New member, et cetera

Nicole Sestito has joined Standard Input as a vocalist, though she will also likely help with synth and composing (and possibly drums). She's amazing, and has a lot of offer. I hope she'll be able to help us out quite a bit and let her true nature shine through.

Also, Jon Kopetz noted that he might be willing to record vocals for Gaiya Solitude. This would be great, since we haven't gotten any vocals that we've liked thus far, and he's a good singer.

New Standard Input site URL

I failed to note that the 64h.net subdomain system was marked "private", and so when my domains were rejected (after a long period of working properly), I switched the subdomain to a public one. Thus, the new standard input band website is located at http://standard-input.strangled.net. I hope this doesn't screw things up too much.
~John

Standard Input's Recording work

Doug and I have been working on recording and mixing Gaiya Solitude. It's coming quite well thus far, and even though it's our first song to be recorded, we're already showing some pretty neat stylistic touches. We have a few synth drum beats, a bit of guitar, some willowy synth strings and chords, and we're already pretty far along putting it together; we are planning to record the vocals either this weekend or next, although I'm not sure which one of us will sing.
As we go on creating more real music, we inevitably end up defining for ourselves our own genre. CyberRock, which is essentially invented by us, is becoming increasingly developed even in the few things we have instrumentally composed. Right now, the dynamic is relatively simple: high data density, poetic lyricism, interesting variations, and the ultimate trip. Although not complex in makeup, the emergent synergy is complex enough to generate something that is worth listening to, and there are enough possibilities that one is unlikely to get bored with a variety of the stuff.
Anyway, check the link above in a few weeks for a demo/download of Gaiya Solitude, as well as more band info. If you're interested, add us to your friends list; it's useful to have some sort of casual fanbase, at the very least for communcations reasons.

~John

Standard Input on MySpace

Standard Input now has a MySpace account. I had been holding out on that for a while, because MySpace tends to seem like quite an un-nerdy thing to use, but for the utilitarian purpose of gaining publicity (not to mention being able to stream audio without taking up Two's bandwidth majorly), it is a rather elegant solution. Also, the networking systems on that site are rather advanced, and so we will be able to maintain a pretty wide group of fans in the future (assuming we can get any :D , the music may be a little too strange for most, as it tends to vacillate between cyberpunkish hard-tech and mushy sentimentalism ^^; ).
Hopefully, I can get Doug and Hanju to join this blog (as the MySpace one will likely only be used for events and such; I tend to like the Blogger.com capabilities better for normal blogging and casual updates :P ). I'm going to invite Doug again, and Hanju for the first time.
Anyway, see you all later.

~John

standard input site back up (finally)

The site is finally back up! My host was having some difficulties (his server's in the UK and he's been in Turkey since this summer; not a good time to change a harddrive :P), but it's finally back up.
The band has a new member: Hanju Roe. He's going to be playing guitar and synth. He's a nerd like us, but he's pretty stylish, and he's suave too.
I'm going to try to convince Jon to sing (as he has a very nice, deep voice), however he seems to be resisting the idea.
Doug has gotten a number of new applications for different music-creation tasks (they were legal, we swear :-O ), and he needs to learn how to use them so we can get our music recorded, mixed, and synthed-up properly. He estimates it will take him until after christmas to get all that done, and so the album should be released some time after that.
On a lighter note, we now have postage stamps emblazoned with the cover of our first album. Look at the store link on the main site for these and other items; this is also where we will be selling the album when it comes out.

That's all for now. Until next time, keep on jammin' and keep on hackin'!
~John

New Standard Input songs uploaded to fictionpress

I just uploaded a few new (and old, but regretfully previously disincluded) songs to fictionpress. I could not upload them to the official stdin site at the moment, because the server is currently down, but I will as soon as I have a chance.
They are as follows:

• Links


• Data Nation


• Meat Machine


• Obsession

Meat Machine and Data Nation are actually some of my very early stuff. Obsession is quite new (some time earlier this month), and Links I wrote last night.

Read and review, please!

~John

New Standard Input site URL

The new url for the Standard Input site is http://standard-input.64h.net . Because I used http://freedns.afraid.org , a free dns place, we no longer need to put up with ads on the site because of the subdomain redirections.

In other news, Doug and I got the instrumentals on Gaiya Solitude written, and it's coming out pretty well. If we can get together more often and keep up this productivity, we'll get the CD done in no time ^^;. I'm liking Gaiya Solitude's music quite a bit, and I'm liking the way it's put together. Hopefully, we can get this (albeit short) song to be quite stunning on the album.

Also, Ccs4ever (Jon) said today that he didn't wish to be a performing part of the band, but I suppose he remains our funding man and the person who tells us whether our intended audience will like our stuff. I suppose it was asking a little too much to have him play the synth (though he bought it), but maybe I can get him to sing backup in one track, and perhaps it'll grow on him (he's quite a good singer when he sings within his range).

Well, in any case, I'll post again soon, and hopefully all of you out there are still waiting patiently for our new album.

~John