reawy browing it...

Uh, lots been going on. Too much to convey. Travels through Canada, Germany, the Western United States, Japan. Whoa. Writing, photoshooting, documenting people and places, gathering ideas and inspirations, recording ghost wars and awesome muscles songs... and eating, lots of eating. Even a broken rib and a slipped disk or two. Ouch. Good/weird times.

Send word, xo
AJC/Ghost Wars

5:02 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

New Ghost Wars song added
Current mood: optimistic

Hello Friends,

Once again, it has been a long time since I last posted an update on the state of our project. But sometimes there just isn't a whole lot to say. Or maybe there is, but none of it feels all that great to say. And sometimes it is simply a matter of other things getting in the way of writing these updates.

Eating, working, writing, editing photos, mopping up anonymous vomit, warfare, road trips, far flung travel, bleeding, showers, drunk tough guys, baby horses, geese attacks, suicidal friends suffering nervous breakdowns, ex-girlfriends/black Jettas, cuts, schmoopy eyes, bar fights, Yosemite National Park, Big Sur, Tahoe, cleaning the bathroom, New York, nightmares of Seattle, small dogs, mountain views, brie cheese, the final season of Sopranos, reading Henry Miller, Qui shows, laundry, insomnia, an oil change, fried plantains, quadruple espressos, dusk hikes in the forest, jousting with birds of prey, making sweet love, holding hands on the beach, watching Los Angeles burn, trying to help out, trying to hold it together.... All of life's crap -good and bad- can get in the way of writing "blogs." Sorry, my bad.

Thanks for the ongoing inquiries and words of encouragement. It really is more appreciated than you know. Thank you. For that I will try to paint a thorough portrait of how things are going on the Ghost Wars front.

If you've been following along with the Ghost Wars, then you likely already know the issues/bad luck we've been having. If not, then reading back through the previous posts might give a bit more insight into what I'm blathering on about.

Long story...longer....

The laptop was stolen on tour during the late Fall. The back up drive died in Winter. All through the Spring we tried to retrieve the data. We got it back...as a clusterfuck of 50,000 unnamed audio files. Pretty awesome. Indeed, perhaps too awesome and daunting to mess with.

Ever since getting these raw files back we've been trying to wrap our heads around how we might be able to piece the material back into coherent songs, or at the very least some semblance of the way we'd originally intended them. That process is ongoing, but at this point it has stalled. Doesn't mean it won't resume. Just means we're at an impasse. Fisher and Myers are Pro Tools wizards, but they live in Seattle and I live in Los Angeles. Without Fisher & I sitting side by side for long hours (weeks? months?) trying to piece the audio puzzle back together... Well, you get the picture.

So with that said, for the last few months I've mentioned that I might post a few more cdr rough mixes from these lost recordings. At the time the laptop was stolen and the drive went dead, we had about 24 songs in various states of "done." Several of these tracks were near completion. Some needed nothing more than vocal tracks or additional guitar tracks. Others were only starting to find their final shapes and sounds.

All along, as we were tracking, we occasionally burned cdr's of these songs-in-progress. Sadly, we did not routinely make back up Pro Tools files or track-by-track audio files. We just made cdr's we could pop into our cd players and iTunes programs to get a sense of how things were sounding. I still have a lot of this stuff, thankfully. And now, we can sort of use these things as blueprints or guides for when we resume recording. Demos? Wow, I guess it is now reasonable to call this material our demos. Hilarious.

I'm not sure when we'll try to begin starting over. I head up to Seattle in a couple of weeks to look at a few proper recording studios. Would like to suss out just going in and recording, say, eleven songs in one fell swoop. Vroom! That seems like the best way for us to get back on track. Were we to do this, it'd probably happen in late August or September. Between Eric Fisher, Morgan and the Blood Bros, Murchy and Minus the Bear, Eric Akre, Goth Joel and the Hideous Thieves, Josh Myers, Nate Mendel, Gabe Carter, Rosie Thomas, etc, etc, etc... trying to schedule a straight ten days in which to record with everyone is going to be logistically difficult. But fun. Which is the whole point, anyway and always.

