In which I proceed to talk about various things that are boring to most people but are endlessly fascinating to me.

Working on Giles Corey, though it’s always slow-going. That difficult in and of itself is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’ll be on vacation this week, then Thao will be back at work and I will have a few weeks alone. The plan is to finish the whole thing. We’ll see.

Mixing is fine, it’s the writing that kills me. Hard to do, and then I get into such a morose mood that I can’t finish what I started.

Ironic?

I have them.

Out now on ENEMIES LIST, so I demand that you go purchase this thing. I’m going to just quote from the CTINDIE review:

America Addio has done it again. In case you haven’t heard this band is the work of one M. Kestigian, a synth genius recording pop in his bedroom. His second release is titled Cotton Kingdom, and it’s mindblowing. Over the past two years he’s been working on recording the album, and it’s finally finished and available as the 9th release on Middletown label Enemies List.

It’s danceable pop, with catchy guitar licks and fun vocal effects, but if you listen deeper, you’ll hear intelligent vocals and very complex effects and production. With lines like “We’re all raised by nature /Some of us by the woods and some of us by the wolves” in the track Simply Living and “I will have my Grushenka / The same girl that my father adored” in Astray in Hawkeyeland, you know Kestigian is well-read, and won’t settle for typical pop tune lyrical fluff. When was the last time you heard someone spitting lines about Dostoyevsky? The entire album as a whole is a beautiful faded snapshot of the life in the midwest that seems to both praise and criticize all of it’s flaws.

There’s no way you should miss this. You can stream the album from last.fm but please consider buying one from Enemies List, as it’s only $10, and all profits are being donated to Heifer International, an organization that fights poverty and hunger by providing useful and profitable animals to needy families.

Will, Andrew and I somehow thought it would be a good idea to record a podcast. The result is DEF PANEL, a mostly-pointless but rather enjoyable exercise in ridiculousness.

The site is over at www.defpanel.com – go there and watch the podcast, tell me what you think and whether we should continue doing it, or just kill outselves.

I haven’t written in here forever. I feel bad. In fact, I feel guilty. Not that I should, but I do, despite myself.

Things have been very busy. I’ve been posting elsewhere, doing things, some good, some not so amazing. But still doing things.

I’m going to rejuvenate this blog – tie it into twitter, use it as a place to gather all the different projects I work on (music, business, academic, etc), use it as a curriculum vitae, etc. Just not right at this moment. I’m at work, on break. But you get the idea.

Instead of writing more about that, I’m going to write a list of things I am thinking about doing/need to do in the next weeks and months.

1. Put out several records that are not mine, but are awesome. That means more mailorder and such, not something I love, but I love putting out music so you see the problem.

2. Finish off Giles Corey, which is close to being done, but kind of stalled out due to creative block. I got a bit too far away from the project in general, with everything else that’s been going on. It’s important to me to get it out and done.

3. Start a new solo project. I haven’t really told anyone about this. It’s called Les Effaceurs (probably). It is (probably) going to be a one-man-electronic-black-metal-ambient-dance-band-with-extensive-video-and-spoken-material-on-coltan-mining-and-resource-exploitation-in-the-Congo-concept-band. It will be a ridiculously intense, consciousness-raising experience. And all money from live performances, records, whatever, will go to benefit the horrendously fucked up situation in Congo. This is just in planning stages, but I am very, very excited about it, and have already written a bit of the material.

4. Fix our goddamned webstore, which is awful. Switch it out with something better than the entire new store I designed, because that was far too complicated.

5. Get my side-business selling classroom history posters up and running. I need to get the Adwords campaign running.

6. Go to Mongolia, Tibet, and Scotland. And India.

7. Get the wallpaper off the wall that we half took the wallpaper off of and then kind of forgot about.

8. Read way more, in general.

9. Keep working on the new HANL material and keep working on the live performance.

That’s a lot of stuff. I’m going to stop now, though I could keep going, but somehow I feel most of that stuff isn’t going to get done already. I can’t believe it’s March already.

New Enemies List website! Go check it out: www.enemieslist.net