Monday, June 24, 2013

The Florida Evans Showband and Revue - "Good Times" Music Video



At some point during early 1999, some film major friends approached us about making a music video for "Good Times" as their final project for a film production class. Being the agreeable young men we are, we naturally said yes.

The concept is pretty straightforward -- still photographs edited together to make a comic book style story of a team of super(?)heroes taking down an evil mastermind and her henchpersons. Pretty sure my bits were shot in some production room in the upper levels of O'Shaughnessy Hall, while Matt and Dan shot most of their outdoor bits out on Lincolnway West. The party and live band shots were filmed in the basement of The Hive, also known as the house on Bulla Road where Ron and Matt lived.

Matt remembers being upset that he had to use a weird bass in the live shots and that the party was really fun. He also pointed out that we used stills from the video in the album artwork for our album Made Simple.

If I remember correctly, the "Good Times" video closed out the ND Student Film Festival that year. A number of people recognized me at Lula's the next day, which was fun. Florida Evans was in two student films that year -- the other one featured us playing at a house party during the crawfish boil, though the only thing I remember actually appearing in the final version was Matt biting the head off a crawfish.

Enjoy the video. It's fun, as befits the song. And keep an eye out for Ron throttling a stuffed rabbit.

--Doug

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Streganona - Applications For Aluminum Siding

Did you know that towards the end of their existence, Streganona recorded a full-length studio album? When the band broke up prior to it's release, though, it was filed away and mostly forgotten about. Fortunately, we have it here for you to enjoy, and it's pretty great. A maturation of their earlier recorded material, this is a post-hardcore gem that gets more rewarding with each listen, and could easily stand up pound-for-pound with some of the great releases of their contemporaries. I can't recommend this one enough.

A few notes on the album from former bassist Mark Miyake:
Our only album not recorded on my old Tascam 4-track. We got some nice open-ended funding to record it, and it was slated for some pretty wide distribution (we were touring fairly far and wide and frequently at that point), but we broke up between the mastering and package design phases of the project, so it was never released. We recorded it in an all analog format over about a week at the Amphetamine Reptile Studios in Minneapolis, and mastered it at Acme Studios in Chicago. It sounds great and does a good job of capturing what we were doing over the last year or so after we recorded "Plastic." 
The title was intended as an audio medium joke-- the previous album title was about plastic and was released on cassette and this one was going to be on CD, so we were going to go with an aluminum reference.
listen/download: