Kings of Slop (Playing catch up part 2)

We here at The Brown Christmas pride ourselves on our sloppiness. It is only when you embrace the essence of slop, and reach deep into the viscous bubbling depths that you can find unexpected mixtures of accidental beauty. This album was recorded at the very beginning of January 2018, after not jamming for over a month we were fully ready to get sloppy again.

This isn't your average 'slop flavored fluid substitute,' this is quality pure distilled slop. Every minute of this album oozes thick, dense, textured, slop. Each track takes its time, slowly spreading and changing its texture, while also remaining concise and not overstaying its welcome. Most of the album keeps a fairly leisurely pace, allowing simple melodies to slowly reveal themselves over shifting ambiences, shining for a moment, then disappearing back into the sloppy ether. "Luck People" is a prime example of this; jovial arpeggios and Al Santillo loops provide a thin surface for mallet textures to knock on, eventually shattering the surface and dissolving.

The tempo picks up briefly as the monolithic "No Body Knows..." comes to an end and bursts into the frantic "Martini Rodeo." This is an all out assault of drums, synths, and guitar feedback; eventually falling apart, and leaving only a wiggly bass line. My favorite part of this album however, comes when the soothing lullaby of "Magic Mattress Bliss" shifts into the uneasy fever dream drones of "Starsand Hourglass." A heavy bellowing kick persuades the listener along a winding and unstable path of echoing bells, warbling ghostly howls, uneven synth pulses, and glistening rain textures.

The final track "Cyborg Vacuero" brings the tempo back to a frantic pace, closing the album with chugging guitar riffs and a squealing synth solo. This album demands several replays and deep listening; for just 30 minutes there's a vast variety of sound happening. At the time of it's release in June, Kings of Slop would have been my pick for our top album of the year. It has since been replaced by a different album, but is still a great listen. Check it out, taste the slop.

Chair Club for Men

Enjoy the most luxurious sitting experience of your life! The Brown Christmas is proud to introduce our latest business endeavor; the Chair Club for Men. We provide only the finest chairs in a wide variety of styles, both modern and classical. All of our applicants are screened very strictly, so you will be guaranteed an environment of only fellow chair enthusiasts.

While you're having a relaxing sit in one of our award winning chairs you can listen to our newest album. You'll find that one technique we often employ when recording is to take a simple theme or melody and turn it into an epic wall of textures. We open the album in this manner, with the gradual swelling of "Edge of the Void" which blooms into the monolithic second track "The Colossi of Memnon." The track ascends with the massiveness of an ancient giant emerging from it's slumber in the sand. Deep bellows from Joemazing's synth are punctuated with a more pizzicato string-like swirling melody. Crashing drum samples propel the song forward in a lurching motion as the otamatone breaks through with a screech of victory.

You'll find this same technique again on "The Serpent Swallows," which begins with a pensive drone and driving drum machine pattern, before building tension with increasing layers of atonal drones and seesaw arpeggios. The heavy breathing of Joemazing's synth adds to the anxiety as I dance around with a playful yet eerie melody.

On the track "Rain Dance Brings New Life" we have a slightly different style of building intensity. This time we work more with percussive textures, stacking them haphazardly on top of one another generating a chaotic down pour. These slowly change and disperse, opening up space for playful bird-like melodies. These simplistic chirps soothe the listener into the enigmatic final song "Puzzle in the Dark."

After this we get a short reminder from Joemazing about the importance of proper chair maintenance for both quality sitting and quality tone. So send in your applications today, we have a limited amount of openings for this most exclusive club.

Stogie Fest

Vape enthusiasts need not apply, it's Stogie Fest 2017!!! In addition to improvising music, we also have a tendency to improvise dialog. This is usually limited to a few remarks at the end of a track, but occasionally we'll do slightly longer 'skits'. Aside from Brown 'til Dawn all our recent releases have hardly any talking segments, but I felt as if Joemazing and myself had some entertaining exchanges that deserved to be included.

Let's not forget however, that there is also music on this album! It seems we stayed pretty consistently laid back and upbeat with these songs. Our usual detours into abrasive clusters of synth noise are absent, and while we do get spacey we never quite get spooky. Things get a little dark on "Cold Ghost Wanderer" and our cover of ZZ Top's "Tush," but for the most part we keep things chill and silly.

What else would you expect to hear while attending Stogie Fest? The audience demands mellow tunes for relaxing under clouds of acrid tobacco smoke. Wether it's "Sunset Hay Ride's" uplifting, melodic build up; "Picnic by Comet Light" with it's cosmic ambience over inquisitive arpeggiated bass; or "Swimmer in the Night Sky's" driving, forward flowing rhythm, this is the ideal album for wrapping up the end of summer.

Besides the afore mentioned "Tush" we also cover the Primus song "Mr. Krinkle," and do another cover of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain." You can also hear new versions of our own songs including; "Love Young Brown" and possibly my favorite version to date of "Cataract Jack."

So light up your stogies, catch a screening of Wall Blart, and get one more relaxing weekend in before your brick arrives for Wall Day.

Honey I Crunk'd the Kids

Presenting part 3 of The Brown Christmas' crunk TRILLogy; Honey I Crunk'd the Kids! Recorded in May of 2016, this is the only recent album to include all three members of The Brown Christmas. The excitement of this reunion comes through in the grandiose variety of sounds layered on this album.

Our sonic territory ranges from eerie ambience on tracks like "The Chemist's Ergot Wine" and "The Mother Sphere Rises"; the manic insanity of "Folie à Trois" and "Daily Exercise Regimen"; to the unmitigated abrasiveness of "Shark Toothed Horn." Where I think our progression as a band really shines through however, is on tracks like "Murmuration Amongst the Clouds," "There's a Home for Me Somewhere," and "Ravages of Time." It is on tracks like these where we direct our sounds into more harmonious, concise, synth-pop-esque directions while still remaining completely improvisational that truly show our growth and exploration of new terrains.

Everyone was operating at 110% when recording this session, there were no lulls in the music or confused meandering in our improvisation. Everything has it's place and nothing is lost in the mix, a real feat considering there were five synths, a drum machine, a sampler, as well as various pedals being operated by three people at any given time.

A few more highlights from this album include our noisy rendition of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" on which Todd's synth sound like 1940's news radio static, and "Joemazing's House of Pain," which is sure to be the party anthem of the summer. The album closes with a craig's list track, "Load Ranger." Normally I would save this for another volume of Dicks Pics, but I don't when that might happen and it seemed like the perfect closer for a rock solid album.

I would also like to mention that the cover art was again done by Michael Burke, who continues to create extraordinary visual compliments for our sounds.

Booty Sammich

Although our albums are 100% improvised, leaving plenty of room for unexpected sparks of inspiration to kindle, there are two themes that seem to emerge with some regularity; we like to call them: spooky and spacey. More often then not I am the one generating the spacey feelings, and Joemazing creates the spooky feelings, although this is not exclusively the case. Maybe the music we create just naturally lends itself to visions of slowly moving massive celestial bodies in an expansive void, and of dark otherworldly forces clawing their way out of dreams and into our waking life. So here is Booty Sammich; a little spacey, a little spooky, and always a little silly.

Go Ahead Call the Cops

I usually try to write a little bit about each album when I release it; this time I was a little lazy/a little busy and didn't get a chance to sit down and type something up until now. I also occasionally find it hard to write anything of interest about certain albums. Sometimes there are no funny anecdotes from the date of recording, no particular concept in mind for the album, sometimes the album is just really good, and there are only so many ways I can say an album is good.

 ...and this is indeed a good one.

This album definitely takes the crown from Dick Hz as our most aggressively noisy release to date. A large factor in this I believe is Joemazing's extensive pallet of synth and percussion sounds on Go Ahead Call the Cops vs his almost exclusive use of guitar on Dick Hz. While not necessarily abrasive the full way through, there are some softer and more melodic tracks that mix things up, when it does get hard it gets rock hard and sonically dense. The version of "Nobody Knows..." on this album is also one of my favorites, ending the album with a definitive slam like the closing of a book.

So there's not much more I can say about Go Ahead Call the Cops, except that you should give it a solid listen. It marks our 12th consecutive monthly release and we have many more to go before we're fully caught up, but I think this is a fitting mile marker for essentially a years worth of music.

