We went on our first multi-city tour! We played NYC, Boston and Philly three days in a row. It felt similar to our "tour" at SXSW this year but with less partying and more driving. Despite being only three days, it was a pretty insane experience. There are few things I've experienced in my life as thrilling as going on tour. It was like riding a roller coaster for three days straight.
Here are some fun highlights:
Getting into a fight with the sound guy in NYC over stage volume
Backing up a rental van into a trash can
Running out of beds/sofas at our AirBnB so Matt slept on a camping pad in a closet only to find an extra bed in the morning
Doing a choose-your-own adventure novel that included crying 1000 tears to save a unicorn (we failed to cry enough and the unicorn died)
Searching for dinner at 1am in Lowell, MA; stumbling into a Columbian dance party instead
Hourglass' "birthday cake" french toast (I am sorry, you had to be there)
In conclusion, I am grateful that Matt, Hourglass and Lauren are all wonderful people that made living on top of each other for 72 hours easy. Plus we sounded great! By the third show at PhilaMOCA we were so in sync with each other. I also totally blew out my voice and need to figure out how to stop doing that, HA
Sophomore Album - (Still) Eighteen
"part two" for that album about the liminal space between adult and teenager.
Where to Listen
The album is exclusively available on Bandcamp. It will be on streaming September 7th.
Astro Alloy on the Radio (WXPN)
I cannot believe this happened. Astro Alloy got played on the radio. I've dreamed about this, but never thought it would actually happen?
Thank you to WXPN and John Vettese. You can check out the 7.30.2024 broadcast here. "Please Go To Therapy" is the third song played and John even has nice things to say about the band 😊.
Headroom Studios
I want Astro Alloy to sound like a real, living band. Not something meticulously pieced together by someone alone on a laptop. (Not that I think there's anything wrong with that... there's plenty of room in this world for both!)
I have a chronic need to not repeat myself. I don't want to use the same mics, record in the same space and I absolutely do not want to follow best practices. I want to break all the rules and do the things you're not supposed to do and find out what happens.
This, on the surface, probably sounds exciting. And it is. But in practice, this means we have to work a lot harder to make these ideas work. That means suffering the consequences of my decisions. I hope, when this project is over, that people can tell that there's something different about us, that the extra work mattered.
We booked Headroom Studios for a weekend. We recorded a four-minute instrumental live on tape without a click track, playing it over and over and over again until we got it right. We were all in the same room with our instruments. There were acoustic panels everywhere because I wanted to hear each instrument in the room itself rather than thru a headphone mix. It was thrilling to nail a take as a full band, to lock in and sync up with each other to get the performance right.
Thank you to Mark Watter from Headroom that had the wisdom and grit to pull all this off and to Richie DeVon (from Lástima) for their assistance.
CART Studios II: Electric Boogaloo
Back at CART! Lauren & I recorded guitars for an EP that'll come out some time later. We've got vocals to track next. (We do have an album coming out in a few weeks, this is another separate thing!)
We got to do something cool in the studio with Matias: rather than piece together each guitar track individually, Lauren & I played our parts live together at the same time and positioned the microphones to let both our amps bleed into each other. This should give a full, live sound that we couldn't have achieved otherwise. Very few overdubs. Pretty much the opposite of what I did when tracking guitars by myself in the Eighteen days.
We were supposed to play a show that same evening but Matt got the 'rona. The first show we had to drop! Ah well!
Back to the Studio
Hourglass & I spent this afternoon at CART Studios to record drums for some new songs. We've worked with Matias before and he's great. Drums are notoriously difficult to get right in the studio so I don't take for granted that the session was easy and fun. Credit to the skill of both of them.
For one of the weirder songs (which Hourglass describes as "three different genres") he set up his kit with two different snares and switched between them. Then we added some extra percussion after.
I have big ideas for this project but I don't know what the end result will be. I hope it will be something cool. For now, things are sounding great!
West Philly Porchfest
Thank you for our biggest show yet! We had no idea if anyone would show up, and by the end of our set there were over 100 people, enough to block the street. It was hot enough in direct sunlight to start melting the power cable to Lauren's pedals (?!) and wow at one point I thought I was gonna pass out because I didn't drink enough water (!!). So, lots to learn from this one.
Special thanks to Flower Clvb, the beautiful flower shop that hosted us and, more importantly, dealt with the noise complaints because we were just too punk rock. Rock'n'Roll!
We Got Merch!
Look at this awesome merch Lauren made! DIY patches, earrings and free stickers! More to come. No online store, if you wanna buy you gotta come to one of our shows ;)
WXPN 24-Hour Song Challenge
Philly's local public radio station, WXPN, did their first-ever "24-Hour Song Challenge" where musicians were given 24 hours to write and perform an original song with a given prompt. This year's prompt was "summertime". We wrote a song called Winter Mood, which you can check out on YouTube or click the pic above. Check out the other 400+(!!) submissions here!
Guitar Tabs
omg! you can view guitar tabs for the entire Eighteen album right here on astroalloy.com! clicky da link
Apologies to anyone who has no idea what we're talking about.
Debut Album - Eighteen
An album about the liminal space between adult and teenager.
