About Me

(from my myspace page)

Hmm. About me. A few years ago, I was getting on stage to sing with Reckoning on my birthday, and Kevron intorduced me as "Everybody's Best Friend." Later, he said he'd meant it literally, but not in a good way.

More recently, I was described by another close friend this way, when his mom (who loves me to pieces; they all do;) asked about me, concerned. He said (I quote): "Glenn's a nice guy. Women take advantage of him and fuck him over."

This is not entirely true. It's not just women. For every woman who has fucked me over, there has always been at least one man taking advantage of me and fucking me over at the same time, somethimes guys I was really best friends with. Let's just be clear on this: despite appearances, I have had MUCH better luck with loyalty from the women in my life than I have had from men. It really does all suck as much as (or way more than) it would appear to be me.

Last year, yet another close friend told me to rot in Hell. Just so ya know, Tom, I am and have been rotting in hell. Maybe that is why I didn't have the patience to drag you through yours, and I'm sure you will be better for having gone through it without me anyway, and I DID tell you that on at least a few occasions before and after you cursed me. Doesn't matter; it's gotta be karma for something else I did, I have my ideas why, but man...

About me. Hah! Looks like so much fun, sitting around and writing music. I used to be the absolute King of the Scene, but the scene got really, really dirty, people, and mostly, Glenn is NOT proud of you. Bad things are happening because you are all (with rare exception) DOING BAD THINGS, and you are rotting out your once-beautiful lives because of it, and I do not like it, and I do not want to be around it any more. Clean up, people, this from your best friend. i still love all of you, but I can't talk to each of you one at a time, and I don't even want to, because the more I hear from each of you, the more sick I get about it, and stone cold sober, my stomach is literally rotting out because off it, and I have lost months and years of sleep over it.

Yes, everybody's best friend. I still hear everything, whether I want to or not. I do not have the strength anymore to stand by and tell y'all when you are doing something stupid. You should know by now, and take control of your lives. It is not so hard. Fade's and the Brew and the Brick are a poor substitute for the center of a life. Get a life. I love you (you all know who you are). Cut the suicidal, hypocritical, bullshit "it's all about the music" ranting, and get a life. Remember, the first 2 letters in the word "FUN" are...

How Cool Am I To Be A Record Label?

First, there is the bizness of harvesting the plastic. Plastic grows very slowly over billions of years, starting out life as tiny rocks, buried deep in the suburbian jungle. As it grows, ever so slowly, it is exposed to powerful cosmic rays, which, over years, cause the plastic to become pliable. At just the right moment in the plastic's development, it becomes ready to accept SOUND. This moment is the EXACT moment when I need to be there, sound on hand, ready to SQUASH the sound INTO the plastic, which causes the sound, now together with the newly-harvested plastic, to be squished into the shape of a playable audio disc. Sometimes this volatile process makes wonderful records, sometimes it makes TERRIBLE records, and sometimes any kind of records in between. March up and down the aisles of any record store to see what I mean.

Trapping sound to put into the plastic to make records is another hassle entirely. Sound is a wily beast, I'll tell ya. Capturing sound is really as much of an art as it is a science. Deep below the ground of Earth and several of the smaller asteroids, there lies a layer of crust called the Blathersphere . In order to visit this layer, one must garb itself in special heavy equipment for the journey down below. Deep below the fiery lava of Mexico, the blather boils away little organisms from the rocks. In the throes of their tiny deaths, they emit tiny screams of fire. Unique to the Blathersphere, these screams are trapped in volcanic bubbles which gather into clusters. Using highly specialized nets, blathernauts (as they are called, or bubble-jockeys, in slang of the trade) rush the clusters of bubbles, and push them into sacks. Once back on the Earth's surface, the bubbles are sorted by size and color into different sacks, and passed by quality control agents, who send the bubbles through a rigorous cataloging process. Once cataloged, the bubbles are equally distributed by mule, and combined with plastic to make records, as described above. Upon joining with the plastic, the tiny bubbles finally burst, the various combinations of their tiny screams releasing to combine into the thing we know as recorded sound.

