i could write a 400 fucking page book about the whole 4 month period beginning with my dad being diagnosed with cancer and the tour wrapping up. i feel like a black hole that sucked in all the rest of the black holes -- i have no idea what is positive,negative, at all. everything is just held in this weird centre. to attempt distinguishing results in failure, so i just hop on the machines and make a track about it from time to time. i have no idea what i am doing. i really miss hanging out with the tour crew. every day. i havent talked much about the tour cause tbh i dont want to appear braggadocious & i dont want to give word to things indescribable and ruin them for myself, or misrepresent them to other ppl. btw have y'all listened to 199X yet ??? :) <--- lets see who gets that
i want to share stories from the tour but wana keep most of the best memories for myself. but then i realize that i have so many stories that its ridiculous and i can share some. its in the spirit of the tour anyway, i'm afraid theyd care but i dont think theyd care . they know whats up. b4 i really say anything, the basic idea that all the words orbit around is that i hope all of you are doing well and are seriously happy, if any of your relatives or friends are sick or anything like that, or if youre having to make trips to the hospital to see someone special to you, i know its inappropriate to even go here publically but man, i fucking love you and i know what youre going through and i'm right there with you. life is an indescribable mystery and aint it strange that it comes with pain too? its like a hyperreal video game where you can actually get hurt. hang in there and everything will be fine, there are people there for you to carry you if you let them, and just take it day by day. whether u believe in god or not doesnt really matter, cus atheist or theist you are surrounded by supportive loved ones and you should reach out to them, be with them. they love u and even if u dont think they do, they think about you before they go to sleep at night and wonder how you are feeling. if you lost something in the past or someone special to you, man i know that pain. that is terrible. i would listen to you talk for hours about it and it would be easy because it would be my own words becuase i have lost so much myself. lost everything except my rhythm. i dont know what the fuck i will do when i lose that LMAO, ill just post tracks on bandcamp that are all silence and ask for money. it's "art " tho
anyway the funniest thing that happened on tour was actually on the very first night. we didn't have a bus yet, we were in Portland. i'll start from when i left from dallas. actually i'll just describe the entire day. this is super emotional for me. any single day i pick out from the tour is super emotional and it's weird, even one of the travel days where we weren't doing anything but lounging on the bus. so i wake up at my girlfriends place around 9am that morning and i grab my bags, we hop in her car and it's off to DFW. my composure is stable but theres a television set in my brain scrolling a ticker and it reads "you are about to go on a tour with a band you have idolized for 15 years. you are going to live with them and be in the company of nothing but complete strangers for 30 days. have a panic attack you bitch" and my blood pressure spikes, the readout for my blood pressure wouldve said "999999999 PSI" or whatever. my girlfriend drops me off at the airport, im concealing a panic attack the same way id be concealing a bomb and i'm at an airport which kind of makes me laugh internally, i calm down a bit. TSA fuck with me a little bit about my pelican case which has my elektron rytm,analog4,blofeld,mixer,tb3 and mpc in it. it's just over the weight that prices it at 60 or 70 dollars. bitch weighs 80 pounds and is not very easy to drag around. probably at 30-40 pounds, yeah, but at 70-80, its just unweildy.
my girlfriend says very warm/honey/milky things to me , she loves me so much man, she's crying because we're going to be apart for a month. we say goodbye and the last thing she says is "they chose you, because you are awesome. if you were not awesome you wouldn't have been chosen. believe it." i'm holding back, at that point, tears, a panic attack, my knees are vibrating. i'm only mildly harassed for being brown by the TSA security check and then i hop on the plane. i'm seated next to a guy in a yellow shirt. TV screen ticker in my head starts scrolling "you are 30 thousand feet off of the ground, have another panic attack bitch", so the last panic attack goes nuclear. i order a gin & tonic, it subsides. i order another gin & tonic, its calm. panic attack goes from being a lion and i turn it into a soft little baby kitten. success. drink another one and I'm passed out. remember what i said in the last paragraph because everything in this paragraph basically means what i said there, the words are just orbiting and theyre meaningless. i wake up in portland, i text my girlfriend saying i landed, etc. i call mark parsons, our tour manager, get directions to the hotel we're staying at. marks voice is a lot deeper than i expected it to be.
im feeling pretty stabilized after a bowl of soup at a restaurant in the airport. i lol to myself when i realize i'm in portland and there's an actual open mic with a dude playing the guitar in the airport terminal. straight out of portlandia. i catch a cab, we're driving to the hotel and the landscape just catches me. if you 've not been to dallas, tx - it is a godforsaken flatland, covered in concrete, buildings. there are some places with greenery, plant-life, but it's rare. and i mean it doesn't really count because someone put it there, right? i take out my phone and make a video . i arrive at the hotel , pay the cabbie with my card. first being i see walking to me is rob brown, wearing a white t-shirt and khaki's and sunglasses. gives me a huge hug and a welcome, warm smile . asks me how was my flight, i tell him it was good - takes me over to a courtyard where sean and rob hall are chilling. sean & rob are wearing sunglasses, the chairs are black, metal, the walls of the courtyard are short, its small - there's bees flying around. i'm talking with the guys, while i think mark is trying to find out which hotel room is mine for the night. feels like i'm hanging out with good old friends/brothers/comrades and all sense of panic or psychic destabilization subsides completely. it's around 4 or 5 pm. we all go to my hotel room, i drop my suitcase and gear off. we're all chilling in my room for about 2-3 hours just talking. me & sean vaping, rob halls talking about skam, rob b's talking about autechrey stuff, sean goes into it about electro in the 80s, man parrish, and autechrey stuff. rob browns talking about sound mixing. i could outline everything said cause i know u would want to read it i just dont feel like indexing all of that. they tell me about jamie harley (the sound guy), mark. from this point until i went home a month later i would have no sense that i was hanging out with idols or celebrities but brothers, friends, but even more importantly humans - good humans - because that's what you need. thats whats important ultimately in any scenario you get into in your life. you want to be around good people, people who you vibe well with and feel relaxed around. it is as important as oxygen imo.
i want to expedite the part of setting up for the show when we get to the venue because its very routine -- except for one part when sean & rob were opening up their mixer and sean couldnt open the box with a knife, rob gives it a try and then gives it back to sean , leaving to retrieve something else. mark asks sean "what are you moaning about " and he's on stage with his arms at his side standing above this box with their mixer in it, frustrated af "I couldn't get the box open even with this knife, I felt like I might as well just start stabbing me-self in the face with it" causing me to laugh my ass off
we play the gig and it's awesome . first gig of the tour, goes off great. we pwn everybody - my set is like 100 times better than i was thinking it would be. rob hall plays in the room adjacent to the stage @ holocene in his own booth. he kiled both nights with his sets even tho not too many people danced. visual crowd. anyways yea my sets were dope - elektron gear rly needs good subs to represent that bass but also needs something else, a kind of sweet spot that can single out the transient in the kick drum. i learned so much just on the first day from sean & rob & rob hall & jamie about sound mixing ,it was like space oddyssey 2001 when the apes find the obelisk. i'm like shit i've been doing that wrong for 5 years? ok. lol. after the gig i meet and hang out with claude young, golden donna (you guys hear of him? joel? from portland. hes dope, look him up) i get invited by some complete fucking rando's to go to a weird after party type thing. i don't.
ANYWAY. we get crammed into a van because its first day of tour and we don't have a bus yet. me and sean are in the back and rob hall & rob brown get into the next row. rob hall puts his seat back as he's in front of sean. sean's obviously cramped to shit with his backpack in his lap and his legs folded like an armchairs almost. he goes, "What am I? A fucking mongoose?"
for so many reasons, exhaustion related and just the visual image of a mongoose transposing over his cramped legs, and because mongoose aren't birds but have the word "goose", i died laughing . i literally was like lmao until we got back to the hotel. and thats is what i wrote all of this stuff just now for.
the human mind is something indescribable, something u cannot put to words because for all the effort and writing i just did, i mean, all of that , with all of its emotion, the thoughts, is literally not even .001% of the total experience of just that first half of the day, or the gig, or after it . not even close. could literally write a 900 page book
