DIY fest in pictures

1.

2.

a tweet.

Bored at kinko's

while my flyers get made. I'm paying $0.20 per minute to type this.

geeking out

I really enjoy making flyers the old school way, at Kinko's with scissors and tape and a sharpie and some sort of book. For my next batch of flyers I'm going to take a 30-panel story from Edward Gorey's Amphigorey Too which a friend gave me. I've really grown to love it. The first story I'm using is called "The Beastly Baby" by Ogdred Weary. It's the first story in the book. I'll be using the first four panels to make these flyers tonight, 500 of each, highlighting our Small's show but also listing three other shows of ours on the back plus our myspace and homepage addresses. 2000 total which I hope to get rid of by the end of DIY. So if you happen to get one of these flyers, and somehow make your way to our blog, you should have a number between 1 and 4 on your flyer, these are the captions for the images:

1) Once upon a time there was a baby.

2) It was worse than other babies. For one thing, it was larger.

3) Its body was not merely obese, but downright bloated.

4) One of its feet had too many toes, and the other one not enough.

great night.

Tonight we played the Shack with Noman and The Hadituptoheres. Found abooking agent. Started to plan a new release. Booked a really cool show. Met some really cool people. Really cool night.

Awesome.

Don't know yet who shot these but they're totally great.

Dally in the Alley 2009

Carrie shot some videos at tonight's show, I think they turned out pretty awesome:





new video page (can't remember the password for the old one or the email address it's registered under): youtube.com/blasespleevideos

why the hell not.

download: Hold My Baby (demo)

Carl and I are getting together tonight to clean out and back up the dps... which is what we used to record both the album and EP. Carl and Mike have been using this thing for years and it's about to find a new temporary home in my office as we are in the process of upgrading our studio. We may discover some gems tonight, I'm excited to see what we can dig out of that thing. :)

newness abounds

Carl and Mike and I started working on our Verse Chorus Verse set last weekend and will most likely continue to work on it tonight. The Leo bash, aka Smelsea and Smarl pt 3 aka Carl's birthday party looks like it's not going to be happening at the Painted Lady after all, and instead will probably go down in the backyards that join Carl's and Mike's houses. Macrame Tiger had to bail on the show and Running With Panthers... well, not even sure what's up with them but it looks like it's going to be Drew doing NOFX covers which I'm honestly stoked to see. I'm sure it's still going to be a lot of fun and I've been wanting to play a house party for some time now.

We've got some new music "in the works"... still in the planning stages but we might have anywhere between one and four songs released by the end of the year, depending on how busy we force ourselves to be. Also our voices and some of our instruments are going to be in a movie that's coming out soon -- more on this and other stuff later. The library at my work is closing up now so I gotta gtfo.

Blaze Spluh updates n' stuff

Things have been awesome lately and we have lots of cool things coming up. We've played 5 shows already since our record was released last month and have met some awesome people! Super awesome thanks especially to the dudes from the Royal Oak Jimmy John's and their friends who have been coming out to like every show and bringing tons of people. I don't have most of your names down yet but if you guys stumble upon this blog, you should know how awesome you are!

Macrame Tiger has been doing some amazing things as well. For those of you who don't know, the dudes in MT and most of us go way back and have been playing in bands together for years and years, throughout high school and everything. It's been great to play shows together and get to party with those dudes so often lately.

Last night we played with a band called The Extraordinaires who were the coolest band I've seen in a while. We had a great turnout last night at the Berkley Front and had a great time with the Macrame Tiger, The Five Alives, and the dudes from Child Bite who threw this whole thing together. We partied til 4am -- on a Monday!

We're about ready to announce some big announcements -- local festival performances, Carl's birthday show, our submission of our music to be part of a film soundtrack, but in the meantime here are some videos and stuff from some recent shows:

When We Kiss @ The Lager House


Hold My Baby @ The Lager House


Thanks to Amanda Galeczka for these videos!

Macrame Tiger's Lucy Sue from their first show / our record release party at Small's


Also there's a really super rad article / video about Macrame Tiger's American Apparel show last Sunday here at motorcityblog.net. These guys are great and have invited us to play their big 5 year anniversary party downtown this December and we totally can't wait for it. :)

monday morning myspace bulletin +

The cool dudes over at Future Perfect Radio are currently featuring The Thermals, Sonic Youth, Jeffrey Lewis, and.... Blasé Splee as their picks of the week! If you're the type who listens to internet radio to get you through a workshift or something, this site seems to have lots of great channels, such as these ones that are featuring our music:

Future Perfect Radio
Featured Artists
New Music
Great Lakes Soundtrack
Au Naturale

The 3rd annual Smelsea and Smarl Birthday Bash will no longer be featuring Blasé Splee... Tommy and Dave are going to the Blink 182/Fall Out Boy show that night so instead, me, Carl, Mike and Tony from Macrame Tiger are planning something different and calling it Verse Chorus Verse. We'll probably just play this one show. I'm totally, ridiculously excited. This'll be the set I've been wanting to play for sixteen years.

download: What I Want (demo)

how to make an é

On my Dell Inspiron 1525 (which does not have a number pad), I hold Fn & Alt and hit m k l l which does this - é. (Notice the numbers next to each of the letters? 0 2 3 3.)

I believe if you have a number pad, you'd hold Alt and hit 0233. It doesn't work on the numbers above the letters on my keyboard, though.

I think my girlfriend taught me how to do this, it's made things a bit easier.

today's myspace bulletin

Thanks to you who have come out to our last three shows in the last twelve days since our record was released. You guys have been really great and it's been wonderful to meet some new people. We promised to give out the first 100 CDs but we actually ended up giving away around the first 300 which has been a lot of fun. We really hope you guys like it... play it for your friends, put it on their ipods, pass the cd along, tell them about the places online where they can stream our records for free.

We've got one more show booked before we go on vacations and stuff in July and might not be playing any shows until some time in August:

Friday, June 26th
The Belmont - Hamtramck
with:
Old Empire | website / myspace
The Wednesdees | website / myspace

edit:

I'm listening to the record for the first time streaming from our jukebox, and it actually sounds pretty good. Very near CD quality. Waaaaaay better than anything on MySpace or Facebook or anyone else who's hosting our mp3s. Usually, the music is of much, much better quality when it's hosted directly on a band's (or label's) website... I've been spending a lot more time on bands actual websites lately, there's some amazing stuff out there.

Three ways to stream our record for free

Our record is fully streamable at the following websites:

Our Facebook page

Et Cetera at last.fm

or stream every song we've ever recorded in our pop-out jukebox at blasesplee.com. Just click on "jukebox" and navigate away!

Come see us for free tonight at PJ's Lager House with The Rosewood Thieves and Wild Years. We'd love to see you there.

Cheers,
Blasé Splee

Saturday night's show

deserves its own blog post. I've been planning on writing one for days now, but haven't managed to find the time between working and sending out press releases. Plus, we're waiting on some photos that we haven't even seen yet from two different people, so whatever.

Tonight's show. While I was at work on Tuesday afternoon, I sent a press release to the buyer of the Magic Stick and about an hour later, I had received a show offer from him. We confirmed it yesterday morning and played it tonight. We were told that we were playing at ten and ended up playing at twelve, after a band from California that left immediately after they played and apparently took the entire crowd with them. The stage setup was extremely awkward and so distant from the audience that people's faces were almost indiscernible. We were above bowling lanes while games were going on beneath us and pins were crashing a few feet behind our amps. We hear that we sounded pretty good, but from the monitors we sounded so terrible that we figured it was hardly worth it to even try to be entertaining. We played the songs faster just to get through the set quicker and about ten or twelve people stuck around until the end.

But we really appreciate the show offer, and being able to play in the coolest bar in town and hope to play there again soon. And it was nice to get a show like that out of the way so the next ones will be easier.

Lots of amazing things are happening tonight in Hamtramck!

Hey everybody,

Our album is DONE! We have several boxes of them here and can't wait to get them to you.

Tonight is our album release party at Small's with Sh! the Octopus and Macrame Tiger. Our friend Scott, aka DJ Bearclizzyawaw will be providing all of the music before, after and in between tonight. We have a lot of big plans and can't wait to see you there.

There is also another great show going on tonight down the street at the Belmont. Millions of Brazilians, Love Meets Lust, New Grenada and Noman are playing a show for MotorCityRocks.com and it's definitely the place I'd be if I didn't have to be at Small's in a couple of hours. If you're trying to figure out what to do tonight, we encourage you to check out all the cool bands that are playing... there's really no excuse not to be in Hamtramck tonight!

If you're already planning on heading to the Belmont later, we encourage you to stop in, say hi, grab a free Blasé Splee CD, check out our great, great friends Macrame Tiger who are playing their first show ever tonight and party with us for a while -- and we hope to see you at our free show in ten days with The Rosewood Thieves and Wild Years at PJ's Lager House. We can't wait for all of you to hear our new songs!

Cheers,
Blasé Splee

okay.

This is fun: All of it All (demo)

I think Mike and Carl made this back before anyone joined the band.

In tidying up my bookmarks,

I came across this website. I must have bookmarked it with the intention of checking it out later. I've spent the last two hours or so completely absorbed in it.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Also, this one is brilliant. I hear Phil Elvrum (Microphones, Mt. Eerie) might have something to do with it and I really hope he keeps it up.

http://woodchopping.blogspot.com/

Yeah, this is pretty standard Saturday night behavior.

Carl, are you going to post that riff2 interview or what?

For the archives...

Tidying up the old myspace...



Dave & Vega are CRAZY!

Greetings from Traverse City.

Blog day special

Today's the day we start blogging. In celebration of blog day, here's a cover song that Mike, Dave and Tommy recorded last year when they all lived together.

download "Ain't it a Shame"

Et Cetera tentative track list

1. What I Want
2. When We Kiss
3. Sorry I
4. Hold My Baby
5. More Than Ordinary
6. All of it All
7. Praise
8. She's Wanting Me More
9. Houses Not Homes
10. Zeitgeist
11. Better Days
12. Right Where You Belong

We still may tweak the order a bit, but this is roughly how it's going to play out. A handful of these songs came together in the studio, and we're going to have to learn how to play them together in time for next Saturday. We haven't written a set list yet, but I'm sure we'll be playing most of the new record along with most of our EP. Some of these songs date back years and years ("Right Where You Belong" was an old You and Yours song, "All of it All" was on Mike and Carl's electropop demo and "More Than Ordinary" and "Better Days" have been Blasé Splee songs as long as we've been Blasé Splee) and some ("Zeitgeist") were written as recently as six weeks ago.

Before Blasé Splee had a MySpace page (assumingly before Mike and Carl had decided to form the band), I stumbled upon Mike's wife Chelsea's page, which at the time had "Better Days" up as her profile song. I believe this was some time around summer '06, it was a recording that Mike made in our old corner house on Knowles before I had even met him. This was around the time when Chelsea was telling me that I should get together and play music with him and Carl, and I was all "ehh....."

download "Better Days (demo)" (2006)

Et Cetera update: May 24, 2009

Mixing is boring.


day 1



day 2



day 3

Et Cetera update: May 9, 2009

Last night, Carl, Mike and I (Jon) began work on one of the final songs for Et Cetera titled "All of it All." The song dates back to the original 2005 electropop demos that would eventually coerce Tommy and Dave into collaborating with Mike and Carl for future songwriting purposes and led to the creation of Blasé Splee. These songs haven't been heard by many people that aren't close to us, and we're very pleased to be able to include one of them on our upcoming album.





Carl and Mike recording "All of it All"

The song was originally recorded with acoustic guitars, with pots and pans used as percussion. We decided to stick with the original formula for the song, but expand on it and improvise a bit.


Mike playing the anatomy book (props to Arcade Fire)


the vocal booth after the tracking of the anatomy book


Carl recording glasses filled with varying amounts of water


Mike playing the typewriter

not pictured: the garbage bin, the steel chair, the compressed air, sock mallets

I'll continue to update as we finish the song over the next couple of days, and contunue these updates as our record nears completion. We're very close, and we can't wait to share it with everyone!



Cheers,
Blasé Splee

Et Cetera update: May 6, 2009

Hey everybody,

We're one month away from our album release and we're definitely feeling the pressure. The first tracks were recorded well over a year ago and we're now working on recording (and re-recording) the last little bits of the album and plan to start working on the final mixes a week from Friday.



one of Mike's handmade pickguards

The record will consist of twelve songs--six of Carl's and six of Mike's. Some of these songs are older than everything on our EP and a couple of them were just written over the last few months. We're really happy that we've been able to spend so much time working on this project completely on our own in the house where Mike and Carl live and can't wait for you guys to hear our newest material. A number of these songs have been tested out live; "More than Ordinary" is as old as we are and was played at our EP release show along with "Better Days."



Jon's 3-keyboard recording setup--for recording "I Never Hoped" (tentative title) and "Houses not Homes"

Mike's "Hold My Baby," "She's Wanting Me More" and "What I Want" have been played out several times over the last year and a half, and we're excited to finally be able to release these songs. A couple of Carl's songs have actually already been played out back when he and Mike were in "You and Yours" (with members of Macramé Tiger) and have now become Blasé Splee songs.



behind the scenes at our latest photo shoot @ the Maple Art Theatre w/ Joe Gall

We have a few special guest appearances on this album. Dave Jakubowski, who played trombone on our SubSprawl xmas jam added some horns to "When We Kiss" (which is previewable right here on our page) and another song we're currently referring to as "Praise" which we introduced at this year's blowout. (That's Dave playing piano in the McDonald's drive-thru on our myspace page, btw.)


the piano featured on the majority of the songs on "Et Cetera"

We're also very pleased to be currently working with Nicole Varga of Tone & Niche, who is adding viola and violin to "Praise" and also an old song (which dates back to the early 2005 electropop demos that would ultimately become Blasé Splee) called "All of it All."



recording Niche in the empty house next-door to our rehearsal space/studio

Also, WRIF's companion online HD radio station RIFF2 (riff2.com) has chosen us as "band of the month" for the month of May. Go check it out! We'll most likely be scheduling an appearance in the studio and may bring along exclusive tracks and/or perform a song or two live on the air.


Dave recording bass


pink & purple vocal booth built entirely out of "found" materials

And lastly, we neglected to mention our amazing writeup after the Blowout on The Post Rockist (post-rockist.com). Check out Scotter's kind words about us:

Blasé Splee is incredible. The songs are extremely well-crafted and performed, the lyrics are great, the songs are soulfully sung and the harmonies are not just striking to the ears–they’re striking to the body. They played a song last night that started slow and then kicked in with a three-part harmony that threw my body into a shudder. They were one of my favorite Detroit bands before this performance and after their performance last night they’re one of my favorite U.S. bands. After next year, they’ll probably one of my favorite world music bands.



Mike playing Wii fit

See you in a month!

Cheers,
Blasé Splee

Progress: