http://www.hydrogenbar.com/ News from the Hydrogen Bar, official home of Chemlab. en-us Sat, 17 May 2008 02:37:45 -0500 Copyright 2006 hydrogenbar.com http://www.hydrogenbar.com/images/minicon.gif http://www.hydrogenbar.com 16 16



Slotted in here:

]]> Thu, 15 May 2008 20:58:01 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)







One of my fave delis.


And then there's Katz Deli that's about to disappear. Let's ring in a big cheer for the Reign Of The Beige. Go and see it if you get a chance and "send a salami to your boy in the army" though that has to be said with the right pronunciation.









Beautiful synagog in my old neighborhood that's now owned by a couple of sculptors.




And then, almost right across the street is this little bit of wall where another synagog used to stand. The city I once knew, where I recorded many a disc, is no longer there.










In the Land Of The Beige there are a few lone outposts of riot still disturbing the masses. ABC NO RIO stands across the street from my last home on Rivington Street. It'll be gone soon, so go see it.







In the Dead Lands, the towering sculpture of battered shards is a beacon for the wanderers.




The 'circle' may look unbroken but don't be fooled, it is.






They almost certainly only sing their vertically majestic songs to me and me alone.












]]> Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:39:56 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)

There's a light in the window of night.
I've been deep in the sewers of the night and thought that it would make sense to get back to you. There's much to discuss and I've been hungry to pass so much of it along to you. I've been deeply inspired by going to see the recent retrospective of Derek Jarman's work at the Serpentine Gallery. It was one of the most inspiring journeys I've been on in ages. It has made me want to push every aspect of my own work further including the PRUDE record. I'm also aware that it's high time for me to go back to painting, collage building and releasing some of the physical shards of my work that haven't had a forum in recent years. I'm debating book building as well as part of me feels that perhaps my lyrics and other randoms deserve a home more physical than the binary stream. I'm building and painting memento mori boxes again and I've thought of possibly putting them out into the world as well, but that's currently out of the range of vision. Jarman's creative life was so off-kilter, so divinely decadent and utterly driven, without a care about convention or what the rest of the art and film world was doing. He was in a profoundly fascinating position, pioneering film and video techniques (and their nexus with painting), questing without maps or precedents as he was really so far out ahead of the curve that it's taken years for the rest of the art and film world to catch up to him. No one was doing what he was doing when he was doing it and he loved that as it allowed him to just make up the rules as he went along. It gave him great freedom of movement. Brutal beauty. As ever, in the face of this caliber of incandescent talent far greater than my own, I stand in awe, but Jarman's artwork in particular I find both energizing and humbling as I see so much of what I've always attempted to do in visual art all the while knowing that I'll never be talented enough to even come close to his genius. Not that I'd ever want to replicate him, but I'd be happy for a fleck of that creativity to color my water.Instead, I'll just continue to thrash through the underbrush in my own inimitable and careeringly fucked up way.
In the shadow of the sun indeed.

I'm uploading a collection of pictures that I took while I was in New York in January. I was there working with Gabrielle Penebaz, the iris-eyed light-demon. We've been working on a collection of films to accompany the Altered Statesmen record that's currently encased in amber. I'm fairly sure that these films will see the light of day long before the record ever does. They've got a wonderfully off-metronome quality to them that mirrors the nakedness and injured immediacy of the material on "the death of radio mars". I love working with her as she's willing to simply leap into the void without care or caution. We shot some film between two subway cars on the express trains that had some fantastically harrowing moments. I'm looking forward to working with her both on more film projects as well as larger, as-yet-unnamed projects. She rare, and towering.

The shots that I've uploaded come to you courtesy of no sleep, then or now. I'm not going to caption them, they simply reflect the light and shadow of where I used to walk when I was both angel-headed and fatally crippled. We laughed a lot, both then and now. You have to laugh at Death or it eats you and leaves your shitty little bones washed up on the bleak shale.










pray for pills












That's it for the moment, but I'll be back with another installment in another day or so. There's a deep well of them as I had the camera on constant capture since I'm still so in love with, and inspired by, the city. ]]> Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:17:14 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) “found away from my world,
feeling for foothold through a blank profound,
along with unborn people in strange lands.” *

There’s a dead bird in the backyard today. Actually just a gay pile of feathers lightly catching the tips of the breeze as it edges in off the water. There’s no heraldic husk and certainly all of the fires are out.

Must be a day to turn back over. Let sleep pamper me like a familiar, salty lover who always has a new delight with which to surprise her jaded lover.
Swim tenderly down and succumb.


* The quote’s from Browning though possibly a forgery.


]]> Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:49:14 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
It ages strangely, but her questions are always diamond-tipped.
A rare quality indeed.

http://www.fabryka.darknation.eu/php-files_en/readarticle.php?article_id=40
http://www.fabryka.darknation.eu/php-files_en/readarticle.php?article_id=185 ]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:45:48 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.regenmag.com/Blog-26-Top-10-Industrial-Albums-of-All-Time.html

Pretty cool, ain’t it? And one of my fave rags too.



]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:08:00 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
The pictures are from the idiot box, sorry for the lamp images on the screen.



There are some good video reels from the BBC. Mute the v.o. as it's incredibly lame:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7230000/newsid_7237100/7237169.stm?bw=bb&mp=rm&asb=1&news=1&bbcws=1









]]> Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:23:41 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_D4NYVlJpY

enjoy the bruise! ]]> Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:42:28 PST (hydrogen bar)







Here's the first installment of what turned out to be a fascinating and profoundly sprawling interview with James, Wes and Christine, the brains behind www.alterati.com which is an endlessly challenging and stimulating site full of great interviews and upended insights to the bleeding edge.

http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1747

There's a text portion to follow as well that'll breach the vent-hope pretty soon, as soon as I can stick a fork in the fucker and call it done.









All pictures courtesy of George Hagegeorge, an old friend discovered in the wreckage of the ages. ]]> Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:20:13 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Night-bruise!

Here's the next one in the series of interviews that's been going on since we got back from drifting DDT all over the damn country. Ilker put together a great interview, and i laughed my ass off at the picture of my head being kissed by Restless James.

http://www.regenmag.com/Interviews-214-Chemlab.html


HERE'S THE DDT EYE-SLASH FROM ORLANDO AT THE BACKBOOTH.
All pictures credited to Amanda Moore.

Winding up for razor-flail:


Turned away in the blur:


I get so angry I get all knotted up:


He gets the knot too:


Fucking knotted so tight he can't breathe:


Spitting sparks and shards of dark:


In one hand, the knife, in the other the chalice:


I love them when they're on their knees. What about you?


I kissed the floor on my way down:


Can't wait to get back on the stage. ]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:29:46 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Rock Star Journalism has long been a haven of support for bands that are doing interesting things and who aren't afraid to push the envelope. The women behind RSJ have also long been willing to push the edge, interview bands that they find stimulating and do it all in the face of profound adversity. They went off the air over a year ago, but it appears that they just couldn't stay away from the fray. Just like me. We met up once again at the show in Baltimore on the recent tour and decided that we should lay out a few more lines of code to bolster what we've done already. RSJ are always a pleasure to talk to as they always manage to come up with good questions. It's good to have them back in the mix.

http://www.rockstarjournalism.com/id81.html

There are a number of other interviews coming up, some done and some not. I'll get them posted as soon as.

There are also a slew of picture links that I'll finally be getting up now that I'm in
Re-Plug Land.

I'm attaching a link to the superb video from 1996 when we were rolling with Levi and Greg Lucas. It's taken by Aarin Ripes, the freak also responsible for getting our music onto Jeopardy years ago, and he took some fantastic pictures of the DDT show in LA-LA. Great sweeping glance back through the fog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKkm3YTp8qs ]]> Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:58:31 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
So, here's Tom Cruise in nine minutes of glory talking about the wonders of being a Scientologist. It's not only hilarious, but it's deeply disturbing. To top it all off, he never, NEVER, finishes a sentence. He does what we call in this house the "Fox News Ramble" where someone talks with great authority, misusing as many "big words" as they can manage, and yet they never actually say anything at all.

http://defamer.com/344987/the-tom-cruise-indoctrination-video-scientologists-dont-want-you-to-see

And here's the more recent one.

http://defamer.com/345699/tom-cruise-why-ask-permission-we-are-the-authorities ]]> Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:14:56 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.theaircar.com

what makes this innovation so much more interesting, and more of a realistic threat to the industry and its ossified manufacturing and production modes, is that this is the most sought-after and driven car by the middle classes in India. now, if you haven't been paying attention, the middle class in India measures, as of the census from last year, larger than the total population of these United States.

let that one sink in a second. it's cool, it took a second for me too. then, factor in the reality that both India and China are fast becoming the countries that will be driving the decisions made by most economies globally, and you quickly come to the obvious conclusion that the Tata, as it's called in India, is going to cause a major, global paradigm shift in automobile manufacturing. the potential of the Prius can't be ignored much longer, and in actual fact, the Prius is going to have a lot of severe competition from this car as well as soon as the final rejig comes and the Tata, or version 4.0-whatever, can be run off the "oompf" of the proletarian bicycle pump.

we're living in fascinating times indeed, and although the almost vertical climb of technology and the speed of socio-cultural changes can be mind-boggling and daunting, it can not be argued that we live in an age when we really have to struggle to see what's coming next. that's pretty fucking exciting. for those of us born under the perpetually rain-black aegi (is that in fact the plural of aegis? i guess it is now) of Blade Runner and JG Ballard, this is exactly the sort of thing that we used to scroll across our screens before we went to bed at night, or at dawn. we dreamt of slotting 'softs in the port behind our ears. i took PK Dick's conceptual-technical offspring on tour with me, and they lightened my load markedly: tri-band cell phones, my Mac powerbook, gps guidance for the van, web cams and ipods. we accessed the consensual hallucination of the web via wifi nodes in clubs, hotels, production offices and locking on signals at myriad coffee shops and truck stops. we traded tracks via flash drives and updated our set as we needed off Gabriel's computer in the afternoon and played a new version that night. i made movies with my phone, my cybershot and my panasonic dv cam that could then be posted every night on the viral engine of youtube, and when i started to run out of space on my internal hard drive, i dumped off the files onto my portable 250gig drive that's the approximate size of my wallet.

i could go on.

what's interesting to me is that there'll be a segment of the pop that reads this and will be totally uninterested in the marvel of it all because these innovations aren't innovations for them. due to their lack of perception of it (and that's not a value judgement at all, just a fact) they're just seen as the Bic pen of the day: they're what you use. they're actually living ahead of the curve, not marveling at it at all. they're sniffing out what's coming next that i can't even see yet. they're generation gapping me without even realizing that they're doing it.
that's the most fascinating.

the real Panther Moderns at play in the fields of Steve Jobs.

the future's dead. long live the future. ]]> Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:02:53 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
The DETONATION DAYS TOUR is now officially over and sealed tight. It came in like a lion and went out like two lions fucking. There are a number of tales that I’ll be telling in some of the upcoming string of interviews (four of them Friday alone), there was a new shirt borne out of it that we’ll have up for sale as soon as I get back to the lair beneath London (MUSIC FOR FUCKING AND FIGHTING), and, amongst other things, there was a lot of footage taken of the tour.

And now, treasures, I come to you. Many of you took both film and camera footage of the tour dates. Some of them I’ve seen and some not, but all of them were sanctioned by me/us with one single caveat: that I get to have copies of the footage.

I’m in the process of working with the rest of the band to review and possibly cut together as much of that video/film/DV footage of Chemlab as possible and I’m making a general call to everyone that brought their cameras to the shows to get in touch with me. There are a number of possible end-products being talked about at this stage of the game and it’ll help us immensely if we can see every single, lurid Zapruder image you’ve managed to collect.

I’m less interested in the photographs at the moment though please get in touch as I’m always happy to drool over pictures of me and put them into the ever-growing archive that I’ll be propping up over at the h-bar’s photo gallery.

For the time being I want moving images of any sort. Interviews as well as live footage, random segments shot at the shows, after-show footage of the two of you (Three? Four? More?) getting it on in the hotel room you rented for the night. Blurry, crisp, vertiginously hi-end or gutter-scrapingly lo-tek, whatever it is, I want to see it.. It can also be footage that you’ve filmed as inspired by the night or the band. We’ll consider that too. Please get in touch with me at the bullshit frontier (www.myspace.com/chemlab ) if you haven’t heard from me already and tell me the best way for us to contact you and work out having your black eyes and burned ideas embedded into our sprawling mass of mess. You write, we’ll write.

There are other projects galore, but the next main thrust is to finally get the Altered Statesmen record I finished with Mark Spybey last year out and into the world. Come listen to some of it: www.myspace.com/alteredstatesmenband  
Maybe we’ll even have it on the road. There will be films of that appearing very soon as well.

As usual, I digress.

Send me your eyes; battered, batting, blinking, winking, beating little hearts that snare the world in nano-second snapshots.
-jared

]]> Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:11:25 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


See how Continental rolls? He might be heading out to That California next too.



All comedy aside, as we head down the freeway into Atlanta, we passed an overpass that carried the name Blue Ball Avenue. How the fuck did the cartographers, or whoever named that avenue, decide that that was actually a viable name?! Stimulated by non-stimulation? Frustrated backlash? Child’s game gone awry? Hard to imagine that it was an idea that was decided on in committee. It must have been steamed up by one guy, and yet it had to have passed through the gates, locks and checks of committee approval at some juncture. I’m eternally amazed. “By what?” you might ask. By us, I would reply. As animals, we’ve tackled some of the greatest feats, created some of the greatest works of Art and perpetrated some of the most egregious crimes of all time. We’re also one of the strangest and most comical and perpetually confusing of all animals. That’s one of the things that sets us apart. There are countless things, and I get so tired of people that say: “opposable thumbs are THE ONE THING that set us apart from animals”. Bullshit. Guitars do too. So do guns, and the ability to bar-b-que a nice set of baby-back ribs. And the iPhone. Our vision is so simplistic sometimes.

It has finally come through the fogs that Jared might actually not be talking crazy and that crashing on the floor in front of the banquettes (you like the pretty terminology I use to make a van bench sound attractive?) might be a reasonably good option for sleeping. Crazy old man.

