*** Obligatory sales message ***
Yes, we have an album. You can buy it here for only eight US dollars. If you want to look at the cover art and sample a few of the tracks first, you can do that here.
Greetings all.
This is the official website of the band known as Sea Water Bliss. (Also known, for Googling purposes, as "The band known as Seawater Bliss".) We're a rock-n-roll combo based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Unofficially, this is also the online home of Michael A. Charles (AKA OrangeRaisin), who has attained a slight level of fame as a creator of mildy amusing internet cartoons. You can read more about Michael at his blog, Stuff I Done Wrote: The Michael A. Charles Online Presence.
(Michael also has some old stories and plays and what-not archived here.)
Unflattering photos, mp3s, a synopsis of our rock opera, and lots of other random crap can be accessed using the menu at top left. If you're still not sure why you're here, you might want to start by visiting the Frequently Asked Questions page.
Recent news.
May 29 2009. And suddenly it's June. With the band in a state of semi-retirement it's easy to forget about this website for months at a time. But every once in a while I look at the statistics and I'm surprised to see how many people visit. A lot of people are downloading our songs, for instance. Who are they? Where are they coming from? Are they here out of genuine enthusiasm for our music or are we the victims of some extremely subtle practical joke?
I thought it might help if I linked to some of our more popular songs right here on the front page:
January 4 2009. Although it's been decent for me personally, musicwise it's been another pretty woeful year in Sea Water land. Andrew and I managed to squeeze in our sole public performance of 2008 just before the clock ran out by playing a few songs at our friends J & K's annual New Year's Eve party. There has been some discussion of returning to Vonda this winter for another rock-n-roll orgy at Sig's Place, but I don't know if anything will come of that. I'd like to try and get out and play in public every month or two, but to be frank, it's always a little depressing. We don't have enough friends to fill even a smallish coffeeshop with supporters, and if we play more frequently than once a year, the novelty of seeing us will wear off, and even our friends will stop showing up. I guess if we want to perform more often we'll just have to toughen up and get used to being ignored.
The thing is, Andrew and I have been practicing pretty regularly and we're sounding as tight as we ever have. Our constant process of weeding and winnowing out the weaker tunes has left us with a fairly sturdy set list. Seems a shame to waste all that purty music on the centipedes in Andrew's basement. Anyway, just checkin' in to say Happy New Year, and Watch This Space.
Oh, yeah, I dug up some more old demos and decided to throw them up here. These ones are pretty rough - The protest singer reached approximately the halfway stage in the recording process, while Brian Zerff and Brian Gash stalled at about 2%. Still, possibly of interest to our more rabid and/or inebriated fans.
November 24 2008. I'm gonna try and get a little organised around here. Keep the Sea Water Bliss website for stuff related to the band, and post purely personal nonsense over at my new personal blog. It'll take a little while for me to get my old posts moved over to the new location, so for now you can still find all my poems, plays, short screenplays, and journal entries here.
I should also link (belatedly) to Jim H's new home at Wordplay, the Crossword Blog of the New York Times.
Other than that, nothin' going on.
October 18 2008. Oy, I really need to reorganise. The rock-n-roll, the reason this website exists, is being crowded out by increasingly non-rockin' cartoon content. Garson Hampfield, though he's hardly a rocker, at least has a rebel spirit. But today's update is about pretty much the exact opposite of rock-n-roll: real estate.
There's nothing more I can really say except - damn, look how much trouble I can stir up without even trying. Imagine how self-destructive I could be if I were an honest-to-goodness rock star.
September 18 2008. Over on the soon-to-be-defunct JimH Crossword Blog, a familiar face celebrates Jim's ascension to the title of Official New York Times Crossword Blogger:
(Watch out for a cameo by Sea Water Bliss bassist Andrew Hall.)
What else is new? Lately we've been dreaming up a plan to bring back our rock opera 404 in online, interactive form, but as we'll need to scrounge some money to make that happen, it could be years before anything comes of it. Meanwhile, Jay and I shot a short film over the weekend at a friend's cabin in Fort Qu'Appelle (starring rock opera alumna Sarah Barss). It's gonna be a few months while we edit that. But you just keep on watching YouTube. We'll throw some more stuff out there sooner or later.
August 30 2008. Thanks to a brief stint as a "featured video" on YouTube's main page, Garson Hampfield has now been seen by 87,000 people. This is pretty big stuff. (By comparison, we've sold about four Sea Water Bliss CDs to people outside our immediate families.) There's a Garson sequel in the works - gotta cash in while I can! - and I'm working on a live-action, non-crossword-related short film with director JW Arnold. Meanwhile, Andrew and I are cookin' up some rock-n-roll schemes.