So, there you have it. That's how records are made! It's a lot of work, but it's so worth all of it, to see you cry along with it, and to hear parents world-wide yelling to "Turn That Thing Down!" Tune in next time, when I explain how we record labels get the things to market. Cheers!

MORECOFFEEMORECOFFEEMORECOFFEEEEEE!!!

Army of Coffee

(the sound of freshly brewing
coffee is heard distinctly.
Out of the sound of dripping,
steaming liquid,
rises the sound of
many marching
cardboard cups)

Have we lost our minds?
Have we lost our mind..?
The coffee cups
are getting up
And marching in a line!

Is it I? No! I make no mistake about it, and Neither should you, my friend. It is Coffee! Coffee that fuels the conquest of Empire! Coffee that fills the coffers of my catalogue with shining, shimmering sound! Coffee!! And ARMY of COFFEE, that marches, never-ending, along the shelf of my closet, visible only through a tiny window, a window known only as a door, a sliding door-window onto the glory of GLORIOUS , MARCHING COFFEE!! COFFEE!! YES! IT IS COFFEE WHICH BREWS THE WAY, COFFEE THAT CHORTS AND STEAMS ALONG ALL OF THE WORK DOWN HERE IN THE SOUNDMINE, COFFEE THAT DRIVES THE MUSIC --
DOES THE COFFEE DRIVE THE MUSIC -------------

... or does the music

... drive the coffee??

COFFEE IS THE KEY!

COFFEE IS BOTH

THE MASTER and THE SLAVE

...THE BEAN
AND
THE BREW!

BITTER AND SWEET!
HARSH AND SMOOTH!

Coffee,
The Enemy of Complacency

Coffee,
The Fuel of Desire...

Coffee!
Denier of Sleep!


Coffee!
That Drives Endless Days
and Longer Nights
in the SoundMine!

MARCH ON COFFEE,
BRINGER of
THE DUSK
and
THE DAWN!

HAIL COFFEE, THAT BRINGS BACK TO ME A FRAGMENT OF THE LIFE THAT YOU SUCK AWAY FROM ME!

"THROUGH a Window on a Shelf in my Closet, They MARCH... their White Cups, like Armored Teeth, Brightening the Grin of the New Dawn... GREEN Plastic Straws pointed Oh Thank Heavenward, like Weapons of FREEDOM, Poised to Bravely Claim the UNIVERSE!!!!"

Long Time

Well, been a while since I updated this thing (yeah, really original). So much has happened. I was in a really dark place when I started this blog. It was a dark place on the light-end of a much darker place.

Love

Love will age you, love will kill you. Getting attached to the wrong people, even for right reasons, will rot the living hell out of your insides, even if you don't want to let it.

Lots of stuff has happened since last October. Enough about Love. Love will, certainly, ultimately be the death of me. So, enough about love.

MYSPACE

I'm pretty done with MySpace. Oh, it's really a great forum for dropping my creations on, or posting silly pictures, but I've really become quite the hermit. People are mostly very stupid, even if they are very nice, and I find that my attachments to them wear me out and use up my every resource. I was never like that til around ten years ago, so giving that it would kill me. Now, I find that because of my generous nature, I need to withdraw to my apartment in order to save anything at all of what is left of my life, and to get anything done for myself. It's not really a selfish phase; it's merely survival. I've really got nothing left in me after five years at failing at being in love. Oh, yeah; there's the aweful word again.

WHO IS GLENESIS?

I'm a trained audio engineer. Through my emotional struggles with myself, I've collected a lot of songwriting ideas. I figure that I have enough for five albums, right out of the gate, if I group them into relevant collections. The ideas go back into the middle-1980's. I'd stumbled onto a primitive, multi-track sample-sequencer, called Studio Session, around 1985, in the Mac Plus lab at Nassau Community College. First, I found the player for Studio Session files, and I really dug the lo-fi music that the thing put out of my Mac's speakers. So, I bought the software, and started composing in it's editor. The program used instrument files that were recorded with a serial input device called the MacRecorder. I saved up, and bought a couple of MacRecorders, and promptly started making piles of music with custom, 3-second-long audio clips, on 8 tracks of monophonic playback on a piece of virtual staff paper. I clicked in hundreds of thousands of notes, one click at a time. At a time when expensive synthesizers sounded like cheese (really good cheese), a time when using software MIDI sequencers was more like wrestling in thick, cold mud than it was like making music, I was putting together tracks almost the way I wanted to, way ahead of my time. I have thousands of custom samples at 8bits resolution, 11kHz sample rate. They are truly awesome.

