farpastpost’s blog

What’s Happened In The Last 6 Months?

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:32:12 -0800

Well...

Farpastpost studios (A.K.A. my garage/house) is still under construction. At least 2-3 more months before it's usable again. Still working on a computer on a counter and living out of boxes. Looking forward to moving back in and getting regularly productive with the show/website/podcast/etc. I have a full-time job, a band, a girlfriend, and this show to split time with so progress on the show is slow, and the house reconstruction just makes it slower.

Got a farpastpost twitter account here:
http://twitter.com/farpastpost

Updated the bands page on our website to include: afformance, aidan baker, alfheimr, the american dollar, amateur takes control, and so i watch you from afar, ...and the earth swarmed with them, bell orchestra, carta, cliff martinez, collapse under the empire, crippled black phoenix, daturah, detwiije, the echelon effect, EF, eimog, eksi ekso, epigram, felperc, flica, genghis tron, glaciers, in the wake of giants, japanese Sunday, jonsi, Kasan, kerretta, konntinent, let airplanes circle overhead, like bells, lunar node, mutual of omaha, nadja, no one wished to settle here, oaqk, oriin, our ceasing voice, pan spherics, parhelia, pet slimmers of the year, port-royal, sickoaks, the six parts seven, sleepmakeswaves, sleepy eyes of death, swath, swimming with ghosts, tangled thoughts of leaving, theta naught, tim hecker, tundra lights, we're from japan.

Updated the stream so that our corporate listeners could stream the radio show without getting blocked by a firewall.

Super bummed about Jerry Fuchs dying.

Super stoked that the farpastpost podcast has over 250 subscribers!

We're looking to maybe make some farpastpost t-shirts. Would anyone be interested in acquiring one of these? Any design ideas? Send them our way!

Hoping to line-up some more band interviews in the next few months. We'll keep ya posted on that of course.

Anybody heard any really good music recently?

Cheers

Mike
www.farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio

Switching Servers

Sat, 5 Sep 2009 21:18:38 -0700

Hey Folks,

Farpastpost has been forced to change to a new SHOUTcast address. If you’re accustomed to listening to the show through a media player like iTunes or Windows Media Player you’ll need to go to www.farpastpost.net and click on the link associated with your preferred media player. If you listen to the show through our website just keep listening. Sorry for any inconvenience, but we do these things to continue our show or improve on it. Let us know if you have any questions at farpastpost@gmail.com.

Cheers
Mike & Terryn
www.farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio

The MOLD!!!

Fri, 4 Sep 2009 21:13:45 -0700

So we’ve been a little preoccupied around here lately due to farpastpost studios (A.K.A. my garage) having a substantial amount of mold and rot. I’m currently in the process of renovating it myself and its taking months. So far this has not resulted in a loss of quality or consistency of our show. We continue our efforts to improve farpastpost, but its going a little slower than normal. Thanks for all your support!

FYI… I thought this article about post-rock was interesting. Check it out if you’re so inclined.

http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/2988308

Cheers
Mike & Terryn
www.farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio

where’d the website/podcasts go?!?!

Thu, 7 May 2009 13:31:50 -0700

Sorry for the inconvenience, but we had to make a slight change to our website URL. This may have caused some of you to need to create new farpastpost.net bookmarks in your web-browser. The new URL is:
http://www.farpastpost.net/farpastpost/home.html

In addition we had to scrap all old music podcasts! To get new music podcasts you may need to re-subscribe to the RSS feed by going here:
http://www.farpastpost.net/farpastpost/music/music.html

If you want to re-subscribe to our commentary podcasts go here:
http://www.farpastpost.net/farpastpost/talk/talk.html

To re-subscribe to our blog go here:
http://www.farpastpost.net/farpastpost/blog/blog.html

Trial and error until we can wrap our brains around how to do this web stuff without fucking things up.

Thanks for hanging in there with us.

Cheers

Mike & Terryn
www.farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio

podcast and website fixes

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:26:20 -0700

You asked for it! Moving forward all of our podcasts will be in AAC format instead of mp3 so that I can add artist/track titles to each song in the podcast. You will now be able to look at your media player or portable mp3 device and find out what artist and track your listening to. I will still add an image of the track listing to the podcast’s webpage and to the art category in the podcast’s id3 tag. Let me know how this works out for ya.

...So as it turns out, but has probably been very obvious to everyone reading this blog, I don’t know shit about technology, web design or podcasting! So little in fact that I thought nothing of doing 2-hour podcasts of new music every week. Apparently streaming a 2-hour podcast at 128k bit-rate is rather taxing to the average web browser, namely Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. They insist on loading all 112mb of the podcast before displaying it on your screen. This leads most people to think the podcast page doesn’t work. But if you give it some time, say 10 minutes or so, it should finish loading, display the podcast and allow for streaming. Of course you can skip that whole debacle by clicking on the “Subscribe” button and download selected podcasts to your preferred media player/portable device. However, if you’re not even sure if it’s worth downloading and want to sample first, then you either need to wait patiently while the podcast loads, or use the Safari web browser to view our podcast pages. Safari works for both PC and Mac operating systems and seems to view our farpastpost website seamlessly. It’s free too and can be downloaded from here http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

If anyone has suggestions on how to get around these stumbling blocks so that I can provide a half-way descent service to you fine listeners/readers send me an email to farpastpost@gmail.com or send a message to our myspace page at myspace.com/farpastpost

Cheers

Mike & Terryn
www.farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio

Scattered News

Sun, 1 Mar 2009 20:06:02 -0800

The Grails at Café du Nord…
…was awesome! I’d seen the Grails before but as an opener, and at a larger venue. Experiencing them at such an intimate place like Café du Nord was a treat. Seemed like every instrument was balanced perfectly, except the bass was a bit too high. I’ll be honest and say that I’ve not been too impressed with the last two Grails releases, but hearing the new songs live gave me a new appreciation for them. And of course their performance of classic Grails songs was everything I could have hoped for. I highly recommend catching them on tour if you can.

From Monument To Masses at the Bottom of the Hill…
…CD release show was RAWKING! Let’s take this one point at a time:
1. It was sold out!
2. The crowd was definitely rowdier than usual for the Bottom of the Hill.
3. Half the crowd was drunk before the 2nd band had finished.
4. The Crowd seemed to be made up of long time fans, as well as friends and family of the FMTM.
5. The new songs are awesome!!!
6. Get the new album “On Little Known Frequencies”. We’ll feature the new songs on the show for sure.
1. Catch them on tour if they come to your town!

We’ve Officially Switched Our Broadcast to SHOUTcast as of Today, March 1st, 2009.
We are no longer updating the LIVE365 broadcast stream. If you haven’t yet, go to our website at www.farpastpost.net and click ‘Listen Now’. If you’ve already switched to SHOUTcast with us, thanks for your loyalty! We hope to reward it with improvements in our programming. Thanks for all the support!

Cheers

Mike & Terryn
www.farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio

We’re Moving From LIVE365 To Shoutcast March 1, 2009!

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:51:18 -0800

After two good years with LIVE365 we’re switching to Shoutcast! Starting March 1st 2009 you won’t be able to listen to the show unless you:

1. Go to our website at farpastpost.net and launch our new stream.

2. Or go to Shoutcast.com and enter ‘farpastpost’ into the search field.

For the most part the show’s content and structure will remain the same. But...there will no longer be “scheduled” broadcasts featuring new songs. Rather a 24/7 shuffled playlist comprised of new songs, as well as farpastpost standards. But if you’re the type of listener who wants their dose of new music concentrated, you can now get each week’s featured new songs as a podcast by going to our ‘music’ page at farpastpost.net. farpastpost’s streaming broadcasts and podcasts are updated weekly!

Leaving LIVE365 was a long debated decision, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience. Ultimately we couldn’t afford the cost of staying with LIVE365 any longer. We hope to direct newly freed-up funds towards making the show better for our listeners. Thanks for staying with us! Send feedback or band suggestions to farpastpost@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Cheers

Mike & Terryn
farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio

Up Till Now

Sun, 8 Feb 2009 01:54:45 -0800

This particular blog is written as a summary of the many events in the history of farpastpost radio. Thanks for reading!

In The Beginning…

It was 2003, I think, and Terryn and I were stoned, bored, and wishing we had some good new music. We had spun Tool’s Lateralus for the fifteen-thousandth time, and we were bitching about how with the exception of Tool, rock and metal hadn’t progressed much in the last 10-15 years. Sure there was grunge and alternative. But we were referring to the progress of GOOD MUSIC! We’d probably had that same conversation a dozen times.

At one of these occasions our friend Matt overheard us and suggested we go through his CD collection of progressive heavy bands. We went through looking for the gems, happy to find anything good, even if it only came in single song increments. Jackpot! Along with a shit-load of extreme metal, and indie-rock bands, we found a small genre of bands, like ISIS and Pelican, often referred to as post-metal. Holy Shit! We were fans of Neurosis but had no idea that a whole new generation of bands had taken it to the next level. Thanks Matt!

Our love for metal returned and we were pleased to know that it could be emotionally rich and beautiful, without losing its heavy end. That got us motivated to look for more bands of the genre. In our search we figured out that we were already fans of a related genre, called post-rock. Mogwai, Godspeed, and Slint are a few examples. But now we were finding many more great bands. Well hell…Terryn and I looked for every band ever referred to as post-rock. We listened to bands considered to be post-rock in the 90’s like Tortoise and Bark Psychosis, as well as the bands of the time like Explosions in the Sky, and Saxon Shore.

Whether they considered themselves post-rock or despised the genre and any association with it, we listened for the similar sensibilities in ambiance each of these bands seemed to be striving for. Fuck! What had we been missing all this time. Godspeed, Mogwai, and Neurosis had not only released classic albums, but new bands This Will Destroy You, Caspian, and Yndi Halda, new to the scene were standing on their shoulders and crushing. We started freakin' out about all this new music.

We started talking about maybe doing a radio show or a podcast to harness some of our re-enlivened energy for good music. We started doing research, looking at internet resources like Decoy Music with their list of the top post-rock bands. The Silent Ballet was a huge inspiration for us; they convinced us that there was a large enough scene to support a radio show. Wikipedia’s definition of post-rock and its suggestion of bands that belong to the genre helped fill-in some gaps. Then Myspace became our next big resource for new bands. At this point we had about 50 bands we thought would work for a post-rock/post-metal podcast or radio show.

We looked into what it would take for two computer illiterate stoners to do podcasting. We also thought we should pay royalties. The original thinking being that we might have a better chance at getting desirable advertising or sponsorship if we weren’t pirate. And also, we just really wanted to support the bands we were going to feature. The easiest and cheapest thing to do was broadcast from my home computer. But to do a 24/7 station like we wanted would have required a dedicated server. That was clearly outside of our budget. We looked at going through Shoutcast.com but couldn’t figure out how to get past the PC only hurtle. I still have a Mac and I’m not giving it up! And we didn’t want to have to add up our royalty dues. That’s where live365.com kept looking sweeter. They provided the 24/7 server, tracked our royalty fees, and had a built in listener base.

On December 10, 2006 we did a 7 day trial of live365, and within days we had listeners and raving emails in support of the show. So we settled in and started to build farpastpost radio. Origin of the name is another tale. We started with a 64k stream, and that sounded like shit! Also, LIVE365 inserted commercials into our broadcast, and that really sounded like shit! We spent extra money every month to not be subsidized by undesirable commercials and to give our listeners a good sounding stream at 96k. This was a huge improvement to the shows quality and character. We picked-up a lot of regular listeners. Fans in Germany and Canada were loving the show, but the U.S. was by far our biggest demographic. We attempted at our first blog on blogspot.com, but never kept up with it. It’s kinda dead now, and this blog has taken its place. We started our Myspace page and our website. Bands started submitting their music and doing interviews. Listeners were enjoying the show and befriending us on Myspace. The ball was rolling.

We had a few setbacks. We could barely afford to maintain the show let alone build on it. Terryn and I had very little time to focus our energies in an efficient manner. And then there was/is the threat of being shut down due to retroactive royalty rates that congress and the major record labels still seem to be in limbo about. On top of everything our website looked like amateur hour, and we couldn’t afford the time or money to do it right. We knew that there was the possibility of sponsorship but didn’t have the time to search for advertising we could find agreeable.

Because of listener support via email, Myspace, and Paypal donations, we’ve kept this show going. You’ve all been the driving force keeping farpastpost radio alive. We want to thank everyone who has supported us in any way shape or form. We hope to be a part of this community for as long as there is one. And if you’ve read this far…Holy Shit!

More blogs to come…

Cheers

Mike Terryn
farpastpost.net
post-rock & post-metal radio