Jerry

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a decent drummer. Not great, but good enough. Then I met Mr. Jerry Fuchs and I pretty much gave up. He is, without a doubt, my favorite drummer ever. He has MIDI jacks on his arms!!! Literally. Okay, not, like, LITERALLY literally - they're tattoos - but, like literally in that obnoxious way where literally actually means figuratively...because he plays as though he does in fact have MIDI jacks in his arms.

Behold him with his band Maserati as he does with one hand what I and most drummers could only dream of doing with two. Literally.

Bonus cool points for the Corsica t-shirt...Nick

Q-Tip Is Cooler Than You

And most people for that matter. Check as he ignores the MPC to his left and loops up bits from a 45 with his pointer finger...Nick

(Edit: Video seems to have been deleted. Arg!)

Autotune the News

This is amazing. A little slow at first, but just wait for Katie Couric. And Nancy says we have to sign our posts...Nick

Mike McD On The Mic

One of the songs we were mixing at Plantain ( see post below) is a track that features the great Michael McDonald. So here's a relatively boring video of us listening to his acapella at the end of the session. After listening to the song about 2 million times, his vocals still make Nick and me smile Every. Single. Time.

Plantain

We just spent a couple days at the lovely, and recently cleaned, Plantain studios in DFA HQ mixing two new songs (more on that later). I took some pictures.

Matt and Alex comparing compressors on Alex's vocals. The main rack of gear, recently gutted by James who took most of the good stuff with him to LA. The beautiful and rarely used "Live B" room. While making the Automato record, this is where James and Tim set up a TV and an XBox and temporarily rechristened it "The Halo Room."Boneless Buffalo Wings from Atomic Wings. This is what you eat at Plantain. It's a rule. Once upon a time, Tim Goldsworthy did all his editing on big, old Akai samplers (if you're not a nerd, this is incredibly difficult and time consuming). In a stack of Zip disks I found some gems including a blast from our past in the form of an old Automato song. And...
...almost half of the Rapture album crammed onto one 100 meg disc and "House of Jealous Lovers."

Gavin's homemade modular synth, AKA "The Dream Machine." This is what he and Delia used to make their amazing "Days of Mars" album.

Jessica 6

As you may know, Andrew, Nomi and Morgan, once of Hercules & Love Affair, started their own band called Deep Red. But then some speed metal band from Florida with the same name threatened to sue them so they changed it to Jessica 6. Elle Magazine is doing an article on them or something so last night they had an impromptu show at someone's house on Bond Street for the photo shoot. It was really fun. They were really good.

we all put our pants on one leg at a time, but when james does...

So, we walk into the DFA offices the other day and we see this monstrosity sitting on James' desk.



A gold fucking record! I mean, who actually sells records any more!?!?! Let alone a 100,000 of them. What an asshole.

Pretty amazing. Kudos buddy.

Mixin'

Here's a totally boring clip from my cell phone of us mixing our next 12". That's Nick sitting in front of the board at Plantain (dfa's studio in nyc) and me on camera duty. The lovely Matt Thornley ( dfa front-of-house-genius) is off camera somewhere. The mix session was smooth sailing thanks to Eric Broucek, who did all of the hard stuff at his studio a few weeks ago.....Alex

MGMT v. HG!

the remix we did for MGMT is finally out on vinyl.  instrumental mix included.   

http://www.lostinrecords.com/frontend/release/3

keyboardist wanted

When I told Juan I couldn't tour with him anymore he held open tryouts for my replacement. This

guy stood out instantly - chops for days, great hair, good taste in gear - but he demanded a rate of

$1000/day (including days off!) AND his own hotel room each night.

nerd alert!

here's a short "in the studio" thing we did for MOG.com.  We were really hungover and typically inarticulate that day.  For the record, I had just gotten out of the shower and am not wearing gel or product in my hair.