http://www.hydrogenbar.com/ News from the Hydrogen Bar, official home of Chemlab. en-us Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:33:14 -0500 Copyright 2006 hydrogenbar.com http://www.hydrogenbar.com/images/minicon.gif http://www.hydrogenbar.com 16 16
The whole night was capped by the drive back, through the pitch black. I listened to my favorite radio position which is Long Wave band 152. It essentially falls in the perfect intersection of a catalog of actual stations and produces a miasma of sounds that I just can’t get enough of. The main aspects of the non-broadcast tonight were two different forms of static, one of them a very lo-mid range repeating 2-second pulse, and the other a stuttering wash of noise waves that periodically broke into shards and tatters of hi-end tearing crash that scrolled up and down in volume. Layered throughout this melange was an almost constant, low-volume perhaps Czech soap opera broadcast. Then, depending on where I was on the journey through the ink of night, there threaded in undulating portions of “Harlem Nocturne”, some Flamenco guitar solos, a jazzy quartet and some opera singer of stature, Carreras or the like, singing (really) “Yesterday” in terrible earnest. Every now and again some feedback bleeps and tones came cascading through like shrieks from the throats of dying animals. It was so spectacular and other-worldly that I found myself rocketing aimlessly onward for the sake of it, past my turn, just to hear what would be mix into the crucible next. My 15-minute drive took me almost an hour. It was fascinating and riveting and soothing and rending all at once and there are countless post-Cage artists that would have loved to be able to claim that as their finest recorded moment on vinyl or optical beam. One of the best non-broadcasts I’ve caught yet.

http://www.myspace.com/dearbritch
http://www.myspace.com/vileimbeciles

]]> Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:02:36 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Daniel's a visual artist with a strong scientific cant that informs much of his work. He has recently built The Little Theatre of Disease and Desire and displayed it at The Old Operating Theatre Museum along with a slide show of images that either stand as frozen tableau (often disturbing cut-out images) inside the confines of the theater itself, or as actual slideshows and films. The theater is a collision of 18th Century toy theaters and autopsy theaters and explores the delusions, dreams and fevered imaginings that vent from that intersection. Stimulating realm of ideas and one that meshes with my own interests as well.

He's been commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to develop a more interactive version of the theater that'll become the framed setting for a series of student interpretations of illness and desire via charcoal, pencil, watercolor, smudge/smear and other materials possibly. These tableaux will be shot in sequence and dropped straight into Final Cut Pro to be shown there at the museum during the run of each workshop.

I'm really excited about this project. Besides collaborating with him on execution and logistics, I'll be spontaneously storytelling throughout each session, and the shards that I improvise as stimulated by the materials and the student's ideas will be used as intellectual engines to help facilitate the flow of creative juices, acuitive descriptions and interpretations of the material and what the students want to do with it. It's one of the more challenging and complex projects I've been involved in a while and looks to be a blast. it also feels like it's a sign post for future projects.

This is the link for Daniel's Paper Theatre:
http://www.papertheatres.blogspot.com

Here's the site for the Wellcome Trust's collection. Go exploring, it's rich and profound. I've had a chance to work with some of their extensive medical collection before and it's staggeringly broad and stupendously gruesome and only a minute portion of it is on public show.
http://www.wellcomecollection.org ]]> Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:01:07 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Black Sun rise in the solar lodge.

What the fuck?! One of the weirder things I've ever seen on the street.

Seldom a better sight seen.

Art smash and the nail in the head.
]]> Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:09:28 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
The story so far runs like this: before leaving for the Chemlab tour, work got under way between Matt Caustic the bomb factory girl and I. we tossed some ideas and a lot of similar reference points into the fire pit. Luminous? Blackly. Profoundly, and judderingly so. Ugly? Wonderfully. Once it became clear that we were actually going to record more than a few shreds of shard, it was decided to rope in Sean Cyanotic to add a criminal layer of nasty machine groove. To round out the group, my old friend and rock’n’roll shade here in London, Marc Plastic, has unlimbered his guns too.

I’ve been rocking Chemlab for years and loving it. Sean wields the merciless Machine Rock brass knuckles with Cyanotic, Matt utterly decimates the “noise-floor” competition and does it with a cruel and perfect sneer, and Plastic dominates London’s underbelly with Plastic Heroes. Prude isn’t any of these creatures yet it’s all of them and nothing too. None of us is interested in wiring up a band that’s going to head in the logical direction for any of us, the direction that’s expected when you cross-breed our bands. So, Prude’s the mistress we’re all gang-banging and she’s 3-D in four ways. We’re meshing Machine Rock Gainsbourg, Velvet Underground Revolver, 1000 Homo DJs via Gary Numan’s Smart car, Roxy Music subverted by Basement 5, Sly Stone does “Careering” from a hospital bed, and Throbbing Gristle spouting noise-scape brokenword nonsense, and on it swerves. It’s a challenging and stimulating construct that demands a lot of us all, and I’m pretty proud of what we’re doing.

We’re deep in the process of recording right now and it’s not clear when or where it’ll finally appear when it’s all done. There’s a myspace profile, but at the moment there really isn’t much there at all and there may not be for a bit. So, to get a sense of where we’re going and what the fuck this is all about, you can nail a copy of the sleazy treat “Darkroom” on the latest Bit Riot/Glitch Mode compilation. Here’s the info:

June 24th will see the release of the compilation "Cyanotic Presents: Gears Gone Wild". It features new, rare and unreleased material from Cyanotic as well as appearances from a number of friends and collaborators including 16volt, Acumen Nation, Prude (featuring Jared Louche of Chemlab, Sean Cyanotic, Matt Caustic and Marc Plastic), Rabbit Junk, Left Spine Down (Featuring Jeremy Inkel of Front Line Assembly) and more.

Pre-Order via www.bitriotrecords.com from now until June 24th and receive a sticker and pin at no extra charge with your order for getting in there early. Get it now, supplies won’t last, and the promo deal certainly won’t.

“Cyanotic Presents: Gears Gone Wild" will also be available on the 16Volt DENIAL HIGHWAY TOUR starting on the 16th of June: http://16volt.com/tour/.

We’ll have a selection of material up in due course as well as some irrelevant and irreverent artwork and a few video clips that have very little relationship to the neighborhood of The Expected. All questions will be ignored at the moment, as we’re all so deep in the mix of this and the rest of the musical fuck-fests we’re involved in that it’s impossible to devote the stream to anything more. There’ll be plenty of time for probing from you and from us, and the interviews will fly. With any luck, so will the tour dates, and since it’ll be more ‘back to basics’ than Chemlab, we’ll be sleeping on your floors and staying up all night and hanging out in your living rooms and talking shit.

