Recordings Completed, Bottleneck Ensues

Hi there, funny we should meet like this. It's been a while, but all has been very, very busy. Updates on a lot of fronts. In various states of "done", in order of closest to being done and available. Skull Servant NE/SE - Vacant Eyes/Vacant Screen cassette: songs done, need a final mix. Artwork started, needs to be completed. Skull Servant NE/SE - Obfuscation 7": songs done, final mix done, artwork needs to be started. Off to the lathe end of this month. Song is on Bandcamp. If you use Soundcloud, you can hear different, earlier versions of this behemoth as we shared parts of it with different collaborators. Skull Servant NE/SE - Transparency 7": songs done, final mix done artwork needs to be started. Off to lathe cutters at the end of July. Song is on Bandcamp. Skull Servant - Watching dub: still remixing. Looks like this will be a 12" mono dub plate. Skull Servant - The Humans cassette: 5 songs written, in various states of finished - most have drum tracks, some have drums and bass, one has drums, bass, noise and metal percussion done. Skull Servant - Aufpassen cassette: 1 song written. The conceit of this tape is to try to recreate the influence of Einsturzende Neubauten/Test Dept in a series of songs. This one won't be done this year. Skull Servant - Eschelon cassette: 1 song written. This one's a bit different, rather than use the servants to build a punk band, we're using servants to build an industrial band circa 1988 including drum machines and other sounds from that era. We'll see if this fits the motif, and go from there. Probably a long way off. We also provides some noise for Greber to use in upcoming shows and releases. Bring earplugs as these drones are in the upper register (as drones are in the upper atmosphere). This stuff might appear on something recorded, but life is unpredictable and we're not expecting anything to develop for these until next year.

More and More People are Getting the Right Idea

Intermission.

It's been a while. Movement on the recordings have been slow. Perhaps a Test Dept video will suffice?

Skull Servant NE/SE - Vacant Screens/Vacant Eyes cassette

Here at Skull Servant industries, we fly by the seat of our ADD brains, but when we stumble across sounds that don't work for recordings or ideas that are currently underway, we tend to switch gears and focus on the new idea. So in parallel with Obfuscation and Transparency releases, we've finished two new pieces, Vacant Screens and Vacant Eyes - one about computerized surveillance, one about the people who watch surveillance for a living. This will be released in the next month as we finish the art. More fun. Will post when ready.

Obfuscation/Transparency

The next (pair of) release(s) will be Skull Servant NE/SE Obfuscation 7" lathe cut and Skull Servant NE/SE Transparency 7" lathe cut.  Obfuscation will be a sonic piece that works with the idea of obscuring your identity with unreal data points, to create a confused version of who you are for those who track you. Currently we're recording 150 layers for this experiment, and we've completed three of the anticipated twenty recording sessions required to get this level of depth.

Transparency, of course, is the opposite of obfuscation. As a result transparency will be a Skull Servant take on droning sounds. Very minimal, subtle, quiet.

Skull Servant - The Humans cassette is back in the practice stages - we've reworked our original material to create stronger, better songs. We've cut the release down to two longer tracks similar is feel to "Watching", but perhaps a bit less reserved. Doom metal meets powerviolence meets noise, with a splash of blown speakers in there to get the full effect.

Finally, Skull Servant - Watching (dub) is still on hiatus, as some hardware required to make this happen broke. Will be fixing as soon as possible, but of course, things cost money and time. We've also made a DAW switch from Sonar X1 to Studio One - which means the rough tracks need to be exported and imported, and the mixing process with outboard equipment will begin again.

Event #4

An Update Seems In Order

Throughout the Summer all plans have been derailed. In fact it took all summer to get back most of my recording gear, so that things can now progress as it should. Servant No.2 has been working hard on their personal noise work. Now seems like the appropriate time to regroup and start working on "The Humans" which is the next "music" tape which will cover surveillance's effect on the human psyche and changes our behaviour. Mostly ideas about how we revert to (dominant) cultural norms when confronted with observation. Side B will cover some ideas about fear. Looks like early in the new year we should see the tape. Also an accompanying noise tape whose theme is yet to be determined, but will be about all-pervasive surveillance as well.

You can get the Watching 7"  through Scream and Writhe as well as Analog Worship. That happened a bit ago, grab them as you will. There's also a couple copies of the Watchful tape at Analog Worship. Basically, these are the only two places to get it outside of the local Hamilton area, outside of us. We are interested in trades and other distribution opportunities. Contact us at skullservantnoise@gmail.com. The irony shouldn't surprise you, should it?

Long term projects? Why yes, we have a ton. The Watching (dub) lathe cut is still in process. More alley shows, especially in the winter. We will see (as will they).

The Ex in the USA

Skull Servant - Watching 7" EP Available For Purchase

Finally, the culmination of two years, multiple attempts, and a whole whackload of work. Enjoy sounds that mix Einsturzende Neubauten/Test Dept industrial, early 90's powerviolence and modern day hardcore ala Walls with more than a smattering of noise. I honestly haven't heard anything that sounds like us, but if you like the godly Column of Heaven or Gas Chamber, you'll probably tolerate listening to us too.

