Recapitalization

White snow. Pure white snow, untainted with the dirt, grime, and muck of the March thaw, has covered the landscape the entire month. For most of the month, the temperature has been a frigid subzero “hell has frozen over” fiasco. Nights have been spent cooped up inside, with the mind hoping, wishing, dreaming.

It has been a month of “more of the same”. No girlfriend, just minor, even G rated dabblings. Sadly, my main lead in that venture fell through. It wasn’t even that much of a lead, to tell the truth. New experiences amounted to minor bar jaunts, some conversations here and there. A sledding excursion that will be had today seems to be the most “different” out of anything, since I’m trying to make it more of a guerilla tactical team spying out hills in the middle of parks saying “Stop! Hill!” and we go and risk our lives in the middle of nowhere. The day job has not changed. Work with the children was already repetitive and draining. We had a bitchin’ party to celebrate an important new president. The inauguration was a pretty big deal to me, as well.

But if there was ever a constant event, it was Patch dreaming. I have put it through my thick headed skull that the “.01” demos need to be done before I get a band together. I’ve basically put March 1st down as the “Out of the Room” phase of Patch, whether or not the demos are finished.

The plan as of January 31, 2009 (subject to obscene amounts of change and revelation): The first order of business will be to contact Greg, my all-around electronic gizmo bandmate and collaborator. I will arrange all of the pieces I have composed and put them into the perspective of transferring everything to a live setting. Greg is the first piece of that puzzle, since whatever he can’t do instrument-wise onstage will rest on four other people. He will be pressing the sampler buttons, the click track supplied to the drummer, playing effected instruments. We will record all of the “pre-recorded” material before anyone else joins us in a practice space.

Once we have everything set on a certain number of songs, Greg and I will work on drumming/playback. This is to see if the rhythm section is up to par. Rhythm is the primary component for Patch. A lot of the songs lack melodic intonation in favor of noise, energy, and rhythm. I’ll be supplying the drums as Greg works his magic behind the consoles.

After we get the bugs worked out, a bassist will be called on to join in on the fiasco. This completes the rhythm focus. Once that is figured out, I’ll be calling out for a real drummer to come in and learn everything that needs learning. Last but not least will be the lead guitarist.

There are tentative members on standby. I’m hoping for Louie as a bassist, the guitarist from The Engagement, Matt, to be the lead guitarist, and a man named Mike to be the drummer. Yesterday, I came to the realization that Louie might be a little too busy with his day job and his work with The Engagement come March when I call on him to work with me and Greg. But my fingers are crossed . . .

Schuyler, my studio mastermind, will be summoned once the demos are done on the home front. Five songs. All of the Acid Pro files will be transferred to Sonar, where they will be saved onto a portable hard drive and transported over to Schuyler’s humble abode to be properly mixed. Once that is finished, the files will be mastered at the University of Minnesota’s Electronic Music Studio (which, coincidentally, was where the current song on the Patch Myspace page was written and recorded for a class final project. The song that that old project has culminated into, “Switch”, will be mastered there, a sort of homecoming and proper ending to the preliminary audio recording turmoil that has lasted for some two plus years).

When we’ll be comfortable with booking shows is up in the open. My goal is to have Patch playing around town by early summer ’09. The catch is that I’m not looking to just be playing traditional live venues. Patch lends itself to a significant amount of theatricality, dealing with sinister subjects, locations, characters. The first round of songs deal with a very close knit, intimate cast of situations, ranging from losing close friends, to dealing with the notion of “selling out”, losing one’s honor in terms of art. The images abound in my head take place in dark, cold, dirty basements, house parties surrounded by windows caked in mud, red lights, strobes, black and white explosions. Guerilla performances, stripped down open mics that turn into full out ambushes against the calm acoustic atmospheres wine sippers are so accustomed to. The music, the live show, the locations, everything in Patch lends itself to a nice amount of creativity.

When I’m asked: “What does Patch sound like?” I usually say “It’s the lovechild of Beck, Nine Inch Nails, The Mars Volta, Tom Waits, and Radiohead.” People usually say “That’s a good combo.” I mainly say this because I don’t want to be put into the genre of Industrial Goth Rock. If I had to make up a genre combo for Patch I’d say it was Grunge Electronica. If the only place I’m playing is Ground Zero (gothic nightclub in Minneapolis) I’m not doing something right.

Patch is my response to the boring string of Indie Rock I’ve grown so accustomed to while listening to most of the frequencies on MP3 blogs, 89.3 The Current in the Twin Cities, Top 10 lists of every magazine/column/blog that’s worth a damn. There’s not a lot of variety in the mainstream. Top 40 isn’t the mainstream anymore. It’s Top Indie, and it’s a pretty limited musical soundscape nowadays. We’re thrust into a realm with Fleet Foxes on one end, which is a folk pop vibe, MGMT in the middle, a dirty electronica dance rock blend, and The Black Keys/The Kills at the other end, a bar band blues/punk thing. Where’s the catharsis? The rabid energy? There’s the punk underground movement, but that’s a campy enterprise. What happens when you place the best elements of the Indie Craze (folk, dance, bluesy grunge, punk) together into one overall sound?

I’m not saying that that will make for the best band in the world (logically taking the best elements would make for an obscene amount of “Bestness”). It’ll probably be mud to most. But those are my favorite elements of Indie Rock. And I think Indie Rock needs a couple of louder colors to be added into its melting pot in order to hold my attention. Take those elements and add 500 decibels to each.

If certain people agree, those will be the fans of Patch.

The Kills – “Sour Cherry” (Add 500 decibels to this song and you'll get an idea for what the overall “Karmath” EP vibe is)