So, spread the word about 16 Volt’s Denial Highway tour with Cyanotic and Bella Morte supporting. Get out there and make a bunch of fucking noise for me in the front row since I can’t be here to throw down, and pick up your copy of the compilation. It’s an excellently broad collection of talent. We’ll keep you in the loop with the developments on the Prude front. Until then: Banzai, motherfuckers!

www.myspace.com/causticmusic
www.myspace.com/cyanoticonline
www.myspace.com/plasticheroes
www.myspace.com/prudemusic ]]> Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:06:12 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)



Slotted in here:

]]> Thu, 15 May 2008 20:58:01 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)







One of my fave delis.


And then there's Katz Deli that's about to disappear. Let's ring in a big cheer for the Reign Of The Beige. Go and see it if you get a chance and "send a salami to your boy in the army" though that has to be said with the right pronunciation.









Beautiful synagog in my old neighborhood that's now owned by a couple of sculptors.




And then, almost right across the street is this little bit of wall where another synagog used to stand. The city I once knew, where I recorded many a disc, is no longer there.










In the Land Of The Beige there are a few lone outposts of riot still disturbing the masses. ABC NO RIO stands across the street from my last home on Rivington Street. It'll be gone soon, so go see it.







In the Dead Lands, the towering sculpture of battered shards is a beacon for the wanderers.




The 'circle' may look unbroken but don't be fooled, it is.






They almost certainly only sing their vertically majestic songs to me and me alone.












]]> Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:39:56 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)

There's a light in the window of night.
I've been deep in the sewers of the night and thought that it would make sense to get back to you. There's much to discuss and I've been hungry to pass so much of it along to you. I've been deeply inspired by going to see the recent retrospective of Derek Jarman's work at the Serpentine Gallery. It was one of the most inspiring journeys I've been on in ages. It has made me want to push every aspect of my own work further including the PRUDE record. I'm also aware that it's high time for me to go back to painting, collage building and releasing some of the physical shards of my work that haven't had a forum in recent years. I'm debating book building as well as part of me feels that perhaps my lyrics and other randoms deserve a home more physical than the binary stream. I'm building and painting memento mori boxes again and I've thought of possibly putting them out into the world as well, but that's currently out of the range of vision. Jarman's creative life was so off-kilter, so divinely decadent and utterly driven, without a care about convention or what the rest of the art and film world was doing. He was in a profoundly fascinating position, pioneering film and video techniques (and their nexus with painting), questing without maps or precedents as he was really so far out ahead of the curve that it's taken years for the rest of the art and film world to catch up to him. No one was doing what he was doing when he was doing it and he loved that as it allowed him to just make up the rules as he went along. It gave him great freedom of movement. Brutal beauty. As ever, in the face of this caliber of incandescent talent far greater than my own, I stand in awe, but Jarman's artwork in particular I find both energizing and humbling as I see so much of what I've always attempted to do in visual art all the while knowing that I'll never be talented enough to even come close to his genius. Not that I'd ever want to replicate him, but I'd be happy for a fleck of that creativity to color my water.Instead, I'll just continue to thrash through the underbrush in my own inimitable and careeringly fucked up way.
In the shadow of the sun indeed.

I'm uploading a collection of pictures that I took while I was in New York in January. I was there working with Gabrielle Penebaz, the iris-eyed light-demon. We've been working on a collection of films to accompany the Altered Statesmen record that's currently encased in amber. I'm fairly sure that these films will see the light of day long before the record ever does. They've got a wonderfully off-metronome quality to them that mirrors the nakedness and injured immediacy of the material on "the death of radio mars". I love working with her as she's willing to simply leap into the void without care or caution. We shot some film between two subway cars on the express trains that had some fantastically harrowing moments. I'm looking forward to working with her both on more film projects as well as larger, as-yet-unnamed projects. She rare, and towering.

The shots that I've uploaded come to you courtesy of no sleep, then or now. I'm not going to caption them, they simply reflect the light and shadow of where I used to walk when I was both angel-headed and fatally crippled. We laughed a lot, both then and now. You have to laugh at Death or it eats you and leaves your shitty little bones washed up on the bleak shale.










pray for pills












That's it for the moment, but I'll be back with another installment in another day or so. There's a deep well of them as I had the camera on constant capture since I'm still so in love with, and inspired by, the city. ]]> Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:17:14 PDT jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) “found away from my world,
feeling for foothold through a blank profound,
along with unborn people in strange lands.” *

There’s a dead bird in the backyard today. Actually just a gay pile of feathers lightly catching the tips of the breeze as it edges in off the water. There’s no heraldic husk and certainly all of the fires are out.

Must be a day to turn back over. Let sleep pamper me like a familiar, salty lover who always has a new delight with which to surprise her jaded lover.
Swim tenderly down and succumb.


* The quote’s from Browning though possibly a forgery.


]]> Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:49:14 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
It ages strangely, but her questions are always diamond-tipped.
A rare quality indeed.

http://www.fabryka.darknation.eu/php-files_en/readarticle.php?article_id=40
http://www.fabryka.darknation.eu/php-files_en/readarticle.php?article_id=185 ]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:45:48 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.regenmag.com/Blog-26-Top-10-Industrial-Albums-of-All-Time.html

Pretty cool, ain’t it? And one of my fave rags too.



]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:08:00 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
The pictures are from the idiot box, sorry for the lamp images on the screen.



There are some good video reels from the BBC. Mute the v.o. as it's incredibly lame:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7230000/newsid_7237100/7237169.stm?bw=bb&mp=rm&asb=1&news=1&bbcws=1









]]> Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:23:41 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_D4NYVlJpY

enjoy the bruise! ]]> Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:42:28 PST (hydrogen bar)







Here's the first installment of what turned out to be a fascinating and profoundly sprawling interview with James, Wes and Christine, the brains behind www.alterati.com which is an endlessly challenging and stimulating site full of great interviews and upended insights to the bleeding edge.

http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1747

There's a text portion to follow as well that'll breach the vent-hope pretty soon, as soon as I can stick a fork in the fucker and call it done.









All pictures courtesy of George Hagegeorge, an old friend discovered in the wreckage of the ages. ]]> Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:20:13 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Night-bruise!

Here's the next one in the series of interviews that's been going on since we got back from drifting DDT all over the damn country. Ilker put together a great interview, and i laughed my ass off at the picture of my head being kissed by Restless James.

http://www.regenmag.com/Interviews-214-Chemlab.html


HERE'S THE DDT EYE-SLASH FROM ORLANDO AT THE BACKBOOTH.
All pictures credited to Amanda Moore.

Winding up for razor-flail:


Turned away in the blur:


I get so angry I get all knotted up:


He gets the knot too:


Fucking knotted so tight he can't breathe:


Spitting sparks and shards of dark:


In one hand, the knife, in the other the chalice:


I love them when they're on their knees. What about you?


I kissed the floor on my way down:


Can't wait to get back on the stage. ]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:29:46 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Rock Star Journalism has long been a haven of support for bands that are doing interesting things and who aren't afraid to push the envelope. The women behind RSJ have also long been willing to push the edge, interview bands that they find stimulating and do it all in the face of profound adversity. They went off the air over a year ago, but it appears that they just couldn't stay away from the fray. Just like me. We met up once again at the show in Baltimore on the recent tour and decided that we should lay out a few more lines of code to bolster what we've done already. RSJ are always a pleasure to talk to as they always manage to come up with good questions. It's good to have them back in the mix.

http://www.rockstarjournalism.com/id81.html

There are a number of other interviews coming up, some done and some not. I'll get them posted as soon as.