Music for Short Fat People

As I clear out the hours of recordings from recent years and release them into the world, I began to think it was about time I got around to uploading our older albums as well. Here is the one that started it all; Music for Short Fat People. Composed of recordings from January to October 2005 this was our statement to the world. While it was silly, sloppy, and in retrospect maybe not be the most pleasing thing to the ear, we were quite proud of it at the time.

It's interesting to take a look back on something we released almost 12 years ago and listen to how much we've advanced. I had not listened to these recordings in years and I was quite surprised to find they're much more listenable than I anticipated. They're not what one might called "good," but I was expecting 7 minute tracks of nothing but a casio drum loop, clashing random keyboard notes, and piercing saxophone squeals. Instead the tracks average about 3 minutes long and most of this probably qualifies as music.

I also forgot that we used to try to 'write' songs. What I mean by this is we would write lyrics and then randomly start singing them during an improvised jam session; if things seemed to fit we'd practice it once or twice over the next few jams, and then call it a finished product.

My stroll down memory lane continued as I skimmed through our earliest jam sessions looking for gems that didn't make it to the album. It quickly became apparent that we truly allowed our selves the freedom to be complete lunatics. A fair amount was pretty musical, but there was a lot of literal knuckle dragging on keyboards, slurred stream of consciousness rambling, and maniacal screaming. Any normal person listening to us would have been quite justified in being concerned that we might need to be taken to the hospital.

The result of all this digging is just under 40 minutes of bonus material which is available when you download this album. These bonus tracks capture this insanity in chunks small enough not to overstay their welcome. A few of the more coherent songs in this collection are in my opinion, better than some of the stuff on the actual album. I'm unsure why they didn't make the cut originally.

While it may be clear that we had no idea how to play music (you could argue that we still don't) there's definitely something to the primal nature of it all. We were very much like cavemen discovering music for the first time. There were no arbitrary 'rules' of music to adhere to, it was all trial and error. One day three friends got together with a bass, saxophone, and some toy keyboards and thought; "This is the perfect recipe for starting a band." I think there's something charming about that.

-Michael


When we were recording this album, I would grow paranoid and destroy anything I wrote or played out of fear of being thrown in some kind of institutional setting. I am forever grateful Music for Short Fat People, for better or worse, stood the test of time. It proves that, this whole time, I was right in my actions of erasing any thoughts I had between 2005-2009. Including, but not limited to, that hilarious last will and testament I scribbled on a Quik Check catering menu.

-Joemazing


This album is not meant for people who are not both short and fat. If you are not short and fat, please proceed to turn off your audio equipment and leave the premises.

-Todd

Unfamiliar Voices

A track from an upcoming album. This will be quite an interesting album as it shows off our more ambient side with lovely spacey synths.

BBBW's BBW BBQ BYOB

The long wait is over, here is Dicks Pics Volume 5: Big Bad Bill Weinstein's Big Beautiful Women Barbecue BYOB. Feature wonderful artwork by Philly artist Vanessa Tejada. Check out more of her work here: https://www.behance.net/vanessatejada or here https://instagram.com/creaturerhythm/

Physical copies will be available in the near future, with additional genital art.

Get Cucked

I've been a bit slow on getting physical copies of albums made, but here at long last is Dicks Pics Volume 4: Golden Cuckoldies available on limited edition CDr in a DIY cardstock sleeve. All lyrics are from craigslist casual encounter posts. 

Do you want you cock sucked now? ...well so do a lot of people on craigslist apparently. 

Pick up a copy now!

Love Young Brown

Love Young Brown ...is that the name of your eccentric producer/manager/enabler?

It's actually one of the people we based our band name after. Love Yung Brown and Well Hung Christmas. You know like Pink Floyd did?

I see, but according to the internet Well Hung Christmas was a doomsday cult leader in late nineties Korea. I can't find Love Yung Brown. Although I can speculate that he was an infamous minor league basketball player, largely known for his sexual prowess and insatiable hunger for hotdogs. Which he would eat, as if he were in a competition, by dunking them in lukewarm water and swallowing whole.

Tugboats, Trolleys, and Trains

Check out the newest release, available for free download. Recorded in January of 2013, Tugboats, Trolleys, and Trains is special in that it was the first jam session between Joemazing and myself in over a year, and it also happened to be my birthday. Here we show off The Brown Christmas' noisier side with layers of atonal synth/pedal droning and spacey ambience; which occasionally gives way to some inexplicably funky tunes.

