September 4 2019 Bonus tracks added to Targeted soundtrack

While nobody was looking I snuck six more short tracks on to the back end of the Targeted soundtrack from the early pitch videos and trailers. Then I completely ruined the entire point of sneaking things on to something and told you all about it here. Check it out! It's like three minutes of music. What are you waiting for, imagine if that three minutes ends up changing your life?

June 14 2019 Corrected Monochromes stickers!

When I posted about the shiny Monochromes stickers back at the end of May, it was only when cropping the picture of them for this website that I noticed something was off about the silver one's print job. The shop had duplicated the design from the blue ones instead of using the one submitted. A horror of injustice surely destined to be a gripping novel and a blockbuster movie one day, I know. One email and a couple weeks later and the much better looking proper sticker is here! All together now: they'll be available at all shows.

June 3 2019 Westbank duo show series with Shane Michaels

Shane Michaels, who some may remember playing with me from waaaay and I mean waaaaayyy back in our bands 200 Proof and The One-Eyed Jacks, got a weekly series over at Mona Lisa Lounge in Westwego for the next few weeks every Saturday at 5 and I'll be playing with him whenever I'm able to since it went real well the first time we did it this past weekend. We're playing a mix of blues, old rock'n'roll and country, swapping off upstage and downstage duties every song so no one's truly the lead and no one's truly the side man. It's a good time and maybe you'll be one of the interesting characters we entertain over the next six weeks.

May 30 2019 Stage page update, merchandise

"Oh look," you say through a forced yawn, "it's one of those really boring updates about something on the site being redesigned." Well, aren't you grateful and unspoiled. What did you want, yet another new sticker? You're going to need a new sticker book at this rate. Oh right, the point: the Stage page is now a lot less cluttered and speaking of stickers, there's now a new section that displays the merchandise you can buy at the shows. "Boooring," you shout brattily, even as you reach to click it and see for yourself.

May 28 2019 More Monochromes stickers are here!

They shine, they stick, they reflect, they're perfect for vandalizing public AND private property, and when you come see The Monochromes play old school rock'n'roll music at a show you can bring a couple extra $$ and get some for yourself. I mean, I'll probably have them at any and all shows I do, so you can feel all ironic and hip by buying them at a Pale Devil Sun show.

May 22 2019 Song collaboration with Moses Knightshead

Moses Knightshead and I sent ideas and files back and forth to each other and here's the result, "Blight Season". Moses wrote the chord progression and played the piano and I wrote the words, sang and played the rest of the instruments. Stylewise, I think it'd fit right in with 2016's Over. I might put it on an album in the future but there's no need to wait for me to decide that, go on and listen to it right now.

May 10 2019 Monochromes stickers are here!

"Where am I supposed to fit that giant thing?" you blurt out loud to your screen. Realizing you're talking to a website, you quickly look around to make sure nobody noticed. Oh good, they didn't. Then you read further to the next sentence that tells you these stickers are actually only two inches. These stickers are actually only two inches, it's just the lack of context in the picture that makes them look large. So yes, as you can see, The Monochromes now finally have stickers you can vandalize things with. Small but classy, get one for a buck at any shows I happen to have remembered to bring them to.

May 10 2019 New Shape Dream release "Substratum Atlas"

Out of nowhere, a new Shape Dream album "Substratum Atlas" is out today! Five months in the making, here's nine tracks and 40 minutes of drone and ambient experimentation. Proper frame of mind required for maximum settling and unsettling.

April 23 2019 The Monochromes live clip reel

Here's some clips from the past six months of Monochromes shows!

April 8 2019 Project spinoffs from Jak Is A Four Letter Word

I'm splitting off three projects that were once under the Jak Is A Four Letter Word name, as it's felt too broad a brush to me for a while now. Error 164 is chiptune /glitch, Shape Dream is ambient / drone, Autodestructor is harsh noise / postgenre, while Jak Is A Four Letter Word will continue to be the antifolk / noise rock project it started as. The digital releases have been reorganized under these names for clarity.

March 16 2019 Red glitter stickers

Is there such a thing as having too many sticker designs? Oh wait, that's right, I don't care! As you almost certainly noticed in the picture above already, the Skelly Barker design from 2008 and the Rock Stance design from three months ago are now available with glittery red elements, making them the shiniest stickers in your sticker book. The effect's proven completely impossible to show in a picture so I went ahead and made a 10 second video of them. You can get them at shows with all the other designs, and I bet you knew that already by now.

March 13 2019 2010's "Mood Swing Era" digital release

And here's "Mood Swing Era", the other CD that never quite made it digital for whatever reason, and it certainly lives up to its name. I touched up a couple of muddy tracks with brighter mixes but aside from that, here's what 99.9% of you missed nine years ago.

March 13 2019 Black Lodge 2600 OST

Speaking of taking more than seven years, the soundtrack for Black Lodge 2600 is now available under my Error 164 banner for anyone who needs a two-tone rendition of Sycamore Trees at all times. I promise the scream sound effect isn't anywhere in the tracks either. Now wouldn't that be a dirty trick if it actually was? It's so loud and piercing and jarring that it would be the perfect sound to throw in out of nowhere. Well, good thing I didn't.

March 12 2019 2011's "Tomorrow Is Postponed" digital release

A couple of CDs from 2010 and 2011 never made the transition to digital, so let's go ahead and fix that. "Tomorrow Is Postponed" is an EP of acoustic guitar instrumentals from August 2011 and is finally available via Bandcamp. And it only took more than seven years to get there, who says customer service is dead?

March 11 2019 "Bloom" from 2002 remastered

"Bloom" was a bizarre half hour of depitched antifolk and primal blues available for about three weeks on cassette and CD in June 2002. I left most of the copies of it around Danneel Street, Esplanade Avenue and the Westbank in random places for people to find, though a few did end up getting sold at shows. Once they ran out I never bothered making more and eventually forgot all about it while I focused on the next album "All Our Sunlight Scattered". A casual glance at the title of this post spoils that I've found the tracks and remastered them and put them back out there for someone to once again find. Oh hey, that's you! Get in the proper state of mind and go listen to this weird thing.

March 9 2019 Buttons!

Oh look, more merch! Get a Jak Locke or Pale Devil Sun button for a buck at any shows that I remember to bring the merch bag to, which is most of them. Secret heads up too, there's a couple new sticker designs coming soon, and they actually aren't another palette swap of the chaos logo.

December 19 2018 Green chaos sticker variant

Since I'm already running low on the blue chaos logo stickers and some of you asked about different colors, I'm going to periodically get some different shades printed for those of you who actually do pay attention to color wheels. Moving backward up the rainbow, we're doing green this time. And I certainly didn't just color-shift the picture of the blue ones from last month's update for this one, I'd never do such a lazy shoddy thing.

December 17 2018 Gold foil stickers are in!

You know what's better than a sticker? A shiny sticker made of real gold. And this is a shiny sticker made of real foil so it's as close as we're gonna get to that. These are designed for you to easily overlap stickers from all those other bands over it without obscuring any of the graphic that I put ones of hours into making for you. Available at shows!

November 27 2018 New 3" blue chaos logo stickers

Sometimes you just want a smaller sticker to cram on your crowded surface. "Jak," you shout aloud to the worried stares of the other people in the room, "my surface is crowded and I want to cram a smaller sticker on it!" From the other side of the internet I've heard you and now have 3-inch stickers for your haphazard sticker collages! These are blue and will go nicely next to a contrasting yellow or orange if color wheels are to be believed. Get some at shows, there's a very limited supply of these!

November 17 2018 Pale Devil Sun stickers are here!

Can't you see the way it's looking at you? Do you like it? Then put it on things you look at every day and gaze at each other forever. Or maybe it makes you feel uneasy? Then put it on signs and walls around your house or favorite hangout to ward off evil. Or whatever. It's just a sticker, you know. Most of them will end up in nasty bar bathrooms, I'm fine with that. And now you can get one or more at all my shows.

November 16 2018 "The Gone" from 2000 remastered

Back in August I started remastering "The Gone", an album/demo I made in 2000 of acoustic rock, folk and some trippy stuff. I say "started", because putting together The Monochromes ate up most of my spare time for the following three months but now I've gotten it and myself in effect and finished cleaning this relic up. Sooo it's done! You can now hear it in clear and pristine... well, okay, it's still pretty hissy and distorted and bloomy thanks to the source tracks coming from old cassette tapes, but it's waaay better than it was when it was around the first time. Listen to it on Bandcamp and buy it if you got money for me.

October 29 2018 Not Real Radio Podcast Appearance

Last night I joined Rick English to guest on the Not Real Radio podcast show and promote our show on Thursday with his Queen tribute band Stache Gordon that the Rock Show will be opening! We had fun and learned things about cookie cake and true love while we were at it. We also accurately mimicked our "Under Pressure" performance from last year when we guested on the show, so accurately you'll be hard-pressed to find a difference.

October 19 2018 New Monochromes tracks for the rest of the month

Every live act needs a demo, which means more music for you to listen to -- every couple of days for the rest of October, more new tracks will be added to The Monochromes music page to stream or download! You can even pretend you're a club owner and say "but what's their draaaw" out loud to yourself while you listen.

October 6 2018 Introducing The Monochromes

Last month before we'd even named the band we sneaked an unannounced 20 minute set in after a Pale Devil Sun show. Earlier today we performed for a private wedding. Enough skulking about, this band's ready! It's called The Monochromes and it's a cover power trio playing, ahem, "hot hits, cool B-sides and special deep cuts from the birth of rock'n'roll to the golden classics of R&B to the rise of garage rock." That's quite transparently pasted from the bio which I specifically made for press types who like adding typos to those things for publications and promotions. And coming up unless you're reading this after the fact, November 6th you can catch the official public debut of The Monochromes at The Balcony Music Club on Decatur! We've already got a couple other shows too with way more to come. In the meantime, check out our website and keep checking it every few days as we add more and more song recordings. Onward and upward!

August 17 2018 New album release today!

It's a new release! This tends to happen after about this much time! The Wreckage, The Yield, & A Place I Can Crawl Up From isn't just a mouthful for a title, it's also the new album and it's available as of some point before you ended up reading this! It's been in the works at various levels of focus for about three years now and here it is. Nine tracks of transitional raucous rock and harmonies. And other sounds too, but let's not get too wordy here. New music, go listen, go buy even!

June 6th 2018 "Junkyard Capital" reading for Artists Entrance

I don't announce scheduled shows on this prestigious middle column, so you know it's something new -- Tuesday, June 19th I got picked to be the featured author for The Artists Entrance event at Southport Hall, so you can come hear me do about 20 or so minutes of readings from my book "The Junkyard Capital" if you got 7pm free. Yes I know you can just read the book yourself any old time because you've already bought plural copies of it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and numerous eBook formats, though if you did that you wouldn't get to hear me try to do a dozen different voices for the characters and perform in a format I've never really witnessed, let alone tried to do myself. I might even bring a couple of passages from other books I've been writing and forgetting I've been writing for the past decade or two, who knows. Oh that's right, you'll know if you come out. So do that.

May 21st 2018 1600+ show pictures added

Once upon a time this site had a pictures page that went through several different names, some dumber than others. It eventually got bloated and weirdly categorized, and by eventually I mean within the first two years. When it mutated into its own massive sub-site over the years and I made my thousandth excuse to not update it, it was time to quietly remove the link and hope no one noticed it was gone, the end. This was good for a few years until the other day when I was in the Stage section looking at setlist pages and realized that the void on the right side of those would be an actually logical place for show pictures to go, particularly since flyer images are already there. A week later, and we've got 600-something MB of images, all ready for you to browse through casually one time and then never think of again. Well, go on then!

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