Welcome to High-Pass Filter/Meet Your Hostess
What the hell is this and who the hell do I think I am?
Hi everybody. (Hi, Doctor Nick!) I’m Rainy Maple Sugar Candy and I will be your post-punk psychopomp, your bitchpop party planner, and your rambling Gemini rising over here at High-Pass Filter. This is my introduction post. It’s about High-Pass Filter and it’s about me. This blog will inevitably be a somewhat personal one (I’m incapable of writing any other way) so I think it’s important to get to know one another a little bit here before I go on lobbing Bandcamp links and non sequiturs at you. Watch out for that last Oxford comma: it’s a doozy.
I was born in the year of the roto tom. This is actually inaccurate, I’ve learned, because roto toms were already around in the 70s (WHAT???) whereas I was not. I guess that makes sense, because Queen. (Internal monologue: What year did Fat Bottomed Girls come out? 1978! Jeez.) But what I mean is that I was born in the year of the roto tom the way that one can be born in the year of the rat or the ox. They come around again, y’know, y’know? Anyway, I am perennially one of those people who protests that I was bOrn in The wROnG dEcAde which is so overdone and so gauche except IT’S FUCKING TRUE. I missed everything. I was nine when Kurt Cobain died. At least maybe now that Nirvana has been reduced to comfort-fit Target t-shirt fodder, I can raise my nose up and claim legitimacy by at least having been alive at the same time as Young Blue Eyes.
My relationship with sound is very important to me. It has been a bit of a precarious one at times. I have hyperacusis which means that even somewhat loud, sharp, and especially high-pitched sounds can be extremely painful and briefly deafening for me. I am absolutely in the top percentile of the “frequency of earplug usage” chart. I do think that this sensitivity- I also have excellent hearing- can make me at times formidable in the studio. Silver linings, I guess. While it makes me insane to hear an XBox fan whirring two rooms away that everyone else swears I’m imagining, I’m happy to pick out all your digital clicks and blips before things go to mastering.
On top of the burdensome dog ears, I have misophonia. That’s the one where people chewing with their mouths open making that slappy wet cow sound, even quietly, nearly sends me into a murderous rage. IYKYK, but if you haven’t experienced this, all I can say is that it isn’t some kind of metaphor. God damn this is REAL. There are some theories about mirror neurons and why certain sounds are so triggering to misophonic people, but at the end of the day something is miswired in my brain and I don’t care what it is.
No, you don’t have to feel self-conscious snacking around me.
Just close your fucking mouth.
Last but not least in the “WTF is going on with Rainy’s auditory processing system” Olympics is that I would describe myself as an associative synesthete. You’ve heard of synesthesia? So, I don’t see triangles when a bell rings or taste lemons when I see a triangle; more plainly I do not have projective synesthesia which is the involuntarily perceived linking of two senses at a given stimulus. I don’t truly SEE or HEAR or TASTE one thing when exposed to another. But, I do have very, very strong sensory associations between sounds and colors, sounds and shapes, and sounds and other sounds. For example, this song is swirling purplish gray smoke and it always will be and I will think of this every time I hear it, even if I want to “change” that association. I very nearly “perceive” this the way that a projective synesthete would. Just not quite. I am sorry to all of my bandmates over the years whom I’ve told wrote a riff that “made me think of X other riff” but I am absolutely incapable of not hearing the other one too in my head every time. I’ll try to keep it to myself.
So I think about sound a lot. Meanwhile, I’m over here taking an American Sign Language class because I love the idea of being able to communicate silently and with more people. Fun fact: I learned a few years ago (Dad was adopted/Thanks 23andme!) that I’m nearly a quarter Italian, much of that being Sicilian. Not talking with my hands? Fuhgeddaboutit. Anyway, in my ASL class I wear earplugs to block out the little extraneous noises that might otherwise send me over the edge. And every week I ask myself things like, “How can I best connect to and respect the Deaf community as someone who is so deeply attached to her hearing? Can I use my powers for good?” Historically, I’ve hardly ever known how to interact with people after a certain period of time if we can’t engage about music either as makers or takers of it. Makers or tasters… tastemakers… masters or taters… hmm... I dated a guy who wasn’t a musician exactly one time in my life and when we broke up it was through me saying, “Do you want to just kind of… not do this? I don’t really know what we’re doing.” He agreed. Otherwise I’ve spent so much time over the years trying to stop falling in love with people I was in bands with or starting bands with people I was in love with, but I’ve made my peace at this point. There’s no other way for me. It just has to really, actually work on both fronts.
