"Rat Poor Malice" this years RPM Challenge Album

I had like maybe 5 days or a week total to put this together this year, we had a two week holiday to Miami and a bunch of family stuff to take care of. anyway it’s not too bad all things considered. The first couple tracks are solid.

Beyond this album I also took part in Right Out Of'er Records experimental compilation album where a bunch of stellar artists were given the same crazy Devon Milley drum track and asked to make a song for it. Every song sounded surprisingly different from one another. It’s a fun listen, I thought my song was pretty out there but placed after Victor Lewis’s brain breaking “Valentine” it sounds positively pedestrian.

It’s been pretty quiet on here for awhile but I have been getting busier and busier lately and very shortly I’ll be able to show you some stuff I’ve been working on. Hopefully I can kick my undiagnosed ADD ass into better gears the next few months.

Hey Hello! How's it going? Been awhile, here's an RPM Album for Ya! Real Person Magazine

Hey I had a baby and I had to take care of it for a couple years so I couldn’t make a bunch of art or music. I still have to take care of it and I still don’t have much time to devote to creating stuff but the boy just lucked into a daycare situation so now I have some time as opposed to none. Anyway I did a RPM this year and it’s pretty dang solid I think. I’m putting it out under the name “Coma Shuttles” which is a name I came up with last year when I made a very short RPM with my one year old boy Malcolm called Rictal Palm Mock which is an anagram of Patrick & Malcolm and Coma Shuttles is an Anagram of our combined second names Thomas & Cletus. I dig the way Coma Shuttles sits on the tongue so I might use it for awhile. Well hopefully I will have more and more stuff to share now that I have weekday mornings and afternoons free now.

Give the album a listen it’s a pretty dang good I think

New Album "Rust Protection Maintenance" Sad Tax 2022 RPM

Well February came and went and yet again I am left with a new album of music with an RPM acronym for a name. This year it was way more up in the air whether or not I was going to actually finish an album as I have one of them baby things hanging around my house needing attention all the time. I could only find the time to pick away at it while mother and child slept in the room next door. So this one is much less spit polished than most of my RPM’s but I got a few solid tunes out of it. It goes from dire state-of-the-world type ruminations to pretty much straight up, sappy-assed sentimentalist odes to my newborn to some very silly absurdist excursions. Giver a listen if you’ve ever liked my any of my stuff.

New Christmas Video! "A Child Is Born"

That time of year happened again, here is the final music video in the Christmas video project, the lucky 13th! A Child Is Born is the most sincere song on the album it’s also the most over the top. I figured what with Malcolm in the picture, spending two weeks before Christmas every year making a dour Christmas music video while a toddler screams through the house seems like a losing proposition. Anyway, this’ll be the album opener and it’s also the only christmas song on the list that tackles the nativity story.

The album is now a physical object you can buy and hold in your hand:

Even though the province is going through a ridiculous lock down again lots of thing be looking up for this new year and the next.

Merry Christmas!

Another Thing I Made (with help) A Child Named Malcolm!

Sometimes a project comes up that’s so big you got to push a bunch of stuff off your plate so you can tackle it properly. That has been most of my 2021 as we prepared for the arrival of this little guy, Malcolm Cletus Swab Canning born 6 pounds 7 ounces three weeks ago. He’s a wiggly little bean burrito and we couldn’t be happier.

New SAD TAX Music Video! "I Found Love (in the usual places)"

How many puppets can you make in an evening and a quick trip to Dollarama? about a dozen if your standards are sufficiently low enough. This here is a Janky video for my favourite song off the latest Sad Tax album "Rose Panic Mother" "I Found Love (in the usual places)". I needed to harness the power of bad puppetry and janky green screen to truly capture the energy of the track. It’s my favourite track off this year’s RPM album, which I think at this point I will say is my best RPM album out of the thirteen I’ve done. That’s the way it’s sitting in my ears right now. Maybe this video is a bit jankier than I was picturing at first and I’ve certainly not learned anything from my past experiences with the Youtube compression algorithm as you can see by the final extra crunchy looking 20 seconds of the video where every pixel is active and youtube just has no idea what to do with them all so it decides to process it like a mid 90’s CD-rom FMV videogame. I’m still pretty dang happy with it, it’s got the silliness and the mania I wish I could manifest in my regular life but alas. Hopefully it brings you some.. Joy? Entertainment at least? Ecstatic and ebullient love? Manifest destiny?

Whatever, watch it several times than tell me what you think.

"Rose Panic Mother" my 2021 RPM Challenge album

Well it’s that time of the year again, february came and went and left me with this brand new baby RPM challenge album. Rose Panic Mother is my thirteenth challenge album and my first under lockdown. I felt the need for catharsis and sustained release this last month/year so this album more so than any of my other albums is loud and pretty dancey. My stand out tracks would be “I Found Love (in the usual places)” which is a pretty wacky up tempo number ala The Make-Up or The Cramps with a very overblown musical theatre type second half, “This doesn’t fit in my fantasy” which is one of my better synth driven straight up pop songs, “Mom always asks why I do this every year” which is a chorus-less song about recording a terrible song that gave me a lot of trouble in the studio but a friend of mine who is a songwriter I deeply respect said it “is now firmly in the canon of great songs about songs” so it was worth the trouble, and “Anthem of privilege in the ears of the damned” which is a wordy attempt to write a utopian song that is also a commentary on the absurd distortion of reality from the perspective of privilege, I really enjoy some of the lines in this one and it felt very satisfying to write. Anyway, I think this album holds up as one of my better RPM efforts and y’all should listen to it if you like me.

New Christmas Video "The Warden's Carol"!

The Christmas songs you hear on the radio are usually all recorded cheap and dirty at some point in the previous summer by sad, sweaty, desperate music producers looking for a quick money cash in. I don't mind the quick, cheap and dirty part I just feel it should be done as close as possible to the day itself so you get more of that properly desperate Christmas element in there. Each year I write and record a new Christmas song in the last couple weeks before Christmas, each with their own accompanying music video also done within a week or so before the 25th of December. Oftentimes this harsh deadline creates some real inspiration, although it's almost always more than a little janky (especially the video part). It's my little Christmas tradition that mostly annoys my wife as it keeps me very busy on the first couple days of her holidays, I think next years will be my last one, I figure 13 is a nice lucky number for a completed Christmas album.

Anyway, this years song is a pretty topical and lyrically bleak song about injustices of prison labour, border militias, refugee concentration camps. The reason I enjoy writing Christmas songs is that I like writing tragedies and if you contrast anything awful against the banal sentimentality of Christmas it immediately becomes three times as tragic. I’m quite happy with the song this year, the progression is quite satisfying to play and the vocal harmonies in particular really work well I think. The video is okay, I kinda ran dry on ideas for the music video that I could do in three days, so I just set up the green screen with a couple coloured lights and did a bunch of li syncing takes with my nylon stringed guitar. It’s not my worst Christmas video.

Here’s the Christmas album as it stands so far. Merry Christmas!

C.A.L.M.E.D. Transmissions Coat Of Arms

AE Bridger is an interesting fellow who I have collaborated with on several occasions. During the first few months of this pandemic thing Alex had been doing daily live streams of improvisational drone and meditation music. He did it pretty consistently over a few months until he ended up with over 48 hours of music all of which were recorded from a top down camera on his interesting array of instruments. Alex was talking about making a webspace where he could host this archive of recordings and wanted me to draw he a coat of arms for it. He had a list of fun tongue in cheek images and symbols to include so ended up being a pretty fun little illustration project. https://calmedtransmissions.online/ is launched now and it’s an interesting place to navigate. Go check it out already.

My Cover of This Winter's NQ Magazine

I recently got the fun opportunity to illustrate this winter’s issue of Newfoundland Quarterly and gotta real interesting brief to take on with it. They were planning a large feature on mythological creatures and folklore in the province and wanted an illustration of Newfoundland and Labrador with a large list of creatures and whatnot from NL mythology featured in it kinda like a “here be dragons” old time-y map type of thing. Pretty much totally up my alley. Pretty wild request from NQ which usually has very quiet and artful covers and not usually lunatic psychedelic nonsense. I posted this to facebook a few days ago and it got a lot more attention then I was picturing, enough people have bugged me to sell them prints of it that I’m actually gonna do that, so hopefully in time for christmas you can get your own cryptozoological cartographical study for your own home! or you can just buy the copy of the magazine which is a great issue of one of the longest running magazines in north america I think. Or you can do both!

Now you can also buy a print of it in three different sizes (16”x20”, 11”x14”, and 8”x10”) from my bandcamp merch page!

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"A Year Of February" Big Ol' Compilation Album I Made

I’ve had the idea to make this album for quite awhile. I’ve written many, many, many times already about the RPM Challenge and my participation in it. There’s a situation you get into after doing a challenge like that for a bunch of years in a row is that eventually you’ve amassed a pretty large body of work around it and if you want anyone to check out your RPM work they’re confronted with like a dozen albums over an hour long and people (as you can imagine) will balk at the prospect of diving into it. Also there’s only so much promotion that feels appropriate for an album you make in a month, I’ve never felt my RPM albums needed to be on any of the evil streaming platforms. But I do feel very proud of the work I’ve made for the challenge and I wanted one place I could point people at to get all my favourite bits from the last 12 years, so I figured a greatest hits compilation might be a good idea and shilled out some bones to get it digitally distributed.

Of course calling the songs included “all my favourite bits” is a bit false because if I did that this album would be mostly tunes from 2018 and 2015 (I think those two are probably my best) I wanted this album to represent the breadth of my work on the challenge from the last 12 years so every album has 2 or 3 songs representing it. This project finally gave me an opportunity to design a double disc CD package, no one has commissioned me to do that yet so you gotta do it for yourself. I was planning for this album to come out a few months ago, but of course the pandemic hit and also since every song is off a different album, from a different year, using different gear, with a different sound, I had to do a remix and remaster on basically all 27 songs. I opted to only lightly touch the mixes for the most part, although a few songs get some new drum sounds and quite a few get a lot of bandages put on them, I wanted to keep more of the looseness of the RPM sauce than lose it. When I was picking songs to be included I wanted to showcase any time a special guest would show up and spice up the tune. The RPM albums are usually very solitary projects as efficiency is key in getting an album finished beginning to end within a month and every person you add to the chain slows the project down. But when I get a special guest on it’s always extra special to me so those songs like “There's only good times up ahead” with Chris McGee’s exquisite sax solo or Alison Corbett’s violin part in “Light Knife Woman” elbow their way up the list.

Anyway, I usually avoid a retrospective and I’m on record saying nostalgia and sentimentality is antithetical to my personality and outlook on life, so know that because of that this a larger more important project to me then would outwardly appear to most people. If you have the inclination please give it a solid sit down and listening to as I’ve spent longer then you’d think crafting transitions and tweaking mixes and making album art and all the other countless bullshit that goes into making an album. Mostly bullshit that I love but still mostly bullshit.

Music!

"Weight In My Lungs" Big Ol' Animated Music Video I Made For The Heavy Horses

When I agreed to do the album art for “With Darkness in My Eyes” the hit album by outlaw country outfit The Heavy Horses’ whose front man Justin Mahoney might my oldest friend, it was basically agreed in the same breath that I’d also be doing a music video for it. Justin had secured some government cashola from Factor to make the album and that also included funding for promotional videos. Sweet sweet government dollars! There was a couple things to consider when making this youtube video. For one The Heavy Horses have a strange relationship with youtube where literally Millions of people listen to his music on there from fan uploads but he didn’t have any official music videos on his official youtube channel. This situation leads to an issue where other people are potentially profiting off Justin’s content without his control and direct benefit, so this feels like an issue I might be able help out with. So now that we got some proper funding, with Justin being one of my dearest friends in the world, plus the possibility that (if the almighty youtube algorithm behaves itself) a good few people might actually watch this video, I needed to go above and beyond and see how good a video I can make. Especially since I’ve been given a song as epic and cinematic as “Weight In My Lungs” to work with, I couldn’t half ass it. I mean I could but I’d feel really bad about it.  

I wanted to see how far I could take my animation skills. Is this video animated? kinda yeah, sorta no. Most of what’s going on is closer to puppetry in my mind than traditional animation. The majority of what you see are characters and scenery made from bits and pieces that I individually draw then scanned in at a fairly high resolution, I then drop them into Photoshop to carve them into separate bits and assemble them together, then I import the layers into After Effects, assign anchor points to the joints of the characters and tweak the rotation and position keyframes so they move how I want within the scenery that I’ve arranged into a virtual 3d space where I place a virtual camera and move that around to catch all the action. Simple as that. Nothing much is redrawn frame by frame but I tried to include an element of frame by frame animation in most of the scenes (like the birds in the background, some shambling men and the flames and smoke) so there’s always some variety in the type of movement being shown.

It was pretty clear that song called for a visual narrative. Justin didn’t want to tell me anything specific about the story behind the song and wanted me to interpret it however I wanted. If you’ve ever worked with Justin on one of his projects you will know that this is an unprecedented level of trust and freedom for Justin is very, very hands on with everything. Listening to the song I pictured the protagonist as a soldier or someone who lives with everyday violence and depravity who is looking back on his actions and confronting the emptiness of their worth and the despair he’s caused others. Pretty heavy themes. 

I had a general concept for the story I wanted to show but I never made a proper storyboard or animatic or anything, I just winged it, which is a large part of the reason why this video took ages longer than it should have. I knew the huge instrumental outro (with that absolutely amazing lapsteel solo by Christine Bougie) needed something to match it’s scale. I wanted it to break reality in a way and be just an orgy of confusion and psychedelics. It needed to be the apocalypse, which gave me a narrative goal to work towards. I just needed some event traumatic enough to cause our protagonist to trigger my psychedelic apocalypse. 

Initially I was thinking a regular break up might do it (heartbreak is a big theme in the album) or the soldier’s history of violence coming back to hurt or kill his lover would work but the lyrics describe the protagonist as being unable to commit to anyone so I didn't think that would fit the material quite right. As I began to develop the other scenes I realized it’s hard to build a movie around just one character walking through landscapes so I decided he needed a companion. If you go on his instagram you will know that Justin's one true love in his life is his white husky Ray so I figured our protagonist needed a husky companion. One of the more challenging parts of the whole project was animating the dog's movements, the way a dog walks is not very intuitive to figure out at all and I had to use reference videos a lot, but when I got it down I was pretty happy. But then I realized that I had the emotional key to the apocalypse right there, I had to do an Old Yeller, which apparently people feel quite strongly about. 

Because I didn't storyboard or do animatics like a professional I ended up with a bit of an issue when I started putting together my finished scenes in that they didn't flow together like I was hoping. The thing that makes music videos probably the easiest things to edit is that you have to cut to the music so you already know where the cuts have to happen. If a music video doesn't set to the beat of the music properly you notice it's off immediately and it doesn't satisfy. So, while I had enough footage to fill the runtime the movement within the scenes and the way they bump into each other didn't fit the tune well at all so I had to get creative. 

I had a pretty linear story in mind originally where the soldier wakes up from a childhood nightmare while on a battlefield, wanders the desolation for awhile, meets his dog companion, finds romance, loses romance, falls on hard times, meets his mother's ghost, wanders some more, his companion is killed, man becomes his demon skeleton father from his nightmare then brings about the apocalypse. A tale as old as time. But when I put them in that order it didn't work. I was worried that I'd wasted my time, that I’d have to cut some scenes drastically and have to make a bunch of new scenes. But then it occurred to me that I should try to do a Tarantino and shift around the chronology so that the romance scenes come earlier and sync with the lyrics and the desolation and wandering companion scenes are treated more like flashbacks. It flowed much more evenly then, although, I did have to make a couple in between bits like the graveyard scene and the rotoscoped vultures at the beginning and end anyway. Whatever. 

But of course the finale was easily the most work. Probably close to a thousand separate layers, half of which are moving in abstract patterns, it really tested the limits of my rig, my pirated copy of After Effects and my patience. It also tests the limits of the youtube compression algorithm, I had to upload multiple test versions to youtube to see if the level of detail and movement in it was just going to get completely ruined by the pixel crunch of their compression settings. Ultimately I was never gonna totally win that battle and had to accept that some of the details are gonna get crushed and washed out by the stream and just hope that people don’t notice it too much. In the end it turned out much better than the crunchiness of my Lo Siento video since there is almost no neutral static space in any frame of that video, it gets unbelievably pixel-ly and crunchy. I got my apocalypse looking pretty close to how I wanted it. 

Well this is the longest thing I’ve ever written for this website probably no one will read this far in so I think I’ll leave it here. If you like really in depth breakdowns of what goes into making any of projects let me know, I might do this again if I get bored enough. In the meantime just keep watch the video over and over and tell your friends to do the same.