There are also a slew of picture links that I'll finally be getting up now that I'm in
Re-Plug Land.

I'm attaching a link to the superb video from 1996 when we were rolling with Levi and Greg Lucas. It's taken by Aarin Ripes, the freak also responsible for getting our music onto Jeopardy years ago, and he took some fantastic pictures of the DDT show in LA-LA. Great sweeping glance back through the fog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKkm3YTp8qs ]]> Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:58:31 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
So, here's Tom Cruise in nine minutes of glory talking about the wonders of being a Scientologist. It's not only hilarious, but it's deeply disturbing. To top it all off, he never, NEVER, finishes a sentence. He does what we call in this house the "Fox News Ramble" where someone talks with great authority, misusing as many "big words" as they can manage, and yet they never actually say anything at all.

http://defamer.com/344987/the-tom-cruise-indoctrination-video-scientologists-dont-want-you-to-see

And here's the more recent one.

http://defamer.com/345699/tom-cruise-why-ask-permission-we-are-the-authorities ]]> Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:14:56 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.theaircar.com

what makes this innovation so much more interesting, and more of a realistic threat to the industry and its ossified manufacturing and production modes, is that this is the most sought-after and driven car by the middle classes in India. now, if you haven't been paying attention, the middle class in India measures, as of the census from last year, larger than the total population of these United States.

let that one sink in a second. it's cool, it took a second for me too. then, factor in the reality that both India and China are fast becoming the countries that will be driving the decisions made by most economies globally, and you quickly come to the obvious conclusion that the Tata, as it's called in India, is going to cause a major, global paradigm shift in automobile manufacturing. the potential of the Prius can't be ignored much longer, and in actual fact, the Prius is going to have a lot of severe competition from this car as well as soon as the final rejig comes and the Tata, or version 4.0-whatever, can be run off the "oompf" of the proletarian bicycle pump.

we're living in fascinating times indeed, and although the almost vertical climb of technology and the speed of socio-cultural changes can be mind-boggling and daunting, it can not be argued that we live in an age when we really have to struggle to see what's coming next. that's pretty fucking exciting. for those of us born under the perpetually rain-black aegi (is that in fact the plural of aegis? i guess it is now) of Blade Runner and JG Ballard, this is exactly the sort of thing that we used to scroll across our screens before we went to bed at night, or at dawn. we dreamt of slotting 'softs in the port behind our ears. i took PK Dick's conceptual-technical offspring on tour with me, and they lightened my load markedly: tri-band cell phones, my Mac powerbook, gps guidance for the van, web cams and ipods. we accessed the consensual hallucination of the web via wifi nodes in clubs, hotels, production offices and locking on signals at myriad coffee shops and truck stops. we traded tracks via flash drives and updated our set as we needed off Gabriel's computer in the afternoon and played a new version that night. i made movies with my phone, my cybershot and my panasonic dv cam that could then be posted every night on the viral engine of youtube, and when i started to run out of space on my internal hard drive, i dumped off the files onto my portable 250gig drive that's the approximate size of my wallet.

i could go on.

what's interesting to me is that there'll be a segment of the pop that reads this and will be totally uninterested in the marvel of it all because these innovations aren't innovations for them. due to their lack of perception of it (and that's not a value judgement at all, just a fact) they're just seen as the Bic pen of the day: they're what you use. they're actually living ahead of the curve, not marveling at it at all. they're sniffing out what's coming next that i can't even see yet. they're generation gapping me without even realizing that they're doing it.
that's the most fascinating.

the real Panther Moderns at play in the fields of Steve Jobs.

the future's dead. long live the future. ]]> Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:02:53 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
The DETONATION DAYS TOUR is now officially over and sealed tight. It came in like a lion and went out like two lions fucking. There are a number of tales that I’ll be telling in some of the upcoming string of interviews (four of them Friday alone), there was a new shirt borne out of it that we’ll have up for sale as soon as I get back to the lair beneath London (MUSIC FOR FUCKING AND FIGHTING), and, amongst other things, there was a lot of footage taken of the tour.

And now, treasures, I come to you. Many of you took both film and camera footage of the tour dates. Some of them I’ve seen and some not, but all of them were sanctioned by me/us with one single caveat: that I get to have copies of the footage.

I’m in the process of working with the rest of the band to review and possibly cut together as much of that video/film/DV footage of Chemlab as possible and I’m making a general call to everyone that brought their cameras to the shows to get in touch with me. There are a number of possible end-products being talked about at this stage of the game and it’ll help us immensely if we can see every single, lurid Zapruder image you’ve managed to collect.

I’m less interested in the photographs at the moment though please get in touch as I’m always happy to drool over pictures of me and put them into the ever-growing archive that I’ll be propping up over at the h-bar’s photo gallery.

For the time being I want moving images of any sort. Interviews as well as live footage, random segments shot at the shows, after-show footage of the two of you (Three? Four? More?) getting it on in the hotel room you rented for the night. Blurry, crisp, vertiginously hi-end or gutter-scrapingly lo-tek, whatever it is, I want to see it.. It can also be footage that you’ve filmed as inspired by the night or the band. We’ll consider that too. Please get in touch with me at the bullshit frontier (www.myspace.com/chemlab ) if you haven’t heard from me already and tell me the best way for us to contact you and work out having your black eyes and burned ideas embedded into our sprawling mass of mess. You write, we’ll write.

There are other projects galore, but the next main thrust is to finally get the Altered Statesmen record I finished with Mark Spybey last year out and into the world. Come listen to some of it: www.myspace.com/alteredstatesmenband  
Maybe we’ll even have it on the road. There will be films of that appearing very soon as well.

As usual, I digress.

Send me your eyes; battered, batting, blinking, winking, beating little hearts that snare the world in nano-second snapshots.
-jared

]]> Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:11:25 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


See how Continental rolls? He might be heading out to That California next too.



All comedy aside, as we head down the freeway into Atlanta, we passed an overpass that carried the name Blue Ball Avenue. How the fuck did the cartographers, or whoever named that avenue, decide that that was actually a viable name?! Stimulated by non-stimulation? Frustrated backlash? Child’s game gone awry? Hard to imagine that it was an idea that was decided on in committee. It must have been steamed up by one guy, and yet it had to have passed through the gates, locks and checks of committee approval at some juncture. I’m eternally amazed. “By what?” you might ask. By us, I would reply. As animals, we’ve tackled some of the greatest feats, created some of the greatest works of Art and perpetrated some of the most egregious crimes of all time. We’re also one of the strangest and most comical and perpetually confusing of all animals. That’s one of the things that sets us apart. There are countless things, and I get so tired of people that say: “opposable thumbs are THE ONE THING that set us apart from animals”. Bullshit. Guitars do too. So do guns, and the ability to bar-b-que a nice set of baby-back ribs. And the iPhone. Our vision is so simplistic sometimes.

