I has new neighbours. Most times it’s fun to have new neighbours, my last neighbours were naked…alot. These ones are noisy..alot.
I think they are a musicky bunch. 3 Kids. I think. One plays the piano, one the violin and the other owns a drum set.
So far, the one with the piano has been playing inspector gadget for a month and still not getting it past 1st verse.
Violin person is trying to play the Simpson’s opening theme song and hasn’t gone past the 4th note, for a month.
The Drummer, drums at 7.30pm when I’m fresh out of the studio, and need to be music free for awhile….and…well he’s learning…but the drumming’s very bad and I’m too polite to tell him to stop. Except he does stop, intermittently, and picks up a completely different rhythm before he masters the last. I want to twat him on the head to tell him to practice properly.
Then I hear the tunes of inspector gadget again with the same wrong notes since last month and I want to fire missiles from the strings of my all powerful zither.
This entry is brought to you by your royal cranky, who should really be kinder to budding musicians.
Before there was order. Then the muses said “Let there be NOISE”
And the above where I spent the initial weeks/ months (post Spiked Soul) going into a very bad sort of a bitey, rabidey human bean. All this for trying to write new material.
There’s something very difficult about being creative all of a sudden. So if there was some sort of metaphysical hospital for suddenly non functioning creators, my patient file would probably look like this.
Patient Name: Yunyu Symptoms: Patient exhibits bouts of rage, complains of sudden inability to write, bouts of random nausea, talking to self, telling thin air to shut up, short spurts of head banging on the nearest hard object, repeat random violence sequence, has zombie delusions, was caught trying to chew through the scalp of a fellow artist Diagnosis: Muse Riot-itis
My first album was mostly written in Perth, which for some reason always makes the muses happy. For the most part, I think it is well and truly because my muses are secretly beach bums that were too lazy to even join the reincarnation queue (which is why they don’t have a body and feed off me instead.) …if you believe in that sort of thing. Then said, Perth IS a beautiful place and if ever there was a portal for the birth of good music, Perth definitely had one.
I’m not sure if it’s the epileptic seizure inducing city lights, or the fact that there’s simply too much entertainment (whether u want to or not) in the city, or the fact that I am just a cranky cranky crankpot writer with a helluva writer’s block. Somehow along the way, focused writing became some kind of a colossal challenge.
Spiked Soul was an album that came relatively easy. I was bored in Perth, I heard voices, I wrote what the voices said/sung. The whole process was very much like minute taking in some sort of a madhatter’s tea party kind of way. Too easy really.
Writer’s block or writer’s flood?
Post Spiked Soul, early attempts to write the second album resulted in a choir of muse produced verbal vomit, which certainly wasn’t too pretty.
Maybe I had unlocked some sort of a vein, this writing thing, I suddenly had no control over it. I was hemorrhaging muse spew and there was no end in sight. If I had to blame one more thing it was the huge amounts of graphic novels I had consumed a little after Spiked Soul. Suddenly it was too many ideas, too little tunes.
This meant that it was hopelessly difficult to finish a song without going crazy and trying to change the lyrics/ story in the tune every 30 seconds. The end result was me lying helplessly in a heap of scrap papers with no known musical tune in sight. My overzealous muses had mauled every single visiting tune to bits.
My vicious vicious monkey hyena in-bred muses.
While most of my fellow writers’ vocationally suffer from what is known as a writer’s block, I believe I was battling some tsunami version of a writer’s flood, and , frankly, not handling it well at all.
The result is inherently the same. You end up not completing anything worthy of mention. You also want to eat all other songwriters/ creative people for dinner, very literally. Somehow, in your deepest delusions you hope that by doing so you could maybe absorb some of their inspiration and cleverness back into your system. Then you have to deal with the paranoia… OMG I’ll NEVER WRITE AGAAAAAINNNNN!!!!
For awhile I tried everything, I did the whole artist way thing. I wrote pages (for those not in the know, pages are a form of writing exercise u do, involves a blank page, a pen and just writing anything you want till you fill up 2 pages..worth a try).
I did a hippie dance, I went to see beautiful sunsets and fantasized about beautiful beach people becoming whales and mud wrestling each other and winning sea slugs… I picked up hobbies, attempted knitting….(nuff said). The result of all this positive attempts resulted increasingly eye-watering levels of panic with no cure in sight.
This was until I was kindly reminded of the concept of the concept album.Of course, this is right round the point where I disappear from the internetty in a long spur of a non-naked EUREKA! moment.
Turns out that the cure for Muse-Vomit-itis is all too simple. All I have to do is to write according to a self made up rule, no exceptions, no excuses. That unless a story or an idea worked under the new rules of the newly created universe, muses had to shut up and come back when they had something valid. The new rules for play seemed to work better than the best of super nannies for the rogue muses.