Order from our Bandcamp page or our Big Cartel page - listed over there. It's $10 PPD in North America, which is us taking a bit of a bath to get it out there. There's only a 100 of these available. Mastered by Jack Control at Enormous Door Mastering. Distribution inquiries to: skullservantnoise@gmail.com

Modern Day Number Stations?

Kotaku has written something interesting about YouTube.

Noise Setup as of April 20, 2014

No one has particularly asked what we use in our noise setup - so that's probably a good reason to talk about it. Really, for two reasons - one, we'll be adding some newer gear and may want to revisit this setup sooner or later, and two, I think this sort of gear porn is neat. Typically we have five channels that end up in a mix:

Track 1 is a "vocal" track - meticulously assembled on computer then dumped to 4 track cassette tape - allowing us to pitch up or down the track - or alternately cut out elements entirely should we want to. This may be run to a separate amp, or into our mixer (the Traynor pictured below), or into the house mix.

Track 2 and Track 3 are originating at the weird sound generator - which is essentially a dual oscillator. Both signals go into a Boss DS1 distortion to boost the signal and add some grit. Then it goes into a Boss looper, and split into two signals. One heads straight to our mixer, the other into the incredibly useful Digitech PDS 2020.

Track 4 originates from the Trogotronic 101, and goes straight from the source into the mixer.

Track 5 is a contact mic taped usually on the basket of a shopping cart (of course illustrated here as on the frame of a shopping cart) run through an extension cable to the Boss DSD-2, the Sampler/Delay version of the DD-3.

Even the Servant Can Control the Master

Master/Servant Relationships

So the (Skull) Servant, (Enormous Door) Master(ing) relationship begins.

All Knowing Eyes

Long Cold Winter

It's been a long cold winter. As primary servant in this unit, I've kept much of the projects under wraps - finally some of them will start seeing the light of day. In the meantime, hopefully this will amuse you enough to keep checking back here.

Because our performances are strictly speaking, without human vocals (we usually have a "vocal" track that serves to communicate somewhat with the audience), periodically we print off flyers or what we've come to describe as communiques. It's all very interesting I suppose, but without ruining all the subtext of this idea, we distribute the flyers before the performance, because after, all we typically want to do is get out of the fucking boilersuits and masks. They're very claustrophobic.

So while I've created flyers for the first and second shows, I never duplicated them. The third event, we did have them on hand, but they were forgotten in a car parked several blocks away, and frankly we were set up and ready to go.

For your consideration, here's communique #3.

Unruh Effect

It should come as no surprise that Einsturzende Neubauten is a huge influence on how we as Skull Servant work - their repurposing of metal throughout their career to make noise at first, and now as instruments in their industrial approach to writing songs. We too like what they've done, and take it as great influence on the things we do. In every piece we work on, develop, and ultimately destroy, we want to have this element of percussion, preferrably with found objects.

N.U. Unruh takes us through his storage, which only serves to whet my appetite when it comes to percussion. I want one of those mallet-like hammers, I want to meet him and scrounge with him, banging on every object from here to the East End. Much respect is due, and this clip above certainly make absorb every scrap (pardon the pun) of the development process that Unruh takes to get his sounds.

Video Evidence of Communique #3

From our show where we performed, then did a brief collaboration with Snake Charmer. Mr. Woodford took some great photos. Thanks Mike, we owe you a beer.I ended up smashing my left foot smashing the the shopping cart. Big thanks for Column of Heaven asking us to play, Snake Charmer for indulging our wacky ideas.

We're working on a lathe, the Watching 7" and some other projects (maybe another cassette?). Maybe a show as the full band, and some other art stuff (a video perhaps). Keep an eye out for our activities.

Fall Events

People must like us, or need us to clear rooms because we keep playing to people. I believe our good friends in Snake Charmer and us are going to do something brilliant, or something (as our good friend Imants used to say) utter shit together. I think it'll be cool, but we'll see how it all turns out. If you can't make it I'll be recording the audience again with our set as background music.  

Speaking of surveillance, here's the Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/281674118640997/

Been working on getting gear together to do the Watching Dub in the proper way. Think it'll end up being a flexi of some sort. All those early Jamaican Dub records were subject to shoddy presses (probably due to record manufacturers having a stranglehold on the equipment and resources to do "good" work) so a flexi pays proper homage to what they did in the 70's.   

We still want to do an alley show, but the soonest we can do it is October... maybe a Hallowe'en thing? I like the sounds of that...

Also, the Watching 7" EP is stalled, buy a tape or a button or something so we can afford to start working on it again. It's ready for the presses, just need a down payment while unemployment hinders our progress.

If you like bands, you might like Water Torture.

Skull Servant NE/SE set July 2 2013

July 2 Show

So we're planning on bringing out the noise and omitting the funk (unless that's our smell) on July 2nd for a stacked noise bill featuring:

NOISE NOMADS (Load Records, RRR)
http://bonescraperrecordings.wordpress.com/ 

BELLTONE SUICIDE (Feedingtube Records)
http://youtu.be/K2Dag7TWrvU 

with support from
ISOLATION ORDER (London, ON) http://youtu.be/5N5JxSNNmAA
FOSSILS (Hamilton) http://www.youtube.com/fossilsband
and us (Skull Servant NE/SE).

9PM, $5

Yes, the punks in us might want to see Infa Riot down the road, but really, you aren't going to see anything this good in this area this year.