Dealing with reality:

First part of 2019, really for most of the year, I worked on doing computer forensics. Doing this on a couple dozen devices took years starting from knowing close to nothing about the processes. For the better part of three years learning how to deal with the mess I had took center stage. The entire thing was very costly to me and ruined and delayed years of work being finished, and getting done. Not to say though I didn't do new stuff, as usual!

Because working on music added some flavor, come 2019 I put together the band WeeWee with my Cousin Wess, whom folks in the fam knew as WeeWee. We cut some tracks in fall 2019-Winter 2020 and released some songs in 2020-21 which is known as the EP Oui, Oui (yes, yes). We tried to get a bass player for the better part of a year and nothing panned out.

Most of 2020, like the rest of the world things were messed up. I started strong once the pandemic lockdown began getting stuff done for a few weeks, but most of the year, rarely did I work on music. I was "still" doing and learning how to do forensics on machines damaged from when my house was broken into a couple of years earlier.

In the Spring & Summer of 2021 I was able to get most of the stuff off the messed up computers in 2018 onto a new machine to work on music. In the Fall I began the final segment of the Revolution saga now running @ the 10 year mark. I was able to get that and stuff from some stuff from Commando and Omerta to near finishing in the summer of 2022. I began to put down some ideas from a couple screenplays I had been messing with LAUGR & Retro through 2022.

I also usd the ambient tracks from a road trip to see a friend (the legendary Roachman is back!) in November 2021 and used them as foundation recordings for the loose ad-hoc mash called Big Scooby I began to finish by year's in November 2022. It'd finally see the light almost three years later in 2025!!

December 2021 - I lost my longtime companion Spike in late December 2021. Though I wasn't the best Dad to Spike, I loved him dearly and he meant the world to me. For a long time thereafter, I didn't work on any of my own music. My health was failing rapidly as well. I did begin to sporatically work on some stuff beginning in the spring as mentioned above. By then I also had a new friend, his name is Bruno.

Spring - Summer 2022 - Kept attempting to finish up the long overdue Revolution album. I also laid final tracks down for Commando and some other stuff left over from the ruined mac laptop that I had transferred. It still needed a lot of work to me. All in all there were over half a dozen partially completed projects and about another 7-8 folders with just skeletons of songs with a track or two. Sometimes I'd get a decent amount done, sometimes and usually, nothing I liked. I keep trying though.....

Began listening to the demos from Age Of Fire I had did years before and decided I wanted to finish up the album. I had a few more albums and EP's with a few tracks laid down I began to work on. Once again the Fire Of Creation stays strong and I begin to work on some new material in 2022.

In November 2022 began finishing up mixing the second release from CAMO which turned into the band effort IBC. I had sporatically worked on mixing some of his stuff on and off, mostly off, for close to a year by the end of 2022. We had started literally the night before Spike passed away. Physical problems, including hearing problems, and trying to get some time to work on his stuff scheduled when I felt like doing anything, was a challenge. But the end results were sounding pretty good. He was cutting the stuff with his son, who was just a little kid when we did his first album over ten years ago. It was good to see a new generation coming on.

January 2023 - Digitized and uploaded the Avondale stuff from the Painkillers off a demo cassette I found in a box of tapes rescued from my storage shed of which the roof had blown off a few years back. Theirs and The Plague stuff from the Pat Mell Sessions both from 32-33 years ago were in the box. Great to hear this stuff again. I was producer on both sets of recordings.

August 2023: While digitizing some of the over 250 cassettes from the past of demos and releases bands had sent me, I come across a cassette buried in a box of demos called "Demos 1992". I listen and find out it's a collection of writing solo jams I had did in the year 1992. Including the quarter finished album Institution. I began work on finishing the music and lyrics, because I felt it needed to be done, like a hundred other loose ends needed tied up.

Fall 2023 - I had paid for the domain for UGR before it expired, and the registar I used (from day one NSI) switched payment arrangements no longer accepting the method I had always used to pay, forcing me to lose the domain (see Issue 79) that I'd had since the late 90's. So all that was nowhere online except bits and pieces on places like Archive. Can't say if it'll ever all go back up.

Spring 2024 - I am deep into finishing up albums I've done some basic recordings on over the past couple of decades. The Gaza War offered me the sound ideas I was looking for to finish The Great Angelic Wars, replacing a few numbers I was never satisfied with. Working on that I found a beat on a song called Rising which I thought would fit the part in the film I was looking to portray. Out of that came Lucifer Rising, filling another missing place in the soundscape which was to be the story made into the film.

While doing the stuff of the direct-to-cassette recordings I did with Sex Coven 22 years (come July 2024) prior. Time grows short over a long time, so I had to prioritize what I could actually ever get done in a few lifetimes. I had the album Living and Dying in progress since Dad had passed away eight years ago, then with Mom passing away in the fall of 2023 just a few days shy of her 93rd, I wanted to finish some things off that album which I renamed LIFE and merged it with some of the stuff from Daddy's , which soundtrack and story were all in pieces and needed compiling. I could get some of each project done as one. Out of that came Muzz and Spike.

In the Summer of 2024 I closed down working on the Circle Of Life soundtrack and began concentrating of the primarily the Sound track and screenplay stuff I had began in 2023. At the top were two songs from Little Red, the Theme or "Down The Path", and Wars For Resources, "I Am The Earth", which came together and I was able to finish and publish by Fall Of The Year. Almost. It would be way in 2025 before decent mixes appeared.

I had 13 orphaned and unfinished projects I set up to finish, which included everything from a final song from WeeWee to a few from Omerta, new entries for The Great Angelic Wars and again, stuff from Revolution.. In all this mess I mastered a couple new singles from IBC, A Letter to Sloke and Rocket.

Fall 2024 into 2025

Since having to move my website to a new provider I'd never uploaded all the old zines and some early recordings of mine to the new server. I began this process in late 2024. There were almost 60 webzines needed uploading and 90% of the stuff didn't work link wise in them anymore. Layouts had to be updated in a majority as well. So all this needed to be fixed.

This process took WAY longer than I expected and I was only starting to get close to finishing 6 months later. During this same time though I did mange to get 4-5 of the projects related to music nearly or fully completed, recording wise. I didn't push anything because ear fatigue plus slow ups caused by deteriorating nervous system conditions had to be considered. I could cuss them all I wanted but only occasionally did that make things actually better.

I wasn't as much amazed at all the material I had accumulated over the years but rather frustration in that I hadn't tiddied things up as I went along. So much was scattered or in hodge podge pockets of completion the only thing I can blame it on was my ADD (pun intended, great song!)

In all this mess I had whittled down my ancient homemade cassette collection to around a dozen still needing digitizing. Old Trip 248's mostly but I also had the original mono basic tracks to my first soundtrack, Tattered and Torn, left to do. I completed this in the Spring of 2025. Although not had I planned it, and as starkly bare as it was, kinda like the much more recent Big Scooby, it may be hard to listen to, but it is what it is from a time long ago.

The original recordings for Tattered and Torn were done using a single mic recorded mono straight into a cassette recorder. They were terrible quality wise. I basically did it in leu of writing down the ideas for the scenes, letting the music outline the story. This was the first time I would do this, and I would do it for most of my screenplay ideas past that point.

So I still had those straight to cassette recordings. I also had the Tascam 388 reel I had dumped the tracks on and doubled them. Somewhere along the way I had initially dumped the raw tracks onto a four track to make them into stereo. All I had left was the dump from that 4-track onto the Tascam. But I hadn't been able to get the parts to repair the 388 in 30 years, meaning I couldn't use those much better sounding recordings to remaster.

So I used the original cassette. I had marked the tape Contemporary Art because it was just raw ideas recorded for later expansion. It had Tattered and Torn on One side and the orignal writings for Extremities on the other. Fortunately the Extremities stuff had been dumped from the 388 onto an old 24 track HD recorder I had a few years before I moved locations in 2014. A few tracks from that album I had gotten off before that HD unit became unusable a few years later. Those recordings still needed fixing and finishing as well yet I had enough newer stuff to do.

For a 40th Anniversary Edition then I chose to do the Tattered and Torn soundtrack stuff.

Summer 2025 - I got into a project I had began at the end of 2024 when I began finding cd's from before I'd moved of the chat transacipts of the first years of Live At Underground Records. Those cd's and some more with archived stuff pre-2014 were in boxes mix in with a bunch of magazines.

Late summer I found unmarked on a CD a few of the Top 100 Music Charts html archives. I found a few more online so I cleaned those up and put them back up online.

Fall 2025 - I got together a couple of the boxes of the wholesale and label catalogs sent to me over the years in November. Couldn't find really any of them online so I started scanning my collection to share because they're rock n roll history. All this archiving was taking away from my final 6 weeks of the year to finish what should have already been done, some of it last year.

Did I mention I have ADD?

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