The drive from Orlando wasn’t the worst of them by any stretch of the imagination, and 8-9 hours seems comparatively light in the face of what we’ve done so far, but the fatigue of the end of the tour has come and the physical realisation that regardless of the days off or the longer stretches of sleep, there’s a terminal, low-grade fatigue that simply won’t go away until around Christamas time. So, this drive was pretty quiet and we tried to actually get ahead of the dim sound on our internal channels, the sound of collapse. Only a few more drives. The bittersweet realisation that it’ll soon be over.


Sugar, sugar, water, vitamins and Sharpies. This is the front of the van between the two seats, strange contrast to the old front well/dash: smokes, tin foil, lighters, pills and Sharpies. Old men at work. pretty soon it'll be denture cream, hemm cream and Bristol Cream.



I’ve been casting back through the posts that I’ve mounted over the past three weeks and a few things have brought themselves “up to the level of my vision” as my sage mother once said in the psychobabble lingo of the Neurolinguistic therapist.



One of the things that I notice a lot is that I spend very little time actually writing about the shows.


Certainly there are slashes and glimpses of them and they’re skewed, lurid and surreal.


In some elemental way though they don’t really make the kind of appearance that perhaps the readers of a tour journal might want. I know that the incidentals and the peripheral glances are the things that interest me the most, but I’m not at all sure that they are what the reading public are likely to get caught-up in. I find in my writing a lot of musing about the varied countryside that we’re passing through and the people that I get to spend time with this time out. The pleasure of spending time with this weirdo band of freaks is surprisingly profound and it inspires me to mention it just about every post I get. The obvious reason is that they’re more evolved than the creatures that I used to spend months-at-a-time with in a van. With the exception of Greg Slo-Hand Lucas, none of the other van-patriots were particularly intellectually stimulating. Not that that’s a requirement for going on tour together, but I find it’s refreshing par fois. A good sense of humor, twisted or otherwise, is critical. Lest I digress again, the people and landscape are fascinating, but the actual show appears in sidelong haze.


Atlanta, I can recall so much about tonight and countless “Atlanta nights” before it, and I’ve got lots to tell about tonight, but the show itself is less memorable. It was a great show, but it seems to me that that’s what I say all of the time. Though it may in point of fact be true, it doesn’t make for the most scintillating of reading.
“The show rocked!”
“The show was a killer tonight!”
“We really rocked the joint tonight!”
I keep nudging up against something dim in the recounting of the actual event around which the cosmos of these days revolves, and I stall in some critical way. I keep trying to put the same feeling into new phraseology, and failing.


Part of the problem is that the world starts to close down on me as the evening progresses and I find myself increasingly unplugged. If you’ve tried to talk to me before the show I hope that I’ve been reasonably polite, or at least diplomatic, but it’s increasingly hard for me to focus on human interaction as we get closer to show time. The edges start to blur. Friends often wonder if I’m really drug-free as there are times when I won’t even recognise them until my pre-show brain has had a chance to assimilate the face and experience.


This happened with Dee Madden in PDX. He came up to me and threw his arms around me and started to talk to me and I really couldn’t imagine who in the hell this strange man was that was talking to me like an old friend. Embarrassing, and it took me at least an hour to put him to his face. The pieces all crashed down on my head at that stage of the game and the ignominy I felt was profound.
There’s the mounting tension as stage time races up, getting ready to rock, stretching and pacing (sometimes I discover that I’ve been inadvertently pacing quite a swath) and trying to remember the last few strings and randoms. A weight starts to sag down on my shoulders about 15 minutes before we kick off, and it doesn’t lift until sometime during the first song though I’m never really sure when it happens. Before I know it though it’s the first break in the set, we’re rocketing headlong into the enveloping, ferocious yet sensual throat of the songs and I’m whipping and driving the horses like mad. Great feeling of liberation and electric juice, but it’s hard for me to actually remember what goes on on stage during the show itself.

For decades, from the time I was 15, I was a dedicated drug addict of one stripe or another, in search of that negative satori that we all look for when we’re blotting everything out as quickly as it can be written. I had a bottomless hunger for Oblivion. I wanted to be Not-There and to enjoy all of the warm pleasures of Not-Space, standing up on the rooftop drinking in the starless night. Certainly I often craved ‘sharp’ too and so was a speed freak for many years as well as a lover of barbiturates in all forms, but I think that the groove that I found to be the most delicious and satisfying in terms of total abandon and seismic blur was smack.


Through years of experimentation, trial and error (a LOT of error) I’ve discovered that the stage is in fact the most powerful of all of the drugs that I’ve ever managed to cram into my me. One of the weird by-products of that situation is that I get really, really off-the-grid when I perform and all of the things that “matter” and are important slide out of focus in some really elemental and primitive way. It’s The Great Debilitator. That’s a strange thing to say as I’m not really out of touch with what’s happening on stage or the world around me, but I just don’t really take it all in either, or care.



It’s like the old quote about being old enough to appreciate Youth. I’m finally clean enough to appreciate Oblivion. It’s pretty hard to explain and in reading back through it it seems to me that I should simply stop trying to get the details of something captured when the actual essence of the thing itself is beyond details and the ability to ensnare it with words. It’s fabulous and I love it and I have a delicious time not being there. I always have, it’s just that now there are fewer millstones attached. Heroin was a colossal blast and I enjoyed many aspects of it without regret or debilitation for many years. The problem was never being on drugs, it was being OFF them that killed me and all of the fun. I suppose that if I had been independently wealthy it would’ve continued to be a fantastic dream, as long as I kept my eyes shut to all of the other details.
....blahblahblah.... never would've gotten here though, or snared Maja and had Django, I'd almost certainly be dead and all of this would be academic, and a bit surreal as ghosts being academic is always a bit strange and off-beat.

Oh bondage, up yours! Anyway, the stage transports me and if you’re wondering why I’m hard to approach before the show, now you know; I’m high on lights and monitors. Come see me after the gig and we’ll hang out and cause trouble.

Steve “the fly” Watson, the guitarist from the whole Burn Out period was there and it was amazingly cool to see him. He got all sideways for a bit and smeared love all over me and the band. I think we knocked his rocks off. He said we did. He left at the end of the night with a head full of sparks and laughter and lit off a bunch of fireworks on the pavement right by the van too. It was sweet to hang out with him though we didn’t have much time to catch up, There never is enough time.


-kiss-kiss-"oh, i remember those lips"-


Narc from Helltrash slithered through as well and we spent a little time trading tales of foolishness in the dark. I’ve always liked his approach to Rock as he's got attitude and soul. He turned out to be far more fey than I’d ever expected from our correspondence. Email simply doesn’t convey some of the finer points and gestures of human nature and of some of the characters that we meet in the ethers. Real life can be a shocker. Like the back room at Max’s Kansas City where everyone was beautiful and in love and draped around each other under the red lights. Once the night had worn off and they hit the pavement under real light many of those budding romances died a startled and sudden death. Really cool cat and a great attitude though. Could certainly see more of him. Andy Combichrist showed up and got mobbed. Would’ve been nice to see him more and actually get to hang out, but it wasn’t happening. He and I met last year at Blacksun and became friends. He said that Chemlab was one of the reasons that he started doing music which I think is sweet but I’m never sure if I really believe that one. It continues to be next-to-impossible for me to believe that the band could’ve had any more than passing effect on anyone at all. It’s nice for my ego to hear though. I remember hearing it years ago in New Orleans from Brian Warner and not believing it then either. He also said that he wished that he'd thought of the Fuck Art shirt and was willing to kill me for it which I had a far easier time believing. The shirt part, not the killing. He's such a nice boy.
Still nice to hear though.

