drinking songs

art and fame and creating in a void

2011-05-11T16:18:00.000+10:00

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there 's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They 'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

- Emily Dickinson

On Rights

2010-09-21T12:01:00.002+10:00

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine, an up and coming film maker, on the subject of copyrights. I've discussed this before but I've been thinking about it some more.

He asked me a question which I really had to think about. It was "don't you think that artists deserve to be paid for their work". I had to really think about this and I surprised myself with the answer, which was no, I don't.

I came to the conclusion that actually no one "deserves" to be paid as such and that whatever money you make comes from you doing something that people want to pay you for. This is generalising, but from my point of view you do what you can to make a living, and then you do what you want to do. Sometimes those are the same two things but no one deserves for them to be. Perhaps I'm just bitter as I find my job in corporate IT uninspiring compared to song-writing or performing (though in some ways, much easier). But I've never felt like I deserve to be paid for doing what I really want to do. I've certainly never felt that I need a system of law enforcement to prevent people from behaving like people (i.e. sharing, mimicking and altering the things they love)

The refrain we hear repeated over and over is that copyright protects the income of creators and allows them to keep on creating but the system itself actually benefits publishers the most. And if we look at the history of copyright law, it is all bundled up with printing presses and the rise to dominance of the publisher over the scribe.

A scribe is a kind of artist, creating unique products, works of serious labour. Publishing is not art and published output may be a copy of art, but there is nothing unique to it. It is one of many identical physical units. This is the business model that led to copyright. It was never about the artist, it was about the publisher asserting their right to be the sole source of these units, something an artist does not have to do.

If copyright existed to help artists, it should really protect the artist from those seeking to financially benefit from their work (i.e. the publishers). And this is really evident in the music industry where labels will front up cash for a new act as a loan, the band having to then tour and tour to make back the money they owe. If this is what a band has to do to get noticed, why do they need a record label to own them for this period? If record labels suddenly went away, would musicians stop making music and playing gigs? If musicians were guaranteed to never make money for their music would that be the end of music?

The music recording industry, as it is now, is an entity that did not exist before the 20th century. It had a run of about 50 years where it was able to produce a physical medium for transporting and listening to recorded music that consumers could not easily produce for themselves. Now that time is over and we're in a transition period. Artists need to make money, yes, and legal protection from sharks and poachers is nice to have but a system created by publishers for publishers is never going to support artists in the way that they want it to. And artists will still be artists no matter what, culture will keep growing and changing as it did before copyright, before CD sales and before MTV.

The archetype of the struggling artist didn't go away due to the existence of copyright law but the archetype of pop star is a pure 20th century concept. If we have to chose one or the other, it's worth considering which we'd prefer.

Beard and Brau: Golden Paw Review

2010-09-07T10:10:00.001+10:00

I recently reviewed Beard and Brau Golden Paw for the Kino Sydney Zine (a small zine available only at Kino Sydney screenings). It was written for a non-beer-nerd, but possibly inebriated audience. Here is the review I speak of:

This beer has sprung forth from a small microbrewery in South Australia, that land of fermented plenty, and found it's way to the lips of Kino Sydney participants. At an age when new beers are creeping up on us from every angle, I have decided to try to provide some direction to my fellow beerish travellers and kinoites.
Golden Paw is a beer brewed in the style of an American Pale Ale. This is a fairly modern style of beer that is generally known for big flavours. Beers that let you know they are being drunk. In fact, it could be said that an American Pale Ale is all up in your grill. This particular variety, however is brewed with lager yeast. Lager being the style of most well-knownbeers, it has subtler flavours and a drier taste. Golden paw then combines the thick sweetness of strong malts with the crisp finish of a lager yeast. The hops flavours are typical of North American hops: astringent and citrusy, and used in quantity.
All of this, however, one could glean from a few google searches. To really do this beer justice, I felt it was important to procure a sample and write these words with the cloudy, golden ale on my tongue, that the authenticity of my review be felt. Of course the sample I obtained was warm, so I placed it in the freezer to cool and immediately forgot about it. Iawoke to a freezer full of beer slushie and am now sitting with what icy chunks ofbrew I could worry from the bottle slowly melting in a glass next to me.
As such I can inform you that Beard and Brau Golden Paw is a remarkably cold beverage, somewhat crunchy and entirely flat. It does not wish to leave the bottle that it comes in, but when it does, it tends to sit sluggishly, foaming in anger. Despite this, a full flavoured beer can be detected between the icicles. And I am just enough of a beer lover to have enjoyed this regardless.

Find inspiration where you can.

2010-08-31T10:33:00.001+10:00

Sometimes you run out of words and life is simple (or complex) experience. It takes a little something extra to bring the words back again. In this case my inspiration is an image which perfectly sums up my reasons for creating this blog.

Used with permission from unexpectedtales

I am ready

2010-05-18T15:51:00.000+10:00

My entry for tonight's brewshare is bottled, rested, labelled and ready for guzzling.

Bacon beer, me hearties. Arrrr.

2010-05-17T15:34:00.000+10:00

Wherein I talk like a salty sea-dog for no reason at all.

I'm on a quest to make a beer with a flavour that says "bacon". This, as a homebrewer, is my personal holy grail. When I close my eyes and adjust my tongue in just the right way I can sense it's flavour, like a siren call coming over the waves of amber liquid that are so often flowing towards and into my mouth.

I'm not quite there yet, but I've been getting closer. With the brewshare night at the local taphouse looming on the liquid horizon like a shimmering mermaid, I decided to see how close I could get in time to present a brew. The theme of the night is a stout or a porter, so I thought I'd bend my will creating a smokey porter for the evening.

I used a good amount of pale malt, along with some chocolate and crystal malt. But the main flavour I was hoping to capture came from kilo of smoked malt that I added to the mash. I think next time I will use even more smoked malt because the competition with crystal and chocolate was a little too strong.

I went very easy on the hops, with only 30 grams of amarillo hops, added right at the end of the boil, for minimum bitterness. This turned out to be a perfect balance, in my opinion, as the herby flavours of the hops sat just beneath the smokey, caramelised malts. In effect the hops simply supported the main flavours, propping them up list a mast holds a sail.

My new first mate, white labs Australian Ale yeast, proved itself a trusted ally as the cultures I'd made have just kept on churning out good brews. This was no exception and I have to say that the whole experience went smoothly.

It wasn't the bacon galley I had dreamed of sailing, but it was a damn fine brew. The test was the tasting and I opened up the keg just in time for a visit from an old friend who braved the voyage from the Americas out here to the Antipodes. A group of seven worthy drinkers finished off all but a pint or two, so I consider that they were well pleased with it.

Tomorrow night I'll take the bottles I saved aside to the Darlo brewshare and we'll see if it stages a successful mutiny or is made to walk the plank.

Low down disco

2010-03-30T13:29:00.001+11:00

I know you've all been on the edges of your pant-seats^*, waiting for a new Meat Pig song. The wait is over and the song is here. Near. Dear. Beer. Mmm, beer. You can listen to it online or you can keep it for your very own by downloading this mp3.

Back-story

A few weeks ago my brother and musical co-adventurer, El Cucurucho, expressed an interest in making a disco song. It seemed like everything we had done up to that point was clearly pointing to the genre. I remember feeling surprised that we had not already sunk our canines into some disco flesh while a relentless strobe light made our feral blood sport appear artistic.

In preparation for the song, I listened to Diana Ross's Love Hangover repeatedly over weeks. This is a song that took a fine lady of soul and transported her into the majestic disco matriarch that we all remember her being. We followed the basic vibe of this song; slow to fast with an excited squeal at the transition. The Wooo, in my opinion, is an important aspect in a transition of any kind.

Despite my love of Wooos, we added a third, woo-less transition. This marks the dark change to the theme of the track as we descend into a kind of tonal chaos of despair.

Song Form and Stylings

I've been lusting over the idea of a through-composed song for a long time now. I'll basically talk to anyone about it, and I have. If you've been around me while I've been beered up you probably got an earful of through-composition and how much I wanted to try it. Anyway, this seemed the perfect opportunity. The song is in 3 acts, the first being the kind of generic slow-funk that any whitey can pull out of their trousers. It's just a teaser, but it establishes the setting: a local food court, tilled and echoing, a range of international cuisines on offer united by their general lack of nutritive value.

The second stanza simply kicks the first up a notch. Here is where our disco balls start spinning as we begin to sample the local wares. The bassline jumps down an octave, symbolising that we are descending to new lows as we dine in this underground eatery. The keyboards tighten up to keep the rhythm on the dance-floor smooth and consistent. Hand claps find their way in to enhance the authenticity.

In the final stanza we break it down Sun-Ra style. Proper free jazz with space effects and atonal chords. There may be a bit of walking bass in here. This is where the true horror of our dining experience is revealed as the constant vibration of consumption shatters our illusions and we can no longer hide the raw human ugliness that surrounds this cursed meal. This part is the hardest to dance to, but the most rearding if you can pull it off.

