Invisible Rays

Practice Makes Practice Makes Practice

2005-03-24T00:50:00.000-05:00

We had an unusual wed. night practice tonight. Maybe it's because I've been in the space for four nights with Verona Downs and maybe it's because my finger is sliced and it seems that my nails are long and maybe it's because my wrist is acting up in pain and maybe it's because I'm not hearing the Bflat major in the new song and maybe it's because we haven't practiced in a while and perhaps it's because we haven't gigged in a bit and perhaps it's the great scott gig that fell through but I was having a hard time getting into the practice groove thing. I'll feel better soon!

Radio

2005-03-21T01:14:00.000-05:00

So the radio is starting to LOVE the Invisible Rays. Just kidding!!! ZBC has played the rays a couple of times, so that's nice. I heard Tracy play Sampler Science on the local show the other day, but it sounded so weird and foreign and in need of fixing! In a quick search I've found that Sampler Science has been played three times and Don't Run has been played once. I thought I heard that Fete Fatale was also played, but that's not showing up on the Spinitron records, so maybe eric meant Don't Run. The band will be playing at Mass Art on april 25th. I should update the web site to indicate that, and it look like we'll be playing the famous pig roast at sunshine studio also. That's going to be a blast!

New Works Revisited

2005-02-28T14:17:00.000-05:00

I've updated some of the files on the new works page. Much has changed in my life since my last post. My mother passed away and I'm largely unemployed, as is Ned. But I hope to have an EP out fairly soon of this new stuff. The Rays have also begun pre production for the next project. It's ok. In case you can't find the new stuff, it's here.

NewWorks

2005-01-24T23:31:00.000-05:00

Hey kids - check out RafiLabs for a sneak preview. It's not new Invisible Rays stuff, but it's what I've been doing when the Rays miss rehearsals. And, since I thought no one ever came to this page, I had thought it was safe enough to post unfinished works.... (Nightsweatfever proved me wrong on that count, though.)

The Rays by have now missed at least two rehearsals either because of the weather or because of my schedule. Next on our agenda is some recording... That's because we're both ready to try some new tricks and because we seem to not have any gigs lined up.

PYGA Reviews

2005-01-02T16:00:00.000-05:00

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 29 2005

Ned says we've sold some 20 copies of PYGA online. Here's some of the feedback about Put Your Gun Away.

Badassmospheric rock that your friends haven't heard yet
Reviewer: Justin A.
Admittedly, even the website is badass - and the album deserves it. The opener track "Fete Fatale" gave me an idea of what it could sound like if Sonic Youth, Portishead or maybe even My Bloody Valentine ever tried to soundtrack a Philip K Dick novel or redo the music for Patrick McGoohan's spy/mindf*** show "The Prisoner". The rest of the album is similarly evocative, with a compelling signature sound.

Great album!
Reviewer: XXX
with this C.D. your life is less worthless

From CD Baby
Three minute pop rock instrumentals. That’s right. With so many instrumental rockers concerned with the extended jam, The Invisible Rays ask the following: why make a song ten minutes long when you can make it in three and make it rock? The textured instrumental expanses (created by guitars, bass, drums, well-placed samples, and electronic elements) serve as musical building blocks while the actual songs swoon, hum, and buzz with some catchy pop prowess. While there are hints at Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, and Calexico, this record does stand alone; it is instantly appealing, and there’s plenty for you guitar geeks to dissect over the long term.

From The Noise - by Joe Coughlin
There's a special place in heaven for all-instrumental bands who can really pull it off, 'cause there's about a dozen if we're lucky. Except now it's 13. This is trotted out as "an imaginary spy film soundtrack," but it would work just as beautifully if they'd titled it "Steaming Pile Of Dung." What sets these forward thinkers ahead is the sheer variety of moods they're willing to take on. I mean, let's face it, The Ventures and Los Straitjackets are all good fun, but they don't exactly run ya through the emotional gamut. There's playful, pensive, sinister, spacey, and much more here, and not a note of it feels forced. Plus, it says they largely wrote it as they recorded, which hints at some massive possibilities for their future. The overall organic wash of this is far greater than the sum of its considerable riffs and soundbites, resulting in a grand head-trip of the finest order. I seriously can't wait to hear it in a moving car. Or for their next one. My only advice would be to bag the motifs next time, because some people are actually dumb enough to only hear what you tell them they're hearing. Just do your thing, because it happens to be extremely damn cool and necessary right about now.

Order your own copy of Put Your Gun Away at Cd Baby.

This is a review from Serge Entertainment Group, which I guess is out of Georgia.

Instrumental alt rock is very rare and Boston’s The Invisible Rays may be one of the most talented purveyors of this unique genre. With influences twisting from Midwestern punk of the Husker Du vein, to artsy melodies ala B-52’s and Devo, the music is still highly original and intellectual. More guitar personalities than Sybyl, eerie keyboard backdrops, tasty sampling garnishes and intricate but solid rhythms dominate this captivating CD.

LIVE SHOWS:

Opening for Kinski at TT's in August by Steve Gisselbrecht

The first thing I see of The Invisible Rays, who are playing when I enter TT's, is the huge bank of synthesizers that they're triggering samples from, and I'm nervous. This doesn't seem like my kind of thing, necessarily. But as I round the corner, I start to take in the really excellent drummer, the solid and melodic bassist, and the squealing, tragically undermixed guitar player. Plus the projection behind them, an oscilloscope trace of the output from the synth setup, which proves a suprisingly entrancing visual accompaniment to their set. The samples provide a lot of weird snippets of speech, mostly on the topic of synthesizers and sampling when I can make them out—it's all very recursive—and since there are otherwise no vocals, it's kind of nice to have that thrown into the mix. My own focus is on the rhythms, which are complicated and beautiful, with lots of good odd-time stuff that gets me dancing. A very pleasant surprise overall. Also pleasantly surprising is the respectable crowd here for the first band on a Tuesday night.

Possible Titles

2005-01-02T14:45:00.000-05:00

Akathisia - Motor impatience
Palilalia - A speech defect marked by abnormal repetition of syllables, words, or phrases. Also: a pathological condition in which a word is rapidly and involuntarily repeated
Echolalia - The often pathological repetition of what is said by other people as if echoing them
Echopraxia - The involuntary imitation of movements made by another. Also called echomotism

12:21:04:ZuZus

2004-12-22T17:54:00.000-05:00

I think we redeemed ourselves from the Midway Fiasco with our subtle and stealthy show at ZuZu's this fine evening. We were medium tight but there were no "obvious" fuckups and I think we all felt fairly comfortable together on "stage," not that there is one to speak of at the joint.... I don't think any pictures were taken or that the event was documented in any way. Oh yeah, I made a great flier. I guess that's worth something.... Here it is:

The very cool unicorn is courtesy of Mike Langlie, master mind of Twink.

Don't Run

2004-12-17T19:17:00.000-05:00

This song ended up as track two on Put Your Gun Away, and I can't remember why. It was originally a sketch that I recorded onto my 1/2" eight track at the old Segue space using Ned's drums, ron's bass, and dan's crappy casio keyboard. It even had a vocal section ("...Run...Don't..."). It was derived from an open tuning song I had written in New Orleans about old friends changing to the point where they become different people (spiral into addiction plays a big part in the transformation). I think this track was possibly the most difficult to get just right for this project. It actually appears in another incarnation towards the end of the record as Run. More on that later.
Don't Run was recorded initially in my bathroom on Bragdon St. (aka Blue Room Brain). Ned played the snare drum in there, and I both close mic'd it and distance mic'd it from the shower curtain. I recorded some dobro and numerous unplugged electric guitar tracks, all in the bathroom. Just assimilating those elements into coherent tracks was time consuming, because the song really had and still has no structure to speak of. I think this was early in my learning curve in terms of figuring out how to compose and edit my own performances using pro tools. It's a fine display of the ABAB:|| phenomenon that we are so often guilty of...
Bass soon followed; but since Don't Run was made at home from scratch using pro tools, it had a grid and thus the bass is heavily looped and sequenced. Oh, that's also because I played it, and I'm a crappy bass player:)
For samples, I pulled some stuff from Roger and Me. Initially I used the rabbit lady, but we decided that sample was too cliche. We ended up with the deputy sheriff guy who evicts people; he has great cadence in his delivery. He's very melancholy, and if you think of eviction in the context of the title of the song maybe you'd have some sort of narrative there. Also guesting towards the end of the song is Roger himself talking at a workers Xmass meeting or something ("In the hopes that nature will accommodate our longing for a Total Experience"). Now he's a slimy fuck! I kept other samples around from that movie that have made appearances in unpublished Ray Loops, such as Wouldn't It Be Nice.
Since the track kicked around for so long without us feeling as though it was properly completed, it endured many overdubs. A few things stuck; kick and floor tom were recorded using dan's weird old cocktail kit, but we did that in our new practice space on Brookside. Those tracks are woefully out of phase... Also at the Brookside space (Sunshine Studio) we recorded some electric guitar through the Cordovox rotating speaker cabinet. A highlight of the recordings on this track was the invention of the Voice Changer Toy inside the Coffee Can effect, which is the feedback sound that dominates the intro of the song. While this sound continues to amuse my clients to no end, I have yet to have recorded it on anything else! Also added at Blue Room Brain is the little static guitar amp noise heard at the very beginning of the song, which corresponds to the dobro part. I spent quite a few minutes on that little nothing!
At some point I was so frustrated with the song that we tried recording the track again at another session at the barn, with JD and I both playing along with Ned. I played guitar while I think JD played bass. JD took those recordings home and messed with them using his digital recorder. Those recordings resulted in the track Run. They also provided us with a great synth line that we had JD perform onto the final version.

Midway Cafe - December 11th

2004-12-16T12:11:00.000-05:00

I guess this Midway show was our first headlining show. I don't know why Donna Parker decided that we should headline - we certainly didn't plan on headlining. We had a very chaotic show with numerous equipment malfunctions. It was also Brendan's first show with us, so there was an element of the unexpected and unprepared. I did feel kind of crappy after the show. I want to get back to the story of Put Your Gun Away soon. We have had two good reviews of the record and one very bad one.

ZuZu's November 10th

2004-11-18T09:44:00.000-05:00

We performed at ZuZu's on Wed. Nov. 10th. with Karen Langley's Wisteriax. It was a fun show and a crowd gathered outside the window to watch us twist and shout. I burrowed a fender deluxe reverb, an old model from the 70's or 60's and it sounded pretty cool, if a little too clean sometimes. I have decided that I don't like the MXR dynacomp simulator in the line 6 box I'm using for distortion. It adds some dirty crappy sounding distortion to the signal - I have always thought of it as just a signal booster/compressor guy, but it seems to have the same nasty effect on every amp I plug it into.
Anyway, a gentlemen named Bill T Miller who is a huge fan of Karen's came and shot her set, and then was gracious and nice enough to shoot our set and even post his favorite shots on his web site. Check them out here. Bill is a veteran of such legendary Boston noise artists OBE, the Out Of Band Experience, which, when I moved here as a high school kid, had an 800 phone number you could call and leave a message at and they might use your message in one of their pieces. It was far out! That number was active until just this year. Check out Bill's site for info on his studio and his remarkable collection of bent toys - children's electronic toys that have had their circuits modified to add bizarre functionality. I was looking at his list of gadgets and realized that we shared a few, though his collection far exceeded my humble little bag of goodies.

"One blog isn't going to change them"

2004-10-07T12:41:00.000-04:00

So Fete began as an excessively syncopated drum beat that I was messing around with in the old Wyman St. garage (now a mold-infested contaminated waste zone). It has the classic N/A song structure of a mysterious, minor A section followed by a happy major B section and then a thrashed out rehashing of the minor A section. Nice and simple the way drummers like it. I added some bass and guitars with cheesy effects on my 414 and put aside. When we started to record drums for PYGA I basically took song ideas Rafi and I had come up with and various 4-track forays (including Fete, Distracted and Let it Go) and turned them into primitive drum charts. Since there were only the two of us, we recorded the drums by themselves with me getting all the inspiration I needed from my scribblings. Most of the songs, including Fete, hadn't really been entirely written yet; although we made a few minor changes to form when over-dubbing and mixing basically the forms were set up with these drum charts and it gave us a nice skeleton to build upon. We actually recorded all the main drum parts in just a few quick days. Back then I was playing a Ludwig-Rogers hybrid/bastardized kit. A Ludwig Rockers kick and 16 inch floor tom from the late 70's and a 12" and 13" Rogers Holiday model toms (from the '60's Cleveland era when Buddy Rich was their spokesperson - "The Cadillac of drums"; I've since rounded out the Rogers kit by adding a Dayton model 20" kick and a 16" floor tom). After we had put most of the tracks down for Fete and were listening to it with master Darron Burke we realized the syncopation was a little much so we added all sorts of percussion to counteract the psycho-synco effect. I think at one point we were going to have our good friend Kate Krug (who used to sing with Incus) sing some femme fatale type business on this track but since it kept on not happening we decided it would be easier just to embrace our instrumentalness and the idea for samples had already been kicking around in our head. So when Karyn started listening to our rough mixes she started imagining various story lines for the songs. Same Old Shit (as it was lovingly called) K said took place during the party where ominous forces are gathering, so femme fatale became fete fatale ('fete' of course meaning 'party').

A note on inspirations for PYGA: Although I didn't realize it at the time, I think one of the main inspirations for the concept and sound of the record comes from the soundtrack for Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily" a hilarious re-dubbing of a pulpy, campy Japanese Bond knock-off from the mid '60's. The soundtrack was done by The Lovin' Spoonful and is in turn mysterious, spy-tastic and country hoe-down good fun. As for the source for samples I think the 80's collaborative project between Brian Eno and David Byrne "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" is really the earliest and certainly most interesting use of vocal samples I knew of. I was exposed to this record by my sister when I was young and though I was at first freaked out by it, it has become one of my favorite records. I think it influenced not only our use of samples to accentuate the mood of our instrumental sound but also influenced the process we used of building a piece of music as we recorded it. As we were beginning to put samples over the tracks and worrying about the copyright issue I discovered the group ECC (Evolutionary Control Committee) which is most famous for their song "Rocked by Rape" which is a series of Dan Rather excerpts put to a reworking of Back in Black. Their record not only uses great and weird discovered audio, it also has a great explanation of why their record is not copyrighted. They believe that recordings of any kind should be fair game for usage, manipulation and reworking into new compositions which is basically what their entire record is.

Photo Shoot

2004-10-07T01:42:00.000-04:00

Here's a first impression of what went down in yesterdays photo shoot...

Check out Mr. Thomas
Visit Kid Rafi's Blog to see the original color photos a little larger.
Also I'm trying to figure out how to best sequence all this information. No answers yet.

Fete Fatale - Same Old Shit

2004-10-05T16:30:00.000-04:00

This song started out being titled "Same Old Shit," which would imply that it's pretty much the exact same thing as Distracted, or any number of other songs in our arsenal. SOS stuck as a title for a long time, until we finally graduated to Fete Fatale at some point when the movie narrative was developed by K.

Makeshift Process
I think Ned had a version of Fete on four track that he was working off of - I don't remember ever playing it in our practice space before it was recorded. In fact I still have a hard time remembering how to play it! Ned played the lions share of instruments on this track. To start out he played bass, (after he had recorded the drums of course), and then preformed most of the guitars. I don't remember too much about that, except that I remember the parts being somewhat meandering and that he recorded two tracks of guitar using my blue paul, possibly with the boogie(?), and that he was in the room with the amp, cause he was going for a feedbacky feel I think.

I played many of the guitars in the B section, including a banjo line, possibly? I think ned played the banjo in the outro. Banjo was appropriately distressed and ran through an MXR distortion box (using Ned's pickup) and into some amp, the Scout would be my guess... Around this time I recorded several guitar solos over the end of the song, later deciding I hated them all, so they were mixed in very quietly. I also played some scratchy guitar parts into the scout or some other tiny amp. Those are the small-stoned sounding guitars in the intro I belive.

Tributes
The B section has the infamous Dan Martinez Memorial Guitar line - which is buried way in the background and goes chug chug chug in a nice thin tone of a strat, but it's probably Ned playing Daron's tele. It might even have gone through my awful black box, the VORTEX. I added an acoustic guitar to the b section at home @ Blue Brain Room while pre mixing. Darron brought that part out nicely when we remixed it after mastering the record and deciding the track was too weak to be the opener in the state we had it in. To be honest, I think it might have been one of the first things we ever mixed for real at Q.

Look, Fete In The Box!

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
One important component to this piece is the Steve Reich slide part which was initially three tracks of the identical slide part. These came in and out in important parts, as they still do; except that only two tracks made it to the final mix, due to 24 track limitations of the mBox. I recorded this one night alone in some frustration at our lack of progress on the record. Little did I know then that we had many more moons to go!

The Machine
Most important though are the samples. In the very first A section before the guitars really kick in you hear an organ part from some spooky movie (Attack Of The Giant Leeches?), which we cut up carefully and arranged in that space - it really makes that part, and is now a big feature in the live performance. We also have a strong female presence admonishing us that One man isn't going to change everything - which might be a good way for us to think of John Kerry.
In the very intro we thought we'd be clever and add a man who says: I thought it was the end! when in fact everyone knows they just hit play and heard the first track of the record - how smarty! That man, btw, reappears later and says "Nasal Block" (Dne Eht Saw Ti Thguoht) leaving the B section I think?
I believe that intro was a little manufactured, I think Fete had started right away with the drums and bass, but i think I flew a few guitar lines earlier to add a little width to the event.

I Thought It Was The End!
The very end has a both the Major Dillon introduction, the high hat solo, and the distorted and delayed epic banjo section. We fought with this section quite a bit in the premixing phase.
The last (but possibly most important) thing to get added, during mastering, was the Invisible Ray sound. It's taken directly from the movie of the same title and is the sound the gun made while being fired - i think in this instant it's being fired at a mountain. It's actually being used in reverse for some reason.

Drop The Needle In The Groove

2004-10-03T17:51:00.000-04:00

So this is the Irays blog - it will serve the purpose of telling even more than you'd ever want to know about PYGA, and after I'm all done with that we'll move on to bigger and better things, like our next record! But for now I need tea.