Month: May 2020

On Friday we will release Night Mode’s Your Pain Matters in celebration of Bandcamp’s fee waiver. We hope you’ll add it to your list of purchases on Friday!

Your Pain Matters is my follow-up to Dirac Spike. It’s a solo Night Mode effort recorded from March to July 2017, with the setup* used on the first Night Mode trio jams** and shows*** plus some overdubs****.

* Alesis Micron, Korg Volca Bass, Poly app for iPad, effects pedals

** What became Load Exceedance and Load Transcendance

*** April 2017

**** Rhodes, guitar, etc.

Musically and emotionally, Your Pain Matters is really the beginning of my story with making instrumental synth music. I absolutely stand by Dirac Spike but it was only a first experiment, and all of its pieces are based on the Poly app. (The app is fun, but I have not used it since Dirac Spike.)

For Your Pain Matters I began writing and performing parts for synthesizer with no sampling or sequencing; just me, at the keys & knobs, coming up with sounds and playing/recording live. This is largely what I continued to do for several more albums yet to be released, and am still doing. I did a bunch of it last weekend.

For the few who might care to trace Night Mode’s sonic development, here’s an attempt to sort out who was doing what, when. Of course reality was and is messier than can be fit into these boxes. We’ve had this idea of a Drew solo > Howie solo > Some type of collaboration (duo or trio) release cycle; Capsule was a departure from that, and it seems likely we’ll continue to deviate from that idea. It was a cool plan, but it doesn’t line up well with the pace at which we finish things individually or together.

	Drew	Howie	Damon	(Collaboration)
Feb – Dec ’15	OTHER
Jan – Aug ’16		Dirac Spike
Feb ’17				Duo (H/Damon) – (Untitled/Unreleased)
Mar ’17				Trio – Load Exceedance Load Transcendance
Mar – Jul ’17		Your Pain Matters
?? – Jul ’18	Gentleman Scientist			(there’s a Drew/Damon noise / Marshall reamp / drums project in here somewhere
Jan – Apr ’18		Working Bears Or Barely Working
Jan ’18 – Mar ’19		Only Mostly Dead Come In Alone / Stuck On You (Sep ’18)
Jun – Nov ’19		Not One Person Left Out
Jan-Feb ’20				Duo (Drew/H) – Capsule
Mar ’20				Duo (Drew/H) – (Merritt/Unreleased)
		In progress: Seen Heard and Known, Monotribe record(s) (Oct ’19 – ??), AX60 record (Nov ’19 – ??), Medusa record (Apr ’20 – ??), Noise record (Mar ’20)

Hopefully, in a couple of weeks, the world’s first Thereatari; a photoresistor-controlled dual 555 timer “Stepped Tone Generator” synth (the famous “Atari Punk Console“) with a bunch of bells and whistles.

It’s nice to be building again, after a break since early fall when I made the run of FNTSTC octave fuzzes.

This Thereatari will mostly live in the minirig, along with the Monotribe. The enclosure will also hold two passive mixers: one for submixing things to the Monotribe’s audio input, and one main mixer to produce a mono output from the whole system.

I might do a run of Thereataris later. In addition to putting them in others’ hands, it would be cool to have one for Night Mode shows to put at the front of the table and invite audience members to play.

There’s a shortage of perfect indie-punk records in this world. Would be a pity to miss the 20th anniversary of Idlewild’s 100 Broken Windows.

(Thankfully I’m not alone in remembering this album, like I seemed to be with Goldfinger’s Hang-Ups (read from the bottom up))

I must have heard the band first through KDNE. 100 Broken Windows came out before I was even at the station, so my guess is the label may have been giving it a push in the run-up to releasing Idlewild’s next record (The Remote Part). I got comp tickets to The Remote Part tour through my connections as Music Director. This show also introduced me to the French Kicks; I remember both bands’ sets clearly.

All to say, I wasn’t quite in on the ground floor, but I made up for it in listening. Every note on 100 Broken Windows is as familiar as a favorite hoodie, and if CDs could be worn out my copy would be.

100 Broken Windows is a perfect indie punk record; it doesn’t waste a breath, it maintains momentum from start to finish, it’s stuffed with hooks, and it has a perspective.

This is expressed most clearly in Roddy Woomble’s use of repetition. Look at the lyrics to “Roseability.”

Roseability, there is no roseability
Roseability, there is no roseability

You’ve got off with too much now
You’re getting off with too much now
Stop looking through scrapbooks and photograph albums
Because I know
They don’t teach you what you don’t already know
You’ve always been, dissatisfied

Gertrude Stein said “that’s enough”
(I know that that’s not enough now)

Roseability, there is no roseability

You’ve got off with too much now…

Gertrude Stein said “that’s enough”
(I know that that’s not enough now)

Roseability, there is no roseability

You’ve got off with too much now…

Idlewild, “Roseability”

Across three verses there are only two lines (“Roseability…” and “Gertrude Stein…”). Both rhyme words with themselves, and follow the self-negating form [Thing] / [not Thing]. This is a recipe for boredom and cloying simplicity, but Roddy and the band make it work beautifully. They pull this trick off over and over across the record, and it still works.

For twenty years I’ve been happy any time I played this album, and I’m sure I will be for twenty more.