Technical Musical Elements

The entire song is in the key of G and contains uses of the dorian mode while mostly leaning heavily on a minor pentatonic scale. This is not really so different from most of our songs.

Concluding Thoughts

I'm really happy with my brother's work on both the keyboards and the drums. I think his drumming ties the whole song together in what might have been (although you may consider it still to be) a disjointed mess.

El Cucurucho rocks the Ardour

This was one of the smoother experiences thanks to El Cucurucho's increased aptitude for the equipment we were using. I really got to see the Ardour audio software shine. I'm increasingly amazed at the times we live in, where this kind of technology both exists and is available as free software for anyone to use. Powerful times call for powerful music, so we do our best to deliver.

I actually really expected this song to have been a failed venture since I came to the session completely without inspiration or direction. My brother provided most of these energies. My main contribution was to somehow come up with a concept and then actual lyrics while he was experimenting with audio effects and timing. I wrote all of it in about 15 minutes from concept to stepping up to the mic. For this gift, I'd like to thank Frank Zappa. I've been listening to Overnight Sensation a lot lately and the following lines (from Camarillo Brillo) form the prototype for this song's entire lyrical dimension:

She stripped away her rancid poncho
And laid out naked by the door.
We did it till we were unconcho
And it was useless anymore.

* Pant-seats are a pair of pants with fold-out seat legs that you can use as a seat whenever and wherever you want. They don't actually have an edge as such but I trust that you, dear reader, will indulge me in this exercise of creative license.

Where's all the song?

2010-03-09T15:50:00.000+11:00

Looking over my recent entries, I see there's a whole lot of drinking and very little singing. My family's move to the suburbs has put a big wedge of space between the two members of Meat Pig and we all continue to be poor in time. So little music has been produced, however I've been getting a lot of input into my music-brain.

Last night was a great example of nodes forming in the chaotic mess of Sydney's music scene. My wife and I attended Kino Sydney #34, a local independent film-makers event known for its ability to connect with all manner of creative forces in the city. This particular night was themed to help launch a new album of remixes by MA, an upcoming Sydney electro outfit (and might I add personal friends of Meat Pig ... yes, I might)

Victoria White from MA

What we got out of the night was a live performance by MA, and a great set of films made by kino participants, set to remixes of song's from MA's first album. I also got a chance to chat to some of the DJs and in particular members of Neon Hearts who have an eclectic mix of influences and are involved in various venues and radio shows as well.

I'm a bit of hermit when it comes to music, and not really well versed on what the kids are all up to these days. I tend to look backward for inspiration, but every now and then I think it's healthy to get a dose of what's happening out there in the world. To feel out where people's heads are floating. Basically I'm always in need of inspiration, and sometimes I need more than just listening to howlin' wolf over and over.

So if you're like me and interested in something you might have heard of yet, I'd encourage you to check out all the above-mentioned acts. And if you live in Sydney, I urge you strongly to get involved in kino, cause that's where it's at.

brewshare at the local

2010-03-05T11:29:00.002+11:00

When you invite people into your home and ply them with alcohol, it's very unlikely they're going to say anything negative, or even particularly critical, about the experience. So I was scared but also drawn to the brewshare night at the local taphouse in darlinghurst like a fat blowfly bouncing into the deadly blue light of a mozzie zapper. I was daunted, walking into a room full of 30 or more strangers to have my beer tasted and dissected by a group of people who mostly know more than I do about beer. The daunt was literally flaking off my arms leaving a mess all over the floor (it smelled like gruyere)

It turned out I was among friends. What unfolded was a night of civilised drinking, tipsy conversation and all-round good cheer. I tasted a lot of beer and still had a hoppy flavour in my mouth a day later. There was some stand-out entries, including a mango beer, some kind of crazy belgian raspberry beer and some american pale ale that was so strongly hopped it made my eyes water, with beer tears, which is more pleasant than it sounds.

The next brewshare is on the 18th of may, and it's worth going to even just for the experience of not having to share the local with after-work-suited-wankers. I love the vibe and the thing of the place and getting to hang out with beer nerds drinking bubbly grain alcohol in there is one of those experiences ... do you know the kind I mean? When you're right at the point of drunkeness that you mostly have bodily control but a pleasant layer of cheer and goodwill has settled on your brain. You're losing the ability to speak but you don't need to cause everything mostly makes sense, people are smilling at you and you have a comfy couch under you, keeping you stable. That's the moment that I love and being in a pub like the local, with it's dark wood and tarnished furniture, it's uncountable rows of condensationed taps*, I can just sink, comfortably, into it and let the conversations flow right through me.

