!!

_

Here's something I've been working on this semester:


It's a series of live mixes, using a modular synthesizer, sheets of metal and reverb units as the sound sources. The "presentation version," which I'll be debuting in a couple of hours, features two 7-foot sheets of aluminum, wired as reverberant amplifiers, as the rear channels of a 4-channel playback system: