Haulin' Oats

Whether you're a Quaker or a baker, if you've got oats you need hauled The Brown Christmas can get it done in no time flat. Around the holidays more than ever we get tons of oats that need hauling; and if you're speeding across state lines with a truck load of legally questionable oats, you need some good cruising tunes.

As with our previous album, guitar is featured prominently on Haulin' Oats. The opening track begins with Joemazing chugging away, before messing around with his guitar's faulty wiring to make it scream like a hawk. The synths and drums create a slow moving, lightly textured framework for Jomazing guitar to gradually melt over top. This destruction continues on "Mass of Choronzon," as I play some dramatic string samples and Joemazing screams and distorts things into an unrecognizable mess of feedback.

The tempo takes a more upbeat turn as a circus melody emerges from the ashes of the previous track. A deep bellowing synth line bounces us along drunkenly before building to a growling drone, as silly melodies dance around. The ferris wheel is rusted, the bumper cars are short circuiting, and the carnival barker is in a radiation induced rage.

Overall this album has an aggressive, lo-fi, abrasiveness that is best exemplified with my favorite track, "Missa pro Defunctis." This melancholic march sounds like it was ripped from a withered VHS tape; a simple but effective melody punctuated by drums, is made all the more epic when complimented by the thick analog drone that emerges about halfway through the song.

The closing track is another high point, and possibly the best version of "Nobody Knows what it's like..." we've recorded to date. We take turns belting out the lyrics as over the top as possible, and I do my best emulation of the drums from "In the Air Tonight."

That's about all I have time for, these oats aren't going to haul themselves! We've got deadlines to meet, and the oat hauling business is very competitive. This album is a great example of our grittier, lo-fi, noise sound. Give it a listen.

How to Make an Egg Cream

The Brown Christmas is equally skilled in the culinary arts as well as the art of love, our latest cookbook/erotic novella perfectly exemplifies this. These tunes are perfect whether you're in the kitchen or in the bedroom.

We are now in the final stretch of our unreleased catalog, all recordings from here onward are only about a year old. We entered 2016 with a auditory exploration that begins light hearted and innocent, leads to the triumphant sounding "A Thousand Risen Suns", then slows to a crawl. At this point we gradually enter darker and dark territories, reaching a peak with the punishing electrical sizzles of "The Crushing Weight of Nothingness." Eventually we emerge from it unscathed and can breathy easy again with the cheery, round-a-about melodies of "Scattered Rolling Beads of Light." Finally we wrap up our adventure with "Hundred Foot Strut," a hard grooving tune with a squealing synth solo.

A solid chunk of this album is tethered together with a deep, pulsing kick drum; keeping a slow steady pace while melodies and textures are exchanged. Joemazing's knack for creating interesting textures really shines through on this release. He lays down a nice skin of sound ranging from subtle spooky drones, piercing shimmers, to thick walls of synthy distortion.

It's not an easy task to make an egg cream, but with our new album anyone can learn!

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

Contemporary Adults

Enjoy some music for the adult of today! We here at Brown Acres Enterprises realize that today's discriminating adult will not settle for just any flavor of music. That is why we are proud to offer an alternative to the mainstream. Contemporary Adults starts smooth and finishes strong, always full flavored never watered down.

This album starts off slow and spacey with docile drone tones before taking a sharp turn into more gritty lo-fi tunes with our bizarre cover of Pantera's Walk. The madness continues with a long overdue circus performance by the Gorilla. The astute listener will also notice Joemazing shredding on the Otamatone on several tracks, an instrument that hasn't made an appearance on an album since L.E.D Zeppelin V.

Please listen responsibly

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.

Almost BFF's

As you can see there are some printing issues at the moment, but physical copies of Beast Friends Forever will soon be available for purchase.

Updates

One of the benefits of acting like a hermit is being able to catch up on editing all the weird music no one will listen to. After a few months of mercilessly plowing through hours upon hours of jam sessions I am down to the final two. There are at this very moment, six albums worth of new unreleased Brown Christmas material ready to go. Expect to see these gradually trickle out over the coming months.

Here is a preview track from one of them.


Physical releases are also on the way, although there's been a bit of a setback regarding the logistics of making these. Originally the plan was to make crafty packaging using recycled cardboard boxes from my day job. However after several experiments It became apparent that these were too thick, unmanageable, and of poor quality. Now there are useless mountains of cardboard sitting around taking up space. However this will not deter me, I am exploring other packaging options, and hopefully you will see physical copies of Beast Friends Forever for sale by August.