It has finally come through the fogs that Jared might actually not be talking crazy and that crashing on the floor in front of the banquettes (you like the pretty terminology I use to make a van bench sound attractive?) might be a reasonably good option for sleeping. Crazy old man.

The drive from Orlando wasn’t the worst of them by any stretch of the imagination, and 8-9 hours seems comparatively light in the face of what we’ve done so far, but the fatigue of the end of the tour has come and the physical realisation that regardless of the days off or the longer stretches of sleep, there’s a terminal, low-grade fatigue that simply won’t go away until around Christamas time. So, this drive was pretty quiet and we tried to actually get ahead of the dim sound on our internal channels, the sound of collapse. Only a few more drives. The bittersweet realisation that it’ll soon be over.


Sugar, sugar, water, vitamins and Sharpies. This is the front of the van between the two seats, strange contrast to the old front well/dash: smokes, tin foil, lighters, pills and Sharpies. Old men at work. pretty soon it'll be denture cream, hemm cream and Bristol Cream.



I’ve been casting back through the posts that I’ve mounted over the past three weeks and a few things have brought themselves “up to the level of my vision” as my sage mother once said in the psychobabble lingo of the Neurolinguistic therapist.



One of the things that I notice a lot is that I spend very little time actually writing about the shows.


Certainly there are slashes and glimpses of them and they’re skewed, lurid and surreal.


In some elemental way though they don’t really make the kind of appearance that perhaps the readers of a tour journal might want. I know that the incidentals and the peripheral glances are the things that interest me the most, but I’m not at all sure that they are what the reading public are likely to get caught-up in. I find in my writing a lot of musing about the varied countryside that we’re passing through and the people that I get to spend time with this time out. The pleasure of spending time with this weirdo band of freaks is surprisingly profound and it inspires me to mention it just about every post I get. The obvious reason is that they’re more evolved than the creatures that I used to spend months-at-a-time with in a van. With the exception of Greg Slo-Hand Lucas, none of the other van-patriots were particularly intellectually stimulating. Not that that’s a requirement for going on tour together, but I find it’s refreshing par fois. A good sense of humor, twisted or otherwise, is critical. Lest I digress again, the people and landscape are fascinating, but the actual show appears in sidelong haze.


Atlanta, I can recall so much about tonight and countless “Atlanta nights” before it, and I’ve got lots to tell about tonight, but the show itself is less memorable. It was a great show, but it seems to me that that’s what I say all of the time. Though it may in point of fact be true, it doesn’t make for the most scintillating of reading.
“The show rocked!”
“The show was a killer tonight!”
“We really rocked the joint tonight!”
I keep nudging up against something dim in the recounting of the actual event around which the cosmos of these days revolves, and I stall in some critical way. I keep trying to put the same feeling into new phraseology, and failing.


Part of the problem is that the world starts to close down on me as the evening progresses and I find myself increasingly unplugged. If you’ve tried to talk to me before the show I hope that I’ve been reasonably polite, or at least diplomatic, but it’s increasingly hard for me to focus on human interaction as we get closer to show time. The edges start to blur. Friends often wonder if I’m really drug-free as there are times when I won’t even recognise them until my pre-show brain has had a chance to assimilate the face and experience.


This happened with Dee Madden in PDX. He came up to me and threw his arms around me and started to talk to me and I really couldn’t imagine who in the hell this strange man was that was talking to me like an old friend. Embarrassing, and it took me at least an hour to put him to his face. The pieces all crashed down on my head at that stage of the game and the ignominy I felt was profound.
There’s the mounting tension as stage time races up, getting ready to rock, stretching and pacing (sometimes I discover that I’ve been inadvertently pacing quite a swath) and trying to remember the last few strings and randoms. A weight starts to sag down on my shoulders about 15 minutes before we kick off, and it doesn’t lift until sometime during the first song though I’m never really sure when it happens. Before I know it though it’s the first break in the set, we’re rocketing headlong into the enveloping, ferocious yet sensual throat of the songs and I’m whipping and driving the horses like mad. Great feeling of liberation and electric juice, but it’s hard for me to actually remember what goes on on stage during the show itself.

For decades, from the time I was 15, I was a dedicated drug addict of one stripe or another, in search of that negative satori that we all look for when we’re blotting everything out as quickly as it can be written. I had a bottomless hunger for Oblivion. I wanted to be Not-There and to enjoy all of the warm pleasures of Not-Space, standing up on the rooftop drinking in the starless night. Certainly I often craved ‘sharp’ too and so was a speed freak for many years as well as a lover of barbiturates in all forms, but I think that the groove that I found to be the most delicious and satisfying in terms of total abandon and seismic blur was smack.


Through years of experimentation, trial and error (a LOT of error) I’ve discovered that the stage is in fact the most powerful of all of the drugs that I’ve ever managed to cram into my me. One of the weird by-products of that situation is that I get really, really off-the-grid when I perform and all of the things that “matter” and are important slide out of focus in some really elemental and primitive way. It’s The Great Debilitator. That’s a strange thing to say as I’m not really out of touch with what’s happening on stage or the world around me, but I just don’t really take it all in either, or care.



It’s like the old quote about being old enough to appreciate Youth. I’m finally clean enough to appreciate Oblivion. It’s pretty hard to explain and in reading back through it it seems to me that I should simply stop trying to get the details of something captured when the actual essence of the thing itself is beyond details and the ability to ensnare it with words. It’s fabulous and I love it and I have a delicious time not being there. I always have, it’s just that now there are fewer millstones attached. Heroin was a colossal blast and I enjoyed many aspects of it without regret or debilitation for many years. The problem was never being on drugs, it was being OFF them that killed me and all of the fun. I suppose that if I had been independently wealthy it would’ve continued to be a fantastic dream, as long as I kept my eyes shut to all of the other details.
....blahblahblah.... never would've gotten here though, or snared Maja and had Django, I'd almost certainly be dead and all of this would be academic, and a bit surreal as ghosts being academic is always a bit strange and off-beat.

Oh bondage, up yours! Anyway, the stage transports me and if you’re wondering why I’m hard to approach before the show, now you know; I’m high on lights and monitors. Come see me after the gig and we’ll hang out and cause trouble.

Steve “the fly” Watson, the guitarist from the whole Burn Out period was there and it was amazingly cool to see him. He got all sideways for a bit and smeared love all over me and the band. I think we knocked his rocks off. He said we did. He left at the end of the night with a head full of sparks and laughter and lit off a bunch of fireworks on the pavement right by the van too. It was sweet to hang out with him though we didn’t have much time to catch up, There never is enough time.