Dedicated to writers/ songwriters/ creatives who suffer from some version of a muse riot/ strike. Hope you find your muse nanny soon. Keep writing. (even if your writing looks like mine…which is like rancid cat pee)
How’s all? Thanks for the warm twitter welcome. I hope everyone’s well in these crazy times and keeping ok. I have missed you, dear minions. Spidey is needing internetty minion chatter to continue maintaining some facade of sanity. At least to her outside world.
I’m alright. Still working on the album, which is proving to be bigger job than all my multiple personalities combined. It’s going slowly but not badly. Thanks to my long suffering manager, the second album has become one with many crazy good people working on it, so if it calls for me to take a little more time with it, so I shall, and I hope my minions understand my need to take time with this. I just want this album to be bloody bloody good.
We’ve decided to hold back on the singles releases until the rest of the tracks are more or less completed. So, at this point I want to take the time to thank the minions who have been checking on me with pulse checking machines. Sorry for the internetty silence, but there was some intensive songwriting to be done the last couple of months and your royal madness actually managed to get pretty focused about all of it.
So for now, I can tell you that almost all the material for the album has been written , and is sitting in the later stages of production, mix master etc There might be one or 2 more tunes/tales I might like to write but they are a bonus tunes at this stage.
New album is concept album
You are going to find that I haven’t mentioned anything about anything I’ve worked on at all. The reason is simply because the new album is a concept album, so any smidgen of research/ lyric bits I reveal is probably going to give it all away and spoil the surprise for everyone. For those who might have looked hard enough at previous photos I have posted on the blog, I might have given the game away already. Those who think they have worked it out or are in the know, keep it to yourself.
Much much more importantly…knowing me and my arse luck, telling you about the contents of the album is going to jinx it all somehow.
So I’ll update u as much as I can, in the entries soon to follow… while I carefully navigate/ distract u pass the research papers/lyrics/mess that might give the game away.
So with this…just 2 teeny tiny rules of engagement.
1) please please, don’t ask me what the album is about or ask me for hints ( things will be revealed in their own time) and;
2) don’t ask me when the album is going to be done. It’s done when it’s done and you will hear about it..promise. (because, believe me that’s all I’m obsessing over at the moment).
Back shortly, wednesday to be precise. I should be back in broadband civilization by then.
Chance for a singles preview at the much awaited Animania in Sydney. Yes I will be there playing.
Details below. Not long on the official singles release now…more words on that when the masters are warm and writhing in my hands.
Artwork by Queenie Chan check out her newly released manga adaptation In Odd we Trust a great companion book to Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series.
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Dear minions,
been awhile I know. I’m still in studio bat mode actually. I haven’t seen sunlight for awhile now. Winter could be a reason, studio is another.
So on to main matters before my muses come to knock… Interstate gig alert : Next stop — Brisbane (Free Entry)
Gig in Brisbane. Details here. Show as part of Creative Commons Australia.
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Where: State Library of Queensland
When: 24th June 2008
Doors Open : 5.30
Entry: FREE but must RSVP here by 9th June
As most of you might know, 2 songs, A Prayer and Lenore’s Song are available under the Creative Commons NonCommercial-Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 licence as streaming audio. Which in plain English really means you can share, you can remix and I will not eat your soul, rain you with legal bullets etc.
The rest of the album, Spiked Soul has been released under a similar agreement, stated here:
http://yunyu.com.au/home/creative-commons/
Which really means that yes, share share share the music, mutate the music. As long as it is not commercial, consequences of violation are also colourfully stipulated here.
Very happy to be asked to do the gig for Creative Commons. Mainly because I think these licences need a little more understanding and can do so much more for artists trying to share their work in the digital world.
So again, Bris minions or those visiting Brisbane. Important info regarding the gig:
As it stands my single is almost done. Specifically it has about 2-2.5 weeks as a studio bat and then it flies out to the mixing studios and voila. It is complete enough so I start being able to play it on stage already so I shall give it a nice airing there at the ccSalon.
Dear minions,
Gig this Friday at Sonar (Luna Park, Milsons point, Australia) with Aleeoop, videoKidz and your royal madness. If you haven’t booked yourself a ride into the mad teeth of the Luna Park. Do so now. I promise to make your childhood delusions come true. Well, most of them anyways.
I made maggots last night. That’s all I did. Honest. Swear. Maybe.
See there’s this pen you can buy from the main chain stores…toy section… The real ‘real’ magic pen they call it. All you need to do is to use the pen to get a sample of the lifeform, draw, put it in the sun and voila, you have lifeforms of your choosing in any shape you desire.
