Curious Quail

ATLF is a very special record to us as a band and to me as an artist - we were a bunch of little shits making nerd music and thought 'hey what if we tried to use kickstarter' and had no idea how successful that would be.

Once the record was released we pretty much immediately started work on what was going to become the follow-up. If you saw us perform live between 2016-2019, you may have even heard a few of these songs in their early iterations. Hell, our Tiny Desk TWENTY SIXTEEN entry was the title track.

Joyce tracking her solo in Empty Victories - a parting gift to the band before she left the country to join the Queen Musical 'We Will Rock You' as the lead guitarist (hand-picked by Sir. Brian May because of course she was).

Principal tracking for the record began in 2016 at Rhythm Academy - a drum school where Joey taught - they had given us permission to use the place after-hours. Most of the photos throughout this piece are from these sessions.

Getting ready for Drum preproduction at our rehearsal studio in San José. I lost this Life is Strange shirt in 2017 when I moved to the Coachella Valley. No idea what happened to it.

For a story about the future and time shenanigans at the end of the world(s) I think it's fitting that part of this new record was recorded over the span of ten years in between other projects. Some of the songs have drums from 2016 with percussion from 2019 or gameboys added in 2021, Erin or I harmonizing vocal takes with ourselves from nearly a decade ago - Empty Victories has been a process and we're proud to get it out to you now.

Group vocal session - we also recorded group vocals for a Petriform song that night.

Most of the band proper lived in the Bay Area until about 2016; Erin moved to the PNW, in 2017 I relocated to the Coachella Valley and we continued working on music remotely as well as syncing up for live shows when schedules allowed.

Nobody puts Joey in a corner

Except Joey, I guess

In 2018/2019 we put out Twelve Months, a songwriting/video exercise where each month we'd get random restrictions assigned and write a song / film a performance video of it before the month was out - the idea was it would be a smaller, more rapid fire release approach while we worked on Empty Victories in earnest. Rarely were any of us in the same room for these sessions but there was hope that we'd get to do more shows of those songs live - again, while working on Empty Victories on the side.

I was hilariously bad at remembering to turn the fan off during acoustic takes and having to start over

I can't say that we had a bunch of concrete plans (in fact the two concerts we had locked in for 2019 - MAGFest in Maryland and a PDNF reunion in San Francisco - I missed for health reasons, and the band performed with recordings of my vocals) but in my heart, in January of 2020 I put out into the universe that this was going to be the year we finished Empty Victories and got back on the road.

but it turned out both the hard drive with all of the mixing session files for the record and the backup drive....had died.

and then Covid hit.

Lol, lmao

Josh's energy is always infections (on stage or in the studio)

but hey! In 2021 I found an external USB drive that had all of the raw audio tracks from the recording sessions. No mixing, no processing, just the straight-from-the-microphone takes from the various recording sessions we did throughout 2016

The seagate USB drive of hope (sponsor us you cowards)

So while it wasn't quite starting back at zero with everyone needing to re-track their parts, it was a massive step back towards actually having a finished product. A lot of work needed to go into it getting cohesive.

Listen, if you get the mic's for the violin positioned correctly and you have a violinist who is incredibly expressive and a talented dancer, you have to put down some fucken ground rules

Michael "Gunther" Chiang, the engineer who worked with us at Dirt Room on ATLF reprised his role and came up from Santa Cruz to help with tracking

We had a fair amount of our own gear but Gunther brought his rig (again, a bunch of which we used on ATLF)

And there were some omissions - things that weren't on the drive that caused some panic. Most notably, Joyce had tracked for three of the songs before she left for her Queen journey and the only thing that survived was her guitar solo from the title track.

ERIN WAVEFORMS

At this point she'd moved out of the Bay Area already and so scheduling her time in the studio was tricky but absolutely worth it.

There were fevered calls to members of the band "Hey uhh can you re-track this part" or "I need drums for track 3, we didn't do that in the first session". Everyone was a real sport about the whole thing - and I wasn't entirely on-top of it because we were working on other music or other projects or life was happening.

For frame of reference on how all over the place this was, I had to do Gameboy retracks in 2023, and Erin wrapped her final vocal parts for the record this month - so when I say there are times when she's harmonizing with herself from a decade ago I'm not fucking around.

I don't remember why we had so much New York Seltzer - I think I was bringing it but it became this like ongoing joke. (Sponsor us you cowards).

