DETERIOR

Men Like Gods by Deterior Here it is, the fourth Deterior album. I suppose it's a bit like the last one but a bit heavier, faster, crunchier, etc. I hope you like it as much as I liked making it. As usual, it's free to stream and pay-what-you-want to download. The Bandcamp download comes with an exclusive PDF booklet with extensive artwork, lyrics, and credits. label: GarageMonkey Productions (GMP-029) format: digital file released: 29 November 2011 time: 46:06 recorded and engineered by Deterior in Studio 175 from September–October 2011 mixed and mastered by Deterior in Studio 175 from October–November 2011 cover art: Ivan Aivazovsky

It's done. After over a year and a half of work, it's finally finished. Mixed and mastered. I'm going to be listening over the holiday weekend and making sure there aren't any bugs needing ironing out (how's that for a mixed metaphor) but aside from that it's done, and it sounds great. All else there is left to do now is cross our fingers and wait until Tuesday.

Replicant [single] by Deterior from Men Like Gods . also contains a remix of "The Rhetoric Drain". label: GarageMonkey Productions (GMP-028) format: digital file released: 15 November 2011 time: 9:37 recorded and engineered by Deterior in Studio 175 from September–October 2011 mixed and mastered by Deterior in Studio 175 from October–November 2011 cover art: Ivan Aivazovsky / Deterior

One week to go until the single is out. I haven't worked on it in a while because I wanted to give my ears time away from the mix before I finalized everything. I listened to my "release candidate" export today and I'm feeling hesitant about it; maybe it's my mood, who knows. Even if it doesn't wind up totally right, there's still another two weeks after that for the album itself to come out right. So I have high hopes for things. In other news, in case anyone is interested, here is the complete poster set for all four albums . I don't think these are available anywhere else (since stashbox closed and myspace probably deleted the Primitive Circuitry poster), and I don't think I have hi-res versions of any of them, sadly (besides the new one). If anyone is interested I can see if I can wrangle up some bigger ones. Update: Alright, here are hi-res poster versions . That's about as good as you're going to get. Fortunately I'd saved the r...

No better topic for the 100th post on this blog: The fourth Deterior album Men Like Gods will be released November 29, 2011. The tracklist is as follows: (The Leviathan Has Woken) Watching the Lid Dead Revolution Replicant (The Leviathan Is Moving) Everything Is Alright Crawl Space Behind Red (The Leviathan Has Drowned) Men Like Gods The obligatory single will come out on November 15th: "Replicant" b/w "The Rhetoric Drain (Furnace mix)". I'm still working on artwork for each; that should be done hopefully soonish, then I can really get cracking on mixing and finalizing stuff. Dates and titles are subject to change, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with this.

Alright, finally recording is all done (unless I find bits I need to re-do). I am going to have to spend a bit of time reinstalling some software since I did a clean reinstall of Windows, so it'll be a few days before I have my workstation up and running again to start editing the vocals, putting in effects and interludes, and starting mixing. But stuff is definitely coming along.

Finally getting vocals knocked out, the last major obstacle before putting together interludes/final sound effects, and then mixing. Pretty exciting stuff. I have two songs done and will probably get one more in today; the other four will probably get done next week sometime, probably sooner rather than later.

My Internet access is back, so I can post here consistently now! This past week I have had tons of free time so I went ahead and recorded all the guitar parts for the new album. The new guitar and distortion pedal sounded fantastic, so thanks to everyone who has donated at my Bandcamp page , you've helped make the new stuff sound good! More or less it's a continuation of the sound of the last album, maybe a bit more death metal and post-hardcore influence, which is pretty interesting. Hopefully I will make some decent progress on vocals this week, but we will see; I think I want to get some more rehearsing in first. One of the more common complaints about Primitive Circuitry  was the vocals, so that's something I'm going to try to focus on a bit more heavily. (Gotta give the people what they want!) Still gonna say November for a tentative release. Haven't made any decisions on titles or art or anything like that yet.

So this time I have a good excuse for not updating this blog: I just moved and haven't had consistent Internet access for a week, nor will I for another week. However, not having Internet means that I am forced to be more productive. And I have been! In the last couple of days I recorded all the major bass guitar parts. I might have to re-record some bits or later but for now that's all completely done. I will do guitar and vocals probably all in the coming week (I finally got new strings too so I should be all set). So if I get recording done this coming week, let's say I'll probably have all the sounds laid down at the end of the month, spend October mixing, and maybe it will be out in November. We'll see, as usual.

Finished tracking drums, finally. That's always the longest and most excruciating part. They're not even really done for real; I still have a bunch of tweaking to do since all I wanted was to get the groundwork down so I could record other stuff over them. Hopefully I'll be able to get new guitar strings this weekend (also, finally) and actually maybe start recording for real. It's definitely not gonna happen by the end of the month like I speculated. It might not start before the end of the month. Moving is gonna screw my schedule up. Album's looking to be maybe 43 minutes long or so. I hope you enjoy this silly fact.

I had been thinking about getting a new guitar to record the new album. I've had my current one, the Ibanex EX 370 (I talked about it a bit here ) for I think about six or seven years now and while it's held up all that time it's really not that great of a guitar; it has obnoxious features and it's a bit beat up and doesn't sound all that great. So I was going to look around at some stores, see what struck my fancy; I wound up getting a new one on the first day I went looking (Saturday, at Woodsy's in Kent, Ohio ): a Schecter Omen-6: (Not my photo, although it's the same exact thing except with all-black pickups.) It's not an expensive guitar, but it's new and very well-built (Schecter is a great brand, from what I've played before) and it sounds awesome with my Metal Muff. (I'm pretty sure the Schecter Diamond series are designed specifically for playing metal anyway.) The only thing is it needs new strings and they closed the only good musi...

