Are We Alive? Yes!

Missed us?  Well, as you can probably tell, we at \\\Maytag haven’t been particularly active over the past year.  In fact, when I said that Tnuc Lana and I started recording, we literally just worked on it for a little bit, and then proceeded to play Super Smash Brothers for a few hours before calling it a night.  You see, as it is now, \\\Maytag is effectively a two man operation, much like SunnO))).  However, the two of us have a lot of things going on in real life that just don’t translate well to having time to commit to such a serious project like this.  We both work many hours a week, just like you probably do, and mixed with educational whatnots (derp, college), we just don’t get to meet up and collaborate as a team like we’d want to, nor do we get the time to fiddle around with production much.  It’s sad to see that our beloved project is slowly fading away into obscurity.

I silently noticed to myself that May 26th was the 2nd anniversary of our debut releases.  That, followed up by a Metalsucks post about us, got me thinking about the status of the Fridgerick Douglass EP that we’ve been working on for ages now.  Well, 27 minutes have been done for awhile now, ready for production and mixing, and as of yesterday, I finally got the fucking balls and motivation to start writing more music!  I got a dandy new Bionaire portable mini fan, with two speed settings, and recorded it for a bit.  As of now, I’ve turned that into an intense 3:30 of new material, with massive layering and production value, that will surely be a wondrous new addendum to the material that we already have!  I’ve actually been practicing my production techniques since we released our first album, and I’m ready to really test them out here!

So yes, world, we are alive.  All I can say about this music is that it’s guaranteed to be better than a Morbid Angel album.  Y’know, that album (IT’S TOO EXTREME!!!).  Jeez, we couldn’t make music that bad if we tried…

Recording Starts Today!

Well, I have a bit set up already that I really like so far, but today shall be the first official live collaboration!  Tnuc Lana and I shall be working together to make Fridgerick Douglass the best refrigerator drone ever.  It’ll be very interesting to see how  \\\Maytag music works with two people actively involved in the creation of one final product.  Also, this is awesome:

Guess What? We Want You To Bootleg Out Merchandise!

I was checking our last.fm, and I noticed that a user known as steinarhr1 uploaded a picture to our photos of a \\\Maytag shirt that they made themselves.  Franky, we are flattered that someone would go out of their way to make \\\Maytag clothing–thank you, steinarhr1!  With that in mind, I’d like to officially open this up to the rest of our fan base.  If you so desire, you are more than welcome to create “bootleg” merchandise.  In fact, we’re encouraging you to!  We want you all to make as much bootleg \\\Maytag stuff as you want. Go ahead, make bootleg shirts, hats, capes, socks, eye patches, posters, and anything else that you can think of.  It would even be funny if bootleg CDs started being circulated.  Feel free to spread around what you make as well.  Although we’d prefer that you not sell it (or at the very least, only charge for what the materials cost), it’s not like we would plausibly stop you.

To start, we should provide you with high-quality (1515 x 1515) PNG images of our album covers.  We have all of them at this quality except Concerto for Three Washers in Sea Major, so here they are:

The Saga of the Frostbitten Lands of Frigidaire

Permafrost

I’m on a Fridge

Fridgerick Douglass

In addition, here are some variations of our logo, as well as our mascot (at lower resolutions and in JPEG format):

Black and White

Red and Blue

Mascot

Of course, you’re not limited to just this–you can use anything you want, even with original content!  Anyway, if you do make something, feel free to send pictures to us at maytag235[at]gmail.com and we’ll post it here!

Fridgerick Douglass

With the announcement of new material, I also thought it might be a good idea to reveal the album cover for our next release–”Fridgerick Douglass”–in all of its frostbitten glory!  I actually made this over a year ago (Photoshop FTW!) before the release of the original album and revealed on this site in the form of a hyperlink, but not many people saw it, so this is more of a true introduction to the magnificent cover of “Fridgerick Douglass.”   For this release, we will be giving away our music for free, as usual, under a Creative Commons License.  I’m going to estimate that this will at least be completed (not necessarily released) by the end of summer, because that is all the time that Tnuc Lana and I (and possibly Pledgehammer) have to work together.  As for promotion, this time around, I will be more aggressive in terms of sending it out to people.  Since this is now a (more) serious musical project, I feel that it should get more of the exposure it deserves.  I saw a few blog posts about us after the release of the first album, which was pleasing considering what it was, but for the next album, it shall be better!

Does Anyone Care About Myspace Anymore?

If so, then you might like to know that I recently gave our Myspace page a complete makeover.  It actually looks kind of nice now.  In other news, Tnuc Lana and I might get together soon to record new material!