I remember watching an estranged maggot crawl by on a lazy summer day. I reach with my pen and penetrate the writhing white lifeform….slowly. First it curls around the nib in a lover’s embrace and still I push. It curls some more. I am aware of the deathly silence that surrounds this moment and then CRACK. I have broken the white squirmer and all is still as my vampiric pen refills it’s juices. Strange sucking sounds, my pen suckles it seems, and the maggot disappears.
Then there I was doodling, for no reason at all, a nest of maggots. And as the sunlight hit, they squirmed across the page as they made their transition from 2D to 3D. One maggot had become many. I watch the strange dance of white maggoty joy and then “Slam”. I was bored and I didn’t want the worms on my bed. Pity about the notebook though, it’s probably ruined or very squishy. It’s a nice day anyways so I figured I’d head out.
I step out into streets into a world I don’t recognise. My neighbour is killing her husband and tells me she going to draw a better one. Says she likes him younger and with more hair. When she’s done he’ll do her. It’s all very scientific. Meanwhile, She’s happily stabbing him in the eye with a pair of gardening shears. Tells me that this is all rather therapeutic. 40 years of marriage, this has by far been the most satisfying moment. I wonder when she’s going to get to the drawing part.
There is a long line forming where my best friend lives. She’s an artist so she draws pretty people, and today, she’s asked to be a mass murderer. She’s as efficient as ever was though. She’s got assistants who look like real life manga beauties and they are taking numbers. In the waiting room she’s got dead bodies strewn all over the clinic with the magic pens sticking out of their jagular. A roomful of suckling sounds.
Almost like a nursery.
One by one the pens bubbling with warped DNA bits are delivered to her studio/clinic, where, in a few minutes, the assistants carry her lifelike artwork out of her studio to the sun to dry.
One by one, youthful sailormoon like figures crawl out of the paper. A few hello kitties come out of the room with shy hellos too. This was way way weirder than cosplay. A couple of Angelina Jolie look-alikes stroll by too.
“Are their souls intact or have they been redrawn as well, they still the same person after this?” I ask
“Perhaps, maybe, whatever, think it works like plastic surgery probably, can you hand me that spray paint?” my friend was evidently an artist busy at work.
I spy a couple of cops at the clinic and they have signed on to be drawn as teenagers. Something about going back to school and making sure they never end up in law enforcement again.
Meanwhile in the parks, trees have taken on phallic shapes as young vandals inject their magic pens into trees and re-draw tree DNA into shapes they deem funny. On the other end, bunch of greenies are busy poking/ killing each other with the pen and turning each other into trees in an attempt to decrease carbon emissions. There are a couple of young tree saplings, so I presumed they started with their children.
The tree beside me starts a song and a speech about the joys of photosynthesis, peace and the hippie movement amidst much joyful babble. He sounds like a senator I know. I had to laugh. All around me are human trees still wearing their hemp made shirts.
The trains comes and I stumble into the city where the bling bling boys are chasing girls around with new and improved appendages, some tentacle-like. Some of the girls have turned to a triple breasted look….some have gone for more that that. 2 real life Sheela-na-gigs stroll past me, closely followed by Mona Lisa herself…and my brain broke.
I scream, the dream guards pull me out, drag me through and I land cold, sweaty and in the dark, tangled in sheets.
Last night. I dreamt of mushrooms and a vagabond. You know? The type where an old man comes up to you brown teeth and all and says “Child, do you never want to dream again? Dip your hand into this bag, and you will know peace. Or then,” he paused, taking out another bag. Pink and stained from all the memories of the world and he says “this one though, will make you dream colour, but you will also know misery. You see dreams are a curse, they make you so hungry. I’m hungry…you have cinnamon? They are nice things…Hurry hurry, pick one child, because you are running out of time.”
I had to ask then. “Are dreams bad? Can I not pick? I will dream when I feel like it thank you very much, and no I don’t like your mushrooms either ways. They look like goldfish eyes” Then the vagabond sniffles, glows and vanishes. I pull a face. He leaves both bags behind. One a dream giver, the other the dream void. I try and pick up the bags, knowing them to be powers of the world but as soon as I touch them I start to dissolve into sand that divides into rivers that flow like spores/ sand into the bags of mushrooms.
70% into the dream-giving bag. 30% the dream void. I remember noting this as I fall into sand. 2 sand rivers sorting and dividing into the bags. Funny how statistics are such vivid and round numbers in dreams. I’m down to my chest now, slowly atomising into sand. There’s a tray of cheese crackers, what looks like good cheese and some wine and I help myself. Atomising is such a slow process. I am almost bored out of my mind about my inevitability.
