Last Thursday we played at a venue in Kyoto. During sound check, after one song, the MTR we use for our prerecorded sounds suddenly stopped playing anything. We reset it, perplexed, and then it asked us if we wanted to format the memory card. Oops.

We reset it again, same result. All the data was gone, so we played an impromptu acoustic show which probably turned out okay. I noticed that the mixer was also acting extremely strangely, with dead spots on the pan pots and insane popping whenever I switched inputs. After testing it upstairs to make sure I hadn’t just broken it somehow, it was pretty clear that it was an electrical problem, probably from the hodgepodge of daisy-chained extension cords and the fact that the mixer was plugged directly into the house system through some weird board, and not through direct boxes as usual, so the most likely suspect was a ground loop. My theory is that the memory card got zapped that way.

Lessons learned:

• Always use a DI box.
• Always bring a backup, preferably several.
• I can get a plastic ball through the hole in a kick drum head in only two tries.

By the way, if anyone can put us in touch with these people, we are extremely interested in touring with them.

Mr. Z, proprietor of nerdy music blog and mecca Hipster, Please! has at long last released his latest compilation album - Old Nerdy Bastard.

The album is a veritable fudgeload of remixes and mashups of all stripes. Featured on the album are such nerdcore rappists as MC Frontalot, YT Cracker, MC Hawking and Optimus Rhyme, as well as internet rockers The Grammar Club and Brad Sucks and a bunch of wizard people. Probably the most out-of-place is a track by some band called Hidari, remixed by one Glenn Case and featuring Justin Bacon and Atsuko Nishimura on backup vocals. Actually, it doesn’t fit within the traditional remix mold, so we might have to coin the term ‘demix’ to describe it. Which has probably already been coined. Fiddlesticks.

Download the whole album for free at hipsterplease.com.

I moved things around a bit today, so any of you that are subscribed to any RSS feeds around here should probably update your bookmarks.

Do let me know if anything looks broken.

I should have posted that before I changed anything, but I am a maverick.

(Sorry)

Tomorrow morning at around 11:30AM, Hidari will be doing some sort of interview on Kobe’s KISS 89.9FM. If you are the sort of person who lives in Kobe and listens to the radio, don’t forget to tune in.