One Year Anniversary/The Future of \\\Maytag

Happy Anniversary!  On this day last year, we officially released our debut album and EPs!  In the year that these releases have been available, here are the download figures:

The Saga of the Frostbitten Lands of Frigidaire:  552 downloads

Permafrost:  140 downloads

Concerto for Three Washers in Sea Major:  170 downloads

Considering that we have no promotion whatsoever, I’m proud of this.  Also, over the course of the year, we have gotten some wonderful reviews written about our work.  Here are a few gems from various reviews on RateYourMusic:

“kboose is a fag”

“There are a lot of things you can accomplish with your free time when you don’t have a girlfriend!”

“A group of losers on the Internet with no talent make fun of a band with more talent and success than they’ll ever have.”

“I don’t know why I wasted time on this dumb novelty.”

And the best one…

“I don’t know if this makes me gay or w/e, but here it goes.

Whenever I shower I always test myself to see how far I can stick my index finger up my ass. I have to do it in the shower because I don’t want to go spend money on lube. Plus, I always feel kind of weird buying personals (toilet paper, soap, lotion, shampoo, etc.) at the store.

This one time I almost got my finger into my ass up to my second knuckle (counting down from the tip of the finger). That was in the morning. When I showered again in the evening, I thought to myself, “fuck it, let’s try it again.” Well, it happens to be that I hadn’t cut my nails in a while and in the process of ALMOST getting half my fucking finger in my ass, my goddamn roommate bangs on my restroom door. I jerk, and since my finger is in my fucking ass, I shoved it in a little further than I expected.

I swear to God I cut my fucking rectum.

That moment, that fucking one second it took for me to cut my rectum, can be expressed through this fucking thirty-six minute utter shit parody song.”

Thanks for your kind words!  You, the fans, truly motivate our musical endeavors!  Speaking of that, we have been silent for awhile for a reason.  Apparently, the I’m on a Fridge song and music video did not sit well with much of 235, and they have mostly shunned \\\Maytag, claiming to have never liked it (despite proof of otherwise in the form of the archived original topic, which can be found on this site).  They are refusing to associate themselves with it, and if it must be, then their departure is fine with me.  With that in mind, that leaves me (kboose), Tnuc Lana, and Pledgehammer left unless some 235-ers step up.  One one hand, it would be nice for them to help out with another album.  On the other hand, some of Tnuc Lana’s demos from last year show more promise than the parody drone we released last year.  Dare I say it, but I think the next release might be slightly more serious than the debut.  If that is the path we will go, then I think that making this have as few members as possible is a good idea. I think we could produce this ourselves, since Tnuc Lana is pretty damn good at this (I love his mixing on Permafrost), and I’m not too awful considering that it’s just drone music.  Of course, we still might need to take a shot or two at SunnO))), but we should be classier about it this time around.

In the meantime, I have done a small bit of work on some demos myself.  I’m most satisfied with this one, which is a 4:30 clip that, as of now, I intend to be the intro to Fridgerick Douglass, and album or EP that I had already designed the cover for over a year ago.  Download it here.

Otherwise, thanks for the support over the past year, and hopefully we can keep making music.

-kboose

MUSIC VIDEO RELEASE–I’M ON A FRIDGE!!!

And the song covered is…”I’m on a Boat?”

Yep!  Instead, it is renamed “I’m on a Fridge!”

I got pretty bored in June, and was thinking about random pop songs.  “I’m on a Boat” got stuck in my head for about a week or so, and then I had a revelation: \\\MAYTAG SHOULD COVER THAT!  Except we have to make it really metal, so I wrote up a bunch of silly metal lyrics.  It was literally just cutting out lyrics from the original and putting in metal ones.  No real thought process besides being as metal as possible.

At first, I thought this would just be silly, but then the idea of fusing the totally inaccessible genre of drone/doom/fridgecore with pop actually seemed interesting.  The song is mixed with vocals in mind, with the fridge noises relatively low, but the atmosphere is still there, and there is absolutely no percussion, which makes it sound really different from the original.  In addition, since the original has three vocalists, it gave me the opportunity to experiment with death, black, and clean vocals.  My clean vocals suck ass, so I decided to make fun of the awful falsettos so common in metal by doing the T-Pain part in a more atrocious falsetto that I jokingly auto-tuned A LOT to sound like T-Pain himself.

I also had been wanting to make a \\\Maytag music video.  I’m on a Boat happens to have a rather humorous and memorable music video, so that worked well, but I also wanted to bring in some of the humorously grim overtones of Call of the Wintermoon.  This song gave me a good opportunity to do so.  Thankfully, we got a few people to also submit footage, so it actually looks pretty metal in a lo-fi, DIY type of way.

Then, for the album cover, I decided to make a fridge-ified version of Dawn of the Black Hearts.  Brutal stuff going on over here!