scores of witness is dead

if you haven't noticed, i don't post here anymore. not really for any reason...i guess the format of the blog is no longer motivating.

but hey! i have started a really great, fantastic new blog called The Glenn Beckoner on tumblr. it is a music blog I try to update at least once daily with a new song.

go there!

WWW.THEGLENNBECKONER.TUMBLR.COM

WWW.THEGLENNBECKONER.TUMBLR.COM

WWW.THEGLENNBECKONER.TUMBLR.COM

WWW.THEGLENNBECKONER.TUMBLR.COM

WWW.THEGLENNBECKONER.TUMBLR.COM

WWW.THEGLENNBECKONER.TUMBLR.COM

every song I've ever made

at this site you can download every song I've ever made by myself for free. there are probably about 150 that were lost in various computer crashes and there was a cassette tape of 40 beats I made that is gone forever, but this is everything I still have. enjoy, or don't!

WWW.EVERYSONGBYJAKE.BLOGSPOT.COM

WWW.EVERYSONGBYJAKE.BLOGSPOT.COM

WWW.EVERYSONGBYJAKE.BLOGSPOT.COM

sad story

I am currently working on a zine with my girlfriend. the idea is for me to write a few short essays about whatever I want, and she will illustrate them. right now I'm in the writing stage. here is a thing I wrote for the magazine but I don't think I'll put it in because it is too depressing.

After we got home from grandma’s funeral, my dad told me he had found a card she apparently intended to mail to me but never did. She had written the address to my mom’s house, where I was living when I was 15, in nearly illegible script on the front of the envelope. The address was also wrong. The front of the card depicts a smiling cartoon dog flying a kite through a cloud. In a simplistic child-like font, it says “Grandson, you’re such a joy!” The inside of the card says “Mischief, giggles, fun and love – Grandson, that’s what you’re made of! Have a fun filled Easter!”It made me think of the time I spent living in her small house with my brother and dad. This was right before the family was forced to put her in a nursing home since she had mentally and physically deteriorated to the point of requiring constant care which we couldn’t provide because of our jobs. She would fall down a lot. I once woke up and walked into the living room to find her sitting on the couch like she always did, but with dirt and leaves all over her hair and the right side of her face, which was also bleeding. She had gone out into the patio to sit and somehow taken a spill as she was getting out of her lawn chair. Stuff like that happened pretty frequently. I wrapped her arms in bandages countless times. Her skin was like paper, it tore easily. She would brush up against a door knob or something on the way to her bedroom and her skin would be pulled right off, there would be blood everywhere. She had also long lost the ability to prepare her own meals and we had to make them for her, which really wasn’t a big deal but it was weird considering the memories I had of her doing the same for me when I was a kid. She couldn’t clothe herself either, though none of us had the guts to help her in that department, I’m embarrassed to say. She would sometimes come out of her room with her adult diaper on the outside of her pants or her shirt on backwards. We just kind of stifled our laughter in those times, too afraid to address how truly sad and disturbing it was to see the mind of someone we loved and who loved us disintegrate like that. To make matters worse, we were all very rude to her. My dad was clearly troubled by and deeply resented the situation and was so condescending to her most of the time it made me wince. We were all frustrated with having to see what was happening and annoyed that she would ask us the same questions over and over again and do irrational things because of her Alzheimer’s. On one of my first solo CDs, I included as a hidden track a recording of an argument my grandma and I had. She had come into my room while I was recording a demo of a new song and asked me the model of the old organ she had inherited from her dead sister which I kept next to my bed. She claimed she was going to run an ad in the paper for it to try to sell it. She was unemployed and so was my dad. We were buying groceries with her social security check and had absolutely no money to spend on an ad in the paper for an organ that no one would want anyway. She knew this and was being totally crazy. I told her so and incidentally recorded the discussion which followed. Listening to it later, I couldn’t believe what an ungrateful little shit I sound like. Granted I was like 16, but I was still being a rude bastard. During the argument, I offered her $1 for the organ. What a smart ass. My grandma and I would argue all the time because I had grown impatient with living with her. Perhaps the very last cognizant memories she had before she completely lost her ability to communicate were of her family being terrible to her because they hated their lives. I went with my dad to visit her in the nursing home a few months before she died. I hadn’t seen her in years. She looked like a corpse. People should not live as long as she did. She could barely talk to me but I focused on her all of the ten or fifteen minutes I was there because I felt guilty. She asked me questions the answers of which I know she knew at some point but she had forgotten everything. She still cried because she knew who I was and she loved me and it meant a lot to her to see me. The last thing I told her was that I would be coming to the nursing home to visit every week. I never did that. I don’t know if she was aware of it. At her funeral, there were pictures of her as a teenager and we were all surprised to see how pretty she was. My brother wore his Airman’s formal dress uniform and I wore a $10 collared shirt from Wal Mart I had bought the night before and my work pants, which were covered in grease. I felt like an ass. My grandmother died in a place called a nursing home where people send other people to die out of sight. She was kept alive probably much longer than she should have been because every month is another paycheck for those facilities. Nature is what killed my grandma, but it is man which robbed her of her chance at a dignified death. People are a total bummer sometimes.

