Dead Carnival Demo Recording; or, the past two days.

Recording is more or less done. Alex is in charge of mixing them and I hope he leaves some of my incidental talking in the mix. I have a bad habit of speaking nonsense much of the time and a lot of it got picked up before and after recording takes. My favorites thus far are on the same song, "Clementine," at the beginning of which I'm in the background saying "pillows have feathers in their stomaches, like birds?" and at the end say dreamily "oh, lovey." The first is due to my reading W.O. Mitchell's novel "Who Has Seen the Wind" and finding that particular sentence funny enough to read aloud and the second is due to my equally bad habit of not pronouncing the "L" in "lovely." I think they fit in with the sentiment of the song, which is, for all intents and purposes, a fucked up story of obsessive love. We shall see, though; The demo is still in its infancy, much as I would like to rush it.

Yesterday, though meant to be a day off, ended up being a photoshoot and a mini rehearsal. "Clementine," the song I mentioned above, is being premiered at the gig we're playing this coming tuesday at Slainte Wine Bar so we practiced that rather quietly, but there was still much guitar playing and singing. Our little festival party wandered down to the carnival to watch the fireoworks and I handed off my camera to my friend Vanessa who took some gorgeous photographs of Alex and myself wandering around. This is one of my favorites- I don't know what's so funny or why this moment happened but it's adorable and I'm glad it was captured:




The rest of the photos are on the myspace and the facebook fan page (http://www.myspace.com/gincircus). The evening was good all in all, and ended with Alex, myself, and two of our friends contemplating the intricacies of being a professional children's singer as we watched an old VHS tape of a Rick Charette concert. If you don't know of Rick Charrette, you probably aren't from Maine and I direct you to his official site here: http://www.pinepoint.com/rick.html . We all decided there was comedy gold in such a job, but it could only be done justice by the Showtime network.

Today I woke up feeling off mentally and emotionally and therefore our band practice was off mentally and emotionally. Alex is deliciously patient with me, though, and we muddled through until 6pm when he had to go practice with his other band, Blue Mire. We worked out some covers to sing at Slainte and ate buttered toast. We recorded a scratch version of our cover of New Order's song "Temptation" which ended up being rather good, although I can't decide if I should post it to the myspace or not. Once Alex left I attempted to write some happy songs and found myself incapable of penning cheerful lyrics. Barring that, I took a "dead photo" for my collection, which basically means I posed myself to look like I'd died falling down the stairs and took a picture. This brings me to another topic for future blog discussion: why I am not Amanda Palmer yet share a ridiculous amount of interests and activities with her. She recently put out a companion book to her album Who Killed Amanda Palmer which contains dead photos of herself with accompanying stories by Neil Gaiman. While I greatly anticipate receiving my pre-ordered copy I feel I have to point out that I've been taking dead photos of myself for quite some time now and don't intend to stop just because Amanda Palmer has a book of similar work now. If anything, I hope my dead photos will be part of a movement of such pictures and we can all live in dead photo harmony. But, yes, I am not intending to copy her in my music or my art-- she is older than I am and likes similar things and therefore got to explore them publicly first. I consider myself no better or worse than her just part of a similar circle of influence (although I am jealous of how well she can play dead). Here is my dead photo, for the curious:



and if you think that's awesome I strongly recommend Amanda's book since it is double awesome due to there actually being stories accompanying the photos (with Gaiman influence, no less!) Case in point:



You may order it here: http://whokilledamandapalmer.com/

But, band practice is at 10am and Tuesday's show is at 10pm. That with coursework in between means this tired kitten needs sleep.
-Aubin