I'm really excited about participating for the first time in this year's RPM Challenge.I'd been thinking about trying to enter the challenge this year, but then, with a full-time work schedule and a two-and-a-half year old son at home--not to mention all the other projects I've already got underway--it just didn't seem practical.
With my current project studio setup, it's fairly trivial for me to work on mixing and mastering on headphones late in the evening after my son goes to bed. But recording sessions for new material require some pretty complex schedule coordination, with my wife Lori having to take Ander out of the house for the day to make it possible, and in general, it's just not easy to find time to record these days.
So I kept putting participation off, telling myself that with luck I might find myself in better circumstances and able to try my hand at the challenge next year.
But then, just when it seemed too late to even consider taking on the RPM Challenge anymore, an email from an old friend in Manhattan sent a Friday the 13th miracle sweeping into town: that miracle, friends, was the miracle of Spaz Rock.
For years now, a revolving stable of musically-inclined buddies of mine and I have had this open-ended project where we get together every few months when the stars align just right, to get a little rowdy and make a joyful cacophony we like to call "Spaz Rock."
To the untrained eye, what we call Spaz Rock appears to be little more than an extended improvisational jam session, but in fact, Spaz Rock differs from a typical jam session in a couple of crucially important ways.
First, as a general rule, we always try to bring as many different kinds of instruments as we can with us to a Spaz session, and then we frequently change up who's playing on what instrument as we play--regardless of whether we know how to play the particular instrument or not.
Second, we don't pick a key to jam in or start playing from any prepared riffs or seed material, we just start playing with no communication other than each other's performances to guide us, and regardless of how good or bad it sounds, until we're too exhausted to keep playing on a particular session, we follow only one rule: Don't stop.
Third, we record everything we do. We've got probably close to a terrabyte's worth of music we've recorded since we first started doing Spaz Rock about six years ago. At our most recent session this past Friday 13th alone, we recorded over 20 Gigabytes of raw, improvised live music.
So this last time around, I explained the concept behind the RPM Challenge to my collaborators in Spaz, and asked if they'd be up for doing it. They agreed enthusiastically. And so now, all the source files from our most recent Spaz session have been transferred to me for post-production, and I'm positive I've got more than enough raw material to fashion a good entry for the RPM Challenge.
For the next 12 days, until the Challenge's deadline, I'll be spending late evenings cutting, splicing, mixing, tweaking and otherwise paring all that musical chaos down--almost two hours worth of musical performance--into a coherent, relatively polished-sounding album of 10 songs or 35 minutes in length. (This on top of getting ready to launch the new Tangemeenie record--but that's another subject.)
So wish me luck. I see the job ahead of me now as kind of like being the copy editor who, after the proverbial 1,000 monkeys with typewriters have finally finished typing out all the works of Shakespeare, has to go line-by-line through the mile-high stacks of typing paper they left behind, editing out all the passages of random gibberish until only the right words in the right order are left. Only in this case, there's no way to know what the right words or order is in advance. (I really am psyched, actually... I love a good challenge! I just hope my sanity and personal life make it through the next 12 days intact.)
Last night I stayed up after my son went to bed and finished the first rough track for the project. For now, I'm calling it "Welcome to Spaz," because at the conclusion of the jam that provided the source material for the track the mic picked up somebody shouting that spontaneously into the room. That particular piece of room ambiance didn't make it into this track but will probably find its way onto the finished album somewhere.
In the meantime, here's a link to the RPM Challenge profile page for the project, called "The Very Best of Spaz Rock - Volume I: Monsters of Spaz," where you can hear "Welcome to Spaz" now and other new tracks in progress as they develop.
