Mark Pantoja's Blog

Last December, 2018, facebook started spamming my feed with an upcoming show of John Maus at the Great American Music Hall, which I promptly ignored. I mean, come on, I'm not dumb enough to fall for clicking like on sponsored posts or reposting them or even turning them off cause I don't want to give FB any kind of data on what I do and don't like. Never heard of John Maus, not interested.
But here's the thing. They don't need any more data about me. They already got me figured! I mean, for the most part. I still get ads for terrible kickstarters cause I backed one one time and they think I'm really interested in Neil Gaiman (I am not). But anyhow, I finally came across John Maus and yeah, they got me figured out at least that far. Still, not about to interact with any sponsored ads.

There's a new venue in San Francisco, the August Hall over on Mason. It took over the Ruby Skye venue that I worked at for one night only back in like 2001.
What was a dark but very cool place has been lit up and remodeled to bring out some of the old classic luster. The mezzanine looks great, whole place looks great. But I said it was a new place, but truth is, its been around for a minute. Or at least the promotor has: Live Nation. I could go on about this, but these articles cover the corporate encroachment/take over of the bay area music scene in detail. I will say that Live Nation moved the show time up on us without any notice so I missed the opening acts. Methinks this was due to the show not selling out so they wanted to close down as soon as possible. Whatever the case, shady corporate hijinx in SF is nothing new, in fact is downright old. 
At any rate, we did get to see Black Moth Super Rainbow and man did they slay. It was like watching a master class on how to do lo-fi electro-synth-pop. From the lights to the vocoder to the performance, watching these guys live was truly awesome. And inspiring. Inspired me to really dust off the vocoder and go down a rabbit hole of old synths that I'll write a post on later. In the meantime, feast on the magic that is BSMR:

 

I was at a friend's wedding and the place we stayed in had one of them creepy Alexa machines. My roommate has one. The kind that's always listening and probably recording me and my tastes to sell to North Korean by way of the Ukraine darkweb hackers... and Google.
Figured I'd try it out so I said, "Play modern, beautiful, experimental classical music." It played this piece second.

One thing I really like about this piece, and you can see him do it live, is that he really gets into what he's playing, I mean, he learns the mechanics. Not only has he dug into both the Roland Juno-60 (the constant arpeggiator in the background) and not only is he very well versed in the piano, he plays the Roland RE-501 like an instrument. He's actively playing/messing with the tape delay, the motors and speed and anything he can futz with. I first saw John Dwyer of the Oh Sees do this at the Chapel a few years back. I know I'm late to the game, people have been playing tape delays as another instrument since they came on the scene (terry riley, etc). But I've never had one. Frahm inspired me to go out and get one. Which I did! Totally stealing this guy's steez.

I can only assume that even though I travelled to Colorado for the wedding and don't own an Alexa, Alexa still recognized my voice and knew exactly who I was. Or, this really is just straight up modern, beautiful, experimental classical music.

Let's believe that.

At least for now.

I first came to Nils Frahm through Alexa.
I was at a friend's wedding and the place we stayed in had one of them creepy Alexa machines. My roommate has one. The kind that's always listening and probably recording me and my tastes to sell to North Korean by way of the Ukraine darkweb hackers... and Google.
Figured I'd try it out so I said, "Play modern, beautiful, experimental classical music." It played this piece second.

One thing I really like about this piece, and you can see him do it here live, is that he really gets into what he's playing, I mean, he learns the mechanics. Not only has he dug into both the Roland Juno-60 (the constant arpeggiator in the background) and not only is he very well versed in the piano, he plays the Roland RE-250 like an instrument. He's actively playing/messing with the tape delay, the motors and speed and anything he can futz with. I first saw John Dwyer of the Oh Sees do this at the Chapel a few years back. I know I'm late to the game, people have been playing tape delays as another instrument since they came on the scene (terry riley, etc). But I've never had one. Frahm inspired me to go out and get one. Which I did! Totally stealing this guy's steez.

I can only assume that even though I travelled to Colorado for the wedding and don't own an Alexa, Alexa still recognized my voice and knew exactly who I was. Or, this really is just straight up modern, beautiful, experimental classical music. Let's believe that. For now.

Hey so, I released a little four song EP in 2018: Death City One [1]. You can listen to it for free, not that you will, but I thought I'd write up some production notes, just cause, hey, why not? I'll go song by song. But first, an intro:
DCO1 is made up of four songs, three of which I wrote this year and one that I wrote, jeez, I don't even know how long ago, two? three years? Talking about Under Cover of Dark. The idea behind this release was to keep going. My main band, Face Tat, is still around, still active, however, the other half of the band, Mike G, moved on over to New York, so you know, makes the whole jamming aspect hard. Yes, of course, there's plenty people can do from afar, such as Postal Service. Plenty of artists don't even meet in person, they just send tracks back and forth. And that's all well and good, but first you really have adapt your music playing style and process for a studio project. This ain't always easy.
I grew up playing in a bunch of bands that none of you have ever heard of, so I learned to play live with others. Really learned to write by vamping out parts. In the studio, it's all on you. There's many different ways to skin a cat and write a song. Some people jam, others write lyrics first, others strum guitar. Some people are very intentional and know exactly what they want to get out of a studio. For me, music is a process of discovery. I don't really feel so much like I write or compose music, but instead that I discover curious little musical ideas, some of which have been done before, but all of which I want to share. Thing is, the studio allows you to do anything, and sometimes that makes one feel directionless, and therefore nothing happens. I really had to dig in and just experiment. As time has gone on and I've built out more and more of my studio (which is nothing fancy, just a collection of synths, guits, and drums) I'm discovering more and more what I can do. So, these songs reflect a lot of studio growth and discovery. Case in point: You Will Set This City On Fire.
One of the things about studio writing, and most creative projects I work on, is that I write about 80% of a song in about one sitting, in just a few takes. But these takes are mostly terrible. I mean, they're great ideas, but they are not at all for public consumption. They're rough, lots of mistakes, maybe only a few good takes, but that doesn't matter, they're all scratch. I then spend a week or so recapturing the initial idea and recreating the sound clean (or sometimes dirty) and flesh out the body of the song. So, we're at about 95% here. After that, everything single studio session is about grinding down the remaining 5%. Editing, mixing (and mixing and mixing), mastering, making tiny little fixes. This is why deadlines are so important. The first 70% you can do in a day, the next 20% takes you two weeks, and the last 10% can take a month or longer. As you get closer to 100% and "perfection" the more it costs in time and effort. Is that little pop at the end that will take you three hours to edit out or do all over again worth it? Sometimes yes, but mostly no. Songs are never finished, just abandoned. And they only way for me to impose this is by deadline. My point here is I wrote YWSTCOF in one weekend, while my bud Al Lover was in town visiting. We hanged out one night and after he left I just a laid out this drum patter and heavy bassline. I didn't really know what to do after that so I slapped on an arpeggiator for the chorus part, which I played by hand, meaning I was adjusting the tempo of the arp via knob twiddling. Sometimes I feel that arps that are so on time and in sync with the tempo with computer percision just takes the life and excitment out of the sound. Sometimes this is good, you want a cold, unemotional, detached feel. But for this song, it was supposed to be loud and dirty and messy, which it is.
After that, I wanted to play with tone. This song is nothing if not playful. Such as that Beastie Boys 808 tom at the end of the drum phrase. Everybody I played it for told me to take it out, but for me, that was the tone of the song. Dirty as bass and drums with a playful tone. To accentuate this I added that twinkly arp in the intro (just a microKorg with the attack turned way up). To play with tone more I played that main melody on a Roland Gaia and then decided to get real cheesey and used some midi mens chorus preset in Logic Pro X.
Finally, about 95% done I showed it to Al Lover and all he said was, "you need some hella trappy high hats on that." So I asked him, "care to send me some hella trappy high hats?" So he did. I messed with them a bunch, but they're all Al.

This is a good song:

I made a something. I guess it's musical, at least the second part is. It is organized sound.
I went down to Baja for New Years Eve with Angel and a group of friends. I made field recordings of the weekend, both indoors and out. I mixed, edited, and arranged the field recordings as a stand alone soundscape/narrative of our time down there, in a not very chronological order. I was lucky enough to get Deena Rosen to read some haikus she wrote on the trip and the track art is a photo Roger Thomasson took from the house down there. 
The second track is loops made out of what I captured that I mixed in and out and then later set to music: piano, cello, microKorg. I ran a bunch of tracks through an RE-101 and laid down some droney reverb over the background. This created a susurrus that gave the project a dreamlike quality. I also noticed that the susurrus, taken as a whole, was hovering around certain notes: G, A, A#, C, and D#. That's an grouping: G and C fifth/forth; A# and D#, dominant fifth; A and C, minor third; G and A#, minor third. There's a lot of harmonic potential in there. But enough nerding.
I tried to make a melody out of all of that, but nothing stuck. I think part of the reason was the loops themselves, they were constantly making new arrangements every iteration, because the loops all have different play lengths. There's all sorts of new combinations of sound every second, though over time certain ones stand out. This creates a constantly shifting landscape which makes a consistent melody hard to apply, or at least for me it was hard. Every time I found an enticing melody it felt like I was imposing order instead of bringing forth new musical ideas. I tried to address this in the mix, but many of the tracks were recorded poorly. (I tend to record loud things and up close via low input as it cuts down on windnoise and popping and other recording artifacts, things I don't want, but this time some things were too far away or too quiet for the input level I had. Frankly, I really need to get a windshield for my handheld, you know, one of them dead cat/clown nose things to cut down on wind and increase my input level. Live and learn.)
So, because I couldn't really find a melody that represented the piece I ended up playing a bunch of little variations in free time, with no backing track, on a Rhodes piano. Then I threw on a bassline that's imposes a bit of order, some cellos to smooth things over and bring out some more emotional nuance, and a random-pattern microKorg arpeggiator. That sounds all fancy, but really, I just messed around with things and twiddled knobs until it good. One thing that didn't come out until the final mix is the musical downbeat that was captured on one of the recordings. It makes a kind of beat that's in the mix on the second track, "La Muerte Sueña," that I would've liked to have explored more, but I ran out of time. Next time, boost volume and mix everything first, before trying to write music. 
At any rate, I'm pretty pumped with the result. There's some real delicate sounds that I just love (the crickets calling back and forth to each other), so I'd suggest listening to this at at least 75% volume, maybe up to 85%, with some really good headphones, but I've played this on a lot of systems and it sounds good all that I've encountered.
Finally, I wanted to dedicate this project to Michelle Ybarra, who organized the trip along with Joanne Lee, even though she didn't make it down, and all the rest of the Bajajaja crew:
Angel LowreyTodd SillsBenita SillsSarah SolomonRoger ThomassonDeena RosenElizabeth LyLiam O'DonoghueJulia Hathaway
It's on soundcloud and on bandcamp (at bottom), so take your pick:


Or:
Bahia de los Muertos by screams

So, I mentioned earlier this year that I'd launched a new project, screams. Since my other projects (Face Tat, Girl-Face) were mostly in the reformation stage as people moved and adjusted to life changes, this is was mostly going to be a solo side project, with the goal of finishing up a bunch of songs I'd started over the years but didn't get finished as other projects got in the way. But as these things go, ended up writing up a bunch of new material.
Since it was just going to me with my friends helping me to flesh out the ideas and appearing as guests on the tracks, I really wanted to go for a lo-fi electronic sounds, a la Black Moth Super Rainbow, Suicide, early Grimes, with just a tinge of industrial, a real stripped down lo-fi sound. So I released the first screams song: Many Things.
Many Things by screams


I wrote the principle music for Many Things in one go (as I'm sure you can tell) and messed with it here and there. The bassline is a MicroKORG, the lead is a Roland Gaia, and the drums I built off a  Roland Octapad SPD-30. The Gaia is killer, but not as easy to interface with as the MicroKORG or the Octapad (though the Octapad has a bit of a learning curve and there's plenty of things that it can do [looper, sequencer] that I don't use cause I have other machines that can do the same and a lot easier to use). I initially recorded it just to save an idea, but really like the grittiness so I decided to round it out. Found a killer movie quote from  Dune , when the Guild Navigator tells Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV that little Paul Atreides need to get whacked, and threw it on there. It took me a while to clean up the sample, there's all sorts of machine and hissing noises cause those Navigators are weird mutants and that white noise was part of the scene so I just decided to include in the song cause to take much more of it out would have taken some from the voice quality of the Navigator.
I looped the "plans with in plans" part at the end and got it to extend out so far by automating the volume on that track so that it kept increasing as the loop faded out, thus making it last nearly five minutes. Which is longer than the music. Studio magic, my friends. 

Guess this tour diary is a bit late, seeing as how it's about Desert Daze 2012, but I just played Desert Daze 2018 and wanted to write about it and couldn't write about one without writing about the other, so here goes.
Back in 2012 I lived with two roommates, my Mist Giant bandmate Rap Dan and some guy called Al Lover, who's put out a thing or two.
Me, Al Lover, and long time goodbuddy and bandmate Mike G got together and made a few cuts: Al on an MPC-1000 doing beats and samples and Mike and me on fuzzed out guitars trading harmonic and melodic lines. It was simple, stripped down, and a lot of fun. We practiced, showed up, played some shows. Called ourselves: Al Lover & the Haters.


Well, we (and by we I mean Al) got invited to play down at the 2012 Austin Psychfest and then the Moon Bloc Party's Desert Daze 2012 music festival. So we booked up a few more shows, SF, Santa Barbara, LA, ABQ, Las Cruces, and a few spots I forget and took our show on the road. Mike and Al drove down to LA and played Burger Records while I stayed in SF to finish up some work thing, then I flew down and met up with them and off we went.
We played Desert Daze soon thereafter. It was crazy. I mean, it was great. They had the fest at an old beat up roadhouse called Dillon's down in Desert Hot Springs. Actually, don't know how run down that place usually is, might even be a fancy spot, but we didn't get there until day eleven of the fest. You read that right, they ran an eleven day music fest at a roadhouse in the desert. One-hundred and twenty acts, two stages, eleven days. So, you know place was hit kinda hard. I mean, actually, for an eleven day music fest, it wasn't as wrecked as it coulda been. But then again nothing is as bad as it coulda been, except Nazis.
Desert Daze set up some camping nearby for the attendees, but all us artists(!) got to stay in a nearby motor lodge type place. One of them two-storied horseshoe shaped deals with a big pool in the middle, though they didn't let us swim after dark and it's a fest, so nobody got to use it. The cool thing was that after the fest we got to go back to the motel and keep partying, going room to room, while the owner operators mean mugged us.
After the fest, we went back on the road and played some shows on our way to Austin, TX. Played the Trainyard in Las Cruces with the Cosmonauts.
Burt's Tiki. Blurry. Sry.But the best show we played was to an empty lounge in Albuquerque, NM. Burt's Tiki Lounge (which moved locations by a block and then abruptly shut down earlier this year