Since After the Lights Failed, we've put out some music that I'm super proud of - Twelve Months and Branching Paths were a LOT of fun - but due to the incredibly hostile nature of streaming services, most of these have not made it outside of Bandcamp or Itch.io - I don't know if that'll change, but it did feel wrong to not push for this sequel to ATLF to be as available as its predecessor was so it will be. (Just most likely not on release date)

That said, the best way to financially support any artist is to buy from them directly when available, and in most cases Bandcamp is as good as that can get (though Mirlo looks really promising). Streaming a song earns an artist fractions of a cent. I'm not gonna make a 1:1 comparison but I can say if we had more financial stability in 2016/2017 we likely would have finished and released this record much sooner (and hopefully before the drive failures).

Anyway, thank you for reading this far, and for supporting the band even though it's been a weird trajectory for us. This won't be the final Curious Quail release but we are saying goodbye to an era and heading toward the future.

Eric was a friend of ours and we as a band helped promote, organize and staff his annual video game music festival, Rockage.

During Rockage 4 in 2015, a tumblr blog called @boycottfanali popped up with a series of troubling allegations against him.

When I confronted him flat-out, his response at first was that it was all made up. When I pressed him, he relented and said that the alleged sexual relationship with the person who was 17 at the time (he was in his 30's) was "consensual", and they were "Coming after him" for ending it.

We cut all ties in that moment.

Afterward we'd learned that he'd preyed on several of our friends, as well as attempted to bribe some of our fans who were under the age of 18 with concert tickets in exchange for "sleepovers" because he felt like he was "young at heart".

Makes me sick to even type that shit out.

To avoid fallout leading up to Rockage 5, he made a public statement declaring that the allegations were all untrue (despite, again, confirming at least the most damning one to me in person) and that he nor his organization (Grand Fanali Presents / Rockage) had found any wrongdoing - he then "retired" from booking and closed down GFP. He "sold" Rockage to his second in command Davain Martinez (who had violently threatened one of the victims who had come forward) but stayed on unnamed as the talent booker.

Rockage was later "sold" by Davain to a group called South Bay Button Mashers who put on the next Rockage event, again with Fanali not credited, but booking the artists in the shadows.

He began working with the doomed downtown San José video game bar "AFKgg Lounge" as their talent booker, again not named anywhere on the website.

(an email shared with us confirming Eric was still in charge of event booking as late as 2018)

After AFK closed, other video game bars in the south bay would host "Rockage", "AFKgg" and "South Bay Button Mashers" events with him as the talent booker.

This weekend, the annual bay area arcade and pinball expo, California Extreme is taking place in Santa Clara, CA with a Rockage live music showcase.

It's incensing at best to see him lurk for years, continuing to have access to booking and young fans of music and video games, but that he would then be audacious enough to attempt to sue the organizers of the boycott blog for defamation is beyond the pale.

We’re working on the third song of Branching Paths now which thanks to the latest poll is clocking in at 97bpm, has ACCORDION and is in the key of....”computer screen”. Look, I don’t know what happened either but we’re rolling with it. Once this song is out, we’ll be letting y’all vote on the next song’s direction. It’s definitely been an INTERESTING project so far.

This is part one of a new monthly project we’re working on called Branching Paths. With Twelve Months, we had 3 restrictions a month, and a video component. Branching Paths will have more randomization per month, in addition to listener interaction - a “Choose your own adventure” as it were with all random restrictions we are assigned put to vote. 

Make sure to follow on Twitter, Instagram and / or Patreon so you can vote! 

Cicadas was randomized with the restrictions:  Must have acoustic guitar, flute, organ, be 143bpm and in Eb major.

Polls for the next song will go up next week, so keep an eye out, and enjoy the song! It’s #BandcampFriday right now, so if you purchase any music by any artist on the platform, they get 100% of the proceeds as every first Friday, Bandcamp waives their cut of sales as a kickback to all of us struggling to make art in a pandemic world. 

I wanted to share a series of images by Amber Hughson who specializes in Conflict Resolution that I think could potentially help you put into words (or thought) what an end to policing as we know it could look like.

These aren't perfect or a 100% rip'n'replace solution for our society at large but it's important to have these thoughts present because status quo is only resulting in more innocent black people being murdered by an overly militarized gang who in any other profession or industry would be fired for their ineptitude and recklessness.

A society that was told people had to just die of a medical pandemic because of lack of medical equipment and resources can't sit by and watch hundreds of millions of dollars go in to increasing the weaponry of a group of people that consistently show they aren't responsible enough to be in charge of anything other than committing Geneva convention violations in the streets of our cities.