Facebook username

Well, friends, we finally did manage to get a personalized username on Facebook (the rules were different for Fan Pages than they were for personal usernames and only just became available today). Unfortunately, due to Facebook's labyrinthine rules, we weren't able to get our preferred choice, which would be /theendless, so we had to settle for /theendlessband. So if you are looking for us on Facebook, we are at www.facebook.com/theendlessband. Similar to this website address (we have been trying for 10 years, by the way, to get www.theendless.com, which is just lying fallow). Come over and be-fan us!

Podcast Tonight: Let the Healing Begin

Our music is going to be featured tonight on Isgoodradio.com's Dr. Groovy ("the marriage of music and medicine") at 7pm Pacific Time. As the email let us know:

"...with the theme for June being "mental health" and a focus on anxiety and ways of combating it...your music will be a part of the mental healing."

So listen in tonight, Monday at 7pm PST for Dr. Groovy and the Endless. Think you'll miss it? The podcast will be available later at www.drgroovy.podomatic.com. A big thank you to the very cool IsGoodMusic for featuring us!

Can You Be The Hunter?

For the most part, the shoot went well. I had two characters. The wolf:
And the lamb:Let me just tell you, my friends, I am cozying up here to a character which I saw fully in my mind's eye and genuinely made me cry. I was that attached to it. I kept thinking, "why is this kind of deep and honest connection so hard to conjure when I'm acting, but here I am cozying up to a lumpy piece of cloth and am completely full and in the moment?" I think the answer might be because this is my art and my story. Very interesting.

We had a light blow out about 20 seconds into the first take which you can witness in all its glory here:
Silliness. My sister Victoria is a makeup artist so she came to make me perty, which was nice. I think we have a couple of pics of her working on me behind the scenes which I will post.

A big and hearty thank you to Maron Studio for the use of their green screen (and the very fun shoot for their movie the day before). We are now sending off the footage to Mathias in Sweden who will hopefully be able to use some of it (*crossing fingers*). We'll let you know how it went!

The Heart Of You Is What Is True

This Sunday we are going to shoot a video for our song "Hunt For The Heart" with Mathias Erixon (aka Oddity). We found him via Radar Music Videos and are really excited about working with him. He has an impressive background in videos, just see his previous work at www.oddity.se. His ideas for the song are really exciting, and we loved that we can work long-distance together (he is in Sweden, we are in Los Angeles). We will be doing a green screen shoot on Sunday and then he'll be working on the collage/animation aspect of the video on his end. Very, very exciting.

I've been haunting our local shops for just the right costumes for the video. There are two characters/aspects to portray and I think they are starting to come into focus. A lot of greys, lavenders, and whites. Maybe some feathers, we'll see.

I also have a shoot for a role in The Diamonds of Metro Valley, so it's going to be a full weekend. More pics to come on Sunday!

This just in: our song "Was I Not Your Muse" has been selected as a featured song on Women Of Substance radio. Go listen and check them out on their MySpace page. Nice!

"Writers and artists aren't machines."

There is a really excellent blog today from Neil Gaiman, who goes into some detail about the time and energy it takes to create.

You don't choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created.

And sometimes, and it's as true of authors as it is of readers, you have a life. People in your world get sick or die. You fall in love, or out of love. You move house. Your aunt comes to stay. You agreed to give a talk half-way around the world five years ago, and suddenly you realise that that talk is due now. Your last book comes out and the critics vociferously hated it and now you simply don't feel like writing another. Your cat learns to levitate and the matter must be properly documented and investigated. There are deer in the apple orchard. A thunderstorm fries your hard disk and fries the backup drive as well...

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

This is so true, and lately I have been acutely aware of how much life has been putting us on a bit of an unwanted hiatus. It happens. I used to fight it in the past but in the last few years I have realized how futile that fight is. I think that's why Somniloquy was a lot less stressful of a record to make, because we didn't fight against life, we worked when life let us.

Reading this blog led to a conversation this morning with my friend Matt, a fellow writer, who offered the following observation:

mattnuez13 (10:51:35 AM): u know what else is beautiful: I was thinking about u and D and ur albums, esp. the new one...
mattnuez13 (10:52:07 AM): and I realized, more consciously perhaps than I have before, how much of an actor you both are, as a band, in creating your albums
mattnuez13 (10:52:28 AM): and that has so much to do with how scenic and storytelling-landscape-esque your productions are
mattnuez13 (10:52:43 AM): you guys find an idea, and then follow it down the rabbit hole
mattnuez13 (10:52:53 AM): and immerse yourself in it and research and ponder

He's right, and it's something I've never considered before, that because I come to this music process as a life-long classically trained actor, I can't help but put a million miles of thought and research and backstory and almost Meisner-level preparation into the songs. Funny thing to not realize after all this time, but it makes perfect sense that one discipline informs the other. Thank you, Matt!

This all being said, we are working on a lot of projects right now that we are looking forward to sharing with you all as soon as the Flying Spaghetti Monster allows.

Choosing A Video Director

We recently learned about a great website called Radar Music Videos which helps match bands with video directors. So we have submitted a call for treatments for our song "Hunt For The Heart" and have gotten some absolutely awesome pitches! We are mulling over our choices and are really impressed and excited with the quality of directors that are working with the site. If you are a band in search of a video, check out Radar!

More on who we chose and the process of making the video as this all unfurls!

Gearing Up

We went on a journey to the outer edges of Los Angeles-land last night to get our hands on a keyboard that we can use for live shows. It was so far, I think we might have actually gone over the rainbow. But it was worth it, as we now have a new 62-key family member who is not even remotely as heavy as our 88-key weighted keyboard who simply hates leaving the house. Some instruments just aren't as comfortable playing live as in the studio.

The gears are cranking up ever so slowly for playing out. You are probably wondering why this is taking so long. A little back story: this last year we've made the transition from PC to Mac, and have been working hard to get all of our stuff backed up from Cubase into some kind of semblance of order for Logic. We are in the beginning stages of learning how to use Mainstage, which is Logic's live counterpart. This means having to essentially unravel every bit of what all of our songs were made of and re-assembling them piece by piece. Then we have to figure out what can be played on instruments live, what can be created live in loops, and what needs to be stripped away.

We are also on the search for live band mates. This will be an interesting process of discovery. As soon as the Endless Live Machine gets itself whirring, then we can play and play and play as much as possible. It's just the getting there that is proving to be the challenge. This is what you get for writing electronic music (and having a day job).

We are also in the pre-writing stages for the next album, which means lots and lots of intake. It means museums, travel, nature, films, painting, playing, and just generally consuming life in the hopes that it will bring inspiration over the next year. With that in mind, we had a little trip to the ocean this weekend and met these guys:

They do help.