I play bass in an Oakland three-piece rock band called Ovipositor. I guess it qualifies as an indie rock band, though that term makes me cringe these days. The music we make is not qualified by tight pants, lip piercings, trucker caps, or anything even remotely deemed emo; our music is more akin to the kind of punk-born indie rock that was coming out of Chicago and Seattle and D.C. and Austin in the early and mid-1990s — you know, when indie rock was fun and loud and brash and kinda drunk and a little sloppy and maybe even a bit dangerous.
I’ve been with the band since late last year, when I put an ad on CraigsList.org looking for a drummer to play with (I had just bought this ungodly huge bass cabinet and a great amp, and I needed to get it out of the house before my girlfriend left me or the neighbors called the police; I figured the easiest way to do that was to find someone to play with and some place to play). Mark, the drummer, responded to my ad and asked if I’d be willing to play with a drummer and a guitar player. I went to their practice space, guitarist Colin’s basement studio, and we worked through some stuff for an hour or two. They asked me to come back.
I hadn’t played music with other people in a really, really, really long time and I had no idea what to expect. I wouldn’t say we clicked right away, but there was something there…I mean, something other than the fact that no one else had responded to my CraigsList ad, and no one at all had responded to one that they were running for a new bass player (their previous bassist moved to New York). But there was enough of a spark to keep it going.
So it kept going. Two practices a week (give or take), a hand full of live shows and a dozen new songs later, we ended up at New, Improved Recording in Oakland this past Tuesday, with owner / engineer Eli Crews, recording the live tracks for Ovipositor’s as-yet untitled third album.
Though I’ve spent fair amount of time in professional recording studios, I’ve never actually recorded in one, so it was sort of a new experience for me. Of course, it wasn’t much different than I expected, not all that different from the recording situations I’ve previously taken part in…except, you know, better. It took a couple of hours to get things set up — the seclusion of my bass rig in an isolation room, dialing in the guitar amp, troubleshooting the minor annoyances that popped up in the setup phase, and of course, the process of micing the drums — but once were all set, we managed to knock out 14 songs in a day. Which isn’t bad.
The whole day was a lot of fun, informative and productive. We recorded the whole session to 2″ tape, which I’m pretty stoked on, and Colin is now in possession of the digital dump of the tape so he can do vocals and a few guitar overdubs. We’re doing a proper mixdown later in August, and should have media product by the end of September, beginning of October.
In the meantime, here’s a live performance of the song “Red Crust,” an Ovipositor classic, which was recorded back in June at Nick’s Nightclub in Chico, CA. Enjoy…
[audio http://homepage.mac.com/maxsidman/.music/Blog/Ovipositor_Red_Crust_liveChico.mp3]