Jive on This

Once upon a time I was a youth group kid. I wasn't, however, a "youth group" kid...if you will...My friends and I did go to 3 youth group meetings per week, we did feel guilty about not asking each other about our "walks with the lord" enough, and we did look down on every poor, secular peer in our high school...but... we were "cool" youth group kids...this is how we were different. While most youth group kids would spend their spare time planning the next youth event, we would go fishing off in the sewage-infested water of Lake Ontario; While other youth group kids would sit home alone reading the latest John Eldredge book or doing their homework, we would be out filming each other embarassing strangers or jumping off playgrounds...

....ok the truth is that we weren't very cool...or we were REALLY cool...im not sure which. All I know is that we felt pretty damn good about ourselves given the fact that we weren't faced with the temptation to "party" or "swear" like the lost souls of our high school. I also now know that something in our bodies was telling us that we were a little off base...resulting in us forming a high school fraternity, which met weekly and consisted almost exclusively of us letting out our inexplicable aggression on each other in irrational competitions and "fat kid vs. skinny kid" medieval battles. Another interesting product of our spare time was the production of short videos. We would often shoot faux-documentaries about things such as "Publishers Clearinghouse training camp," and a fake boy band managed by our youth leader.

This is what brings me to "Jive on This." "Jive on This" is band formed as a side project to the band "Nudist Buddhist" whose principal members were Phil Byers and Chris Sterling. "Sleighbells" is a song we recorded at Parkminister church sometime in 2003 or 2004. It was completely improvised, we picked a key which allowed Phil to simply play any black key on the keyboard, I played drums and guitar, and Chris played bass. The following is the subsequent music video we filmed for the song. Enjoy.



-MIke

Carl's Camera pt. 2

The purpose of the above picture is to document the historic micing of Ivan Colon's vocals from the back of a trash can. This is a production move that I am very proud of and the results can be heard on the opening track of Ivan's EP, "Despite the Atlantic."