You can hear a recording of Paul’s appearance on WBEZ’s 848 program, preparing his winning Krafty Kontest recipe, on WBEZ’s website:

ChicagoPublicRadio.com

Our ‘Draggin’ the Bow’ (from our second album) closes the segment. There’s also a picture of someone identified as ‘Paul Wargasky’, bearing little resemblance to our bassist.

Previous posts:
Tweed bassist wins WBEZ recipe contest

Tune your dial to 91.5fm Thursday (or possibly Friday) at 9AM. Several weeks ago WBEZ’s morning show 848 anounced a recipe contest which required the use of A-1 steak sauce, Toblerone chocolate and Grey Puopon Mustard. This was a challenge I was up for. Over dinner, my wife Lauren and I colaborated to come up with the recipe that won the hearts and taste buds of the WBEZ staff and Chef Efrain, their finalist judge. We recently recorded a segment of us in the kitchen cooking up the winning recipe. For those of you who can’t wait to hear the segment. Here is our winning recipe. For hot pics of us in the kitchen and to hear the story after tomorrow’s broadcast go to www.wbez.org/848.

Barbecued Short Ribs:

1/2 cup duck sauce (Most people have about this much left over in little packets from takeout)
1/4 cup soy sauce (See above)
3 Tablespoons Grey Poupon
3 Tablespoons A-1 Steak Sauce
2 Teaspoons Hot Sauce
5 Toblerone dark chocolate w/ honey & almond nougat triangles finely chopped
1/2 cup apple cider vinager
Preheat grill or start the charcoal
Boil 4 short ribs in a saucepan with bay leaf 20-30 minutes.

Mix together BBQ sauce and slather on short ribs (or other meat selection)Add ribs to grill and cook on that saucy goodness. Recoat when necessary.

Today’s post is more reposty goodness for the holiday season. Enjoy

Here’s another song from the Kennett Brothers’ long out of print and now ridiculously pricey Xmas CD, Santa is Real. This time, it’s the Kennett’s performance of the Marty Robbins tune, ‘One of You in Every Size‘. The lineup as best I remember:
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This is a repost of a post I wrote last year. Enjoy, while I take the rest of the day off.

Santa is Real, the Christmas record my old band the Kennett Brothers put together, is long out-of-print, and, thanks to the efforts of obsessive Wilco completists, prohibitively expensive on the second-hand market. In the spirit of the season, I’m posting an MP3 of one of the tracks, our cover of the Louvin Brothers song ‘A Shutin at Christmas‘.
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So much of the available footage of Lenny is from his last years, when he looked and sounded worn down from his legal troubles and drug abuse. It’s a rare treat to see him younger and sharper in this Steve Allen Show appearance. If you’ve not read it, I recommend Lenny’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.

Mastering engineer Bob Katz has an interesting rant about unlistenably loud CDs. He asserts that contemporary CDs are ten decibels louder than those made 15 years ago.

Remember that decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. A ten-decibel increase means that contemporary CDs are nearly four times as loud as older discs. (See this handy article on ProRec.com to learn more about why you’re going deaf). But the volume comes at a cost — There are a limited number of bits in each sample. Once all those zeros are flipped to ones, there’s nowhere else to put the data, and things start sounding bad. Really bad.

The war for loudness has only casualties and losers. Some CDs made in the year 2001 are 10 dB hotter than those made in 1990! But the system can’t take it…this is only obtained with horrendous amounts of compression and limiting. Can you take one of these CDs for more than 5 minutes? They sound fatiguing, overmodulated…..

Fact: Your CDs are hotter than anything made in 1990. They have reached the maximum level that they can and still maintain the sound quality. CDs cannot escalate because there is a limit. The waveforms of the top of the charts “hits” are shaped like 2 x 4s, sound fatiguing and unrelenting and have no relationship with the sound of a good album. No one is happy—-not the artists, not the producers… And on the radio? Still sound like crap, only worse.

Read the full post at DigitalDomain.

I may do a little post about binary mathematics and explain why it sounds like ass when CDs clip. I’ve become obsessed with this recently because I’ve been ripping a lot of my old vinyl LPs onto my computer. I watch the wave forms as they scroll by on the computer, and marvel at all the musical detail we’ve lost.

Here are a couple blur-ific camera phone shots from our last session at King Size. Click to see a larger version. My camera phone doesn’t take especially good pictures in low light, so, save the shot of hot apple-eating action with Billy below, I don’t really have pictures of the boys in the studio. Just the studio itself.

We tracked most of our last record in the control room while Mike built out the live room. We’re glad to be in the big live room — it’s a good sounding room, and there’s more space for us to stretch out without getting in the way. We’re pretty happy with the sounds we’re getting so far. We have nine songs tracked, and will tackle another five in our next session at the end of the month. We haven’t needed more than a few takes of any of the tunes to get a keeper.

We’ll have a sample track for our list suscribers when we send the next update. Right now, I’m partial to the version of ‘Short Life of Trouble’ that we cut in our first session, with a fine vocal from Mr. T Ryan Fisher and harmony vocals from Billy Oh and the author of this post. It has a banjo-mandolin thing that in the middle that we like to call ‘the thing’.

The band have shown remarkable restraint in not touching the Farfisa or Leslie in the tracking room.

CDs are getting louder, and the increased volume is coming at the expense of dynamics and other musical details. The Loudness War isn’t the sole domain of major labels–indie labels are often just as guilty of creating unlistenable CDs due to poor mastering choices.

Same band, different year
The Buzzcocks are a band I admire enormously. I have all their early recordings on LP, and repurchased many of them on CD in the 1990s. This is one of their classic singles, Ever Fallen in Love, ripped from the Singles Going Steady CD. Here’s a short MP3 excerpt of the song :Ever Fallen in Love (excerpt). Even in loss-tastic MP3 form, it sounds pretty damn good.

The band’s 2003 self-titled release on indie darling Merge records was rightly hailed as a return to form. The songwriting and playing are quite good. But the record is unlistenable. Here’s an MP3 excerpt of a track from the CD: Stars (excerpt). What your ears don’t tell you, your eyes will. Take a gander at this wave form.

It’s a perfect rectangle. And it’s a perfect rectangle because there is almost no dynamic variation in the track. It’s scarcely different from a test pattern. The result is oppressive, fatiguing, and unmusical. I haven’t listened to it since I bought it in 2003.

We quickly become numb to the ubiquitous. We often don’t notice how bad fast food tastes, how ugly strip malls are, what an eyesore our highways are, or the omnipresence of advertising in our public spaces. And, after a few years of listening to oppresively loud MP3s through crappy earbuds, we forget what music used to sound like.