Up to Date

In the interest of keeping things up to date for the sake of posterity, let it be known that Venus Euphoric has not died.  We've been going through some business and separation, but we remain dedicated to the music, and making more of it.  We've recently wrestled our way back on top of our website, and hope to have it back up and running soon.  Hopefully more updates will follow.

Thank you.  That is all.

Frequent Mutation

The new album is three songs strong and still mutating.  It's been an interesting process so far, and I think we're having to work harder to make this album than those in the past.  I guess it's harder to gel when we're so far apart, and able to play together so infrequently.  I envy bands like Gomez or Depeche Mode that just all get together to work for a few weeks every couple of years, and continue producing works of brilliance.

That being said, Charles and I got together the other day and wrote pretty much a whole song from some assorted parts of other potential songs.  Under three hours and we were quite pleased.  I guess sometimes the creative process just accelerates.  I love writing songs with Charles.  We've been doing it for so long that it just flows when we get going.  We come to the same conclusion about what parts should go where and how long we play them.  It's those times that remind me that being in the band is just about that shared experience of creating music together.  I've been casually following some of the drama going on with STP recently, and I'm very glad to be in a band where it's all about the music.  I don't think those gentlemen have released an album where it was only about the music since Tiny Music back when I was in high school.

So, to anyone who is reading this:  we thank you for sharing the experience with us.  And if no one ever reads this or hears the music...hey, we sure have a damn fine time making it.

Then Vs. Now

So, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the songwriting process lately, and how things were back in the day.

THEN:  Matt and Charles lived together in Wallsburg, and jammed quite frequently.
NOW:  Matt lives in Orem, Charles lives in South Salt Lake or somewhere, and I live way out west in Kearns.  You can pick up a state map and draw a rather large triangle to connect us.  You'd have to extend even farther and make it a square to include No Place Audio, the new name for the old Wallsburg homestead.  Matt is closest to it -- a mere twenty minutes or so away.

THEN:  Matt was The Drummer.  Some part of me knew that he took guitar lessons with Charles and could play, but most of me just kind of giggled when he picked one up.  I mean, he was The Drummer!
NOW:  Matt has proven himself time and time again as a musician and a singer, arguably the best of the three of us.  His five solo albums (as Surrounded by commaS) say plenty about that.  It is largely due to his impeccable ear that we ever sound as good as we do.

THEN:  Matt and Charles would have the better part of most songs done and then show them to me.  Not that they were keeping them from me or anything -- they just lived together and got to jam all the time, and I wasn't there as frequently.
NOW:  The other day Matt and I were showing Charles a song we had been working on while he wasn't able to be there.

THEN:  When we first forged ahead as a new band after leading the singer of our old quartet The Maxx RebO Band, Charles and I both wanted to take over the singing duties.  Maybe we thought that would make us cooler or something.
NOW:  Vocal duties are split more evenly than ever, and if both of us had our way, we would have other talented band members to do all the singing.  I think we'd both prefer just playing our strings full time.

THEN:  We'd write and practice songs with live gigs in mind.  We had all the time in the world to do a twenty-minute version of Summer Snow if we wanted to.
NOW:  We write and practice songs with more of a definite end in mind -- namely, how they'll be on the final album.  We are only able to actually all be together three or four hours every week or two, so there's no time to waste pretending we're a jam band or something.

All reminiscing aside, however, we are truly more excited than ever to be a band, and really can't wait to have a brand new offering to try to make everyone listen to.  And I have a feeling that, once album 3 is finished, the delay until we're working on album 4 will be the shortest delay between any of our albums.

Venus Euphoric and the Bi-Polar Bear

Weekly Thursday jamfest is now in effect.  It is the summer of Ve3, and the album must go forth before the personal lives of all of us come crashing back down in the fall.  We have the summer at least to be the band we were meant to be, with much rocking exploding from the place now known as No Place Audio.  (We've always been a band that was going no place; now we do so literally.)

Our Thursday jamfest last week was cut by 33% due to an exploding appendix, but Matt and I still made the most of things.  We did some bass 'n' drums jamming of the new Time Machine song, and even recorded it for posterity.  Or the internets.  We've always been a three-man operation, and we've kept that the same for the video-documenting we've started doing.  It's not easy, but it is pretty impressive what you can do with some tripods and an assortment of phones and cameras these days.  We're trying to put some stuff up on the website to give people something to be interested in as we keep working on the new album.  So, stay tuned for video teasers and assorted bits of interestingness.

CI.com

So, we had to make the hard decision of taking down the CI website recently. Yahoo was over-charging us for webhosting, and frankly, I'm not really sure there is a CI any more.  I mean, all the bands other than Ve have long since broken up.  I'd love there to be new Ultima tunes and new Brodie tunes, and I'd really love Sons of Samus to play again, but I'm not overly optimistic about it.  It's hard enough for us to keep Ve together, and we love each other like brothers.  Far harder still to keep a band together when maybe the people who were in the band don't necessarily love each other in quite the same way.  

But, as the old goes out, so enters the new.  We now have a little corner of the lovely Bandcamp website belonging just to the Collective Intelligence.  We sacrifice some features, sure, but it puts the actual music front and center and lets it shine the way it really should.  That was always the biggest problem with the CI:  all the extraneous features were fun and all, but they were really just trying to cover up and distract from the fact that we weren't savvy enough to just have a music player right there on the main page to play the actual music for you.  Eventually we had downloadable .mp3's, but it wasn't nearly as good as just being able to arrive at the site and push a little button with a triangle on it.  Plus, we only ever had full albums to download.  That's a little unfair to bands like Sons of Samus who never had a full album.  Myspace kind of saved our butts and gave us the streaming option, but it begged the question:  why are we paying for a site that doesn't meet our needs when there are free ones that do?

So, write this down:  collectiveintelligence.bandcamp.com

All the albums that were available to download on the old site are there to stream right from your computer.  Well, almost all of them.  Ve has our own bandcamp page (music.venuseuphoric.com), and I'm still waiting to hear from Kody about putting Sandbaby up there.  I'm not going to wait that long though.  I mean, they've been on the regular CI site for free download for a long time anyway.  Also, for the newest, fanciest Surrounded by commaS and Sandbaby stuff, Matt and Kody have their own pages too:  matthumes.bandcamp.com and sandbaby.bandcamp.com, respectively.  (Eventually we'll have all our links and crap together.  You know, for the sake of my OCD...)

Ve.com

Work continues for our massive online presence, from where we will take over the musical world.  Or possibly the home improvement world.  ...Or maybe the massage world.  I did see a massage therapy recently called Venus Euphoric.  Sounds very lovely and relaxing.  We are now back to venuseuphoric.com, and making everything look sleek and uniform.  You may even notice that this page itself looks different.  Although, you may not.  The link up top that says Home will even take you to ve.com now, just in case you're interested.  I'd really rather you go there, actually, than read this.  You can stream files and listen to tunes.  And that's what we're really all about, after all.

We also are happy to have our music on bandcamp, which is truly the most wonderful website a musician can have.  You can punch in music.venuseuphoric.com, or just hit the Music link at the top of the page here.  Both albums can be streamed or downloaded in your favourite format.  You even name your price -- meaning you can pay exactly zero dollars and zero cents for the whole album.  That totally sounds worth it to me.  I might even go download them after writing this.  I mean, sure, I already have them, but how can I pass up such a great bargain?

Speaking of our two previous albums, clicking the Albums link above will get you to a spot where you can download full-sized, printable images of the artwork for each album.  You can make your own Ve album (it's really everyone's dream, isn't it?), or you can just check them out in a large-screen, beautiful format.  (The link might not work just yet.  Our large staff of coders is working around the clock, but there's only so many hours in a week for those Haitians...)

I Have Bread, And I Have Peanut Butter...

I only now require the jam. Yes, there has been a shortage of jam lately for the band, although we have been communing telepathically about new songs. I even halfway learned one on the bass that I sometimes play. Jam is necessary to keep a band going, even if we're the only three people who hear the songs and I'm the only one ever to read this journal. Our hopes remain high for a great new album. Maybe we'll finally have things in line to spread it far and wide in this crazy internet age. What we need is a Ve pyramid scheme where people have to share the album with five people, then each of those people have to share it with five people, etc., etc., etc. ...And by "share" I mean tie down the person in a dark room, place sound-cancelling headphones on their heads, and play them the album at full volume - possibly also slipping them some experience-enhancing drugs. ...Hey, it worked for me with U2's Achtung Baby back in high school. ...And Tuatara's second album. ...And Failure's Fantastic Planet. ...And definitely Death Cab's Something About Airplanes. Damn, what were we talking about?