the lost turfwar song

I used to have a solo music project called Turfwar when I was 15. it was heavy instrumental punk rock/metal with electronic bass and drums. in an earlier post, I put up the complete discography of that band. I just did a google search for turfwar and discovered that apparently at some point I put all these songs on archive.org with one extra song that I totally forgot about!

so, here is an mp3 of the lost turfwar song, "can anyone ever be gruntled?"

be careful, it is unbelievably loud.

DOWNLOAD HERE

spacequeen show tomorrow night

my band spacequeen is playing possibly our last show ever tomorrow night at wonderroot. it might not be our actual last show, but you should come regardless.

colorful drawings

usually my medium of choice is one black sharpie and most of the stuff I draw is in black and white but here are a couple of really colorful things I have drawn, both circa 2008.

ridiculous jacket video

ridiculous jacket is my rap name. today I wrote some rhymes using a song by the unicorns called "inoculate the innocuous". I filmed a music video with the track I recorded in my kitchen. it's called "wowie zowie".

chance cards for a boardgame

in 9th grade I was in computer applications class and our assignment was to make a boardgame or something. I guess these were the chance cards I made. I listened to a lot of jello biafra at the time so these were pretty political and my autistic partner did not understand them. I think we got a bad grade.

new trench party album cover

love songs tape

DOWNLOAD HERE

1. I'm in love with your girlfriend

2. even though we'll never meet

3. in pursuit (of the girl)

4. I heart orange juice

5. goodness gracious

6. Korean television

this is a tape I recorded with a tascam 4-track tape recorder when I was 17. the initial idea was to make an entire album of acoustic love songs for sarah silverman but as it progressed it became more experimental. only the first 2 songs have words, and those are both just a single line repeated. I heart orange juice is one of the doper instrumental compositions I've done. it's a good tape, I totally forgot about it until I started this blog.

new trench party demos

DOWNLOAD HERE

1. american apartment

2. great difficulty

3. horses are naysayers

4. mackaye of the storm

5. mind on the parmesan

6. my hands are killing me

7. our completely discography

8. the unbelievable righteousness of bean

9. we are not the same, I am a martian

here are some demos I recorded for the new trench party album. they are a lot different from previous stuff I've done with this band. probably a lot of these songs will not be on the finished thing and there is still a lot more songs to write. the album will be recorded at noah's house, and we've already finished one song, "mind on the parmesan". it sounds unbelievable and you can hear it here. the next sessions will be whenever noah says I can come over and I have a day off. in the meantime, enjoy these sweet acoustic sketches.