Flash forward, 1991. My fiance, Alisa, left me for my best man. The first time my world was every completely shattered. I buried myself in a bedroom with my Mac SE, a 4-track cassette deck (a Tascam 644 MIDIstudio), a microphone, and a Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard. I wrote for months, and months, and months. Really, I wrote for the better part of 1991, fairly non-stop. In October, I was a passenger in a car accident, and was homebound for a few months due to a head-trauma (a blood-clot between the 2 membranes that surround my brain; very very very lucky). Trapped like a mad dog in a tiny cage, I dove into my setup, wrote a few hundred songs, and combined the best of them into a 27-minute piece, that I called "Just A Happy Go Lucky Guy". In making this thing work, I recorded 1,449 original samples. I still have the files, the computers, and all fo the gear that I used in the production. So...

Flash forward, Summer, 2005. Caitlin, love of my life, joy of my existence, my beautiful best, left me slowly and painfully after a viscious cycle of on-again/off-again romance (I am still worn out from the whole affair). When I wrote the rock opera back in 1991, I worked for a couple of years, then attended Five Towns College in Dix Hills, New York, to really learn what I was doing with this sound stuff. After I graduated, I got sucked into doing sound in bars for ten years, but I really wanted to be making my own music with nice studio gear, the whole time. I never lost touch with that. So, my life shattered completely for the third time, (yeah, there was a second time before that), I began to withdraw from live sound to save my hearing, and to get my nose to the grindstone making the songs I'd written. Over the 2 years with and without Caitlin, I'd found myself inspired by her and over her to write a whole lot of songs, songs I really like. Between 2003 and 2005, the emotional rollercoaster ride had churned up the creative juices the most they'd been stirred up in years. So, I ditched everyone, slowly, and I've been recording my own stuff again.

Anyway, flash forward, 2007: This summer's project is to reconstruct the original rock-opera with modern digital instruments. I'm recreating the piece, note-for-note, side-by-side with the original piece, in a file in Digital Performer. Once the piece is done, I am going to elaborate on it, in an expanded version, incorporating derivative ideas that I've produced over the years in-between, as well as incorporating ideas that I've had while I've been re-entering the notes of the piece and finding equivalent sounds in a 24-bit world.

This project is the culmination of 2 years of digging through floppy disks to find the original samples to get the original piece to play back, something that I haven't done since 1992. I drove around with an instrumental cassette that I'd made for vocal rehearsal for over a decade. I found that I had to dedicate a Mac G4 to running SoundEdit Pro and Super Studio Session (blessedly freeware now, it is still out there for download from Bogas Productions) under Mac OS 9.2.2, But it was worth the 2 years it took to get it playing.

The most painful part of the process was actually finding working copies of the Studio Session instrument files. Many of them were data-compressed to fit on floppy disk, and many were compressed with software that will only run under System 7!!! So, I found myself running Mini vMac, an open-source Mac Plus emulator, to decompress the files. It took most of the two years (more maybe?) to find the correct decompression software for the files. Once the instrument library was back online (for the first time in sixteen years!!!), the project really began to move along.

First, I wiped my G4/450 PowerMac, and installed a fresh copy of OS 9, and SoundEdit Pro, and Super Studio Session, and SoundApp 2.7.3 (the BEST sound-converter utility and player, EVER. Period.). Using Studio Session, I soloed each of the sixteen tracks in two files (one for the right and one for the left; I was very clever back in the day), and recorded sixteen, 27-minute-long, monophonic audio files. The mono files were in SoundCap format, which I could find NOTHING to play under OS 10. So, I used SoundApp to convert the files into something Performer could import as tracks, dumped the whole thing onto an external hard drive, and moved the tracks into my home-brew Intel Macintosh, where I've spent the last few months making Digital Performer play the stuff via MIDI on virtual instruments. Amazing. I am finally blowing my own mind again; it's been a long, long time. Hasn't it?