My favorite genre of music was recently articulated in an article about Shellac in The Wire UK. My favorite genre, apparently, is "a power trio that both skirts and subverts the tropes of post-hardcore, song structures that combine repetition and precision with unexpected asymmetry, bouncy bass and beefy textures activated by ample negative space, and lyrics that simultaneously embody and lampoon a type of flailing masculinity obsessed with big, perverted engines." This is much more eloquent than what I’ve called “appropriately-channeled testosterone” in the past. More on this later, surely.
Other words that describe some of the music I love most are angular, aluminum, rhythmic, dynamic, bass-heavy, biting, clever, jarring, irreverent, and authentic. I love a well-used ride bell or hi-hat part, though you should probably bring it down in the mix a little bit. I like guitar when it’s done completely wrong. I’m not sure what that means. More on this later, surely.
What is a high-pass filter?
Oh. Solid question. Basically, a high-pass filter is used to cut off audio frequencies below a certain threshold, allowing the higher frequencies to pass through. A low-pass filter does the opposite, letting frequencies lower than the threshold through. I use a high-pass/low-pass filter on my bass pedalboard to prevent very high or very, very low frequencies from getting slammajammadingdonged into my speakers because I use some wacky pedals that do surprising things and boy howdy let me tell you, my speakers have not smelled like melting plastic since I got that thing. So wait okay, yes, the point was that I called this blog High-Pass Filter to imply that only things above a certain threshold will get through, like good stuff and things that I like. Get it? Ha ha. Ha. Okay I tried.
I am planning on blogging in four main categories but you know how that goes. They are:
Reviews (live shows/records/songs/gear/music books).
Good News, Everyone! which will be for information like how The Jesus Lizard announced a new record and tour today WHAT?!?!?! Though their Boston date is in my least favorite venue of all time womp womp, bad news, everyone.
Dig Deep Salad, which yes, was a salad my mom used to make that I liked a lot… I just Googled it and apparently there are many different versions, including one that has water chestnuts in it. Water chestnuts. The devil’s styrofoam.
Band Friend Material, when I just want to tell you about a band that I want to be friends with and that maybe you should be friends with. When I stumble upon a new band now, at least one that’s of a geeeeeenerally similar caliber to ours (i.e. not signed to a major label with 8 zillion Internet followers), I like to email them and say hey let’s be band friends. It usually works!
Knowing me there will be two more categories by next week. I will not be posting any sort of “Here’s what’s going on this weekend!” posts because that sounds too stressful and time-sensitive. Also I never know what the fuck is going on.
In closing, I want this blog to be my little ponder playground, but one that you actually want to visit if you’re interested in music, culture, and I dunno maybe some philosophy and crudely explained neuroscience. In high school, the best comment I ever got on a paper was, “As usual, brilliant but skatered.” This was from a tenth grade English teacher, Mr. Hoffman. What I loved about this comment was that scattered was misspelled, though the assessment that my ideas were somewhat scattered was valid. Mr. Hoffman had some sort of spelling issue- I don’t know if he was dyslexic or what, but he always used to write things on the chalkboard, back up, look at them, erase and then rewrite. He was aware of his limitation but he was a kickass English teacher. He chaired the Nashoba Regional High School Literary Magazine which I believe I submitted to maybe once but otherwise didn’t get involved with because I was, unsurprisingly, always doing music stuff. (I also almost joined the field hockey team until I realized they practiced EVERY FRIGGIN’ DAY after school. No thank you.) Anyway, Mr. Hoffman’s comment stuck with me because it did make me try to better organize my paragraphs moving forward, but it also made me feel like in one sense I was just gonna write how I was gonna write. “Brilliant but skatered.” Misspelled, but astute.
When I’m not sitting around trying to turn my pinball-brain thoughts into cohesive essays or pretending I naturally type slower than I do on various instant messaging services to avoid scaring people off, I’m really into cats, books, tequila, Bob’s Burgers, and my growing cadre of houseplants. I play bass and sing among other things in Sapling and sometimes I play drums in Eye Witness.
My favorite Queen song is Dragon Attack because you can’t tell me what to do.
~RMSC