Hammer Mill Days

Oww. Did you feel that? I did. Feels like another podcast coming on. I always imagine this is somewhat akin to launching a new naval ship, except that THIS IS BIG GREEN is full of holes the minute it gets lowered into the water. Oh well... Things have been kind of noisy around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, actually. Pretty hard to finish a podcast with all that clanging, drilling, truck traffic, occasional machine gun, etc. What, with Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm now using our adopted home as a platform for hydrofracking, I suppose I should expect as much. Some might think hydrofracking and music production aren't necessarily compatible, but that's .... well, that's just plain ignorant and insensitive. To some people's ears, the sound of extractive enterprise is melodious and enchanting. And the smell ... just like flowers. Not that Big Green has always required complete silence while working on an album. Far from it, my friends. Just listen to our first two...

Here is the bad news about living in New York State right now: we are standing between what's perceived to be valuable mineral deposits and some of the richest corporations in the world. That's never a good place to be. Ask Iraq. Their abundant oil deposits have brought them nothing but misery, from the moment the West determined that they existed. We (ourselves and, early on, the British) saddled them with repressive regimes, bombed them when they weren't sufficiently compliant, and generally pressed our advantage as the richest and most militarily powerful nations on Earth. Once the home of some of the Arab world's most learned people - they used to say that, in the Middle East, books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut, and read in Baghdad - the place is now a basket case, wracked by sectarian strife, its infrastructure still in a shambles, waiting for the next chapter in a seemingly endless chain of misfortune. Make no mistake - this is not an authorless c...