philip j. leitch

since everybody else seems to have written a story about the rumored $99 refresh i figured i better as well.

if true it sounds like a good move. i’d probably buy one, i mean i bought the first one.

between work and buying an iPad i’ve found it easy to neglect what i wasn’t going to neglect…namely this 19th attempt at maintaining any sort of online bloggy-type presence.

now that my wife has hijacked the iPad i seem to have my time back, so here i am. as far as those jsbx and huggy bear live shows i was going to split up, well i realized my original digitization of them sucked. so i’ll be redoing those and posting them as soon as i get around to it (which could in theory be when i attempt my 46th online bloggy-type presence).

i promise, promise, promise to split up the blues explosion live at ralph’s corner and huggy bear live at the fargo elk’s lodge audio this weekend and get both shows posted.

the previous photo is of jennifer’s veil playing on the main floor of the broadway junction (now known as Dempsey’s). posted mainly since i heard from my old, good friend joel lee after posting the mercy beat songs. unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, i don’t have any photos of the mercy beat so this was the next best thing.

joel and i were members of both the mercy beat and jennifer’s veil back in the wild west days of the early moorhead-fargo punk scene.

the second song from the mercy beat is sex machine. enjoy.

the third song from the blacklisted’s cassette is spit me out.

now that the deck is completed i can get back to what i really want to master, the art of the hypertufa planter. last fall i started and with the basics down i plan to go big with the next one i do.

i really have no idea what got me interested in mixing concrete, vermiculite and peat moss together and then pouring that into molds to turn into planters. i think mostly i’ve become somewhat bored only creating digital things. i miss the days of laying out yahtzeen by hand, making buttons, screenprinting and taking and developing photos.

i miss using my hands on something other than a keyboard and mouse.

haven’t checked out fbft in a long time and it seems to be down. uff da.

looking for volunteers to help me move fbft from media wiki to expressionengine wiki, the pay is horrible but the scenester karma points are tremendous.

hard life is newer than most of the other stuff i have laying around, but more people will likely be interested in it than the other stuff.

more ram was a paul sanders project that released a single on fargo’s meat records. this track is pulled from the cassette he originally sent to meat records. hard life is the first of eleven tracks i’ll eventually post.

i wonder if all of the meat records stuff is posted somewhere? i better get on that.

picked up a Black & Decker DR250B drill (after the one we borrowed from the neighbor turned out to suck) to make the deck work go faster and was quite happy with it. actually performed better than the slighty more expensive, although older, drill we already had. of course jess used the new drill while i used our older one. joys of marriage!

the second song from the blacklisted tape is you can’t feel.

shameless self-promotion, the mercy beat were the first band i was in and it’s damn time we were heard! do you think was the first song we recorded over the course of a saturday when we had access to the msu recording studio.

• rss feeds
• register/login
• photo gallery entries on home page
• finish deck
• buy iPad
• NEW! buy second iPad for wife

sort of. the upload problem is only partially solved. it appears that i will have to split up the digitized shows instead of uploading them as one huge track. either expressionengine doesn’t like the large files or dreamhost doesn’t like them. i’m too lazy to figure out which it is and fix that now, easier to let wiretap studio split them up while i work on other things (like my actual work).

i have figured out the problem with the music uploads (goofy directory path) so i’ll have huggy bear and jsbx up soon with more coming.

the blacklisted were one of moorhead’s first punk bands. religious wasteland is the first song from their never released first recording session.

what exactly are the farchives? they are my lame-ass non-creative name for all the great stuff i recently found in my garage. the fargo archives for lack of a better word and in the spirit of making words up by mashing them together we get farchive. unfortunately while i’ve managed to digitize quite a good share of music, i’m having some trouble working with expression engine after nearly a year of not working with it. not exactly like riding a bike, but i’m catching on pretty quick.

i’ve been digging up some old flyers too so those will eventually get posted to the farchive.

and who knows what else i might find…

here we go again… starting another site that maybe i’ll stick with for longer than a few months. a place for my ramblings, rants, photography and most of all the treasure trove of recordings from the 80s through 90s moorhead/fargo punk scene. that includes not only classic local bands like the blacklisted and floored but some great recordings of bands passing through town like unwound and jon spencer blues explosion.

so, here we go.

soundboard recording from 19?? at the fargo elks lodge.

soundboard recording of jon spencer blues explosion at ralph’s corner bar in moorhead, mn.