-kiss-kiss-"oh, i remember those lips"-


Narc from Helltrash slithered through as well and we spent a little time trading tales of foolishness in the dark. I’ve always liked his approach to Rock as he's got attitude and soul. He turned out to be far more fey than I’d ever expected from our correspondence. Email simply doesn’t convey some of the finer points and gestures of human nature and of some of the characters that we meet in the ethers. Real life can be a shocker. Like the back room at Max’s Kansas City where everyone was beautiful and in love and draped around each other under the red lights. Once the night had worn off and they hit the pavement under real light many of those budding romances died a startled and sudden death. Really cool cat and a great attitude though. Could certainly see more of him. Andy Combichrist showed up and got mobbed. Would’ve been nice to see him more and actually get to hang out, but it wasn’t happening. He and I met last year at Blacksun and became friends. He said that Chemlab was one of the reasons that he started doing music which I think is sweet but I’m never sure if I really believe that one. It continues to be next-to-impossible for me to believe that the band could’ve had any more than passing effect on anyone at all. It’s nice for my ego to hear though. I remember hearing it years ago in New Orleans from Brian Warner and not believing it then either. He also said that he wished that he'd thought of the Fuck Art shirt and was willing to kill me for it which I had a far easier time believing. The shirt part, not the killing. He's such a nice boy.
Still nice to hear though.

Shut your mouth, dear. You'll catch bugs.


Fly, Les Fools and Sundries.

Last of the long drives, heading out of here and up to Balto. We’re leaving tonight and heading straight on. No real time for a hotel or to crash, so we’ll drive instead. Ain't rock'n'roll glam?!

Poor Restless, crashed hard on the hard of the van floor. Smoke at the ready though.
Not really sure if that show’s going to fly or not as it has been on uncertain terrain for a few days now. Although I think that the owner and I have come to an understanding, it seems that the night’s going to be shaky at best. It boggles my mind that a promoter would bid on a show that he’s not sure about, and then try to cancel it once the tour’s rolling, or stop taking calls once the tour’s rolling. As I keep saying, over and over again, “If you can’t do the show, then don’t do the show.” I really won’t be insulted by it, but I’ll be furious if you take the show and then try to back out on it because you don’t know how to promote. Idiots.

I’ve also been dealing with a mountain of mercenary shit from Skeleton Key’s booking agent.

(notice how this "pre-melted treat" really looks like a bag of shit?)
She seems to think that throwing around bad attitude cloaked beneath the guise of “fighting for her band” is the way to endear them to me and the rest of the tour and get the best deal for SK. This has been going on since long before the tour started, but it really has only now become and unpleasant issue. Amazing how she can manage to see Duane’s groin injury as an opportunity to ask for more money for her band. She totally disregards the fact that although her band is great they've had very little draw on this tour and have been nit-picky about the money. Not really sure if they understand their value (or lack thereof) in the marketplace, but they’ve added very little besides sonic joy to the tour, and their agent has been a constant, unprofessional nightmare to deal with. Whatever. The band’s a pleasure to watch every night and they light up the stage increasingly. Feels like they’re really hitting a deep stride as they get more and more jagged every show. That’s a good thing, in case you weren’t sure.

Did I mention that we rocked tonight?
* sound of laughter echoes down the freeway at 80mph *





Atlanta rocks, sorry I didn't really tell you about it. ]]> Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:06:02 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


As usual, the broken pieces interested me the most.



The Jew, The Gentile and a Grecian echo. The crosscurrents are staggering when you gaze above the waves.



Ex Nihilo. From Nothing To Nothing.



Though this isn't the sign for it, "Gung Gou", the symbol that stands for China means "Middle Country, or country at the center of the globe". Once so true in its hemisphere, it's rising once more on a grand scale.



It's the end of the end as we know it.

]]> Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:56:34 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)



Nice collection of shoes ya got there, kid. Yes, they're all mine. Love the leopard-print heels, great lift and very comfortable.




"I can't hear a fucking thing you're saying!"



That anyone would want to read this is beyond me. That it's shoved in our faces is galling. Lets hear it for another assault on the captive audience. It's right up there with the back panel of the Covenant Trucking company trucks that reads "It's a CHILD not a CHOICE"



The Glory!
The Majesty!
The Total, Debasing Comedy! ....like I care.
It makes a superb counterpoint to the last shot though.



We leave so few marks across the face of the Faceless that any chance is worth taking.



10-point.
12-point.
I feel like I'm missing the point with so much that is held to be dear .jpg"no pun) in the heart of my country. I really love the place and all its failings, but sometimes the place goes past me at 100mph. This was displayed in a McDeaths window, another homeland tradition whose ornaments don't really twinkle for me either.



Ok, what the fuck? This is taken, obviously, through the windshield of the Beast, so the immensity is clear. But, what the fuck is it? I'm entranced by it as I am by a number of weird things like this. I'll post plenty of pictures of the 'weird' over the next week or so.
I immediately think "missile silo".

]]> Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:02:04 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.regenmag.com/Blog-19-ChemlabSkeleton-KeyCyanotic-in-Baltimore.html ]]> Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:13:58 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
I'll show you the perfect pictures of the 'bitter' and the 'sweet' about the tour being over as soon as I can get all of my pictures pulled together.

It was a glorious tour and really made me feel like there's a lot of point in not making this just a one-time event. I'll come back to this issue again in greater depth at some point fairly soon, but it has been said, ever since I started to get the band back into working order, that it's foolish for me to do Chemlab without Dylan.
Yes, THAT old saw.
When people heard that I was making another album they said that it would be shit and that there was no point. It turns out that people actually liked what I did with that record. When people heard that I was planning on taking the band out on some select dates around the country the response was that I was insane and that it would suck. I'm not insane and the response to those dates was stellar. Again, when I started talking about the idea that I was actually going to take the band out on the road on a proper tour the response was that without Dylan it would be shit and never work. Everyone who has engaged in the pleasure of tearing me and the band down has been proved categorically wrong time and time again.
I, on the other hand, remain vindicated.
The band was great and the shows were killer and, most importantly, the audiences not only materialized, but they were enthusiastic about Chemlab being back.

As I said, I'll revisit this topic again in the very-near future, but for the moment I'm just basking in the glow of standing in the face of adversity and coming up with a success in my hands.
That success is due in no small part to the band members who deserve a great deal of the credit:
Gabriel Shaw on axe and hack (www.myspace.com/mindfieldebm)
James McAndrew on bass and feathers (www.myspace.com/milquetoasto)
Jason Bazinet on drums and hypotheticals (www.smphq.com)
Wade Alin on sound and vision (www.myspace.com/atomica)

I'll revisit them as well in a bit, but the success is also due to you and your decision to make up your own mind and come and support something that you love and that is alive. That showed, night after night after night, and we all appreciated it immensely.

I'll be spending the next few days getting all of the last posts up on the site as well as starting to upload all of the the photos from the whole tour. There are more pictures there than you might ever reasonably be expected to be interested in, but I'm going to see just how many of them I can get up regardless. That'll require some editing, but I'll get there very soon, certainly while the embers are still hot.

Stay mean, and mean it.




photo courtesy of wendo ]]> Thu, 20 Dec 2007 03:18:44 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Grandfather moss clinging to the trees like dusty cobwebs the same way that outdated ideas and approaches to life cling to this state and its inhabitants. There are a lot of cool Chemlab fans here, but I feel bad for them as this is the sort of state that people really mean when they talk about Red States. Jesus lurks behind every billboard, and every face peering out over the steering wheel is reddened by too much sun and not much else. “What the hell’s that?!” is the usual comment as we roll up to a gas station.

IT’S A SMALL WORLD.
I KNOW.
I MADE IT.
-GOD

Tampa and Tallahassee were washouts. The Tampa show was a pick-up date that was just to fill an otherwise off night. Tampa has a great scene, but we weren’t in it. We were in the wrong venue, without the rest of the touring line-up and supporting a joke, college party band. Bad electro-lite sung by two hairy guys whose schtick is to dance around, slowly get undressed (yuck-greasy and hairy, except for one of them who had shaved his pubes in the bathroom and left a pile of hair in the bowl….classy guys, but I’m sure it’s all supposed to be so very shocking. Uh huh. Shocking. Riiiiiight) and throw beer on themselves and the crowd. Wow. Heeeaaavy, bro, I remember my first beer, dude-bro. I also remember the Beastie Boys doing that far, far better in 83. Blah. We demolished their crowd and they didn’t know what to do with us, but they couldn’t leave either. Stuck in place like dumb deer in headlights, we spattered them with our juices and strutted off the stage to stunned applause. There were some Chemlab fans there and we converted a bunch of new ones, but it wasn’t the show for us. Curse dj’d for a set or two before us and then we rolled out to The Castle where we should’ve been playing. Cool to hang out with Curse since I never get to see enough of him now that I’m overseas. Gen from the Genitorturers hooked in with us for a while and increased the amount of available foolishness. Cool to see her as well. It’s been years. She’s setting up a dungeon deep in the bowels (!!) of The Castle’s maze. We toured it and it looks to be swank and even has bunk beds with glory holes and Afroporn on the slats. Hilarious ride I’m sure. Hopefully some of my tranny fans will tell me what it’s like once it opens up. It was a delicious night amongst damaged friends.

BE SURE YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT. READ YOUR BIBLE.

We were going to hook up with her and Curse and his lady friend Angela, but the next morning came the collapse of the tour and Duane’s groin. That blew everything out of the water and we were so depressed that doldrums set in and we stopped moving. It took all the strength we could muster to get out for dinner. We sequestered early, updated blogs, talked to the USSA camp and friends. It was a terrible blow. We don’t get to spend the last week of the tour together and finish off what has been a demanding but rewarding run. Very frustrating. The cocoon of night came on early and soon we ended the day.



Tallahassee had two bright spots in it, but unfortunately neither of them was the show though Cyanotic have joined us and that’s a kick. I’m looking forward to seeing them every night. Be interesting to see how they pan out with the audience.

The first bright spot was doing a live radio broadcast at V89 college radio. It’s an amazingly cool station that’s drenched in posters and is willing to take a lot of musical chances that many other stations, even college radio, are not. Wade got us set up and balanced fast and just after 5pm we let rip with a white-hot version of ‘White Room’, killer ‘Pyromance’ and I managed to censor myself on ‘Suicide Jag’ most of it but “long live the fucking king” came through loud and clear. Oh well. The FCC can send me a letter.
“I got a letter from the government, I read it, it said they were suckers!”
Chuck D/Public Enemy.

As we ended the last song of the live broadcast, Gabriel held out a stuttered feedback tone and I started to tell a story. It’s a story called “Genius” about a broken-down, coulda-been-a-contender horn player. He’s the cat at the end of the bar that you buy a drink for and he tells you stories all night about the people he’s played with and the things he’s done over his twisted days and nights. He’s a potential incarnation of me, or who I used to think I’d become when I was still on the Next To Die list. As I told the story, in that hot studio space, Gabriel drew lazy, lo-looping lines of feedback through the words, carefully tracing their shape. Continental skittered some non-rhythmic signatures and gentle cymbal rustlings as Restless lay out a strange, crooning sound. We all listened and riffed off of each other, the dynamics building tension and then letting it off. It has always interested me to put musicians who are comfortable in a quantised, programmed context into a free, improvisational non-framework and see what they can do. I find it’s only the most self-confident of those that can get something good to come together. One has to play less and listen more, play the holes between the notes.

It worked shockingly well and when the story finally wrapped itself up I was drenched in sweat and on the brink of tears, water pouring off my face, suffused with the character. As Continental said later on: “it was a very NPR moment”.

JESUS IS YOUR ONLY HELP IN THIS WORLD OF DAMNATION.
CALL HIM TODAY.

The other good part of the day was seeing my old friend Tom Smith. He and I were in an utter noise/experimental band called Peach Of Immortality many years ago (84-87) and we destroyed many stages and many heads. We went through many incarnations, but we were far ahead of the noise crowd. There wasn’t much crowd at that stage and we were Merzbow without caring or trying. He continues to make brutal, visionary, uncompromising music through his hydra-headed creation that is To Live And Shave In L.A. (www.toliveandshaveinla.com that is, if you think you can actually decipher where he’s going.) He’s one of the most intellectually stimulating people I know and has come to a point of balanced sarcasm. He’s a fucking genius and I swallow great gouts of his royal sperm. We spent much of the evening dissecting our past exploits, the pavannnes and divigations of this tour and the latest occurrence of Chemlab discussing the complexities inherent in our nascent desire to release the bulk of the PoI catalog. Considering it spans countless radio broadcasts, performances, studio recordings and ‘events’ the span is daunting regardless of the calibre of blade you decide to slice it with. Some 50 albums. We’ll see what happens when we finally get there though the explosion of that glory will be debilitating. Divine to see him lurk in his civilian get up amongst the dark boys as they slew sideways glances his way with the “who the fuck’s THAT” look. The funny thing is, the way he looks is subversive and conceals so much. Scratch the surface of most “scary looking” people and they bleed bunnies and rainbows and courtesy. Scratch Tom’s surface and you get liquid, rusty razors, howlingly superior intellectual threat and a disturbing calibre of courtesy.
He’s one of the geniuses.

THERE IS LIFE BEFORE BIRTH. HEARTBEAT BEGINS AT 18
DAYS.

The show was what it was. The kids enjoyed it immensely (as did my favorite cynic, TS) and we had a pretty good time. The stage was wide and that meant that I was all over it and not really keeping up with myself. “Sometimes it takes all the running you can do just to stay in one place” said the Red Queen to Alice. Gabriel has been playing a super-sexy solo during Chemical that I’ve been deeply driven by every night. It was sticky and slick tonight. Sultry and sexy. The crowd were jacked by the show, but it was hard to get in the right spot. The joint was too big and there were too few bodies.

We’ve passed The Drag Racing Museum three times in the past 72 hours as we carve a Star of David into Florida’s sunburned brow.

Orlando’s gig at the Back Booth was excellent and easily one of the seriously powerful and elemental shows of the whole tour. The stage was tiny, but there was just enough space for us to ram up into its guts and hammer away. The audience went nuts from the top of the set and there was a crazy, weirdo pit cruising and crushing throughout the whole collection. I haven’t brought the band through Orlando since the White Zombie tour and I’d go back there tonight. Fantastic crowd and one of the few places where a pit broke out from the first song and continued throughout. Super energy and lots of mania-frippery. We poured music into their mouths and they swallowed. And the night ended with very little sleep and the realisation that we’ve got a 9 hour drive from here to Atlanta, and then a 12-13 hour drive up to Balto. That means that we really won’t be sleeping in Atlanta at all. We’ll just leave straight out after the show. Shit-fire. The nightmare’s not over yet.

THERE IS NO HOPE WITHOUT A LIVING CHRIST.

A living Christ? IS THERE in fact a “Living” Christ? Hard to imagine, indeed. ]]> Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:37:56 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
The complexities of the collapse of the Rockyard Ft Worth/Dallas show are too labyrinthine and annoying to go into here, so I’m going to pass. I’m too drained to go through all of it right now. I might have the energy later. We’ll see. Suffice it to say that the owner of the Rockyard closed the club up without warning. The promoter for our show arrived at the club a few days ago to find it dark. I didn’t find out about this from the promoter, or the booking agent, but rather from a fan on myspace wondering what was happening as she had head that the place was dead. Theoretically the promoter tried to get the show moved to another location, but that never happened. I think he just bailed when he realised that he had bid on a show he couldn’t do. So, we got stuck with a solidly cancelled show as we’re hauling ass across the vast expanse of Texas to get to the show in time. All in vain.

This has just been a draining day. The wind outside’s a whipping tornado and it blows the van all over the road. I feel like we’re all buffeted at the moment and morale is at a bit of a low. We’re out here to play. Days off are for when the tour is over, not for when you’re out on the road. Days when you don’t play are days that bleed out money, days that are hard to fill with any activity that's interesting, they’re empty unless you’ve got another 14-hour drive ahead of you…..the joy, days of nothing that stretch off to the horizon blossoming with nothing.

It’s times like this that it all looks bleak. Shows have fallen apart, money is tight (I use the word “tight” to mean nightmarish), tensions run high, girlfriends and wives are hitting the “fuck, you’ve been away a long time” snapping-point as the novelty finally wears off, and van fatigue sets in from too many long drives and nowhere near enough sleep.



None of us slept well last night after the El Paso show. The Mesa Inn where we marooned obviously hasn’t changed since it was built in the 50’s. I'm sure it was intended by the architect to look grand at the time, but it's tawdry and lost it's blush a long time ago, if it ever had blush. The sheets were foul, stained, smelled moldy and had cigarette burn holes throughout. Haven’t been in a motel like that in years and haven’t missed it at all. I slept on top of the covers and drowned in an apocalyptic, choking nightmare. I kept falling back into it every time I tried to shake it off. I even walked around the room for a few minutes at one point, and as soon as I went back to sleep it rocketed right back into my skull. This Mesa Inn’s a horrible counterpoint to the hushed opulence of The Roosevelt in LA and the perfect illustration of where our morale is today.
The windows here don’t even fit in the frames and they let in gouts of cold air all night.
The doors don’t really lock well.
The shower has scum rings in it and no one showers. Our grime’s preferable to theirs. The towels are paper-thin and rough.
There’s a low, whispering hum coming out of the dented grill of the wall-mounted radio.





















Funny spread of hotels on this tour. There have been a few wonderful hotels, and a few horrible dogs, but mostly they’ve been like apparatchiks; functional and faceless, pod receptacles for our frames to cycle-down in, places that leave no mark and aren't supposed to. It's the concept of "Single-serving friends" applied to hotel life.

I hated this place. We all did.
It wasn't the worst, by any means, but it definitely wasn’t a restful night, and a restful night was what was badly needed. Now it’s another day of restless, semi-sleep in the stuffy van as we roll on to the next date.

Countless wrecker yards sprawl on every side just beyond the fly-spattered van windows, mountains of hulking car husks, piles of rusted junk that won’t ever serve any other purpose than as the decorations emblematic of excess and waste. Waves of cotton, hairballs, blood clots, oil drums bursting.
The Exxon backwash leaves a bad taste.















Is there really any reason to spend the money on putting up a sign that reads: Population 117? It seems to me that a blink-and-you-miss-it town like that doesn’t really warrant a sign that must be pretty expensive to manufacture and erect. Weird decision.

Along with the idea of the Trucker's Chapel, there's the mobile ministry. This one no longer looks particularly mobile, but I'm sure it's still doing the Lard's work.









We finally camped out in a refreshingly faceless Ramada/Holiday Inn/Hampton Inn something. Dinner presented itself to us in the guise of Cracker Barrel somewhere off the freeway. Our waitress, Ferrin, was a nymph full of sweet chatter and eyelash-flutter. She hovered around, taking good care of us and we poured out some honey and a tip that felled her. She actually came out to ask me if we actually meant to leave her that much.
We did.
“Well, shoot. I’m sure glad I came to work today!”
This is the letter I just got from her two days later:
--------------------
“hey guys!
i hope your show in austin was "crunk"
it was wonderful to meet you.

~TRUE STORY~
once you left i went bragging to my GM Joe about how i just waited on Chemlab, and he rushed out to meet you too.
he told me that he wouldn't have charged you for your meal...
so yeah, WHOOPS.
my bad, hell you would have had free fish and meatloaf.

it was a pleasure.
~Ferrin~
-----------
I love the picture of the manager hustling his butt out to meet us. I guess we’d already split the scene. Next time we’ll pull in off the blur of the road and eat for free at the Cracker Barrel in Somewhere, Texas.

Sleep came to fold us up in its silent arms and we fell like stones through cold water.



]]> Mon, 10 Dec 2007 05:17:41 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ripesphoto/sets/72157603415265485/detail/ ]]> Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:03:11 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)










]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:39:09 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


It's mind-boggling to me how many of these signs I see all over the country. I guess that in the face of how many guns there are in circulation it's amazing that there aren't MORE of these signs out there.





Caged motherfuckers in New Orleans.



Restless looking for the ladies and cruising for the spark in the dark.



Curse sending you just the tip of the 'love'. You have to beg for the rest of it, boys.



Continental dreaming about free continental breakfast, crappy Motel 6 coffee and a gut-busting belly-punch of Taco Belch. Ever the rock star.



Reading tea leaves at dinner in hopes of finding out more about how Duane's doing.



The barcode comes out from under the thatch. Skeet reveals his technical side.



Trucker's Chapel.
Is there really anything else that needs to be said about that? I think not.



Look at that beautiful, slow-building cumulus cloud. How poetic. How romantic. How adorable. How entrancing. How enchanting. How...
A superstore? A SUPERSTORE? Are you fucking kidding me?
We're a really stupid species.



There's more to come, both eye and finger, in it. ]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:58:03 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) Courtesy of Avery Sik.