*ok, someone's probably counted them

feral

2010-02-02T16:19:00.000+11:00

I had the good fortune to drink and dine at the local in darlinghurst on my birthday. My wife and I shared the banquet, a series of 5 generous courses with matched beers. It's unusual to feel full after the first course in a degustation-style meal, but that's where the big plate of meatballs took us. In the end I had to be rolled out, as I emitted happy little beer burps.

This blog isn't about food, though, so let me get right down to it and say that I had a truly happy beer experience when I got to taste some of Feral Brewery's Razorback barleywine. This was so rich and malty with a sweetness that hid the hefty 11% alcoholic content. This was definitely a brew for sipping and savouring. I've never seen Feral beer for sale anywhere other than the local, but if you see it, grab it and then drink it. Don't forget that last part. You'll thank me, I know you will.

40 litres of happy

2010-01-28T15:34:00.003+11:00

So everything I said about being too scared to brew turned out to be wrong. In the end my desire for beer overcame my fears and I am whole again.

That's a stout on the left and an ale on the right.

Too hot to brew

2010-01-27T10:46:00.001+11:00

Our new home is a heat-sink in this filthy-hot weather. I'm scared to put on any new brews right now for fear that another 40 degree day will wipe them out. The move and the heat have also led to extreme laziness when it comes to writing new music. In the spirit of not doing it ourselves right now, the wife and I opened up a six pack of coopers mild ale and drove down the south coast listening to They Might Be Giants.

Both of these go down easy, the mild ale is particularly good for a low-alcohol beer. Not something I'd usually get into but considering driving plus children plus an un-patrolled beach it was probably for the best.

Listening to They Might Be Giants is always a rewarding experience. Their way of blending standard rock and pop progressions with something that I can only describe as experimental maths rock is something that I aspire to. They are certainly the masters of breaking a melody down into fundamental numbers and building it back up into a complex and disarming array of digital and analogue pulses that is somehow recognisable as music but strangely new, and then suddenly slipping into a familiar blues riff.

It is the kind of thing I'd like to do if I had the time or patience. But my music is all about making it up on the spot as much as possible. That's my niche and I'm sitting in it, looking out at the rest of the world in wonder and appreciation.

A beer to remember us by

2010-01-04T16:22:00.000+11:00

I grew up in the suburbs and it never really fit me. As soon as I could I fled to the beach and hid myself in Maroubra; at the time one of the grungier Sydney beach suburbs. As I got closer to my 30's I realised that my heart was in the inner west of Sydney and moved with my wife into the colourful urban village of Glebe where we have lived since. I swore I'd never go back over the bridge - back to the cursed north side with it's sprawling suburbia - a mono-cultural wasteland in my eyes. Well all things come to an end and age dulls passion.

As time has passed a child has arrived and years of living beyond our means have left us paying back for our past enjoyments. I've managed to land a decent 9-5 job on the hated north side. The pressure of traversing the harbour each day combined with the rising insanity of anything real-estate related in anywhere-fun-to-live in Sydney has led me to suck it up and head north to (hopefully) greener pastures.

Moving house is hardly a joyful experience, but to add a bit of a bonus to the venture I've started up a house-moving brew. It will be the last beer I brew in Glebe in the near future and it will be a gift for anyone who is inclined to help us out. Come over, help us pack and drink a keg of goodbye ale: that's the deal. Let's leave our quaint little terrace house in our rejuvinated inner city slum with a bubbly, burpy smile.

Being time poor in preparation for this special occasion I took advantage of the Coopers company's generous offer and bought a homebrew kit. I couldn't resist using up the last of my fuggles hops and adding it, post boil, to the fermenter. I also added a very bracing 2kg of dextrose to the 19 litre brew to ensure a powerfully alcoholic tonic will be served. I'm betting on a strong, spicy and pleasantly bitter end to a day of manual labour and cardboard grazings (you know the kind, when you rub your lilly-white, never-done-an-honest-days-work-soft skin against cardboard till it's raw).

I couldn't help drinking a little bit of the wort and savouring the ridiculous sweetness. I love to imagine all those little sugars being gobbled up by yeast and pooped out as alcohol. The yeast is truly a god among microbes.

xmas beer cheer

2009-12-29T08:32:00.000+11:00

My attempts at brewing a fat yak style beer are ongoing. I've spent a lot of time in the past working on very slightly hopped beers so my experience in brewing a big hoppy beer has been limited. This was the first time that I produced something drinkable, however, so I'm happy to at least have some beer even if it is not the beer I imagined.