turfwar discography

DOWNLOAD HERE

"chrome to the dome"

introduction

assault and pepper

chrome to the dome

year of the skittle

voluntary confinement

fission: accomplished

a hammer is not a toy

tha streetz iz a mutha

turfwar is nobody's artist!

get up and stop crying

american idolatry

someone stole my picks

bolivian oblivion

king of the hill theme song

"break yer face e.p."

yassir I will

bill gates must die

the wrath of con

coalition of the killing

self inflicted coma

rugrats theme

the last turfwar songs

the plight of child actors when they grow up

jammiwam and eggiweg

not very funny at all

mark byers kills children

turfwar was the first solo music project for which I made cds and began when I was 15. it's instrumental music falling somewhere between punk and metal, with electronic drums and bass guitar. the first album, chrome to the dome was recorded using a tascam 4-track tape recorder and was transferred to my computer using a guitar cable. super lo-fi and nasty sounding. after this I began recording the songs straight onto my computer and I put out a follow-up ep called break yer face later that year. this .rar file contains all of those songs and 4 others that I recorded afterwards but didn't do anything with.

recent drawings

i used to draw a lot but I stopped for a long time. recently I've been getting into it again. here is some new stuff.

"up"

I started drawing this when me and ann marie were watching the movie up and it is obviously inspired by the concept. i like this one a lot.

"crazy thing"

some weird design I drew the other day.

"new thing"

I just finished this like half an hour ago. it's another thing I began during a lunch break at work.

saddam hussein for treasurer

true story: in ninth grade I made a ton of copies of this flyer and taped them all around my high school during the election for school treasurer. I thought it would be pretty funny and it was. none of the administrators found out it was me, but they were all taken down pretty quickly.

song about satan

here is a song about the devil from the upcoming trench party concept album

impericide discography

DOWNLOAD HERE

impericide is an electronic grindcore/dance music project I created back when I lived at my grandma's house in 2006. the initial idea was to incorporate blastbeats and brutality into hard melodic techno songs. I assembled one complete album for this project, the passion of the crust. the packaging was a thin jewel case with no artwork other than a "My name is..." sticker upon which I would write random words or phrases, like this:

the stack of 20 or so copies I made sat in my room for a long time and I never really did anything with them until I finally gave most of them out at a show last october. after this album, the project made a shift from techno-infused grind to become more relentless. the songs became less than 40 seconds long and had almost nothing anyone could dance to. I made like 15 or 20 of these songs and they were all lost forever when my macbook crashed this year. here is a music video for one of those songs:

I finally picked up impericide again this year, programming 5 new songs using acoustica mixcraft, but my trial version ran out for it and I couldn't find a crack for it that worked, so the band is on hiatus again. the .rar file contains all the impericide songs I have left.

monkey death machine

DOWNLOAD HERE

monkey death machine is a music project I used to do every once in a while back in middle school. I was inspired by negativland. I made the songs by doing an altavista audio search for random words, heavily editing the sound files with cool edit pro and putting them together with drum loops and stuff using either sound recorder or acoustica mp3 audio mixer. the result is a big silly mess. I made one cd of this project, pictured above. the .rar file contains those songs, plus a few others, including the 7 minute opus, "monkey death 2000".

notebooks

I used to make interesting covers for the notebooks I kept of writings and drawings and stuff. I stopped doing that as much with the more recent ones and I pretty much never write anything in them except songs anymore, but some of them are cool looking. here they all are, in chronological order!

2004:

2004/2005:


2005/2006:


2006/2007:


2007:

2008:

2009 (my current one):

pizza drawing

this is a drawing I did during my lunch break at work a few days ago. I'm trying to stop smoking cigarettes so I've been drawing and writing in my car instead.

rock and roll songs

1. big rock and roll show

2. i just wanna rock and roll

3. rock and roll life

4. rock and roll town

DOWNLOAD HERE

I made these in 2007 I think. I was listening to the we sweat blood album by danko jones and decided I wanted to make some straight up nasty rock songs. they are really really short but completely filthy. enjoy!