Okay, enough of that. So here you go, this song is called "Virginia, Long Exhale." This is a real rough mix, real rough. The scratch vocals are a bit squirrelly and the levels overall could have used a bit more tweaking. Still, akin to the other rough mixes we've posted here, it should give you some sense of what we've been working on.
Featuring:
Eric Fisher (organ, treated piano, chopsticks & teacups)
Goth Joel (clarinet & sax)
Morgan Henderson (bass clarinet, upright bass)
Arlie Carstens (guitars, car keys & vocals)
Eric Akre (drums, patience).
David Bazan's Baby (unintentional cooing outro)

My heart is very much in this song, I am so proud of Fisher's production and appreciative of the work everyone put into it. Those clarinets sound wonderful! Man, so sad. Have a listen, and if you enjoy it, please pass it along to your friends. Hope this post was informative, or at the very least entertaining, and that it has answered a few of your questions.

Much love & strength,
AJC

5:04 PM - 6 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

Ghost Wars Update: the guts, etc...
Current mood: contemplative

Hello Y'all,

Not a lot of news to report. Last week, Josh Myers went through the broken Ghost Wars drive. It is, indeed, totally wiped out. Gone. Blank. Ballz.

Next up, we'll open the new drive to get a look at just what the data retrieval center was able to recover. They said our Pro Tools sessions are lost but that they were able to retrieve the raw files (see previous update for a more in-depth explanation). Ultimately it might just be easier/less time consuming to re-record everything. The songs may suffer. Or, the whole thing might just come out different and, in its own way, better. No idea, just gonna have to try.

For now, Myers and I are going to take a crack at reassembling a song. Basically, we'll spend several days (or weeks?) opening and listening to thousands of individual sound files. Not awesome. If it goes well, then we'll try another song...and another...and another...until we've managed to rebuild everything. If putting just one back together turns out to be a harsh reality, then, uh, no dice. We'll have to start wrapping our heads around if, when, how we'll get into the studio to do it all again. Brutal, but songs don't write themselves.

Thanks for your interest in our music and for your kind words of support. Sincerely, it is much appreciated. I'll try to post one or two of our lost rough mixes in the next few days.

Other than that, "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch" is seriously my jam right now. Inspired, hilarious, individual, playfully creative, heartwarming, fascinating... even from the grave Henry Miller really knows how to help a fella find his way into and out of the deep woods. Should you find yourself faced with creative conundrums, suffering a general malaise of spirit, or simply want to laugh, cry, and laugh again—I highly recommend it.

Have a lovely week,
Arlie/Ghost Wars

Currently reading : Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions Paperbook, 161) By Henry Miller Release date: June, 1957

1:47 AM - 6 Comments - 7 Kudos - Add Comment

Ghost Wars Update, aka harsh toke
Current mood: blank

Hello All,

Sorry for the delay in writing another update on the Ghost Wars/Missing Files shenaniganery. The news is bad, so I've been putting off writing it. May have more information later.

Whoosh, here goes.

As some of you already know, Fisher's laptop was stolen a few months ago in Toronto while on tour with Damien Jurado. It had all of our Ghost Wars Pro Tools sessions on it. Everything.

At the time, he was pretty certain he'd backed everything up onto an external hard drive at his house in Seattle. So with fingers crossed, I stayed calm and waited more that two months to hear the word. During that time I felt good. I felt optimistic.  I had a feeling all was gonna work out. Every day I told myself our songs were gonna BE ON THAT HARD DRIVE! Yay, songs! Ghost Wars songs! BOO!!! Ghost Warssssszzzzzzzz! Well, sad to say I was wrong.

Here's the word. Gone. Everything is gone.

Fisher returned home a couple of weeks ago only to discover that his external hard drive has mechanical problems and software corruption. This is about as bad as it gets. So I called Nate Mendel and had him put me in touch with a guy who knows a hell of a lot more about this kind of stuff than we do. At his suggestion, we sent the broken drive to a data retrieval center here in Los Angeles. Two days ago -in exchange for an extremely large sum of money we don't actually have- they were able to get the raw data off of the drive. But they weren't able to get the Pro Tools sessions. What does this mean?

Pretty much...fucked.

In a circumstance like this raw data is virtually useless. It's like being blindfolded and told to assemble a puzzle with 50,000 pieces...the only problem is- the 50,000 pieces are all painted black, they're all the same shape, and there is no photo to work backwards from. Raw data files have no distinguishing characteristics. Just raw files with numbers. You open each one up, you listen to it, and hopefully if you recognize what you hear...then you can say, "Oh hey, I recognize that snippet of sound."

Other than that, there is nothing to provide any clues as to how, where, or when a file may have been part of a specific Pro Tools session/song. And, even if you recognize the sound, it is virtually impossible to link each file in the proper order in effort to actually reconstruct the song. The bpm's are all jacked, the overdubs are all wonky, the instrument tracks have lost their plug-ins, etc...

Twenty-five songs and more than two years of our lives. More than 19 collaborators from around the country; people who gave their time and creativity out of a simple love of friendship and music. Countless thousands of hours and dollars gone. I'm feeling down right about now. Real low. Like a boxer who can't pull himself up off the mat. This music is/was my life for the last few years. Working on it, collaborating with our friends, and sharing it with others made life better, more fun. More worthwhile and unexpected.

We have cdr rough mixes of most of the material. A few more of these unfinished songs may be posted eventually. At the very least, we should do that so that people can hear a bit more of what Ghost Wars was doing and where we were going with it. I am so proud of the effort and assistance our friends have given us over the last couple of years. None of the material 'as-is' on the cdr's sounds anything like it is ultimately supposed to, but so much of it is still so lovely and fun. As of tonight, I'm not sure what our plan is next. Maybe we'll start over. But how? Right now I have no idea.

Have a lovely weekend, sorry to be the bearer of such dismal news. Thanks for being interested in our music, and thanks for your words of concern and encouragement. If any of you out there are genius-level data retrieval experts, or know any such people, please feel free to get hold of us; especially if you have any thoughts on ways we might be able to reconstruct the Pro Tools sessions.

Much love & strength,
Arlie/Ghost Wars

10:25 PM - 16 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

Ghost Wars Files/Juno Reunion Shows: Filming, etc...

Hello All,

Just home from the Juno reunion/KEXP benefitsin Seattle. The shows were amazing. All of us in the band were quite surprised and appreciative of the whole thing. So many people came from around the U.S. and Europe. Mind blowing. Thank you.

Sadly, I got annihilated with food poisoning (from the Honey Hole in Seattle, yikes) on my last day in town. Of course, a perfect way to end my two weeks in Seattle. I'll have a more proper, longer post here in a day or two after I've had a chance to get back into the swing of things here at home in Los Angeles. In the meantime, if you're interested, you can find photos from the Juno shows posted on flickr.com by the photographer Chuck Robertson, aka Hootsk. You can also find a few articles and reviews of the shows at www.thestranger.com

As well, documentary filmmaker John Mount from St. Louis flew himself and a crew in from around the country to film the shows and conduct interviews with members of Juno's extended family tree. He's also looking for archival footage anyone might have from our active years together. If you or anyone you know has anything (video, stills, audio, etc...), please get ahold of us and we'll pass your contact information along.

And lastly, Fisher gets back from tour on December 15th. Should know more about the missing Ghost Wars files in a few days. Keep your fingers crossed, hopefully we have everything backed up on his hard drive at home.

Thanks again for your support. Have a lovely week,
Arlie/Ghost Wars/Juno

7:38 PM - 6 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

Juno Reunion/KEXP Benefit Shows: Dates

Hello All,

Sebastian Sterling was kind enough to point out that I listed the dates for the Juno reunion/KEXP benefit shows incorrectly. Sorry, I spoke too soon. The shows are December 9th & 10th (that's Saturday & Sunday).