Having said that, my latest pale ale is quite tasty. The extra hops balance out the lingering sweetness that my beers always seem to have a bit of. The result is a quite delicious ale that goes down easily. I was a little cautious this time, after being burned by Sour Sunday, so I avoided finishing the keg with hops and elected to drop in a bag full of fuggles right at the end of the boil. The result is a bit less aromatic than I wanted and I think next time I'm going to suck it up and go for the proper finishing time with uncooked hops.

The above pictured brew helped wash down all that delicious xmas ham that my wife cooked. It's been a super food xmas and I feel bloated and over indulged in the best possible way. Merry xmas everyone.

Saved by the can

2009-12-01T10:49:00.000+11:00

When you're in a pickle (or at least your brew is full of vinegar) and you have friends coming over in less than a week and you've promised a bountiful flow of beer out of the taps then there's nothing to be ashamed of in running down to bi-lo to pick up a coopers homebrew kit and brewing up a quick and easy pale ale.

At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Woe to me

2009-11-24T09:03:00.001+11:00

I'm very proud of my beer. I've never lost a brew. Every keg of beer I've tapped has been drinkable and, often, delicious. That all changed on Sunday; a day of unseasonably high temperatures (it got up to 40 degrees). A day that I will forever remember as Sour Sunday.

You see, I'd been attempting to make a particularly fine beer. I made it from pure pale malt, which I sparged multiple times to extract as much malty sugars as was possible. I used no bittering hops at all, as I wanted the hopping to be fresh and aromatic, with a summery vibration. I fermented carefully using some fine californian ale yeast. When the fermentation was done my hydrometer told me I had created a brew with a sturdy 10% alcoholic content. I was well-pleased. I kegged up the beer and lowered a sterilised bag, full of aromatic hops into it to sit for a few days, gathering flavour like a mother gathers her young up to her teets.

Then Sunday hit, and at some point before my heat-addled brain thought to move the keg into the fridge my lovingly crafted brew turned to vinegar. I don't really blame it, sitting in our house (the doors closed tight to keep out the heat, but still sweltering at 35 degrees) my mood had also gone acidic. If anything my brew was a mirror to myself, quickly turning sour in the face of the relentless Australian sun.

I'm clinging to a dwindling shred of hope that I can save my brew of it's tangy fate. I've been scouring google, but to no avail. Just now I have sent off some emails to a few homebrew experts who might be able to help me. Perhaps there is some way to neutralise the vinegar and return the flavour of my beloved brew in time for the entertaining I'd planned around it's fruition.

Regardless of the outcome, it seems that little today can lift the weights from my heavy heart.

I'm gonna do it by myself (sometimes)

2009-11-23T12:50:00.000+11:00

In lieu of any new music or beer (both are currently fermenting), I had this idea to write a blog post about the concept of doing things for yourself, going back to first principals and learning how things work. Even if you don't always do it yourself, you get an appreciation for how it should happen. The formation of this idea was closely followed by a warning from my inner self-critic (a rare event!) informing me that I should have a look around before I shoot my mouth off. Turns out that DIY culture is at least as old as my parents and, these days, is tightly associated with "punk"-like counter culture.

So wikipedia helped me dodge a bullet there and I got to thinking instead about how little I want to be associated with a subculture or scene. I had my fill of subcultures when I was a teenager and it's made me suspicious of the kind of exuberance often displayed by proponents of otherwise interesting things like bike-maintenance, dumpster diving or guerrilla-anything. Like old man Buddha, I'll look for the middle path, not that I'd ever want to be associated with Buddhism.

Some things, like beer and music, suit a DIY methodology so well that it seems silly to rely on other people to make them for me. Other things, like computer memory sticks, I'm quite happy to let someone else have a go at on my behalf. I'm pretty sure that if it came down to it, I'd fail at making my own memory sticks.

I don't want to write a blog post unless I have learned something new. So I guess what I have learned today is that I'm a ignorant of modern punk culture, that I'm hesitant to sign up to any pre-defined lyfestyle movement and that despite all of this I still love to make my own shit.

Chocolate Stout

2009-11-05T12:40:00.000+11:00

There was a time when if you happened to walk into my house on a weekend you'd likely smell some sweet barley aromas and see me bent over a large blue esky with a sack of barley on my shoulder. We got kicked out of that house a year ago and I hadn't made a proper beer since. Now a coopers homebrew kit is cheap as chips and makes a drinkable beer, but you can never hold up a chilled glass of that stuff and feel a swell in your chest cause all you really did was follow the instructions. This had to change and so a few weeks ago I made an order with the good people at Dave's Homebrew to organise a nice, big bag of grain and some other goodies delivered to my door, then I got busy making some real beer.

