we're a long way from cassette trading, dual-deck dubbed demos, and mixtapes... for better and worse, a band doesn't self-launch on the tape underground just by being available and free, anymore-- every band is available online now, and you can listen to pretty much everyone for free. The downside of this is that there is so much Noise in the line, it can be hard to discern a Signal (the upside, of course, is: hey, new music!).

The trick, now, is to get people listening, and that generally means describing a band engagingly enough to warrant a listen... which I thought was going to be easy, because ubik. is a pretty unique band, and the songs tend to be fairly different from anything I've stumbled upon.

Unfortunately, every band in the world describes themselves as "unique." The writeup from the emo band that sounds like they belong on a mid-90's teen sex romp soundtrack call themselves unique, the white-blues lead guy playing nothing but pentatonic minor scales over I-IV-Vs calls himself unique, the heavy rock band that really wants to be Tool call themselves unique. These bands bore me to tears simply because they really do sound like every other mediocre entry in their genre, are nowhere near unique... but I don't think anyone wants to describe themselves as sounding like everyone else.

So we've given up on self description, mostly-- it seems to be a futile effort. People have compared us to everyone from King Crimson to Rage Against the Machine. Michelle gets comparisons ranging from Karen Crisis to Bjork (though she sounds nothing like Bjork, she has black hair and a small nose, and that seems to be enough similarity for a lot of people... music be damned).

We've taken up our own genre: psy-prog drift core. We actually asked people to name our genre, and the most intelligent response we got was someone telling us that we are, in fact, a rock band... which is pretty much true, but telling a would-be listener that we're a rock band doesn't tell that listener anything: it could mean anything from The Beatles to Soul Coughing.

How people describe us is a whole other phenomenon. Everything from funk to metal gets thrown at us (seriously? funk?), though psychedelic and progressive get thrown in there often enough. A recent show billed us as Am-Rep inspired prog-metal... and though prog-metal always makes me think of Fate's Warning and Dream Theater, so be it-- but I don't even know what Am-Rep is. What does that even mean?

Labels: music genre ubik label unique

Strangely, though our Everett gigs are plenty successful (2 for 2)... man, these are difficult shows to like. I wished I'd had taken a video of stepping into that place, panning from the stage to the body of the bar (crowded with video poker and pool tables) as Sweet Home Alabama played on the overheads. It was sort of like playing the Blue Moon, but where the Blue Moon is Harley Davidson, this place was Nike (and really brightly lit).

I have to go back to the thought that this particular "girls rock" showcase was the ultimate venue to play Let's Hunt and Kill Gwen Stefani, but it was a very weird version of the Girls Rock motif (a theme that, so Michelle tells me, was irritating enough to her that she would have turned down the show had the booker told her that's the bill she was agreeing to play)-- the first band lost a member and played a short acoustic set. The other band's singer was too sick to play, so there was no Girl there to Rock... neither being any band's fault, really, but it's a good way to hamstring a show.

So here's a first... we just said No to a show, just because we didn't want to play it. It wasn't pay-to-play, or a night one of us couldn't make it because of work or whatever Whatever was in the way: we just didn't wanna.

That was kind of cool.

It's not like it was frivolous, or we didn't have a reason: it was sort of a dingy sports bar sort of atmosphere, which never works for ubik. as a band. It just doesn't work. We've done sort of poorly at The Blue Moon and Goofy's, and there's just a certain "feel" of venue where we don't fit-- we're not comfortable there, the video light show never works very well, and the dug-in crowd just doesn't get us.

Also, it was in a location where we probably couldn't get anyone to show up, so we wouldn't be doing the bar any favors, anyway.

CD IN STORES NOW!

ubik.s album The World Is A Glorious Biomechanical Nightmare is available now both online and at record stores around seattle. Buy it online here, or stop by Cellophane Square (U-Dist) or Silver Platters (Queen Anne and Northgate).

Pretty keen, eh? We're all pretty excited to be getting these out into the world.

When we took the album to be mastered by the talented and very helpful Steve Turnidge, mastering engineer extraordinaire, he asked us if we were able to do this stuff live. I think the actual phrasing was "can you guys pull this off live?"

I think Joel was the first to respond: the question should be inverted. We do this stuff live so often, we weren't sure if we could translate it to a studio recording (my worry was always that it would end up one of those flat, lifeless records that never lets any of the band's live energy come through).

But the more I think about the question (and the more I listen to a few albums and compare them to their live counterparts), the more I realize how valid it really is. ubik. actually took the songs, as we play them live (which includes timing changes, large dynamic shifts, effected vocals, big flourishes of reverb and echo, one-beat gaps of silence, sound-design style screeches, etc), and just taped it. The sonic identity of our songs was not done in post-production: we didn't really add much after we finished taping the instruments live in the room.

...but those sounds happen on a lot of albums (especially now, in the land of plug-ins and pro-tools). It's not uncommon to hear distorted vocals on one verse or an wash of echo or some strange sound effect on any random album-- it's just not that common for those things to have anything to do with how the band actually sounds when they play.

And here's a quote...

Does anybody really listen to that shitty music they play on the radio? FM radio music... What's it called- adult contemporary? classic rock? urban R&B? You know what the official business term for that shit is: Corporate Standardized Programming. Just what an artform needs... corporate standardized programming, derived from scientific surveys, conducted by soulless businessmen.

Here's how bad it is: one nationwide chain that owns over a thousand radio stations conducts weekly telephone polls asking listeners their opinions on 25-30 song hooks they play over the phone, hooks that the radio people have already selected ("hooks" are short, repeated parts of pop songs that people remember easily). Depending on these polls, the radio chain decides which songs to place on their stations' playlists. Weeks later, they record the hooks of all the songs they're currently playing on their stations across the country, label them by title and artist, and sell that information to record companies to help create more of the same, bad music. They also sell the information to competing radio stations that want to play what the big chain is playing.

All of this is done to prevent the possibility of original thinking somehow creeping into the system.

Let me tell you something-- In the first place, listening to music someone else has picked out is not my idea of a good time. Second, and more important, the fact that a lot of people in America actually like the music automatically means it sucks... especially since the people who like it have been told in advance by businessmen what it is they're supposed to like.

Please save me from people who've been told what to like, and then like it. In my opinion, if you're over six years of age and you're still getting your music from the radio, something is desperately wrong with you.

I can only hope that somehow MP3 players and file sharing will destroy FM radio the way they're destroying record companies. Then, even though the air will probably never be safe to breathe again, maybe it will be safer to listen to.

--George Carlin

so... ubik. had a great time at the autonomous mutant festival, but we don't have any pics of the shows. I know, I know, if we wanted photos, we should have made arrangements, but if anyone has any ubik. at mutantfest pictures, please send them to us.

We're at ubikband@gmail.com