Victor Frankensteins – Small Glowing Pig

From the Vault: "For a Mother"

Now that I’m off of work for the summer (ah, the luxurious life of a middle school teacher), I’ve started organizing my computers and music recording folders. I suppose after nearly fifteen years, my process was worth revising.

I’ve been working between two desktop PCs and a Surface Pro, and file management has gotten a little sticky with legacy files. Steve went with a NAS, which has been great for sharing wavs while doing long distance recording (some of the recent THC songs have been recorded this way). Currently, I’ve got a “Things” folder for all random nonsense and an “ACID Stuff” folder for songs that are in progress. Then I’ve got an external hard drive that has backup versions of these folders along with pictures and videos and stuff. It’s all manual and it’s all sort of a mess.

I have a few options. I could get a NAS or use synctoy to keep the external up to date, but these are either pricey or cumbersome. Why not let the internet do it for me?

At this point, I’ve got over a terabyte of space in my OneDrive account, and it’d be silly not to use it. The only problem I can see with this method is that the Surface’s hard disk space is limited. Should be an easy solution, though, since I can tell OneDrive which folders to keep locally and which to leave up in the ether of the web.

The next step is to get a small USB Audiobox so that I can record using the Surface and the AMD computer (which lacks the firewire port necessary for my 8 input Firepod interface). If recent email chains are to be believed, the band not formerly or currently known as GrllBrsh may be making a comeback along with the 90 degree days. Should that come to pass, having the Surface function as a live recorder would be sweet.

Anyway, while digging through songs of musics past, I uncovered one that I thought I lost in a hard drive failure a few years ago. It was written after a student’s mother passed away, and it not-so-subtly tackles the issue of longing. Despite some rough vocals and weird sound/mixing issues, it still mostly holds up. I had it labelled as Victor Frankensteins, which means I was thinking of working on it with Blonski for the Antimony album. That puts this track somewhere around 2010 or 2011.

For a Mother

Steve and I are still considering a release of the unfinished Steve Blonski is Go!, which could show up soon. I also found the old Rama Ram Jat recordings, which could be fun to re-record…

Until then,
-Mike

New Website Kickoff

The new Small Glowing Pig website is finally here. Be sure to update your bookmarks to smallglowingpig.com, as it’ll be our home for the foreseeable future. On to the celebrations…

First up is a new release from Steve Blonski & the Victor Frankensteins. It’s the first proper followup to a “Steve Blonski & the” album. It also marks a return to a band last heard from way back in 2000. Two tracks from that year’s Not Gonna be Splitting the Atom Any Time Soon are featured on the new release, Antimony. Enjoy!

Steve Blonski & the Victor Frankensteins: Antimony

Next is the first release from Vacation. Meant to be a catch all “band” for all the random nonsense I come up with during my breaks from school. Think Desert Sessions but generally alone and not as interesting. It was originally intended to have a real “band” feel, so I restricted myself to one acoustic, one electric, drums, bass, and vocals. I don’t remember if I kept it up throughout the seven tracks, though. I did, however, only use one microphone for the whole thing – including the drums. Craziness!

We’ll have more news about The Name and about a new project soon. The 10th Anniversary album seems to be on hold. It’s already the 11th Anniversary, so what’s another year?

-Mike

New Blog and New Music…

This is our first blog post for SGP! Figured a place to keep everyone up to date on the latest SGP projects was in order.

A few things happening…

First, the second SB & the Victor Frankensteins disc is more or less finished. We’ve decided to delay the release in order to fool around with mixing/master tricks and some new plugins. All recording is done and at some point we’ll just be satisfied and release it.

Second, the SGP 10th Anniversary album is in the works. We’re recording one new track, one old unfinished track, and then tacking on some unreleased works from the past. This will be the first chance to hear some stuff from the abandoned Andre EP, and the rarely talked about Space album. Thinking about including two “discs” with one greatest hits and one rarities. The goal is to finish it before the end of 2010 so that it’s still the 10th anniversary…

And finally, The Name is making its debut Wednesday the 25th at an open mic at the Main Pub in Manchester, CT. Hoping to release a single before or shortly after the performance.