Ever the intellectual and not in the least contextually predictable.
Courtesy of Ded.



..swarmed by the hordes, I am slowly yet inexorably consumed..
Courtesy of Ded.

]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:46:34 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) Our good friend and tour companion Duane Denison has herniated his groin muscle and has had to leave the tour. He injured it weeks ago and it has gotten progressively worse and worse. We all knew that it was bothering him, but he's not a terribly demonstrative guy and certainly not a complainer or Drama Queen, so he kept quiet about the level of pain he was in.

Yesterday he thought he might be able to continue with the tour, but it turns out that this morning he woke up in much more pain than he's been in before. Waylon took him to see the doctor and the doc declared him crippled and in need of immediate surgery.

So, they're heading straight back to Nashville today.

Sadly, this is the end of the tour for USSA.
Please send them a message of support and respect to their myspace page. If you came to the shows, if you wanted to come to the shows and missed it, if you came to see us and didn't like USSA, I don't care. Please send him and the band some support regardless. I've had a hernia, and the attendant surgery, and it's a painful nightmare that'll fuck up more than the last week of the tour for Duane.

http://www.myspace.com/ussaband

Thanks for writing.


Duane and all of USSA were a pleasure to work with and a knockout to perform with every night. They were professional and carried none of the ego that one might think they'd have wrapped around them. Duane was a gentleman and hilariously funny as well as quietly strong, and he plays a mean, burly guitar that just won't quit. Can't wait to see them back on the road and taking over.

It's been a strange honor for us to be out on the road with them. Strange because I can't imagine in what weirdo universe Chemlab could be deemed to be the headliner above USSA. It should be the other way around. Soon they'll be massive and we wish them strength. We've had a great time watching them and have been pretty lucky to absorb it nightly as they stretched out USSA's envelope. Cool also to be there before it all becomes huge and unaffordable. Chemlab got to tour with them early on.
Pretty fucking cool.

We'll miss them terribly.

I'm too depressed to write anything else. We'll see you in Tallahassee where we meet up with Skeleton Key, get to add Cyanotic to the bill and we'll roll on. We'll see you soon.
-jared

Here's some glory from our friends. More to follow.





Duane's balls. They're big and burly.



Paul and Wade talking about talking.



Duane and Johnny would come down during the tail-end of our set and square dance and reel during Suicide Jag and Summer Of Hate. They always had a great time and it was side-splittingly hilarious to watch them at it out on the dance floor. It certainly made it nigh on impossible to be the "serious-furious rock star" with those loons goofing and having a blast right in front of us. You can see a right shoulder of Bobby from Skeleton Key who joined in the reels sometimes.
I think the shots of Bushmills I brought to USSA on stage during their set might've been a partial motivator for an extended dance-remix show from them here.
Gonna miss that foolishness.



Shadow catching some light at the feet of the ion.



Paul hitting his millennium and getting his groove on.



Gary sending shivers.



Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge.



Irene, good night. Good night, Irene.
I'll see you in my dreams.





Get better soon, fool. We miss you.
-jared, gabriel, james, jason, wade and adam ]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:14:04 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)
Howler in the teeth of the foggy, NOLA night. What a fantastic night.




What a fucking queen!



Drummers are hard to photograph, but I'm putting this cartoon picture up of Continental because he never gets any play in picture world.



Riot Robot.



Let me make one thing perfectly clear, kids.



Feathered and freakish.



FUUUUUUCK YEEEEAAAAAAHH!!!



and here we gooo!



and here we collapse!



Off the stage and into the cage. Why's there a guy with a camera in here instead of some slinky young thing? Filming courtesy of Dan from NooMoon Tribe.



Oh shit! Lock up your daughters! No, sons! No! Well, just get everyone inside and down into the bomb shelter!!

 

]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:26:16 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


Swooping of concrete at un-dusk



We're soooooo industrial!!



Steel giants at the gates of dawn.





Bobby Crash from Skeleton Key getting ready to set up his kit in PDX at The Hawthorn



I still get excited by this sort of thing. I'm such a dazzled-by-the-lights kid. It's like hearing your music on the radio. There's an unshielded wire that still manages to send a frisson right up me and across the surface.



Dee Madden from Penal Colony and some sycophantic creep hanging off of him.



Eric 16Volt Powell and the maniac fools cutting up. I didn't correct for red eye because, for once, i think that it actually enhances things. Shadow with his head back looks really Lost Boys. Restless doesn't look too uncreepy himself.



We're going to go on tour together with our new side project,
The Ten-Foot Tall Angry, Grumpy Heads.



Hey man, how does this modern camera bullshit thing work??!?



The hotel room doors at The Jupiter Hotel in PDX are painted with chalkboard paint. There's a little pile of chalk inside the room that you can use to decorate your door with for the duration.
I love rock'n'roll hotels.



White Room, Red Crash



The Silver Surfer goes to sleep.



New dawn fades.
The next morning, on the way to San Francisco, cigarette break along the road.
Adam hates nature."Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck! Fuck trees! Where are the fucking buildings? Fuck! This fucking sucks. Fuck!"



Continental In The Blur. The guy never seems to stop sly smiling. He's got a really even keel. Makes life on the road so much better to deal with.



Behind the scratched surface.



Between the buttons.



Gabriel hustling the wires as we fly through the green smear that passes for Nature in our world.



Too many jokes to even manage to get just one of them to squeeze out.



]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:02:14 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)


Stars and bars. Shots courtesy of Akiko and Walter.

]]> Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:19:18 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared) Show us your tats!



CACTUS!!



NO CACTUS!!




I love the fact that the 'pet exercise area' is right next to the 'dangerous insects and snakes' area.



Do NOT unload your livestock here under any circumstances!



It's reassuring to me that Jesus rests quietly on his cross right next to the farm house. I've always been curious about where he hangs out.



Behind the stage at Zeppelins in El Paso. That was our backdrop, and the stage never got any brighter, even when we were setting up our gear.



Artwork from the walls in Zepps. Some great looking stuff and a bunch of visual noise. Very cool, jagged stuff.



One of my favorite signs ever. There are a number of them that'll be making an appearance throughout.



We're at The Crowbar in Tampa at the moment and it's a joke sports bar. Won;t even describe it as it doesn't even merit that much. Besides, you know what it looks like in here. It's the kind of place we avoid. Makes me wonder what the hell we're doing here and if we'll have any of our crowd here at all. This joint's the antithesis of everything that I love and believe in. The club has no dj, as far as I can tell, except when Curse gets on the wheels of opti-beam. They're blasting the radio, Cirius and it's packed with commercials.
How sports bar of them.
Hope my wireheads show up.
I'll let you know what happens, obviously.
We'll see.

Tomorrow's a day off in Tampa with Curse and I'm hoping to get myself all updated here with tales of Texas, pictures of the freaks and more .

Detail photos of the Mesa Inn will follow in a little bit. ]]> Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:38:56 PST jared@hydrogenbar.com (Jared)