Shut your mouth, dear. You'll catch bugs.


Fly, Les Fools and Sundries.

Last of the long drives, heading out of here and up to Balto. We’re leaving tonight and heading straight on. No real time for a hotel or to crash, so we’ll drive instead. Ain't rock'n'roll glam?!

Poor Restless, crashed hard on the hard of the van floor. Smoke at the ready though.
Not really sure if that show’s going to fly or not as it has been on uncertain terrain for a few days now. Although I think that the owner and I have come to an understanding, it seems that the night’s going to be shaky at best. It boggles my mind that a promoter would bid on a show that he’s not sure about, and then try to cancel it once the tour’s rolling, or stop taking calls once the tour’s rolling. As I keep saying, over and over again, “If you can’t do the show, then don’t do the show.” I really won’t be insulted by it, but I’ll be furious if you take the show and then try to back out on it because you don’t know how to promote. Idiots.

I’ve also been dealing with a mountain of mercenary shit from Skeleton Key’s booking agent.

(notice how this "pre-melted treat" really looks like a bag of shit?)
She seems to think that throwing around bad attitude cloaked beneath the guise of “fighting for her band” is the way to endear them to me and the rest of the tour and get the best deal for SK. This has been going on since long before the tour started, but it really has only now become and unpleasant issue. Amazing how she can manage to see Duane’s groin injury as an opportunity to ask for more money for her band. She totally disregards the fact that although her band is great they've had very little draw on this tour and have been nit-picky about the money. Not really sure if they understand their value (or lack thereof) in the marketplace, but they’ve added very little besides sonic joy to the tour, and their agent has been a constant, unprofessional nightmare to deal with. Whatever. The band’s a pleasure to watch every night and they light up the stage increasingly. Feels like they’re really hitting a deep stride as they get more and more jagged every show. That’s a good thing, in case you weren’t sure.

Did I mention that we rocked tonight?
* sound of laughter echoes down the freeway at 80mph *





Atlanta rocks, sorry I didn't really tell you about it. ]]> Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:06:02 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


As usual, the broken pieces interested me the most.



The Jew, The Gentile and a Grecian echo. The crosscurrents are staggering when you gaze above the waves.



Ex Nihilo. From Nothing To Nothing.



Though this isn't the sign for it, "Gung Gou", the symbol that stands for China means "Middle Country, or country at the center of the globe". Once so true in its hemisphere, it's rising once more on a grand scale.



It's the end of the end as we know it.

]]> Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:56:34 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)



Nice collection of shoes ya got there, kid. Yes, they're all mine. Love the leopard-print heels, great lift and very comfortable.




"I can't hear a fucking thing you're saying!"



That anyone would want to read this is beyond me. That it's shoved in our faces is galling. Lets hear it for another assault on the captive audience. It's right up there with the back panel of the Covenant Trucking company trucks that reads "It's a CHILD not a CHOICE"



The Glory!
The Majesty!
The Total, Debasing Comedy! ....like I care.
It makes a superb counterpoint to the last shot though.



We leave so few marks across the face of the Faceless that any chance is worth taking.



10-point.
12-point.
I feel like I'm missing the point with so much that is held to be dear .jpg"no pun) in the heart of my country. I really love the place and all its failings, but sometimes the place goes past me at 100mph. This was displayed in a McDeaths window, another homeland tradition whose ornaments don't really twinkle for me either.



Ok, what the fuck? This is taken, obviously, through the windshield of the Beast, so the immensity is clear. But, what the fuck is it? I'm entranced by it as I am by a number of weird things like this. I'll post plenty of pictures of the 'weird' over the next week or so.
I immediately think "missile silo".

]]> Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:02:04 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.regenmag.com/Blog-19-ChemlabSkeleton-KeyCyanotic-in-Baltimore.html ]]> Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:13:58 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
I'll show you the perfect pictures of the 'bitter' and the 'sweet' about the tour being over as soon as I can get all of my pictures pulled together.

It was a glorious tour and really made me feel like there's a lot of point in not making this just a one-time event. I'll come back to this issue again in greater depth at some point fairly soon, but it has been said, ever since I started to get the band back into working order, that it's foolish for me to do Chemlab without Dylan.
Yes, THAT old saw.
When people heard that I was making another album they said that it would be shit and that there was no point. It turns out that people actually liked what I did with that record. When people heard that I was planning on taking the band out on some select dates around the country the response was that I was insane and that it would suck. I'm not insane and the response to those dates was stellar. Again, when I started talking about the idea that I was actually going to take the band out on the road on a proper tour the response was that without Dylan it would be shit and never work. Everyone who has engaged in the pleasure of tearing me and the band down has been proved categorically wrong time and time again.
I, on the other hand, remain vindicated.
The band was great and the shows were killer and, most importantly, the audiences not only materialized, but they were enthusiastic about Chemlab being back.

As I said, I'll revisit this topic again in the very-near future, but for the moment I'm just basking in the glow of standing in the face of adversity and coming up with a success in my hands.
That success is due in no small part to the band members who deserve a great deal of the credit:
Gabriel Shaw on axe and hack (www.myspace.com/mindfieldebm)
James McAndrew on bass and feathers (www.myspace.com/milquetoasto)
Jason Bazinet on drums and hypotheticals (www.smphq.com)
Wade Alin on sound and vision (www.myspace.com/atomica)

I'll revisit them as well in a bit, but the success is also due to you and your decision to make up your own mind and come and support something that you love and that is alive. That showed, night after night after night, and we all appreciated it immensely.

I'll be spending the next few days getting all of the last posts up on the site as well as starting to upload all of the the photos from the whole tour. There are more pictures there than you might ever reasonably be expected to be interested in, but I'm going to see just how many of them I can get up regardless. That'll require some editing, but I'll get there very soon, certainly while the embers are still hot.

Stay mean, and mean it.




photo courtesy of wendo ]]> Thu, 20 Dec 2007 03:18:44 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Grandfather moss clinging to the trees like dusty cobwebs the same way that outdated ideas and approaches to life cling to this state and its inhabitants. There are a lot of cool Chemlab fans here, but I feel bad for them as this is the sort of state that people really mean when they talk about Red States. Jesus lurks behind every billboard, and every face peering out over the steering wheel is reddened by too much sun and not much else. “What the hell’s that?!” is the usual comment as we roll up to a gas station.

IT’S A SMALL WORLD.
I KNOW.
I MADE IT.
-GOD

Tampa and Tallahassee were washouts. The Tampa show was a pick-up date that was just to fill an otherwise off night. Tampa has a great scene, but we weren’t in it. We were in the wrong venue, without the rest of the touring line-up and supporting a joke, college party band. Bad electro-lite sung by two hairy guys whose schtick is to dance around, slowly get undressed (yuck-greasy and hairy, except for one of them who had shaved his pubes in the bathroom and left a pile of hair in the bowl….classy guys, but I’m sure it’s all supposed to be so very shocking. Uh huh. Shocking. Riiiiiight) and throw beer on themselves and the crowd. Wow. Heeeaaavy, bro, I remember my first beer, dude-bro. I also remember the Beastie Boys doing that far, far better in 83. Blah. We demolished their crowd and they didn’t know what to do with us, but they couldn’t leave either. Stuck in place like dumb deer in headlights, we spattered them with our juices and strutted off the stage to stunned applause. There were some Chemlab fans there and we converted a bunch of new ones, but it wasn’t the show for us. Curse dj’d for a set or two before us and then we rolled out to The Castle where we should’ve been playing. Cool to hang out with Curse since I never get to see enough of him now that I’m overseas. Gen from the Genitorturers hooked in with us for a while and increased the amount of available foolishness. Cool to see her as well. It’s been years. She’s setting up a dungeon deep in the bowels (!!) of The Castle’s maze. We toured it and it looks to be swank and even has bunk beds with glory holes and Afroporn on the slats. Hilarious ride I’m sure. Hopefully some of my tranny fans will tell me what it’s like once it opens up. It was a delicious night amongst damaged friends.

BE SURE YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT. READ YOUR BIBLE.

We were going to hook up with her and Curse and his lady friend Angela, but the next morning came the collapse of the tour and Duane’s groin. That blew everything out of the water and we were so depressed that doldrums set in and we stopped moving. It took all the strength we could muster to get out for dinner. We sequestered early, updated blogs, talked to the USSA camp and friends. It was a terrible blow. We don’t get to spend the last week of the tour together and finish off what has been a demanding but rewarding run. Very frustrating. The cocoon of night came on early and soon we ended the day.



Tallahassee had two bright spots in it, but unfortunately neither of them was the show though Cyanotic have joined us and that’s a kick. I’m looking forward to seeing them every night. Be interesting to see how they pan out with the audience.

The first bright spot was doing a live radio broadcast at V89 college radio. It’s an amazingly cool station that’s drenched in posters and is willing to take a lot of musical chances that many other stations, even college radio, are not. Wade got us set up and balanced fast and just after 5pm we let rip with a white-hot version of ‘White Room’, killer ‘Pyromance’ and I managed to censor myself on ‘Suicide Jag’ most of it but “long live the fucking king” came through loud and clear. Oh well. The FCC can send me a letter.
“I got a letter from the government, I read it, it said they were suckers!”
Chuck D/Public Enemy.

As we ended the last song of the live broadcast, Gabriel held out a stuttered feedback tone and I started to tell a story. It’s a story called “Genius” about a broken-down, coulda-been-a-contender horn player. He’s the cat at the end of the bar that you buy a drink for and he tells you stories all night about the people he’s played with and the things he’s done over his twisted days and nights. He’s a potential incarnation of me, or who I used to think I’d become when I was still on the Next To Die list. As I told the story, in that hot studio space, Gabriel drew lazy, lo-looping lines of feedback through the words, carefully tracing their shape. Continental skittered some non-rhythmic signatures and gentle cymbal rustlings as Restless lay out a strange, crooning sound. We all listened and riffed off of each other, the dynamics building tension and then letting it off. It has always interested me to put musicians who are comfortable in a quantised, programmed context into a free, improvisational non-framework and see what they can do. I find it’s only the most self-confident of those that can get something good to come together. One has to play less and listen more, play the holes between the notes.

It worked shockingly well and when the story finally wrapped itself up I was drenched in sweat and on the brink of tears, water pouring off my face, suffused with the character. As Continental said later on: “it was a very NPR moment”.

JESUS IS YOUR ONLY HELP IN THIS WORLD OF DAMNATION.
CALL HIM TODAY.

The other good part of the day was seeing my old friend Tom Smith. He and I were in an utter noise/experimental band called Peach Of Immortality many years ago (84-87) and we destroyed many stages and many heads. We went through many incarnations, but we were far ahead of the noise crowd. There wasn’t much crowd at that stage and we were Merzbow without caring or trying. He continues to make brutal, visionary, uncompromising music through his hydra-headed creation that is To Live And Shave In L.A. (www.toliveandshaveinla.com that is, if you think you can actually decipher where he’s going.) He’s one of the most intellectually stimulating people I know and has come to a point of balanced sarcasm. He’s a fucking genius and I swallow great gouts of his royal sperm. We spent much of the evening dissecting our past exploits, the pavannnes and divigations of this tour and the latest occurrence of Chemlab discussing the complexities inherent in our nascent desire to release the bulk of the PoI catalog. Considering it spans countless radio broadcasts, performances, studio recordings and ‘events’ the span is daunting regardless of the calibre of blade you decide to slice it with. Some 50 albums. We’ll see what happens when we finally get there though the explosion of that glory will be debilitating. Divine to see him lurk in his civilian get up amongst the dark boys as they slew sideways glances his way with the “who the fuck’s THAT” look. The funny thing is, the way he looks is subversive and conceals so much. Scratch the surface of most “scary looking” people and they bleed bunnies and rainbows and courtesy. Scratch Tom’s surface and you get liquid, rusty razors, howlingly superior intellectual threat and a disturbing calibre of courtesy.
He’s one of the geniuses.

THERE IS LIFE BEFORE BIRTH. HEARTBEAT BEGINS AT 18
DAYS.

The show was what it was. The kids enjoyed it immensely (as did my favorite cynic, TS) and we had a pretty good time. The stage was wide and that meant that I was all over it and not really keeping up with myself. “Sometimes it takes all the running you can do just to stay in one place” said the Red Queen to Alice. Gabriel has been playing a super-sexy solo during Chemical that I’ve been deeply driven by every night. It was sticky and slick tonight. Sultry and sexy. The crowd were jacked by the show, but it was hard to get in the right spot. The joint was too big and there were too few bodies.

We’ve passed The Drag Racing Museum three times in the past 72 hours as we carve a Star of David into Florida’s sunburned brow.

Orlando’s gig at the Back Booth was excellent and easily one of the seriously powerful and elemental shows of the whole tour. The stage was tiny, but there was just enough space for us to ram up into its guts and hammer away. The audience went nuts from the top of the set and there was a crazy, weirdo pit cruising and crushing throughout the whole collection. I haven’t brought the band through Orlando since the White Zombie tour and I’d go back there tonight. Fantastic crowd and one of the few places where a pit broke out from the first song and continued throughout. Super energy and lots of mania-frippery. We poured music into their mouths and they swallowed. And the night ended with very little sleep and the realisation that we’ve got a 9 hour drive from here to Atlanta, and then a 12-13 hour drive up to Balto. That means that we really won’t be sleeping in Atlanta at all. We’ll just leave straight out after the show. Shit-fire. The nightmare’s not over yet.

THERE IS NO HOPE WITHOUT A LIVING CHRIST.