Games Part 2

The Brown X mas

This month marks the tenth year anniversary of the formation of The Brown Christmas; That’s a decade worth of strange, noisy, circusy, synth sounds. It’s a strange thing to try to put into perspective. I always imagined being able to look back at time in solid chunks, but when I try to picture this past decade as some kind of physical cube of time, it doesn’t seem to have the massive spacial presence I imagined it would. 

There is no towering structure behind me on the horizon to gaze at nostalgically. There is no defining line that separates what was from what now is, instead everything seems piled upon itself in the now; ever present and infinitely accessible. Every jam session, every note, every outburst of musical ecstasy is present now, able to be called forth at will from the void of my memory. There is a chronological order to these events, but wether they occurred a few days ago or several years ago seems impossible to tell and irrelevant to consider.

It all began as a chance gathering between my two very good friends; Todd, Joemazing, and myself. I can’t say I fully remember how we decided to start playing music or why it finally happened that particular day. There had definitely been talks of jamming for at least a few months prior; I had recently picked up my saxophone again which hadn’t been used since middle school, and had requested and received a sitar that christmas in anticipation of jamming. These two instruments, in combination with Todd’s bass, and Joe’s Casio rapman seemed like the proper tools to start a band. So we gathered in my cramped bedroom with a single bass amp, a worn out cassette, and a cheap stereo with a built in microphone, and let loose a torrent of sound.

It is also unclear why we continued playing music. It’s quite obvious now, and must have been just as obvious then, that we had no idea how to make music or even really how to play our instruments. I imagine most bands start with kids who know a few chords on guitar and want to play some covers of their favorite band. Maybe they get good enough and start writing a few original songs. Then maybe after a few rehearsals they start forming dreams of rock stardom, or at least appearing cool to the kids in high school. We never really did any of that. 

There was no learning chords, writing songs, or rehearing; you just pounded on your instrument until the tape ran out, transferred it to the family computer, and then recorded over the tape again. You ‘wrote’ the music as you played it and you only played it once. It didn’t matter if it sounded good or not, you’d play something completely new the next time. It was a desire to create and perhaps more importantly, a desire to have fun that sustained this.

I could write page after page about everything that’s happened in The Brown Christmas over the past ten years. There are tales of new instruments being added to our collection, screen printing clothing found in a dumpster, performing in crowed basements (and empty basements), instrument malfunctions, abandoned projects, music video shoots, and a particularly zany few weeks involving a character known as the boot. These stories however are probably best left for another time, seeing as I’ve already written quite a bit. 

Instead I’ll close with this; it’s quite amusing to think of all the local indie rock and metal bands formed around the same time who have long since changed their lineup or broken up, and here the three of us are continuing to record weird shit and have fun. In these ten years we’ve recorded over 45 gigs of music, which equates to at least a full week worth of audio, we’ve put out 25 albums, and have played about 20 live shows. 

Roman numeral ten is symbolized as an X, and if you were looking at a treasure map X is where you’d want to dig. Joemazing once said, “It’s a lot like a big pile of trash; you have to dig through all the garbage …to get to the good tasting garbage underneath.” 

Finally BFF's

After many attempts experimenting with different materials, designing various templates, figuring out the complexities of paper weight, attempting to line things up perfectly, and realizing the importance of a bleed zone; I present to you Beast Friends Forever, a physical object available for purchase. Limited edition of twenty number CDr's.

Grab your best friend, or beast friend, and enjoy a collection of tracks recorded mostly between July and August 2012 (with a few tracks dating back to 2010). You'll hear zany circus tunes, spacey synths, gritty lo-fi synths, some vaguely noisy sounds, some vaguely danceable sounds, ley-lines, UFOs, ducks, hippos, elephants, it's all here for you.

Listen/download it for free on bandcamp, but if you're super cool you'll want to buy a copy to show off to all your BFFs.

Christmas Comes Early

We recently recorded several new tracks for next year's christmas album, and as a special christmas gift to you here is a rough preview of one of these all new christmas classics. It's christmas on craigslist!

The Brown Craft Mess

We're getting crafty in the studio in preparation for a very special christmas release.