Not Dec. 8th & 9th as I had posted earlier. Ignore that.

The Sunday show will be 21+ on the main floor and all-ages in the balcony and mezzanine. However, only 50 all-ages tickets will be sold, so get 'em online now if you're under 21.

Go to: www.neumos.com

Thanks, hope we see some of you there.

Oh, and Fisher's home from tour for a minute before heading to Europe with D. Jurado and Rosie Thomas next week. We should know more about the lost/recovered Ghost Wars files soon.

Best regards,
AC

2:13 AM - 10 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Ghost Wars, Juno, etc...

Hello,

News....details. So tired, really. Sorry if this update's a bit lean on sense and jokes. It's been a ballz-bustingly heavy week. Weak. People crying and dying all over the place (not even kidding). People walking into the desert, threatening to never return. People gettin' muscled into rehab. Other people muscling they way into the bar and getting blasted five nights out of seven (when, in truth, they too maybe oughta consider rehab, or simply just takin' it easy for a spell). People crushing their friends & co-workers hearts. People getting in auto accidents cause they're scratching they shins when they should be watching the road. People eatin' sweets when they should be donning sweats. People howling stupid bullshit like, "Hey, man, you're guitar sounds great, but I'm trying to record. Why don't you turn it down!"

Fair enough. Maybe I will.

Turn it down, turn it all down. Take a nap. Take a swim. Take a turn for the sunny side of life. Something other than all this death, disappointment and idiocy.

Like, I dunno, GHOST WARS! It is time for update number whatever.

About three weeks ago I again headed up to Seattle to do another round of vocal tracking with Eric Fisher. We only had two days so we concentrated on vocals for three songs; "Virginia, Long Exhale," "Lay Down Your Weapons," and "The Conductor." Again, the studio we'd booked fell through at the last minute (gear going blaarg seems to be a recurring theme of these last few sessions), so David Bazan was kind enough to allow us the use of his home studio. And, man, does that guy have a beautiful, pleasant recording environment! And what a nice person! Wow. Nice light, nice air, nice shelves, nice gear, nice conversation, nice smiles, nice everything. Really a fine time. He provided Fisher and I with everything one could want for a low-key, maintenance free two days of vocal tracking. Thanks again David, you saved our asses. Oh, and thanks to Goth Joel, Eric Akre, and Stuart Hallerman/Avast! Recording Studio, we couldn't do any of this without y'all.

Now for the bad news. Fisher's on tour right now and about two weeks ago, while in Toronto, had his laptop stolen when the tour van was broken into. The raw Pro Tools files for all 25 Ghost Wars tracks, as well as audio plug-ins and material for several other of Fisher's projects are now gone. I spoke to Fisher a few days ago and he seems to think he'd backed everything up before leaving on tour. We'll know more when he gets home, here's to hoping it all gets sorted and everything's accounted for. If not, well, this could prove a major setback. The starting over's gonna be hard. As you can imagine, Fisher and I are both just gutted by the event. And to the jackass that cleaned out the van, I hope that haul works out for you. I truly do. Best of luck with that.

Now for some good/odd news. For those who might be interested, Juno has been asked to reunite to headline two KEXP winter fundraiser shows in Seattle, December 8 & 9. The community radio station was always good to us and even more recently has been surprisingly good to Ghost Wars (they've been playing a few of the myspace-posted rough mixes regularly for the last several months). The club is called Neumo's and holds about 900 people. The show on the 8th is 21+, and the 9th is 21+ on the main floors and all-ages in the balcony and mezzanine. We're playing with Ted Leo & The Pharmacists and Cold War Kids. It's for a good cause and should be fun, weird, and I imagine- deeply loud. Bring earplugs. Hope we see some of you there.

Best regards,
Arlie/Ghost Wars/Juno

8:00 PM - 7 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

update on the recordings, etc....

