them irie vibes are calling

had an unbelievable recording session at the commune home studio the other day. didn't feel unbelievable at the time... just some freestyles and some manic-page-turners, jamming some rhymes together and what. baptiste blessed the commune that morning (as he does every morning) and the irie vibes must have vibrated thru-out the commune home-walls, richocheting in chaos all day long. the vibe was undeniably good, just me and ves bound within the body-warmed recording room. stuffy and hot, grimy sweaty shit. tom manned the kitched (as he often does) with a waterfall of mountain lightning and gnosh.

i had a legal notepad filled with ideas and ideas for ideas, lyrics and phrases and rhymes... it seemed like chaos (on paper). and chaos always tends towards chaos... i scrawled and squinted, lyrics in low-light situations, bedside manners cast to the wind; i wrote with a pen, an unusuality in my instantaneous, button pushing-on-command, problem-solved lifestyle. i can't remember how to cursive. not properly, anyway. that was third grade or so! my loops and dips, droops and lower-vs-upper-case intertwine and intermix in my head. instant lysdexia. i digress, but that is how they were written; carefully, organically, sloppily. and chaos always tends towards chaos. but not in the studio, or not on that day.

the pre-game looked like a triangular syphon, passing at three axi; me, treble (who had stopped by to antagonize, chill, scavage, and rhyme) and the commune's tommune, tom. syphon and circles, for one-one-one.. two and no bogarts. treble started in on some freestyles, and soon, trailing the cypher (not cyber) smoke were the rhymes, usually one-behind. "i stick siblings' silverware straight into old outlets- neon-glow eighties shit in brazen bold outfits..." laughter eruption. 'don't break the syphon!' chuck says to ves, who had materialize behind the woodshed and elbowed his way into the cicle. 'gotta get me in on that,' ves mumbles, 'i'm on the boards!'

after the session with chuck and tom, and then ves, i moved solo into the studio. just me and my shadow producer, vesuvius. i was warmed from the cicle, already rhyming and finding a cadence in my head. from clicks to wraps, in two measley hours, we managed to track five sets of vocals. the energy was high, the room stifling, and it all felt good. i'm not sure that we'll even release any of these sessions, but that's not the point. it felt good to rhyme. it felt good to manage a mess of freestyles on a mono mic, no popscreen.

i'm meeting party at the commune south tonight. we've got some rehearsals to jam over, some preparations to be made for upcoming live showups. i'm still riding that high vibe off of preceding days events, so i'm up for a long-into-the-night rap and then rap more. we'll let you know how it goes off.. catch us soon at that stop.

hy.

today i saw a dinosaur

today, i saw a dinosaur. i had the priveledge of joining dj stretch at the buzz radio station. i had been there before--as has party--to record radio promo spots for the wine thieves. the buzz is a rare gem, still encased in the rubble of the radio stations of yore. placards honoring their community service fit framed professionally amongst a temple of posters and show fliers honoring the classic and contemporary gods of music. gods were made here; lord zepplin, father marley, the saintly police, and the friends of the devil, the grateful dead.

i let my eyes comb the covered-walls and decorated offices of the old radio station. they own several fm frequencies, but they also still have an am band. who has am anymore? the buzz, would be the answer to the preceding. no xm or anything too sirius (pun). just am and fm around these parts. it's a personal and hallowed experience.

you learn things from the walls in the buzz. they talk. apparently, back in 2002 there was a bash at the beach with soda, beer, wine and in 95 live was on tour. somebody sent the station staff a post card at one point or another. it read, greetings from asbury park. party and i used to chill in asbury park. drank a coffee there. i hold asbury park in a special heart-shelter. half town, half bomb shelter.

we hit the two-person-capacity production room from the getgo. it was pretty straight-forward radio stuff; we used cool edit (a program with a special heart-shelter for me as well... party and i tracked a majority of our older stuff using only cool edit) to track some quick radio promos for the official countdown single radio edit. then stretch lobbed me some typical musician questions (no offense, bro), which i promptly crushed out of the park.

a good time was had by both stretch and i. he's a chill cat, so we have a lot in common off the bat. i called party after the radio session to tell him how it went: great. i felt baptised, like i had been in the presence of some dusty-webby radio divinity, and just a little of their magic rubbed off on me. radio was once universal, like the interweb, but without the annoying anonymous feedback. but radio went the way of vinyl records and rock bands, existing with king elvis and brother morrison and mary mother joplin and the dinosaurs, somewhere in the ethereal.