And I laugh. Suddenly it’s too funny when you are all half sandy and half humanoid. My laughter spills the half drunk wine spills and my sandy bits are soaked. Hmm…tadpoles, wine and sand make tadpoles. Now I am a third tadpole colony a third sand and a third human. It’s a giddy ride, when you are a million tadpoles at a time. It’s almost like having compound eyes except…maybe worse.
Now I’m puking my guts out from the disorientation. hmm…pizza from the night before. NASA should have trained me for this I remember thinking. O wait, it doesn’t make sense, I have no stomach so WTF? Where is this river of reverse gastro food source?! I wave my hands through the sea of puke, sand and tadpoles tracing the source of my digested food. Hah..rope like things, this must be my guts, so I pull…
The mushroom bags come alive like tents when I pull, like puppets. Humanoid puppets, bursting with mushrooms. It’s getting crazy, the mushroom bags from Mr Vagabond now look like frankenstein monsters gasping and the like. They are pulling back my guts too, with arms that look like tentacles and sand bags. I’m insulted and it becomes a matter of pride. So I suppose I should be fighting for my intestines so I pull, they pull, it’s all a great show of strength. All this time, I’m a million tadpoles swimming in a murky morbid sea of puke and sand. I’ve never been busier.
It’s all very distracting, by now I’ve figured that closing my eyes makes the puking go away. Which is a relief, but the mushroom monsters still have my guts.
This is a problem.
Then of course, it occurs to me that my hands are dissolving now and I’m going to be losing the tug of war so I put my intestines into my mouth. At this point I discover that my intestines taste like the best snake candy in the world, and forgetting my fight I start chewing.
I realise to my horror I can’t stop chomping through the rest of myself from the inside out. The mushroom humans realise this too and they start looking really scared and really small. I don’t stop, I can’t stop…chew chew chew this is all I know. I slurp the tadpoles and the sand and all the mushrooms and the bags and the sea of gross out. I am my mouth.
All this time my eyes are closed and I don’t want to open them anymore and I feel my eyeballs slipping out from behind my sockets as my mouth burrows into my face like a giant mutant termite and empties out my sockets and then I think I hear my skull cave in. At this point I know the universe has stopped. At this moment I’m all knowing, all hearing and I know I’m the only one left in the verse. Then I cry and retch huge pieces of flesh and I am me again.
Somewhat. For some reason I’m now wearing a McDonald’s uniform behind a sign that says tadpoles for sale. $4.99 ask for the special upgrade. A girl comes up to the counter and asks for a tadpole special, someone unrolls my sticky frog tongue and gives it a good wipe on the food tray, from my drying spit is a sea of tadpoles with the face of the vagabond….
I woke today to my neighbours chasing each other around their house naked, it took me a good 10 minutes to make my coffee, return to the ongoing scene, spill caffeine on myself to realise, hey I’m not bloody dreaming… So now that I’ve finished acid washing my eyes, I can now proceed to, for no reason at all read up about head transplants.
Maybe it’s the moon but I’m itching to swap some heads today….starting with the naked neighbours. Pity about the spinal cord not being able to reconnect thing…or the possibilities could have been endless. Aside from the medical implications of things, I imagine reading adverts from enterprising fitness freaks might put up…”Give us your bodies and we’ll train it for you!…Taking personal training to a whole new level.” Or in some cases, the disciplining parent, “You two better get along or you will wake up sharing a body.”
Of course youtube never fails us with the visual material. Here’s one of a monkey’s head transplant.
On another tangent. Gig coming up April 18th.
Those in Sydney you are coming yeah? I need some human heads
April 18th, a few fridays from now, we play at Sonar, a new venue at Luna Park. So burn it into your mind or any other remembering mechanisms…oh yes…diaries. So they are called.
Enjoy the beautiful music of Aleeoop and the visual madness of videokidz
Tickets are $15 pre-sale and $20 at the door. So do get in early. Buy tickets here.
For those who make it to the concert, expect a sneak peak of the new, about to be finished single, Butterflies, which has left the realms of delerium and has since attained a more physical form of sorts.
ps: Sonar is a bar a little after the teethy entrance of the Luna Park. Look to your left.
pps: I also hear the subliminal messages to come to your neck of the woods…loud and clear I might add. Help by spreading the word of the music and this gig to friends, and when everything goes as planned and we please the booking agents who guard the gates to your realm. We will meet. A thank you for those who have been telling friends about the music all this time.
Help by spreading the word of the music and this gig to friends, and when everything goes as planned and we please the booking agents who guard the gates to your realm. We will meet. A thank you for those who have been telling friends about the music all this time.
Debut Album Spiked Soul 
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