This tasty beverage is my first all grain mash in exactly a year, according to my beer diary. I keep a record of every beer I make, noting the recipe. I spent a long time honing two beers down to just how I wanted them, a cream stout and a lemongrass ale. Coming back into it, though, I wanted to mix it up a little so I decided to make a hoppy chocolate stout.

Most commercial stouts are pretty mild in flavour but I've been really enjoying some extra hoppy beers lately (in particular, Matilda Bay's Fat Yak) and I wanted to keep on drinking them from my own keg. So I set out to make the perfect chocolate stout. This is what I love about the DIY approach, you can create things just the way you imagine they should be, rather than relying on someone else's judgement of what the market wants (which invariably leads to the lager plague!).

My mash was made up of flaked barley, chocolate malt and pale malt, plenty of stouty flavours in there.

I'm pretty unsophisticated when it comes to the mash. Just a single grain infusion for two hours. Then out comes the sugary brown liquid. I drank a cup of it straight from the tub, all sweet and malty, and admired the wort as it boiled and turned green with bittering hops.

The new warm weather has made fermentation easy, in our slate-covered laundry it stays around 24 degrees most of the time. The perfect temperature for the californian ale yeast that I love so much. The brew took about 2 weeks to bubble right out and then went down into the keg with the finishing hops for a second in-keg fermentation. I let it sit there gathering flavour for a few more days until I couldn't wait any longer. I connected up the keg to the gas line to pressurise on Tuesday, then tapped the keg on Wednesday. What happened next was not an immediate success and the first of several lessons I learned that night. The finishing hops I'd added did not dissolve into the mix as I had imagined, they simply formed a mealy green layer at the bottom of the keg and completely clogged the lines as soon as I tried to pour from them. This took a little work to fix with my wife helping me strain from one keg into another through a layer of muslin. We lost most of the fiz that way (not a huge loss, but still).

After a lot of lifting, moving and wiping up spilt beer we finally had a pourable brew!

Turns out that the beer was delicious and weighing in at 5.6% alcohol it is not to be taken lightly. I held back a bit on the finishing hops, so it didn't really come out as hoppy as I hoped, but that was probably a bonus as the chocolate tones are also quite subtle and the balance of flavours is pretty much perfect. And now all there is to do is sit back and enjoy my tasty, tasty chocolate stout.

This is not a love song

2009-10-29T10:45:00.004+11:00

Writing songs isn't all that hard. You can slap out some 12 bar blues in a few minutes. You can write some lyrics about the first thing you see "Gotta lotta chickens in my underpants". There you go, that's one song right there.

I'm a big fan of this kind of songwriting, but sometimes I want to do a little bit more. Every since I met my wife I've wanted to write a song for her, but what I have found is that writing a song for and about something I really care about is hard. Once I have a topic that really matters, I want the song to be listenable, meaningful and express what I actually want to express. Since my wife is the best person I've ever met, I feel that a song made for her is pretty important to get right so I have put a bit of thought into this one. I know I'm doomed from the start because I can't write the best song in the world, but I'm all about embracing my imperfections so it was time to just do it.

I put together a list of things that I know she likes in a song, and came up with:

my wife loves pop music
she likes songs with counting in them
she likes a song with a catchy hook

None of these elements really sum up anything that Meat Pig have previously made, so this song was going to be a bit different, and yet, as it turns out, it seems that Meat Pig are not capable of making a non Meat Piggy song.

Song Form

I wanted to try something a little unusual for the song form. My original idea was a through-composed song, but that's hardly pop. I then got excited about the idea of a song with the form ABAB, where A and B are both verses and there is no chorus. I ended up with something more complicated, an ABCAD format.

A is an instrumental into
B is the verse
C is a one bar chorus, very minimal!
D is a divergence, a second verse format with a change in style but keeping the key and tempo.

The whole thing is repeated twice and comes in around the 2 minute mark. This is my preferred length for a pop/rock song, as it forces you to be concise. Say what you want then get the fuck out. I'm reminded of Frank Black; in my vague memory of an interview he was talking about the song length of many of the songs on doolittle. Arguing over the length with his producer he claimed that if you look back on all the old delta blues masters you'd see that most of their songs last about 2 minutes. This is important to me cause the tendancy to get self indulgent is always there, waiting to leap out and ferociously bore your audience.