So keep checking back. This corpse is still a-twitchin'.
July 29 2008. Across the border in Having Nothing To Do With The Band Land, there are two new animations for you to enjoy or be perplexed by:
Olin and I recently drove over to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and met up with an old friend of Olin's and a fellow songwriter, Michael Russell. He's a good guy and he's got some good songs, which you can listen to here.
PS. There's now also a "making of the video" video you can watch.
October 14 2007. Meet Squinty and Gummy.
Meanwhile, we had all this footage, so we decided to use it to create a music video for our song The ice age. The music video is pretty much exactly like the movie, only shorter and with no talking. You can watch it here.
Incidentally, that other music video, the one we shot in Vonda in July, is still coming. Just need to get Jay to kick his wedding-video clients to the back of the line and focus on the rock and the roll.
August 5 2007. Not that this has anything to do with anything, but...
June 27 2007. A few photos from Saturday's video shoot in Vonda. This is our director, JW Arnold, setting up for a shot:
Here's me teaching the lyrics to a bunch of young Vondanians:
And here's Tina - whose last name I never even learned - our last-minute fill-in waitress. At 11 AM on Saturday, she had no idea she would be starring in a low-budget music video that very afternoon.
June 23 2007. Just wanted to thank everybody who turned up this afternoon for the filming of our music video "You're not the one" at Sig's Place in Vonda, Saskatchewan. This includes all our friends who drove a half-hour from Saskatoon, and sacrificed a beautiful summer afternoon, to assist us; and the tableful of strangers who happened to be eating lunch "on set" as we filmed around them, and who allowed themselves to be talked into lip-synching the chorus. You guys were great. And I especially want to thank Sig herself, for being so incredibly accommodating. In the end, we'll be lucky if a few hundred people - most of them friends and relatives - watch the completed video when it's posted on YouTube. But Vonda treated us like rock stars. More on the video soon.
March 4 2007. We're still a band, really we are. Andrew and I practice at least once a week, except when we don't. We still develop new songs, which every year or two we play in front of outsiders. We've got an album, which strangers are encouraged to purchase for $10 (Cdn).
We also do this sort of thing:
People might get the impression, scanning the last few updates to this website, that the only thing Sea Water Bliss does nowadays is create Flash animations that are only tangentially related to their music. Not true. We also play Scrabble sometimes.
For previous updates to this page, click here.
Drunken firemen, stone-throwing children, and a mighty muppet chorus.
Jesus loves you like a naughty nurse, Jesus loves you like a Swinburne verse.
There's a little sproing sound buried in the rhythm mix that I like to listen for, it never fails to give me pleasure.
November 15 2008. I'm not going to post a link every time I finish a new StepRep Spokesmonster video. But you can follow his ongoing adventures over at Monster's Blog.
I was recently hired to create animated promotional videos for a local software development company called VendAsta. A few days ago we released what we thought was a harmlessly goofy cartoon to create a little buzz for a service called StepRep, whose target audience is real estate agents and home service providers. You can watch the cartoon, and then read the comment thread to see how pissed off people are about it, over at the real estate blog AgentGenius.com.
August 6 2008. The JimH Crossword Blog has just posted a very flattering interview with me, along with a link to the Garson Hampfield animation. I'm not really a crossword guy, but JimH's site makes me long to sit down with a plate of toast, a cup of tea, and the Sunday Times.
(...This is now an external link.)
...for a job in the "arts industry"
March 18 2008. I'm posting this update from Olin's apartment in Houston, Texas. I've been down here for six weeks already, and it'll probably be another six weeks before I come home. I haven't really been conducting any band-related business - it's been an uninterrupted hiatus from responsibility - but I did take the time to upload some old video footage from our performance at the 2005 Weinstein Follies show in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. Please enjoy:
Olin, Michael Russell, and your bearded correspondent.
November 22 2007. Kinda late notice, but if you find yourself in Vonda, Saskatchewan tomorrow night (Friday, November 23rd), you should drop by Sig's Place and join the small get-together which we will be hosting in the back room. It's the world premiere party for our music video You're not the one and director Jay Arnold's birthday. We'll be playing some rock-n-roll and posing for suggestive pictures with the big moose head on the wall.
September 30 2007. A few years back I wrote the script for a short film entitled Haunting Simon. Pretty simple little story about a depressed ghost and her nose-picking, porn-addicted boyfriend. Last summer Jay and I filmed the fifteen-minute movie with Kendra Anderson in the role of the ghost and some homely dude in the role of Simon. Of course, fifteen minutes is too long to post on YouTube, so now we're trying to figure out what to do with the sucker. Maybe re-edit it to get it down under ten minutes.
An unfinished video for "Theme from Teen Wolf Too".
