“I don’t know this song.” That’s beginning to become my mantra. From an early age I had a strongly structural mind, dissecting the music, the movies and the stories that came to me, anticipating their twists and turns, learning a vocabulary of beginnings, middles, and endings. I applied this vocabulary to my life, as well, predicting wha...
2025-12-02 18:00:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Art by Billis Helg
Lyrics by Amanda Schiano di Cola - another break-up song. "Your eyes shoot daggers into my heart, sharp bloody daggers straight from the heart" - what great imagery!
Recording:
Track 1: MIDI drums and bass
2: acoustic guitar
3: electric guitar
4: vocal
Lyrics:
Sorry doesn't cut it anymore...
2025-11-30 18:10:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Art by Billis Helg
Writing:
This song ended up being a brief depiction of the trials of loss and sickness, and the unexpected reward. Some of our hardest stretched in life come when the ones that we love become lost to us, either in mental deterioration, physical illness, or death. We have to carry on believing that the love is still...
2025-11-30 18:05:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Art by Billis Helg
Writing:
There's a great old folk song called "The Bold Fisherman", which tells of a fisherman proposing to a lady he meets on the shore of a river, presenting her with "three chains of gold hang-a-d...
2025-11-30 18:00:15 +0000 UTC View PostSongwriting stream
2025-11-30 00:30:40 +0000 UTC View PostToday we're building up a song from scratch with this crazy synth setup. I'll try to explain how everything works as I add more and more layers. Happy Thanksgiving!
2025-11-27 01:24:40 +0000 UTC View PostSlight schedule change! We’ll be doing our songwriting lessons November 29th at 3pm PST now.
See you then
2025-11-25 07:38:03 +0000 UTC View PostNovember 26 at 3 PM PST: Synth stream with Seth!
November 29 at 11 AM PST: Songwriting lessons continue with Andrew, Seth, and Will.
See you there!
2025-11-20 18:00:10 +0000 UTC View PostHello patreon people! Ethan here for October's belated live show archive. It was simply too spooky and scary to post until now. This time around it's our Millennium Park show in Chicago, where we got to meet and greet the mighty Bean (I've heard you're not supposed to call it that). It features a cool, very '80s extended intro to Bodys, which I ...
2025-11-06 04:43:31 +0000 UTC View PostAs November is the month for giving thanks, I want to turn again to gratitude - to all of you.
This project has had a remarkably singular trajectory in its 15 years of existence. In spite of existing its first four years on internet pages, with no tours, no consistent live band, no label support, and no coverage on the blogosphere, by 2014...
2025-11-05 16:48:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Art by Billis Helg
Writing:
In elementary school I was in a year-long program ("Odyssey of the Mind") with 5 other students in adapting Romeo and Juliet into a ten-minute comedy, which we for some reason called "Kissy Kissy Goo Goo". In the marriage scene, one of our members would come on as stagehand, holding up a plexiglass between R...
Art by Billis Helg
Writing:
Often in this society I have been called to watch - to be the unseen seer, to treat real life as a TV show, and believe myself to be an uninvolved audience member. I’ve fallen prey to this temptation too many times. There is no uninvolved watcher; we are all a part of what unfolds among us. The call to be ...
Art by Billis Helg
Writing:
This started with a catchy melody that I tried for a while to make into a chorus, but ended up as a verse pattern here. The music seemed to convey a story of triumphing through a difficult trial, of sunlight after darkness. I searched for scripture passages that would help guide me to structure the lyrics to ...
October 25, 3 PM: Band's delight stream. Got a question about an obscure CSH/Will Toledo cut? Join me (Will) for a Q&A! We'll journey into some forgotten corners of the archives and listen to a few tracks. I'll explain the origin of tracks, or the process of working, if I can remember.
October 27, 4 PM: 2025-10-22 17:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings live archive listeners, Ethan here. This one's going up a little bit late because I've recently started classical arts training which has had me pretty slammed for the past few weeks (in addition to playing shows!). The good news is I have finally learned how to sharpen my pencil.
Anyway, this month's show is from the Masquerade ...
2025-10-04 00:39:33 +0000 UTC View PostIt hardly feels like October here. Green still dominates the landscape, but that will surely change by the end of the month. Around then, we’ll also hit the 11-year anniversary of one of two EPs we’ve put out, “How to Leave Town”. In spite of its length, I chose to call it an EP because it felt looser than a full album; it started out of...
2025-10-02 17:00:16 +0000 UTC View Postthe spooky season's upon us! tonight we're taking some loops of Andrew in the practice space and mixing them with some samples from my vhs collection and previously recorded tape. then we took our little creation and recorded it back to 1/4inch tape
2025-10-01 01:37:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Art by Billis Helg
In high school some of my friends and I were on a Rubik's cube kick for a while, so this brings me back to the many autumn days I spent walking down the school hallways, practicing the algorithms the booklet taught us for quickly solving the cube.
Recording:
Track 1: MIDI drums/bass/organ
2: Electric Gui...
Art by Billis Helg
Originally a 3/4ths waltz that sounded like something coming from a carousel, this one stumped me for a while until I eventually switched it to 4/4, and turned again to the gospel of John and Christ's speech at the last supper for inspiration.
Recording:
Track 1: Acoustic guitar
2: 12-string guitar
3-...
Art by Billis Helg
Derived mainly from Proverbs 23:
"Do not look at the wine when it is red,
when it sparkles in the cup
and goes down smoothly.
At the last it bites like a serpent,
and stings like an adder."
I see it as a sort of spiritual prequel to The Drum Strikes Back.
Recording:
Track 1: MIDI drum...
In lieu of a Family Dinner, this month we'll be doing a songwriting 101 session with Will, Seth, and Andrew on October 1, at 11 AM PST. (Ethan will be at college for weekdays through the rest of the year.) Andrew wanted to learn how to write lyrics. Let's see what we can learn!
2025-09-30 18:21:51 +0000 UTC View PostJoin Seth making some tape loops tomorrow September 30th @ 6pm PST/ 9pm EST. See you there!
2025-09-29 16:02:40 +0000 UTC View PostHey sorry to cancel last minute, but this afternoon's stream is gonna have to wait till next week! My OBS software got corrupted, and after reinstalling even more problems popped up. I'll work on getting it up and running to give it another shot later this month!
-Seth
2025-09-23 21:59:09 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's BD stream will take place tomorrow, Sept 23, at 3 PM PST. Join Seth for some tape loop experimentation.
The remaining stream this month is TBD - will likely take place in the first week of October, after we return from Boston.
2025-09-22 19:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostHello again, Patreon land. Ethan here for this month's live show archive album! This time, a bit of an experiment: on a lark I was listening back to some 2018 pre-tour rehearsals at Seattle's Crocodile club, where we spent some time calibrating the set in an empty room--mostly for sound and lights, but also to get acquainted with the setlist in ...
2025-09-02 02:15:38 +0000 UTC View PostSeptember always feels like a beginning to me. It must be all those years of school - a new step on the ladder, a new set of classes and classmates, sometimes a new and unfamiliar campus to learn. I remember the icy dread on those fall mornings - an alarm clock going off far earlier than seemed reasonable, a procession of washing, dressing, and ...
2025-09-01 18:28:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Art by Billis Helg
Lyrics by Amanda Schiano di Cola, written after a rocky relationship gave way. I found the lyrics somehow mysterious at the time, but now they seem quite straightforward, and rather brilliant.
In fact, the music is partially by Amanda as well; she had never written music for her own song before, but when asked for ...
2025-08-31 17:10:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Art by Billis Helg
On "House of Love", I wrote about love, and how the greatest type of love comes in letting go of expectations and entering into the darkness. This track speaks more to the darkness involved in that. I used to more or less believe that as soon as I personally had forgotten about some wrong that I had done, God had forgive...
2025-08-31 17:05:00 +0000 UTC View Post