Hello,

Sorry for the delay. A few weeks ago I said I'd have an update here once we'd finished our most recent round of tracking in Seattle. Apparently I lied. That, or the hikes I've lately found in the Angeles National Forest have kept me too busy. Boulders! Waterfalls! Bighorn Sheep! Montrose! Poisonous snakes! Real dirt! Sunburns! Summer's nearly over and being outside kinda slays the shit out of being in front of a computer. Trust me on that. Soon enough the days are gonna be short, the nights coldish, and the dreaded rains will decend. Man, the rains here are ballz. In Seattle it just kinda spits on you for nine months straight, which is a real drag/mind-numbingly depressing. Here in Los Angeles, however, the skies fall in big, oily blobs for 5or 6 days at a time. Everything slides downhill, fissures open in the streets, trees go boom(!), and the whole big deal goes blaarg....some real end-of-the-world bullshit.

So yup, sorry for that and thanks for being patient and interested in our progress with Ghost Wars. So on with it then...

Fisher and I spent most of July up in Seattle finishing instrument tracking for the first album. All in all, things went real swell. The first studio we were going to use had some scheduling problems so well kinda scratched our heads for a few days until Goth Joel called and said, "Hey, I have this friend named Dan on Bainbridge Island. He has a studio in the SoDo District that I don't think he uses too often. The Hideous Thieves practice there. I'll ask him if we can borrow it."

Sure enough, Goth Joel & Mystery Dan saved our asses! A full-blown studio with Neumann microphones, mellotron organ, piano, drums, ancient amps & guitars galore, loads of percussion toys, compressors, pre-amps, blah blah blah, etc... It was, for real, mind-blowing. Entirely unlike our normal day-to-day lives at all, and certainly different from every recording experience I'd ever had in years past. No clock watching, no nail biting over time/money wasting, no weird cokehead studio owner tripping ballz about when we were gonna get the fuck out so he could party with his cadre of rocker bros and their stripper girlfriends.

We swam in Lake Washington at Madison Beach Park almost every morning, recorded from 1 pm to 2 am most days, and ate sushi until 3 am at Liberty up on 15th (care of Andrew and Ryan Crase, thanks gentlemen). For most of my stay I drove around in a dog-dick-red, borrowed pickup truck, maintained a moustache and a ponytail, wore white pants and a pink linen shirt. Harsh but effective. Basically, I looked like an asshole. Rolling incognito when in one's hometown helps keep daily activities confined and focused. Fisher could hard look at me for the first few days. Understandable. But it was good for the heart and the laugh.

With help from Goth Joel, Morgan Henderson, Eric Akre, Corey Murchy, Ben Verellen, Matt Bayles, and a mess of others we banged into shape eleven songs of the 25-or-so we have. With segueways and whatnot, the album should work out to about an hour's worth of music. Rough mixes of three of the songs have been posted here on the GWarz profile for several months now.

Soon Fisher and I will finish vocal tracking, mix, and hopefully master the album. I think I said we'd have a few more rough mixes posted soon but I'm not sure about that now. Since we're so close to having the whole thing done it might be wise to hold off on posting anything more until after we've done our finished mixes. We'll see.

Thanks for reading and for sharing in the life of our project. Your interest and words of encouragement are hugely appreciated.

Much love and strength,
AJC/Ghost Wars

1:56 AM - 10 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

more songs....

More songs on the way. Currently recording & mixing. Should have a few others posted in a couple of weeks.

Thanks eis,
AC/GhstWrz

9:56 PM - 4 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

the songs....

Hello All,

Thanks for taking an interest in the ghost wars songs we've posted here on myspace. For those wondering, all three are simply unmixed roughs. Eventually a few of them will have different or additional lyrics, instruments, arrangements, final mixes, blah blah, etc... we just wanted to get something out there.
With Fisher living in seattle, me down here in california, and the rest of our friends and collaborators strewn all over, getting the first album finished is an intentionally slow process.

Please enjoy the roughs, download and share them with anyone you think might enjoy them as well. And to those of you who have written us, thanks for the inquiries and kind words of support. It does our hearts and heads good.

Much strength & love,
AC/Ghost Wars

10:33 PM - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment