Aye it’s your boy CC.. nahh nah.. (Run that back Roy!)

wikawika vinyl scratch into slowmo slow down

hYO! What’s going on errybody, it’s your boy City Cole coming at you live from KQ94.. the Nest! Vanessa is vegging out on the visitors couch cause we’ve been up for DAYS gearing up for the Insomniac - EP release. Well that day has come and gone and we can finally.. rest…? *shrinking glance over at Roy*

that’s a damn lie.

Yeah, yeah you’re right as per usual bud. What would we do without you..

Sleep probably… AS IF!  wikawika - never rest, never rest - wikawika

Speaking of “for days,” it’s 4 days before my birthday and the greatest gift I could’ve asked for has been all the love and support y’all have shown for the band over the past year and some change. It’s been amazing and V and I can’t begin to thank you enough. We think Insomniac is our best work so far and from what we’re hearing from our callers and mad respecters is that they think it is too. What a blessing it is to have y’all listening all around the world.

Looks like Roy’s giving me the cue to cut into story time so check it - V was comparing our EP covers earlier and brought up something mad nostalgic that I thought I would share with y’all before we spin that fresh track..

She was saying “aight here’s the sitch.. take a look at these two people *points at the ‘in a mood - ep' cover* and compare them with THESE two people *points at the ‘insomniac - ep' cover.* See that difference in confidence? SEE THAT?! On the ‘in a mood’ cover we were totally buggin’ and now those bugs have wings. Look how fly these two look?!”

Well she ain’t wrong!

She rarely is Roy… Aight, aiight spin that shit before I start tearing up on air.

You got it boss.

This is the title track “insomniac” from well.. you guessed it, the ‘insomniac - ep.'

City Cole.. Veggin’ V.. and the myth, the legend Roy - OUT.

when we first announced that we were a band i said something like “we haven’t slept in months” and boy did i mean it. cole was stuck in a loop making sure every one of his weird little samples and synth sounds was perfectly placed and i was busy sorting through more film footage than i could imagine. i had told him right from the start that keeping up our x-treme output level would be a marathon but he didn’t care. he just shrugged and said “whatever, here’s another beat i made last night…” or some shit like that. he was on his fourth redbull in one hour and had that manic buzz surrounding him that we both get past 10pm. roy says i’ve got to get cole to drink water because he can “hear his internal organs screaming for help” but I know better than to get into that battle.

Ayo it’s your boy, City Cole here and I’m totally buggin.. it’s laundry day.. UGH the bane of our existence as nu-trunge artists.. why clean clothes when we have 100 more important creative things to do during the day… well I guess even Vanessa and I gotta keep up appearances from time to time cause we ain’t no scrubs but I def don’t have to be happy about it.. it’s aight, I guess.. maybe I can bribe Roy to do mine for me while I record some samples on my new micro-cassette recorder.. Scrubby’s here we come.

the dark hour conjures up either the best or worst of our ideas - there's no in between. Roy always says that "the magic is alive at midnight" but i think he read that on the back of a romcom vhs and acts like he thought it up himself. our song midnight came to us in pieces, all of which were born late at night. every time i hear it i imagine cole in a velour smoking jacket saying something sophisticated (that sometimes happens if he's been reading the thesaurus too much... he said the word "penumbra" the other day??). i'm there too but i'm passed out on the back of a jazz club piano or something either in a jessica rabbit dress (they don't call me bunny anymore though) or my pyjamas, i can't decide.

hey its your girl city vanessa here… nah it doesn't have the same ring to it. anyway we're about to hit the road in less than a week! can't wait to be trapped in a car with cole while he has the same VAST song on repeat for hours. its ok though cause i'm gonna pack some ice cold SoBes and Dunkaroos to munch on. we had to wrap the guitars in old towels cause we only have one travel bag so hopefully we don't get in trouble if we get pulled over cause they look mad suspicious. very body-sized. 

it's pretty crazy that our second EP will be dropping this summer. two EPs?? I can hardly even believe that i'm in a band let alone have this much music out. its also crazy that people are listening to that shit for realz - if any of you are reading this… mad respect. 

Wassssup mad respecters! It’s City Cole here! we just so happen to be a week out from our first band road trip and we’re so beyond stoked. It’s gonna be so extreme ya’ll. V was on the phone with our buddy Roy the other day.. dude is a mute in person but once you get him started on the phone… he just won’t stop runnin’ his mouth (but we love em for that.) he offered to be our chauffeur so I guess we’ll be crusin in the roymobile.. I really hope he got his tape player unjammed though.. as much as I love video killed the radio star, I don’t think I can listen to it on loop in a cramped space for a week straight.

ANYWAYS, it’s so cool to see how the band is starting to take off. we can’t wait to share new footage, merch, and music with ya’ll soon. Okay, been rambling quite a bit so I’m gonna tap out.

v here! you ever been stuck in a loop? our new song NBTSA is about snapping out of it and remembering what it’s all about. for us it’s all about making the song, getting that real human dopamine hit of having the idea come to life. i wish Roy would stop leaking our tracks on LimeWire but the man can’t be stopped. he keeps saying he’s doing it “for the people” but surely the people can wait?? by the way if you’re reading this we need our George Foreman grill back you asshole... i know you’re not needing to cook lean burgers for two weeks straight.
anyway if you like guitars, CPR and wolves then NBTSA is the song for you. we hope you like it!

i’m pretty sure that having a second person to bounce ideas off of has permanently altered the way i go about making music. baby girl here, they say i add a little colour to the palette but it wasn’t always that way. there was a time i wouldn’t let anyone tell me shit about how i wrote a song. on first glance that might seem like me being sure of myself but in hindsight i think i was just immature. was too defensive.

it’s probably a good thing to be a bit too proud at first when you’re making stuff cause fuck is it ever hard to not hate your creations. luckily once you’ve made enough stuff you get to a point where a song is a song and you know you’ll make more so why not experiment? cole has completely different ways of writing melodies and structuring songs than i do so now his best tips echo in my brain no matter what i do: simplify this chorus, that thing is too wordy, do not say the word “clock”, etc. at this point i honestly can’t imagine not having his input on anything i make. it feels like we’re a unit - is that what being a band is all about? telling each other that track 12 is 0.2 dB too loud and whooping and clapping when it fixes the whole harmony stack? idk but damn does it feel good.

Yo It’s Cole! 26 years ago I sat at a piano for the first time and learned how to play “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” Something creative in me clicked and within a year or two (give or take) I was creating my own simple originals. I grew up as an only child with busy, hardworking parents so I had a lot of free time to sit at that upright and play horribly for hours on end. I remember how freeing it was to be able to turn mistakes into art. Even though the man, the myth, the legend Bob Ross worked in a different medium, I took the “happy accidents” mindset he taught me on PBS and worked it into how I conceptualized music. It probably drove my piano teacher nuts cause I wouldn’t focus on the traditional assignments but she still nurtured my creativity. So she gets a gold star. 

Fast forward 7 or 8 years and I started hitting a bit of a lull with just sitting at a piano alone (and the drums for that matter.) I needed another outlet.. a way to record my ideas before I went batshit insane from all the melodies I locked away in my brain for years. I started to expand upon my music tastes and also try my hand at producing/arranging my own music. After a few years of doing that (also alone) I felt this urge to reach out to likeminded musicians and try making music with other people. At first sharing that special space with another person(s) was a little scary but that’s where the real, literal music magic happens. Run that VHS even more forward to today and I’m here sharing that special space with V and I’ll never be the same again. A lot of the work that V and I do together is challenging both creatively and in scope but it's incredibly rewarding to see our ideas come to fruition. Especially after all the hours in void writing lyrics, recording vocals, and mixing. So if you’re an aspiring musician or producer, keep pushing to find that person(s) that'll mesh with your creativity and drive you to be the best version of yourself. Don't be afraid of the challenges or being vulnerable.

Vanessa here! I’m geeked that nothing left to find is finally out but if I’m honest it’s got me feeling kinda naked. there’s a whole lot of Cole and I in that song. well, in most of our songs actually. a project like this, something you care so much about, reveals a ton about you. to read the lyrics is to know us, laugh and cry with us, be scared and brave… why are we compelled to write it all down? capture it all in a song? I think it’s just a way to reach out into the dark and ask everyone else “have you ever felt this way too?”

Wassup, Cole here! A creative spark can sometimes only last for a split second for us.. A lot of the time when it strikes it’s like I can feel all of my neurons firing off at once. When I know I’m onto something great, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I get this rush of euphoria. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m gonna cry but in a good way, you know, like happy tears. I’ve felt this way at random points in the creative process with all of the songs that V and I have worked on together so far. With our new song, Nothing Left to Find, I felt that rush when I was working on mixing the bridge part after the guitar solo. The song as a whole was all but finished when I heard that vocal counter melody in my head for a SPLIT second. I knew I would lose it if I didn’t get something recorded right at that moment.. It felt like I had captured lightning in a jar when I listened back. It’s moments like this that make mad routine the most special creative outlet I’ve ever had.

nobody has heard more of my secrets than my microphone. V here. when something cool happens, the lyrics show it. when I’m having the worst time of my life, the lyrics show it. might be subtle but it’s always there, a constant drizzle of moments captured on the page like a graph. every once in a while I worry that I’ve said too much and change a detail to sway the listener away from me. but the mic knows, the guitar knows and most of all, the words always know.

yo sleepy cole here. it feels like the dark hour for me but it’s 12pm.. V is feeling the same way. We’ve been Tired Tired this week. if you’re wondering what the dark hour is, it’s more a feeling than a time. V coined this term for how we feel when we are cooking up late night B.A.Bs, completely delirious and unable to take anything seriously. If ya’ll think V is funny normally, you have no idea how freaking funny to the x-treme V is during the dark hour sessions. I wish I had the brain power to give ya’ll some examples but it took me 20 minutes to come up with “yo, sleepy cole here.”

i dunno what cole really thought about film making when i first suggested it but i have a feeling he thought it was a mega waste of time. Film Director Vanessa Novak here. i love it when he’s wrong because it almost never happens and i love it even more when i can persuade him into my schemes. this is a shot i snuck of him messing with my camcorder (yeah i know, i didn’t freak out that he had his grubby hands all over my brand new tech, i deserve an award for my calm and collected demeanor). he’s brilliant with all music tech so i knew he’d nerd out about video tech if he would just give it a chance. he loves the creative aspect of making movies but hates being the subject of my creations. why?? because i keep asking him about his hopes and dreams for mad routine? cause i don’t know what biome zebras inhabit?? surely i can be trusted with documenting everything everyone loves about him. if not me then who?

ayyyye! wassup ya’ll! it’s your boy, City Cole! so I found out from our friend Roy that our song, recluse, was released on Bear Share last night. We really gotta check our iMac G3 for a leak or something… if it’s not limewire or Napster getting their grubby hands on our stuff it’s something else.. anyways…. it’s all wavy gravy though. from what Roy was telling me people are foaming at the mouth sharing and downloading it like crazy. you know what.. now that I think about it, Roy was the only one aside from V and I that had that one on a burned cd.. i think we might need to have a talk with him.

anyways, recluse had been in the pipeline for a while. if I remember correctly it was the first song that V and I worked on together. it started off as this sad emo piano ballad with the worst offbeat guitar playing imaginable but it really became something unique and special with time. i’m glad we took a bit of a break away from it to clear our heads and gain a bit of perspective on what direction it needed to go in.

this track is one of our heaviest songs in more ways than one. it was a really hard song to write and work on for the both of us. we’ve talked at length about this one in our previous journal posts but here’s a little recap: it’s about that feeling of working against the clock age wise, feeling like you or someone you love is stuck in a web of their own making, feeling like you have to answer to the outside world for your artistic quirks, etc. we will leave the rest up for you to decide.

we hope you love this one as much as we do.

To be reclusive with a friend? Well that’s the shiznit. V to the N reporting in, I remember this day really well. We were at Mert’s Diner - have any of you ever been to that place? The food is mediocre but the staff are really funny so we keep going back. Anyway Geriatric City Cole was telling me something about our newest track and all I could hear was “cucumber watermelon” over and over. I can’t hear any words if there are other sounds happening and boy is Mert’s place loud as hell. But as I was misreading his words and nodding along I realized that this is what it’s like to be one creative mind. He’s talking and working through his ideas and I’m there to give the ideas the space to grow and exist. The magic really happens in the late night ramblings pacing around the living room.

C to the O. L. E. here. Was talking with V about our upcoming single “recluse” the other day.. we were trying to describe what we wrote about using our inside voices. It was in that very moment…. she let me in on some pretty insightful onions. Here are few layers she peeled back.

(Beeteedubbs ya’ll, this whole journal entry might be a bit abstract. We still want you to find your own meaning in the song.)

Point 1. Sometimes creatives feel like they are working against the clock when it comes to age. Thankfully we couldn’t care less. Creativity is ageless so why should it matter? We’ll still be plunking away at our keyboards making beats when we have arthritis.. so?

Point 2. Being a creative person comes with this odd feeling like you have to answer to the outside world for your artistic quirks. Sometimes people don’t understand what all needs to be done to accomplish anything with art/music/etc. For example: we need to be alone, reclusive if I may, for extended periods of time to get fully formed ideas out. Otherwise they kind of eat away at us and that can leave us feeling pretty drained.. But even though creatives have to answer to society, society still benefits from the art that we (creatives) create. It’s a strange juxtaposition.

I could keep rambling but I’ll save it for another day.

v here. we talk about being tired a lot so i’m gonna break it down for you. it’s almost impossible to stop us from finishing a song or an idea once we get going. we’ll go to any length to get an idea floating in the air pinned down to paper. it may be bloody and defeated but it’s ours, ready to be expanded upon and molded into something usable. this process is one of the hardest parts of creating any kind of art - turning the ambiguous and obscure into something real. it’s also the most rewarding. everyone has the power to do this and our world needs and craves it. your creative ideas are not like mine, mine are not like yours and we can each teach each other something if we can just get them down on paper and expressed.

cole and i respect this process and support the others’ tunnel vision when inspiration strikes. we’re tired because we’ll hide from the world in the early morning working on the process when nobody can tell us otherwise. born tired because we don’t know how to stop. never rest til the song is sounding exactly how you imagined it.

v here! disparait is finally out and im here to talk your ear off about it. as I was saying before, cole has worked tirelessly on the soundtrack for our movie. when i first heard the instrumental he sent i knew it has to become a full song. he called it “disappear grungy boom bap” but to me it has this new age, enigma feel that I really wanted to capture. the chanting was added after the fact to really seal the deal.

i struggle a lot with writing lyrics in french even though I speak it fluently. i think it’s because artistic expressions and metaphors don’t come to me as easily compared to english. still, every once in a while I hear an instrumental that’s just screaming for french and this was one of them.

the film was made complete by having this song right at the end. it’s a more desperate yet apathetic take on the original disappear lyrics that I hope echoes the emotions of the story. we are so grateful for any and all feedback on both our visual and audio mediums and are having a blast sharing it with you all.

Wassup ya’ll! City Cole Productions coming at you live from KQ94: The Nest, home to all the best in trip-hop gruuunge. *bird call sound effect*

Today we’re talking about the process of shooting “in a mood - the movie.” Before meeting Vanessa, I was a total film making noob. As I’m sure you all know by now, I’m shy. So being in front of the camera wasn’t exactly something I thought I would be interested in doing.. but with Vanessa’s direction/expertise it made the process a hell of a lot of fun. When I say a lot goes into making music videos and films… A LOT goes into it. Tons of pre-planning, set piece finding, outfit buying, learning new and old technology, etc etc. I had to learn a lot of new skills in a relatively short amount of time. Thankfully I’ve got ears made for listening and I can take direction pretty well.

I wanted to make this film release even more special and try my hand at creating a full original soundtrack for it. I’ve always wanted to make music for movies and I’ve helped out with OSTs before but I’ve never made a full one from scratch. It took me about 2 months but it was worth all the time and effort. I think it really helped bring our initial idea to a whole new level. AND we got a new single out of it (made specifically for the film) which will be coming out on the 19th of this month.

We really hope you love this movie as much as we do.

City Cole, out.