August 12 at Not My Dog!

I would understand fully if there were no followers or occasional checkers-in to this blog, given the lack of posts.  But if anyone outside the band happens to read this - we are very sorry, and we will make it up to you verbally.  There'll be so much blathering that you'll wish you never took an interest in this band.

And speaking of this band, we have been blessed with a set at Not My Dog (1510 Queen Street West, one block west of Lansdowne) on Friday, August 12, 2011. Yes, my friends, blessed indeed, because the Ethics themselves will not be playing until fairly late.  There will be at least one opening act.  One of them MAY be venerated local rapper Essential V.  The other opening act will be Heavy Ethics' bass player Chris Norman, who occasionally does an act entitled "Wussy Songs Of The 60s".  The act is exactly what it sounds like, so even if you don't like avant-prog-jazz-rock (and who doesn't), you may want to hear at least one of the opening acts for this increasingly unlikely band.

Takin' Pride in Bein' So Back

I know a lot of folks have been asking "when are Heavy Ethics going to play another show?" The answer's obvious, dummy. We're playing at Not My Dog on March 26, 2011, with an opening set by local rapper V (http://www.essentialv.com/Vicegrip/About.html).

We will be playing at least one new piece of music. Maybe. It doesn't really matter - what matters is the additional maturity that each of us will be bringing to this performance.

In summary, to those who have been asking whether or not we are back, and if so, how back we are, I reply that we are so back.

Not Not My Dog

Not that this notice will be of any practical use to anyone, but we're not playing this Friday after all. I smashed up one of my index fingers pretty good, and thus I cannot play the bass even more than usual.

Malice

The way I write a piece of music is usually to take an introductory idea that occurred to me years ago and finally make something out of it. The other two methods are turning on Sibelius and just inputting some random notes, and noodling around on the organ. "Malice", which hasn't been performed by Heavy Ethics (in fact they've never even seen or heard it before, except for about one page of a much earlier version - I'm sure they don't remember), is an idea I came up with in the fall of 2004. Only last year did I bother to take it up and finish it. I ended up shovelling in elements from a separate "noodling on the organ" piece and found that it just barely seemed to make sense.

I'm not really going for a lot of motivic rigour here, even though I usually strive for it. (Elliott Carter once said "I hate rigour", which I figure gives me license not to be rigourous once in a while.) This could end up being a guitar/piano/drums piece or a bass/piano/drums piece. Originally it was for bass, but the lack of guitar numbers (or at least guitar numbers that people like to play) in our set was slightly troubling. I don't know if it works this way, and I'll probably change the ending (no idea what I was thinking when I came up with it). I admit freely that this piece is much too complicated.

Here's a link to a horrible, mechanical MIDI demo of this piece:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UCDM4XCU

And here's the score (I'm sure there's a way to upload a file this small right here on the blog, but I have no idea how):
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DVTTNCP6

Leave some comments. Obviously only James and maybe Rommel if he's super-bored will read this, but I'm optimistic that at some point in the future someone who isn't in the band might be also be bored enough to look at this blog.

Band Bloggin' Bandwagon

What better time is there try publicizing the band "Heavy Ethics" through blogging than a couple of years too late? It's true that we move at a glacial pace. Many bands have gone through their entire life cycle, broken up, and reunited in the same period of time during which seem to have done little other than to drift nonchalantly into Not My Dog* every few weeks, run through our needlessly complicated tunes, bash everyone over the head with our dark, pounding improvisations, and then down our drinks either jubilantly or sheepishly (depending on how bad the gig was). However, I don't feel that it makes sense to compare us with other musical acts. I think that novelists provide us with a much more appropriate yardstick. Did you know that the average age at which a writer's first novel is published is 35? That's the kind of relaxed timeline that makes me feel better about myself.

At least I've come up with a bunch of new compositions for the Heavy Ethics band - I wrote more music in the past year than in the previous ten - although we've only managed to give rehearsal time to one of them so far. I believe James also has some very exciting, complex music ready to go. Maybe one thing we could do with this blog is chronicle our meager progress by posting demos of the new pieces, and follow them up with increasingly less terrible rehearsal performances. I'm also going to put up videos, because people like to see James sweat.

Anyway, yet another one of these Not My Dog performances is coming up this Friday, April 23, starting at 10:00 PM. We're playing new music for the first time in about two years - it's a new piece written by me which attempts to depict the travails of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown. If that doesn't interest you, I hear the back patio is quite popular, and since we get a cut of the bar proceeds, I'm quite happy for you to head on back there and ignore us.

*Not My Dog doesn't seem to have a website anymore, but if you're reading this, you probably know where it is already.