A living Christ? IS THERE in fact a “Living” Christ? Hard to imagine, indeed. ]]> Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:37:56 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
The complexities of the collapse of the Rockyard Ft Worth/Dallas show are too labyrinthine and annoying to go into here, so I’m going to pass. I’m too drained to go through all of it right now. I might have the energy later. We’ll see. Suffice it to say that the owner of the Rockyard closed the club up without warning. The promoter for our show arrived at the club a few days ago to find it dark. I didn’t find out about this from the promoter, or the booking agent, but rather from a fan on myspace wondering what was happening as she had head that the place was dead. Theoretically the promoter tried to get the show moved to another location, but that never happened. I think he just bailed when he realised that he had bid on a show he couldn’t do. So, we got stuck with a solidly cancelled show as we’re hauling ass across the vast expanse of Texas to get to the show in time. All in vain.

This has just been a draining day. The wind outside’s a whipping tornado and it blows the van all over the road. I feel like we’re all buffeted at the moment and morale is at a bit of a low. We’re out here to play. Days off are for when the tour is over, not for when you’re out on the road. Days when you don’t play are days that bleed out money, days that are hard to fill with any activity that's interesting, they’re empty unless you’ve got another 14-hour drive ahead of you…..the joy, days of nothing that stretch off to the horizon blossoming with nothing.

It’s times like this that it all looks bleak. Shows have fallen apart, money is tight (I use the word “tight” to mean nightmarish), tensions run high, girlfriends and wives are hitting the “fuck, you’ve been away a long time” snapping-point as the novelty finally wears off, and van fatigue sets in from too many long drives and nowhere near enough sleep.



None of us slept well last night after the El Paso show. The Mesa Inn where we marooned obviously hasn’t changed since it was built in the 50’s. I'm sure it was intended by the architect to look grand at the time, but it's tawdry and lost it's blush a long time ago, if it ever had blush. The sheets were foul, stained, smelled moldy and had cigarette burn holes throughout. Haven’t been in a motel like that in years and haven’t missed it at all. I slept on top of the covers and drowned in an apocalyptic, choking nightmare. I kept falling back into it every time I tried to shake it off. I even walked around the room for a few minutes at one point, and as soon as I went back to sleep it rocketed right back into my skull. This Mesa Inn’s a horrible counterpoint to the hushed opulence of The Roosevelt in LA and the perfect illustration of where our morale is today.
The windows here don’t even fit in the frames and they let in gouts of cold air all night.
The doors don’t really lock well.
The shower has scum rings in it and no one showers. Our grime’s preferable to theirs. The towels are paper-thin and rough.
There’s a low, whispering hum coming out of the dented grill of the wall-mounted radio.





















Funny spread of hotels on this tour. There have been a few wonderful hotels, and a few horrible dogs, but mostly they’ve been like apparatchiks; functional and faceless, pod receptacles for our frames to cycle-down in, places that leave no mark and aren't supposed to. It's the concept of "Single-serving friends" applied to hotel life.

I hated this place. We all did.
It wasn't the worst, by any means, but it definitely wasn’t a restful night, and a restful night was what was badly needed. Now it’s another day of restless, semi-sleep in the stuffy van as we roll on to the next date.

Countless wrecker yards sprawl on every side just beyond the fly-spattered van windows, mountains of hulking car husks, piles of rusted junk that won’t ever serve any other purpose than as the decorations emblematic of excess and waste. Waves of cotton, hairballs, blood clots, oil drums bursting.
The Exxon backwash leaves a bad taste.















Is there really any reason to spend the money on putting up a sign that reads: Population 117? It seems to me that a blink-and-you-miss-it town like that doesn’t really warrant a sign that must be pretty expensive to manufacture and erect. Weird decision.

Along with the idea of the Trucker's Chapel, there's the mobile ministry. This one no longer looks particularly mobile, but I'm sure it's still doing the Lard's work.









We finally camped out in a refreshingly faceless Ramada/Holiday Inn/Hampton Inn something. Dinner presented itself to us in the guise of Cracker Barrel somewhere off the freeway. Our waitress, Ferrin, was a nymph full of sweet chatter and eyelash-flutter. She hovered around, taking good care of us and we poured out some honey and a tip that felled her. She actually came out to ask me if we actually meant to leave her that much.
We did.
“Well, shoot. I’m sure glad I came to work today!”
This is the letter I just got from her two days later:
--------------------
“hey guys!
i hope your show in austin was "crunk"
it was wonderful to meet you.

~TRUE STORY~
once you left i went bragging to my GM Joe about how i just waited on Chemlab, and he rushed out to meet you too.
he told me that he wouldn't have charged you for your meal...
so yeah, WHOOPS.
my bad, hell you would have had free fish and meatloaf.

it was a pleasure.
~Ferrin~
-----------
I love the picture of the manager hustling his butt out to meet us. I guess we’d already split the scene. Next time we’ll pull in off the blur of the road and eat for free at the Cracker Barrel in Somewhere, Texas.

Sleep came to fold us up in its silent arms and we fell like stones through cold water.



]]> Mon, 10 Dec 2007 05:17:41 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ripesphoto/sets/72157603415265485/detail/ ]]> Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:03:11 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)










]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:39:09 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


It's mind-boggling to me how many of these signs I see all over the country. I guess that in the face of how many guns there are in circulation it's amazing that there aren't MORE of these signs out there.





Caged motherfuckers in New Orleans.



Restless looking for the ladies and cruising for the spark in the dark.



Curse sending you just the tip of the 'love'. You have to beg for the rest of it, boys.



Continental dreaming about free continental breakfast, crappy Motel 6 coffee and a gut-busting belly-punch of Taco Belch. Ever the rock star.



Reading tea leaves at dinner in hopes of finding out more about how Duane's doing.



The barcode comes out from under the thatch. Skeet reveals his technical side.



Trucker's Chapel.
Is there really anything else that needs to be said about that? I think not.



Look at that beautiful, slow-building cumulus cloud. How poetic. How romantic. How adorable. How entrancing. How enchanting. How...
A superstore? A SUPERSTORE? Are you fucking kidding me?
We're a really stupid species.



There's more to come, both eye and finger, in it. ]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:58:03 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) Courtesy of Avery Sik.



Ever the intellectual and not in the least contextually predictable.
Courtesy of Ded.



..swarmed by the hordes, I am slowly yet inexorably consumed..
Courtesy of Ded.

]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:46:34 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) Our good friend and tour companion Duane Denison has herniated his groin muscle and has had to leave the tour. He injured it weeks ago and it has gotten progressively worse and worse. We all knew that it was bothering him, but he's not a terribly demonstrative guy and certainly not a complainer or Drama Queen, so he kept quiet about the level of pain he was in.

Yesterday he thought he might be able to continue with the tour, but it turns out that this morning he woke up in much more pain than he's been in before. Waylon took him to see the doctor and the doc declared him crippled and in need of immediate surgery.

So, they're heading straight back to Nashville today.

Sadly, this is the end of the tour for USSA.
Please send them a message of support and respect to their myspace page. If you came to the shows, if you wanted to come to the shows and missed it, if you came to see us and didn't like USSA, I don't care. Please send him and the band some support regardless. I've had a hernia, and the attendant surgery, and it's a painful nightmare that'll fuck up more than the last week of the tour for Duane.

http://www.myspace.com/ussaband

Thanks for writing.