Scales, keys, rhythms

We went for a rock song in F for no other reason than we haven't done many songs in F. We started with a guitar riff that I'd worked out and since I'm a crap guitarist I tuned the guitar up a note to make it easier the play in F. Luke came up with some pretty solid bottoms for this track. We drew heavily from the Jimi Hendrix experience, mainly a combination of Machine Gun and Fire. This is most evident in the drums where Luke slips into a Mitch Mitchel style without even trying, as if he had eaten with the same cutlery as Mitch and been infected with a salivatorily transmitted groove virus.

I added some accordion, trying very hard to reign myself in. I'm really not very good at doing that, since my fingers get bored. I basically improvised over a minor blues scale and an aeolian mode in F, which is my standard thing. Note to self: expand your repertoire.

Background lyrics were just Luke and I, yelling together about 2 metres from our mic. I had to postpone the main vocals cause a cold had left my throat a little ragged and I didn't have it in my to sing any more. I came back to it a week later having written some vocals in my head. I distractedly finished them off in front of an episode of Monkey Magic and then when it came to singing them found my heart beating a little too fast and they came out garbled and broken. More than usual, I'd say. A strange thing, singing this song made me nervous and reminded me of the first time I met my wife. I was coming down a set of escalators and she was standing there alone in a big, empty stone room and I just walked up to her and kissed her while my travel-sick body swiftly caught fire. I was almost that nervous all over again.

Finishing it off

Luke finished off the song , selecting a delightfully cheesy guitar fuzz to cover up the acousticness of our electric guitar-with-broken-pickups. Then he cleaned up some of the more startling errors I made in the lead vocals and finally he uploaded it to last.fm so the world can sing along with us.

If you've managed to read all of this, it would be very remiss of you to not go ahead and download the song, put it your MP3 player and upload a torrent to the pirate bay. Here it is:

Download Meat Pig - Rockin'

I love, love feedback. If you want to tell me anything, good or bad about this song then please use those commenty features down there. If you want to call me an arsehole, then do that too!

Beer Festival at The Australian

2009-10-26T13:21:00.000+11:00

Despite the rains a lot of people managed to make it to The Australian Beer Festival, at the Australian Hotel. In fact it seemed that as the rains got heavier the crowds grew thicker. The sometimes sideward flying rains seemed to have little effect. Arriving early we managed to get our hands on a standing table and clung on to it till the late afternoon. Between the three of us we probably sampled about 50 beers and left in a merry mood.

The highlight of the day was my discovery of Red Angus who were serving a nice, hoppy ale and (despite my general dislike of lagers in general) a rather delicious pilsner. The Pilsner actually had a taste reminiscent of a wheat beer. Even more than their beer, I love their tagline: "grain fed beer" and the imagery of the anagus bull. A very beefy effort all 'round.

I also got my first taste of coopers' foray into Pilsner territory with Coopers 62. It has the full mouth-feel that I'm used to tasting in a coopers brew with the addition of that sharp pilsner taste. It was not at all bad.

Other enjoyable brews I sampled were:

Little Creatures White Rabbit. A dark ale that doesn't even appear on their website yet.
Matilda Bay Alpha Pale Ale
McLaren Vale Brewing Co. Vale Ale

I also got to attend a little talk by a brewer from blue tongue, a somewhat local microbrewery that are in a stage of expansion right now. I want to say that it's hard for me to cricisize a bunch of people who just gave me free beer and four cheese pizza, but I have to say that I disagreed strongly with the speaker's insistence that lagers are the best beer for an Australian climate. I'm a bit of a hippy, and I tend to think that any beer style that requires heavy refrigeration to brew isn't really the best beer for your climate. I also think that the predominance of lagers in australian mainstream beer has led to a vast array of flavourless alcohol water. Not that blue tongue is neccessarily a tasteless beer, but lagers generally don't have the flavour and body of a good ale and that is really what I want in a beer, a bit of personality.

I was hoping to see a few more obscure microbrews, there weren't very many new discoveries, but I was satisfied at least by the lack of any real mainstream beer (with the exception of a small effort by Lion Nathon to serve their 5 seeds cider). I took away a pleasant buzz, wet feet and a growing love of beers that employ finishing hops. I reckon my next brew will have a second fermentation with some quality finishing hops to try and capture that herby flavour.

Giving it away

2009-10-19T13:26:00.000+11:00

I was trying to decide where to start today. I currently have a chocolate stout brewing, and a new Meat Pig track that needs some vocals and some production attention. Neither of which I'm completely ready to talk about. So instead I wanted to get stuck into an issue that I hope will define the spirit of this blog: freedom of information.

As far as I am concerned, anything I put on the Internet is information. This includes the digital audio files that have encoded the music I've made. That information, once it is residing on a global computer network is fair game. You can try as hard as you like to protect it, but the reality of the situation is that someone either knows or can know how to get at anything that's out there. This also means that anything you send out into the world which can potentially be converted into digital format and made available on the Internet most likely will be. In any case you should assume that it is or will be available.

I think that fighting a futile battle against copyright infringement is akin to eating your own organs. They may seem like a delicious idea when explained to you by an order of cannibal elders, but then you realise that you can't metabolise food any more and you are haemorrhaging blood out of the wounds in your torso. That's as far as I'm going to go into the politics because there are so many better spoken people who have put it so well that I hardly need to.

I'm in an enviable position (depending on your point of view) because I'm not trying to make a living off my music. So all this politics and money talk doesn't effect me. I make music in my brother's lounge room. We have about $3000 worth of equipment between us, purchased over years. And we have a network of friends who can loan us things when we need them. We haven't produced any physical media and we use free software and free online services in all of our production work. We aim to get the most output from the least input in our music, so there's no feeling of loss when we don't get paid for it. Certainly there are ways we could try to make money from our music if we were dedicated, but we aren't. So for us, a creative commons license is the perfect system. Our music is free. Free to download, free to share, free to modify and use in your own works. And I believe that this approach is particularly suited to music which, at it's very core, is derivative. When you write a song today, you are drawing (even if you don't realise it) from a source of historical knowledge that can hardly be comprehended. If copyright had no time limit then every new recording artist would have a case on their hands.

So it seems to me that rather than crying about it, like the Lily Allens of the world, a better approach is to embrace freedom from first principals. Have no intention of control. Give and receive freely. So instead of looking at the accumulation of money as success, look for the accumulation of fans, collaborators and remixers. With this in mind then every file sharing transaction is a net gain, a new set of ears to hear your voice and another shot at influencing the collective consciousness with your vision.

This topic is particularly hot right now in the UK where Alice Taylor, commissioning editor for education at Channel 4, is all set to publish an essay proclaiming sharing as the new way in a world where people no longer want to pay for music. I'd like to hear someone in authority go straight to the crux of the issue and stop deferring to the music industry with talk of legal paid downloads and other pretty ideas. The cold truth is that 99% of your fans don't want to pay for your music. If you accept that, even embrace it, then you are less prone to hissy fits like Ms. Allen's, proclaiming your career over because people don't want to give you as much money as you think they should.

Sit back and think about it for a while, do musicians really deserve to be rich? Does anyone? Maybe you work hard for the money, but so do a lot of cleaners, receptionists and help-desk workers who have and will never appear on a music video show, or be ushered into the VIP section of their favourite nightclub. So stop crying and think about what really matters: the music.

Beginings

2009-10-16T10:32:00.000+11:00

I've had this account for a while now and haven't used it for anything more than commenting on other blogs. But I decided that there are some things that I want to get out of my head and hopefully attract comment from like minded people on. So I decided to start blogging and dedicate this blog to my two favourite hobbies right now. These are the brewing of delicious beer and the writing of interesting songs. I've reached a point where I have been experimenting in both and feel confident enough to try to gain a deeper understanding of the craft of each.

I have been home-brewing for a few years now and have become comfortable with the all grain mash style of homebrew. This is where beer is made from barley without such shortcuts as cans of pre-made malt. This allows for greater experimentation and fine-tuning of the beer. I have a few pieces of equipment that I use for this purpose. There is the mashing stage which is done in a mash tun (basically an esky with a tap and false bottom), a fermenter (a plastic tub with an airlock and tap) and, of course, the delivery system (a fridge with beer taps on the outside and kegs on the inside). I want to start working on more interesting beers that require more complex proceedures to produce beer flavours that are not often encountered.

I have been making music with my brother under the name "Meat Pig" for a few years too. Our music is very amature and raw and so far we have depended heavily on thoroughly explored avenues of music, mainly twelve bar blues and general rock forms. Our song writing is spontaneous, and usually we try to write, record and publish a song in a single sitting. This means the music is always raw and unpolished and never overthought, which I like. It also means that often I have ideas for songs after they have been made that I can't go back and redo. I've been reading more and more about the art of songwriting and am interested in spending some more time and thought on the craft and want to document this process here.

So if you are either a beer maker or a songwriter (or both!), I'd love some feedback on what I will be posting here, when I have the time.