been that

What up playas! Me and E boozin’ and checkin’ out the new ish…. None of the poon, Pure rock and roll

Damn, can’t believe it’s been a month since we first stepped into the studio. Well, I spent just under a week mixing and the past two days searching for a good cheap mastering facility. In the final stretch now… from here we press up a couple hundred cd’s and start mailing them out to the majors, minors, indy’s, whatever. Man, I can’t wait to start playing shows again. It’s been a good time in the studio and all, but I definitely miss performing. Tonight we get up with a new guitar player, Greg, who’s actually an old friend and played with Ref in Sleestack waaaay back in the day. I’m hoping for the best. He’s an ill guitar player, without question, but it all comes down to the vibe.

For a moment yesterday I honestly thought god had it out for us. I mean, after all we’ve been through, its hard to owe it all to coincidence and bad luck. Yep, there I was in that tiny room, crammed between turntable and drum set, starring at the frozen computer screen while Aaron reached to restart once again. Of course this is the first time he’s ever had any issues with his gear, and of course we’re already two hours behind!
Aakif, Ref and myself went over to Aaron’s home studio on Thursday night. We only had from 10am to 1:30pm on Friday to get the drums tracked, so we decided to set up and get levels the night before. No problem, everything was in order, everything sounded great. The next morning it was snowing. After a couple calls back and forth neither Aakif, Dan or myself could get a hold of Ref. His phone was going straight to voice mail, which is never a good sign. It was 11:30, and we finally got a call… His house somehow lost power in the middle of the night and his alarm failed to go off.
OK, we’ve got two hours, we can do this! Wait a minute, now the computer decides to crash… What the fuck?!
After 30 minutes of troubleshooting, shutting down, restarting, etc. things seem to be functioning again… with only an hour and a half to track four songs. Alright, ready? recording… Bam! I still can’t believe we actually got through it all. If we had had another hour we’d probably been able to track two or three more. We head back on Sunday (tomorrow) to re track any DJ, vocal and base parts that need to be tweaked. Oh yeah, and can’t forget tambourine as well. Until then…

Up and down, back and forth… something has got to give soon.

January 1st, 2007, we hit the ground running… writing songs, rocking local shows, throwing drum sets, diy recording, re-writing songs, trashing old recordings, drinking absinthe, falling down the stairs, writing more songs… By the end of October ‘07 it had been 10 months since Channel Zero’s first show, and we had our first 10 tracks ready for the studio. A recording session was booked for November 3rd and 4th. This would be our first time in the studio as Channel Zero. Whether everyone was mentally and physically prepared for the 20+ hours of recording was questionable. But it was all the studio time we could afford, and Chris (our guitar player) had to cross the border back into Canada by November 10th due to a soon to be expired vacation visa, so we were determined to get this album done. It was now or never, and we had to nail it.

On Friday November 3rd I got a call from Dan (our DJ). He tells me Ref (our drummer) got hit by a car while doing his bike messenger thing downtown, and was in the hospital with a chipped vertebrate. I immediately thought, yeah, sure, your fucking with me, right? No? Fuck! Fortunately Ref wasn’t permanently injured, but he wasn’t going to be able to play the drums anytime soon, let alone record the following day, so I called up the studio and canceled our session.

Come early December we’re at a new practice space, minus one Canadian, running through our 10 songs, discussing a new plan to get our shit recorded. None of us have heard from Chris, although we assume he’ll still be back early January. After about 4 weeks and countless emails we finally get word. It turns out, sometime in December Chris somehow broke his distal fibula (bone that connects ankle to leg), and wouldn’t be back in Providence till sometime in the near or possibly not so near future. Oh, and he’s also got life issues to deal with? Hmmm… glad we cleared that up. So it seemed we were left with two options… either wait for Chris to sort things out which could take anywhere from 3 months to never, or find another guitar player to record with. We opted for the later and Aakif (the man on the Bass) made a few phone calls. A week later Aaron shows up, a session guitarist, who not only offers to learn the tunes and sit in for Chris on the album, but also to let us record at his home studio for free.

So here we are in the present… Unless by some force of God or another random injury (aww shit, knock on wood), we will get another shot to record (on February 8th). Keep your fingers crossed. The world may finally get to hear a Channel Zero album!

-exile