*** 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.
The lost "Sea Captain" music video, directed by Ray Statham.
January 27 2010. We spent the first half of January working with Troy Mamer and Steve Barss to put together a cardboard puppet show to accompany the Song of Syracuse, which we peformed on January 16 as part of the LUGO arts carnival at the Mendel Art Gallery. There's video of the event, but I haven't had a chance to get it online yet. Maybe next month.
Meanwhile we've been busy. Our old drummer Dean was visiting from his current home in Scotland, so between trips to Tim Horton's we propped him up behind his dusty drumkit in Andrew's basement and forced him to flail along with some of our new material. Alas, no recordings were made.
Also I received a welcome surprise in the mail. Artist Ray Statham sent me a copy of a forgotten music video for our song The band known as Sea Water Bliss, which we made as a lark back in 2008 while I was visiting him in North Vancouver. Now it's on YouTube.
December 8 2009. In my last update I described our preparations for shooting a low-budget time-lapse music video in Vonda, Saskatchewan. It all came off quite nicely. Here's our friend and volunteer binder-flipper Joe being molested by a couple female extras:
So thanks again to everyone who showed up. You can watch the video on YouTube, or you can click over to the page for our song Clowns.
November 26 2009. As I briefly mentioned a few weeks back, we've got a video shoot coming up...this Saturday, in fact. I was a little hesitant to promote it until I was sure everything was squared away, but it looks like the corners are lining up neatly. Knock wood.
I've been calling this event Flipapalooza and it will combine the best elements of a video shoot, a raucous party, and an evening spent flipping through binders. Essentially I've edited the entire video in advance, printed each frame out, and separated the pages into binders. On Saturday night we're going to prop the binders in front of a camera and flip through the pages in sequence while the party goes on in the background. Then we'll speed up the video to match the song, and voila! - by an extremely inefficient route we'll have arrived back at the video I've already edited.
Who knows if it'll work. Anyway, if you want to hang out and watch us work, come on out to Sig's Place in Vonda, Saskatchewan, at 8 PM on Saturday, November 28. I'd provide an address, but as Vonda's main street is only one block long, Sig's Place is kinda hard to miss.
Also, we've signed up for a thing at the Mendel Art Gallery on January 16. It's called LUGO and from what little I've gleaned, it promises to be a cavalcade of bafflement and whatzitry. More on this as it evolves; meanwhile you can check out the post on my personal blog.
November 11 2009.
Remembrance Day already! The snow will be falling soon. It's been a pretty slow year once again, which Andrew and I squandered workin' nine-to-five like ordinary chumps. We are contemplating another video shoot in the coming weeks...but I'll withhold details for now, don't want to jinx it.
Meanwhile, to help out a friend of mine from work, I created a promotional comic for his band Sexy Mathematics, who've just released their debut EP. I'll send you over to my personal blog to have a gander and learn more.
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:
For previous updates to this page, click here.
July 4 2009. I thought my cartooning fame had run its course, but I was recently contacted by the Australian propietor of a website called Word-Buff.com for an interview about my more charismatic other half. (No, I'm not referring to Andrew, though of course he is quite charismatic, but to Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker.)
Drunken firemen, stone-throwing children, and a mighty muppet chorus.
Banjoriffic!
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"
