Another crazy tour! Maybe someday we'll go on a proper TOUR tour where we travel for weeks at a time, but for now it's a big deal just to take a week off from our day jobs (day jobs? rock'n'roll doesn't pay the bills??) and play five shows in five days.
There is a group of people who came to every show. And they're so cool and nice?? Astro Alloy has been lucky enough to have fans early on, and it's next-level to see people love and support the band in-person.
I've rarely heard other musicians talk about this, but so much of making this band work is relying on other people. Booking shows, borrowing gear, sleeping over, just showing up. I have to fight my desire to do everything alone, to not depend on anyone else, because the band wouldn't be able to work otherwise.
In other news, I hit a wall. My own physical limitations. I had a dream/delusion that I would just put in 110% for each show and recover well enough to push thru for the next one. In practice, this worked for a week and then I died. I fucked around and found out that over-exertion leads to health problems and I was knocked out for a whole week with a respiratory infection. (I have still never gotten COVID!) If I were to do it all again (as I plan to) I need to incorporate diet and exercise, or else I will perish.
Here we go again... ATX 2025
We'll be playing four shows in Austin (I think??) and I'm excited for all of them. Then we're hauling our shit all the way to New Orleans. We're blowing all our money on this trip, but you only live once, RIGHT? Maybe we can go viral on Spotify and they can start paying us ⅓¢ per stream instead of our current rate of 0¢. Fuck Spotify and everything that our tech overlords are doing to turn our lives into sleek, efficient meaninglessness. See you in real life.
CART Studios 4: Jirachi Wish Maker
Lauren, Mattias and I moved an upright piano from one space to another in the studio so we could record it with a distant room mic. The three of us sat at the bench together to play a six-octave chord. We reversed the track and added a delay effect. The results were perfect, one of the coolest things I've ever done. Maybe this sounds cool, maybe you had to be there.
There is a tension on this album I'm not sure how to resolve. I think of myself as a balance of someone who is a silly fun clown and someone who feels a lot of feelings and just wants to be weird and sad and loved for being weird and sad. Songs that embrace the former are more liked and our live shows emphasize that "clown" side of me. But there's the other side that writes less-popular songs, less immediately fun, but they are just as important to me. What do I do with them? I asked Lauren and she said "who cares what people think, you should do you," and she's probably right.
We'll be in and out of the studio this year recording the big follow-up to Eighteen/Still Eighteen! Eric aka Jersey Wall dropped by and took lots of cool pics :) I should probably make like a photo gallery type thing for the website. Or even an Astro Alloy app. That would be cool!!
It's hard to fit in a full-time job and do everything that the success of Astro Alloy demands of me. I don't really have time for anything else. 8 hours at work, then 4 hours in the studio... it's not a bad way to live. I just want to stop making content for Instagram, please.
We Are A Loud Band
I've gone to enough concerts to make up my mind: amp sims and click tracks are death for any band trying to convey the energy of rock & roll for their live show. This "no volume on stage" trend for rock & roll is a big "no" for me. Maybe if I was in an eight-piece jazz fusion band I'd feel differently, but I'm not so I don't!
There is a flow state, a primal trance I put myself in when pushing a Big Muff into a 50w tube amp, and it doesn't happen when I'm only pushing 15w or less (unless we are in a tiny, echo-y basement, then 15w it is!) This is not a choice, this is not incidental, this is a non-negotiable aspect of the performance needed for the show to work.
We haul a giant two-ton 4x10 bass cab everywhere. Why? Because it sounds better. The dinky light-weight combo amps don't cut it. 1x15 cabs are okay, but I'm not on putting up with being alive on this earth so my band can be "okay".
Heaven forbid someone says my needs are impractical. Truly nothing is more impractical than a rock band. If we wanted to be practical, we'd break up, throw our instruments away and go be accountants.
Okay one more note: hearing damage is a real thing. We bring special foam earplugs meant for live music to share with the audience (although I keep forgetting to mention we have them on stage!) We each wear hearing protection when practicing and performing. If you wonder, "why wear earplugs? why not just turn down?" then you don't get it!
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.