Duane and all of USSA were a pleasure to work with and a knockout to perform with every night. They were professional and carried none of the ego that one might think they'd have wrapped around them. Duane was a gentleman and hilariously funny as well as quietly strong, and he plays a mean, burly guitar that just won't quit. Can't wait to see them back on the road and taking over.

It's been a strange honor for us to be out on the road with them. Strange because I can't imagine in what weirdo universe Chemlab could be deemed to be the headliner above USSA. It should be the other way around. Soon they'll be massive and we wish them strength. We've had a great time watching them and have been pretty lucky to absorb it nightly as they stretched out USSA's envelope. Cool also to be there before it all becomes huge and unaffordable. Chemlab got to tour with them early on.
Pretty fucking cool.

We'll miss them terribly.

I'm too depressed to write anything else. We'll see you in Tallahassee where we meet up with Skeleton Key, get to add Cyanotic to the bill and we'll roll on. We'll see you soon.
-jared

Here's some glory from our friends. More to follow.





Duane's balls. They're big and burly.



Paul and Wade talking about talking.



Duane and Johnny would come down during the tail-end of our set and square dance and reel during Suicide Jag and Summer Of Hate. They always had a great time and it was side-splittingly hilarious to watch them at it out on the dance floor. It certainly made it nigh on impossible to be the "serious-furious rock star" with those loons goofing and having a blast right in front of us. You can see a right shoulder of Bobby from Skeleton Key who joined in the reels sometimes.
I think the shots of Bushmills I brought to USSA on stage during their set might've been a partial motivator for an extended dance-remix show from them here.
Gonna miss that foolishness.



Shadow catching some light at the feet of the ion.



Paul hitting his millennium and getting his groove on.



Gary sending shivers.



Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge.



Irene, good night. Good night, Irene.
I'll see you in my dreams.





Get better soon, fool. We miss you.
-jared, gabriel, james, jason, wade and adam ]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:14:04 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Howler in the teeth of the foggy, NOLA night. What a fantastic night.




What a fucking queen!



Drummers are hard to photograph, but I'm putting this cartoon picture up of Continental because he never gets any play in picture world.



Riot Robot.



Let me make one thing perfectly clear, kids.



Feathered and freakish.



FUUUUUUCK YEEEEAAAAAAHH!!!



and here we gooo!



and here we collapse!



Off the stage and into the cage. Why's there a guy with a camera in here instead of some slinky young thing? Filming courtesy of Dan from NooMoon Tribe.



Oh shit! Lock up your daughters! No, sons! No! Well, just get everyone inside and down into the bomb shelter!!

 

]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:26:16 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


Swooping of concrete at un-dusk



We're soooooo industrial!!



Steel giants at the gates of dawn.





Bobby Crash from Skeleton Key getting ready to set up his kit in PDX at The Hawthorn



I still get excited by this sort of thing. I'm such a dazzled-by-the-lights kid. It's like hearing your music on the radio. There's an unshielded wire that still manages to send a frisson right up me and across the surface.



Dee Madden from Penal Colony and some sycophantic creep hanging off of him.



Eric 16Volt Powell and the maniac fools cutting up. I didn't correct for red eye because, for once, i think that it actually enhances things. Shadow with his head back looks really Lost Boys. Restless doesn't look too uncreepy himself.



We're going to go on tour together with our new side project,
The Ten-Foot Tall Angry, Grumpy Heads.



Hey man, how does this modern camera bullshit thing work??!?



The hotel room doors at The Jupiter Hotel in PDX are painted with chalkboard paint. There's a little pile of chalk inside the room that you can use to decorate your door with for the duration.
I love rock'n'roll hotels.



White Room, Red Crash



The Silver Surfer goes to sleep.



New dawn fades.
The next morning, on the way to San Francisco, cigarette break along the road.
Adam hates nature."Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck! Fuck trees! Where are the fucking buildings? Fuck! This fucking sucks. Fuck!"



Continental In The Blur. The guy never seems to stop sly smiling. He's got a really even keel. Makes life on the road so much better to deal with.



Behind the scratched surface.



Between the buttons.



Gabriel hustling the wires as we fly through the green smear that passes for Nature in our world.



Too many jokes to even manage to get just one of them to squeeze out.



]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:02:14 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


Stars and bars. Shots courtesy of Akiko and Walter.

]]> Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:19:18 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) Show us your tats!



CACTUS!!



NO CACTUS!!




I love the fact that the 'pet exercise area' is right next to the 'dangerous insects and snakes' area.



Do NOT unload your livestock here under any circumstances!



It's reassuring to me that Jesus rests quietly on his cross right next to the farm house. I've always been curious about where he hangs out.



Behind the stage at Zeppelins in El Paso. That was our backdrop, and the stage never got any brighter, even when we were setting up our gear.



Artwork from the walls in Zepps. Some great looking stuff and a bunch of visual noise. Very cool, jagged stuff.



One of my favorite signs ever. There are a number of them that'll be making an appearance throughout.



We're at The Crowbar in Tampa at the moment and it's a joke sports bar. Won;t even describe it as it doesn't even merit that much. Besides, you know what it looks like in here. It's the kind of place we avoid. Makes me wonder what the hell we're doing here and if we'll have any of our crowd here at all. This joint's the antithesis of everything that I love and believe in. The club has no dj, as far as I can tell, except when Curse gets on the wheels of opti-beam. They're blasting the radio, Cirius and it's packed with commercials.
How sports bar of them.
Hope my wireheads show up.
I'll let you know what happens, obviously.
We'll see.

Tomorrow's a day off in Tampa with Curse and I'm hoping to get myself all updated here with tales of Texas, pictures of the freaks and more .

Detail photos of the Mesa Inn will follow in a little bit. ]]> Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:38:56 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Desolation reigns supreme off the I-20 between El Paso and Dallas. There are so many places that have fallen to disrepair, lost love. There’s a lot of money in Texas, but it feels like it’s really centralised and closely held. It doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of money flowing downhill, “trickling down”, as Fuhrer Ronnie Regan used to call it. The sources are dam’d and everything below is quickly drying up and blowing away in the wind. Chaparral grows wild and scrabbly all across the land, stretching out to the attenuated, white horizon.

Motels and Inns where fun has come to die sigh by the road’s edge, their forecourt’s home to the rolling tumbleweed now. The signs out front are often blown apart by shotgun blasts from passing pick-up trucks full of local yahoos playing with their guns and drinking beer. Windows blown out and boarded up.



We played in a venue called Zeppelins in El Paso, and it bombed. Not “it was the bomb”, but rather, it bombed. I think that there was a total crowd of 9 people there all night. The promoter, Justin, took really good care of us and laid on the hospitality, and the Bar-B-Que from across the street, which was stellar, but no one showed up. At all. USSA aren’t on this date as they felt it was too shaky, so it’s just us and SK. There isn’t a guarantee for this show, it’s just a pick-up date as we head East. Door deal, meaning we get a percentage of the ticket sales. I knew heading into this one that there was the possibility of the date shooting blanks. By the same token, we have to drive through El Paso anyway to get to Ft Worth, so it makes sense to me to stop in El Paso and see if there’s the chance that we can at least recoup some costs by selling merch. If we could sell two dozen shirts and discs then I’ve got costs covered and the night’s not a total wash, regardless of the door. We’re not making money, but we’re not bleeding either. It’s a bandage on the gaping wound of the past few days. Merchandise is the way bands stay on the road, not the guarantees (that money is spent far in advance, guzzling at that OPEC teat, filling your belly with packaged “food products” and providing faceless motel rooms). No merch sales night after night directly correlates to fatal band collapse and tours dying in the dust by the side of the road. Bands limp home, fight, break up, often simply because of the merch.

Dates like this are unequivocal gambles. You have to hope that your street team is working the show hard in advance, and that the promoter is doing his job, and the label is doing their job, and that your booking agent has put you in the right venue. Critically, you also have to hope that you sell some merch. Sadly, none of this was the case. I’ve haven’t got a street team here, my label is busy promoting Atkins book about touring and doesn’t acknowledge us when we’re actually ON TOUR (catch the irony there), the promoter didn’t really do the leg-work, and we should’ve been playing at Lucky Devil’s. We could just as easily have stayed in El Paso and not done the show at all and lost pretty much the same amount of money. Nothing balanced out.
Most importantly, we didn’t sell any merch at all.
Not one thread.

There’s a bar called Out Yonder “where friends meet”.
Meet what, the barrel of a gun? Creepy looking joint.

Speaking of ‘creepy’, we just rolled past the Family Video Place, the sign hanging off the sagging porch roof, sway-backed boards hardly able to hold themselves together. Poisonous willows droop on all sides and a narrow dirt road snakes up to the abandoned front, the windows plastered over with movies posters from the 80s. The house looks like it’s straight out of Texas Chainsaw, a dark and grim place where you can rent videos of your own live dissection.

Shows like this are when you can really tell what fabric a band’s made of and if you’re serious about making and playing music or not. They bring your dedication sharply into question. If you’re playing to nine people including the bar staff, what kind of a show do you do, and what’s your attitude to the whole night, and the audience?

SK put on what ranks, for me, as one of the Top 3 shows of the whole tour tonight. They’re hard as ball peen hammers and supple, taut as bridge cables and angular as Tensor Analysis. They railed against the frustration of the day by unleashing a system-crasher of a set. They might just as well have been playing to 5000 people for the quality of the show they pumped out. If there had been any question in our minds about whether or not we were going to unleash the damage-beast on stage or not (and there wasn’t the tiniest shred of doubt), it would’ve been utterly obliterated by SK’s stellar show.

We were drop-forged steel and slotted in a molten burst of some of the best Chemlab this tour has seen yet too. Exile came off the high-rope like a pile-driver and tore a hole in Zeppelins. The sound system was super loud in that empty room and was almost too deafening for us. I roared the chorus of Codeine, second song in the set, through a traffic cone that was used to cordon off the stage (tiny stage, I was mostly on the floor with the monitor wedges). It wasn’t loud enough so I pushed the orange cone fully over the mic creating a whipping feedback loop that cycled up so fast it blew out the PA, and we stopped. Seems like we’ve been doing that a lot on this tour.
Sound System Detonation Days Tour. HA! It didn’t take long for Wade to right the juggernaut, and were back in the groove.

I spent a lot of time singing out in the house, off the stage. There were a couple of plastic lawn chairs and I dragged one on stage to dance with and then spread out on for much of Vera Blue in true Louche Lounge style. Gabriel looked about as pissed off as can be imagined, snarling and gritting throughout. Continental was all tribal all over his drum kit and it sounded great. He’s been throwing out some wonderfully syncopated beats during the between-verse segments of Vera and it just turns me ‘round and turns me on every night. We tore through the set and took no prisoners. Restless, post Tempe foot injury, played a groovy, hip-shaking set while pretty much planted in place. Solid. The sound system remained intact and loud as a motherfucker throughout, like a bullhorn in a cement box, which is essentially what the night was. We decided that we’d cut it off after Blunt Force, opened up the flame thrower and waltzed off stage…...meaning that we stepped down four inches to the concrete. Old friend of mine and Gabriel’s, John Bechtdel (Killing Joke, Ascension Of The Watchers, Ministry and many others), appeared out of the night and stayed to watch us rock. Said it was a beautiful thing, excellent show. I actually agree. For a night with no one in attendance and just a raw space, the performances from both bands were merciless.

That’s how you do it if you’re serious about it. Those people paid to see a show, so they deserve a show. It’s not their fault that Chemlab doesn’t draw in El Paso. It’s not their fault that a dozen other factors ran against the grain of the night’s success. So, give them a show.
Full-bore, or go home.
Days off are for when the tour’s over.
Lame performances are for people who think everything should be silver-plattered to them.
Fuck that.

Hand painted signs that advertise that there’s nothing left here now dot the roadside, the hope evinced in the letters is long bleached out, scratched off or washed away.

Motorboats stand nose-up in red-dusty front yards, marooned alongside the rusted chassis of never-to-be-worked-on trucks and tractors. What a weird anomaly when you consider the fact that there isn’t a drop of water outside of paddling pools and pots and pans for hundreds of miles around. A boat? You’re joking, right? Maybe that’s why it’s no longer in use. Too far to haul it to the water’s edge.

The setting sun’s red, the cotton stalks are red, the laterite soil’s rocky and red. We’re heading into Dallas/Ft Worth for a date with nothing.

The Baptist church frame, devoid of roof has a sign out front that reads “God Loves A Sinner. All Welcome Here.” Not sure if that’s an invitation for sinners to come sin in peace, or for them to find redemption. It’s also comical that it’s totally run-down, the walls made of dented corrugated iron sheeting look like they’ve been shot countless times with heavy-gauge buckshot.
Target practice for the bored.

Roll on, baby. Roll on.

Pictures to follow. ]]> Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:41:20 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
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We’re crossing the Continental Divide, at an elevation of 4585 ft, for the THIRD time on this tour. Just another sign of what happens when you take ten years off from touring. Unnecessary criss-crossing of the country, carving a Star of David over the atlas with a trail of gasoline and tire tracks in the dust. It’s especially bad out here in the western lands where the drives are longer and gas is much more cutthroat expensive.



Really very different landscape heading out through Sierra Vista from Tempe/Phoenix. The countryside here, especially the further East we go,is markedly different to that which we’ve been travelling through coming from California. Over the last couple of days the land has been flat and unbroken, wide and smooth, prone to dust storms and erosion.There are so many little homes, stores and even villages just off the roadside that are totally boarded up and abandoned. I can see through their shells, the boards falling to the dusty ground, still windmills with missing blades and one-pump gas stations that haven’t pumped a drop since it was 95 cents/gallon.



Purple cactus in oblong bunches cluster by the roadside, just waiting for your dumb ass to fall in them. As we pass along through the Saguaro Preserve there are crazy looking, gravity-defying rock formations of orange-tan boulders towering by us and heading off into the distance on either side.They’re stacked one on top of another, precariously piled up, casting dark and inviting shadows in this sun-blistered land. They look very much like some toy Django might be playing with at this very moment back home.

Sometimes it’s so hard to get out of the moment,look at the overall picture and be able to enjoy what I’m actually doing out here. I was talking with Duane last night about attitude and being on the road. The venue was a frustrating one in that it’s set(for us, AGAIN) in a mall and really didn’t look like much from the exterior. On the inside it looked like a c