Today I finished the first draft of the lyrics (finally), something I've been putting off WAY too long, and also made a complete vocal demo. Apart from being really sloppy, the new demo sounds pretty good and I'm pleased with progress so far. Things are finally starting to move a bit faster. I'll hopefully have all the drums tracked by the end of next week, if I'm lucky, and I'll probably round out the month with more rehearsal and maybe recording bass.

Just finished a full bass rehearsal of my new, re-arranged demos; it's sounding really good. I'm enjoying the heavier and more punk-influence direction things are taking. Also, I seem to have forgotten how much better playing fingerstyle sounds with the bass and I'm pretty sure I'm going to ditch the pick entirely for this album; I don't think it really has a place in the new stuff. I've already started tracking the drums for the finished product (one song done, out of seven) and hope to record guitar and bass during the next month. Vocals will have to wait for a bit since I've still barely written any lyrics. It's a tough job. In the meantime, more rehearsing. I think the vocals are going to sound better this time around. There were some complaints about the last album but I've practiced quite a bit since then. Hopefully I'll be updating more next month when I get down to business with recording. We'll see, as always.

Hooray, finally time to work on music! I'm been tweaking song arrangements and writing lyrics for the new album the past week or so. I don't want to say too much about a release date yet, but my tentative schedule is to finish arrangements and lyrics this month, record in August, mix in September, and maybe release late September or October. Perhaps. I've also been working on a new project; this time a collaboration with a friend of mine. I'll talk about that later when it starts shaping up more.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is currently hosting a number of works by Thomas Cole , which I had the pleasure of seeing yesterday while I was in the District. They didn't have Romantic Landscape with Ruined Tower , unfortunately (that's at the Albany Institute of History and Art), but they did have one that looked quite a bit like it— Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower . I'm not a huge art admirer, but it was probably the coolest museum I've ever been to, so if you're around there definitely take a look.

Today I am graduating from college. The last few weeks have been completely crazy, which is why I haven't posted anything here. All I've had time to do is some brief practicing. I'm taking the next two weeks off, but then after that (when I start my new job) I'll have loads more time to commit to rehearsing and arranging new material.

Hello everyone! I figured I'd do a bit of posting about how the new music is coming along. I've decided that I'm done writing demos and have picked out eight of them to become fully-fledged songs on the new album. Right now I'm working on getting the preliminary order worked out, and pretty soon I'm going to start writing the tabs, editing arrangements, and writing lyrics. The songs themselves have turned out great so far. They're not too terribly different in style from those on Primitive Circuitry , maybe with a little extra post-hardcore influence. Of course as always I'm trying to do something different / new / experimental with them all and we'll see how that goes. Well, I'm liking them so far and so should any fans of the last album. It's been a slow process so far, but as I've said before I've had a lot on my plate lately, which is going to change drastically in the next few weeks, and I think I'll have a lot more time to do wo...

Here it is, finally: four covers given the Deterior treatment. I can't put it on Bandcamp because of their terms and conditions, and Mediafire appears to be broken, so here it is on Multiupload instead. http://www.multiupload.com/4N7ROPECR0 (V0 MP3) label: GarageMonkey Productions (GMP-027) format: digital file released: 3 May 2011 time: 21:27 recorded and engineered by Andrew Arnold in Studio 205 from 2009–2010 mixed and mastered by Andrew Arnold Studio 205 in April 2011 cover art: Deterior tracklist: Screaming at a Wall (4:18) [Minor Threat] Light Leaves (5:12) [Why?] The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack (5:44) [Liars] Waiting Room (Version 2) (6:13) [Fugazi]

I've finally decided to finish Ectype . It has actually been almost-done for a while now; it was mostly a combination of working on other things and forgetting it existed. But now it's officially coming! Bandcamp's conditions disallow uploading covers (don't tell them about "Waiting Room"), so I'll just put up a Mediafire link on May 3. The tracklist will be as follows: Screaming at a Wall (Minor Threat, originally from Minor Threat ) Light Leaves (Why?, originally from Elephant Eyelash ) The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack (Liars, originally from Drum's Not Dead ) Waiting Room (Fugazi, originally from Fugazi ) "Screaming at a Wall" is a slightly different mix than that which appeared on the Rate Your Music compilation. "Waiting Room" is a completely different version. Sorry about the two-year wait.

I still have nothing interesting to say while I crank out demos, so I'm just going to keep posting songs.

As you probably know, I've been working on a fourth Deterior album. It's been slow going, especially when you consider I've been writing sketches of new songs since May of last year (yep, before Primitive Circuitry was even finished), but thankfully I've got a huge amount of material to work from—64 sketches so far—so going to the next step, writing demos, hasn't been to challenging yet. I think I'm maybe almost halfway done doing demos. For the last album I made I think thirteen. I've got six so far; I'd like to do at least thirteen again, maybe fifteen if I can (I've definitely got enough material to do at least fifteen). What is making things difficult is my desire to write about a million different types of music all at once. Deterior has traditionally been a post-rock/sludge sort of deal, but I always have this urge to write post-hardcore, death metal, black metal, noise rock... maybe one day; I don't have the kind of talent to pull all t...

Somehow I got through the entire month of January without a blog post. My life was pretty crazy what with starting the new quarter and continuing the job search. But that's partly behind me now. I've still been working on new song sketches and I'm up to about 64, I think, so I'm going to try to finish up assessments and start putting together some demos soon. Unfortunately I'm not as pleased with any of them as I feel like I should be, but that will probably change once I get some demos done. I'm going to try to crank out about a dozen again, maybe a few more depending how long they are (I already have two done), so that'll keep me occupied for a couple months probably. Again, I want to make zero promises on when anything at all is going to come out, because my life is going to be a huge mess come graduation and when I start my new job.