Rehearsal day & my POTential job @ High Times

party is on his way to our diggs (near the commune) in the wilds of pennsylvania. it's a beautiful day--which is either a blessing or a begrudged curse for a traveler setting out on a three-hour-by-car drive. i hope he takes the time to roll the windows down. air conditioning gives me a headache and a false sense of fresh, cool air.

the basement, the dugout, the diggs--call it what you want--is all but prepped. two 15-inch speakers are balanced on their posts, a 1985 yamaha synth is poised on its one-piece stand. the whole ordeal is wrapped in countless guitar cables, quarter-inch. its all there, but for party, the mpc, the 800-watt pa head, the laptop, two mics and another layer of tangled, shorted, wirey-snakey guitar cables. and one eighth-inch adapter, mustn't forget that!

even on top of the above paragraph--the prep scene--a set up for a rehearsal never goes without hitch. it becomes impossible--after years of performing and recording, and packing and lugging--to pull off anything (rehearsal or otherwise) without some sort of mishap, misgiving, misinformation, or missing part of the cog wheel.

in unrelated news, i entered a contest today. no, not a rap contest. not a battle or a sweepstakes. no, a writing contest. i did so in a bid to win a guest editor spot at high times magazine. that's right. consider it my official job application. maybe after this year i can spot writing "rapper" on my w-2... or w-4... one of my w's. i forget which. my 1500 word piece, is sci-fi short fiction. it's about a young woman tempting a young man into smoking pot. in the future. very adam and eve meets weeds meets dawson's creek. you'd love it. i just hope bobby black likes it. and jorge cervantes. and great uncle soma.

but i digress--it's rehearsal day, not writing day. so, i wait here, chilling with stretch until party arrives. should be sometime within the next hour and a half. stretch has been telling me all about the d.c. trip from his perspective. lmfao (or whatever the kids say), that's one gnarly trip we had. if you didn't catch the earlier blog, stretch watched in stitches as styles east pushed some poser out of a moving car! real.

i've got mics to gather and things to forget. it never goes off without a hitch. never.

the king of pop is dead.

as party and i started our first, full-fledged, 800-watts-induced practice, we were greeted with the news that michael jackson was dead. it didn't ruin our day. in fact, there wasn't much of a response from either of us. but the elephant in the room was almost unavoidable. michael jackson is dead. sure, you can take some cheap shots at him. but i'm not going to. yes, he was a freak. but before that, he was a star. he grew up with the ever-spawning and growing papparazzi. shit, he practically invented the stalked and hunted celebrity that we know so well from grocery market magazine stands and crappy cable television shows. before there was E! there was michael jackson. before pepsi threwback, it was a choice of a new generation... that pepsi ad, the one where jackson emerges on-stage from the flames and fireworks, is one of my earliest childhood memories. i specifically remember seeing that commercial during a station break of a david copperfield primetime special: escape from alcatraz. copperfield invented big illusion, like jackson invented the moon walk. it was the time. pre-berlin wall 1980s type shit. ronald reagan and soviets and cold wars... it all goes hand-in-hand in my memory.

i've already reminised longer than i had intended. i didn't cry when jackson died. i didn't even pause. i mean, seriously, if michael jackson wasn't at the top of your celebrity death pool, then you either weren't paying attention or you didn't have a celebrity death pool. it's sick, i know. all of it. not just the death pool, no! the sickest part of all is that good old m.j... the other m.j. from the 80s (not michael jordan)... invented super-celebrity. he invented the moon walk. he invented the white, ghoulish, pieces-falling-off-my-face freak that we all grew to love to hate... and why? he did it for YOU. he made music... for you. he performed... for you. he dyed his skin (or didn't) for you! he shrunk his nose into a dissolving face-drop face-lift for you. he dwelt in a compound that looked like a make-shift disney world, a fantasy world... for you? because of you? you made him a god. and we love to watch our gods die. what is more interesting than a mega-celebrity? answer: a mega-celebrity's death. we build our gods to die for our sins. then we ask, what the hell happened to that guy?! what a freak! what a jerk, molestor, weirdo... insert your favorite jackson diss. he disfigured himself... tried to invent a plastically enhanced fountain of youth... for you. isn't it beautiful?! isn't it amazing!? what he did... what he made... isn't it beautiful?

when brittney commits suicide, or winehouse overdoses... (and this is all "god-forbid" material) ...when lohan goes nuts (if she hasn't already)... and o.j. kills (or finds the real murderers from his new prison cell) ...it will simply be another celebrity who did it all for you. you want to watch... they want you to watch... we build our gods to die. so don't ridicule them. they did it all for you! it was ALL FOR YOU.

...so now that i've completely ranted on the whole michael jackson death, let me reitterate: it did not affect the wine thieves' rehearsal at all. we had an amazing rehearsal. pulled out the stops, broke out in freestyles, and generally lived it up in the basement. ..oh, if those cynder blocks could talk!? (those cynder blocks would rock.) ..they saw us thru countless jersey bound trunk crew rehearsals, a short comedy we made called, billy tony... thru fake sword fights with real swords, real jams with fake drums... from party's old sleeping quarters to gum's fake death on the exhaust-pipe of my since-sold motorcycle... those walls have held in the must and musk, mold and cold... some of my best memories were born out of that basment.

sex & co. (our new ep) will be out monday, the 29th of june. three days away. that gives us a month until our first show... and in the interim period you will be able to download the sex & co. ep. we will be prepping and rehearsing, promoting and selling discs...

..and if our music ever draws us into any sort of spotlight, no matter how dim or how light a shade of lime... i'm going to burn it to the ground. before the demons infest me (i have plenty, thanks). before the papparazzi shoots me, i'm shooting first. before i fight the natural order of things...

don't stop til you get enough.
god bless saint michael.

- hype o

post-prophylactics and good times

...sipping at the dunkin coffee before me, i wonder how the hell they get that dunkin taste... you already know, if you're a coffee fanatic like i am, that you can not replicate the taste of dunkin coffee in your own coffee maker. not even with their beans. there's something--something, probably terrible for your body--that swirls with the chemical compounds of styrofoam coffee cups and hormone-enhanced creamers (and one scoop of bleached, unnatural sugar) that makes me grin. yum yum.

talked to our boy jean-baptiste today... he was skating (skateboarding, not rollerskating... altho now that i mention it, remember when rollerskating was dope?! ...neither do i). actually, he wasn't skateboarding like you just pictured it. jean-baptiste is a pro fingerboarder! no joke here. he actually designs and sells his own custom, hand-made, wooden decks. today, however, he was skating a techy.. like the ones you can buy at wallyworld. a slick little number, logo-tatted with a plan-b graphic. the girls were oohed-and-ahhed by his skills... but they were laughing at his plan-b deck... i didn't get it. turns out plan-b is an oh-shit pill... like ru486... like the day-after pill, ya heard? and a skate company. post-prophylactics and good times taken by all.

so what does this all have to do with the wine thieves? well, i'm powered by ill-flavored coffee, for one. for two, party used to be sick on 8 wheels. i'm talking about a rollerskating-ballet like it was saturday night, 1979. for threed, jean-baptiste's sick fingerkickflips will be highlighted in an upcoming wine thieves music video. this cat can shred, i assure you. with his fingers. and fingerboards. and he shall do so to the tempos of party.picasso and the cadence of yours trues... more on that later, tho...

also, must shout thanks to gumshu! and party for that matter. those two tore up the final touches on the sex & co. ep. seriously--for a moment--imagine finishing a record in a bathroom... a record that was started in a multi-million-dollar studio... finally, wrapped in a room with toilet paper. thanks gum! that's how we roll, rolled for years. closets. coat racks. campers. communes. i thot you knew?!

in other, unrelated updating, i'm throwing down an afternoon of gaming with tom de la commune tomorrow. doritos and dews, bro & brews... you know. co-op style. (jean-baptiste hollers, 3.6.0.2.4.7.-inna-5.7.0. you know!!!)

stay tuned.

peaces,

hype o.