Monday 30 April 2012

Use Your Eyes Mate (revised)

Hello friends,

Mr Donny Stax and myself released another song onto the interweb from our upcoming debut album 'Fine'. The new song we have put up for anyone to listen to is called 'Use Your Eyes Mate' and you can hear it right here right now by clicking on the little play button just underneath these words :)



This song is the 4th one we have made available from our upcoming album. The whole album is finished and will be hitting Itunes very soon. We have even cut a nice radio friendly version where any naughty swears have been reversed and turned into musical rainbows, and any drug references that are not sanctioned by the Drug Administration have been blurred out. George Orwell must be spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.

'Use Your Eyes Mate' was one of the most interesting sessions we had while making the album. It was a Saturday and a good friend of ours 'Mace' was coming to do a track with us. He was due about lunchtime, but I always tended to arrive about half ten. When I got to the studio that day, Donny was already building a beat. So I jumped in there and we started turning it into a song, adding bass and piano and plinky plonky sounds (as is my right as a plinky plonky enthusiast). The song was ready for vocals by half 12, so we sat and wrote vocals for it. Mace turned up about half 2, and by that time we had almost finished the track. We topped the vocals off quickly and then moved onto working on another new song with Mace, we produced the track 'Careless' (it's on our upcoming album). So 'Use Your Eyes Mate' was probably the fastest track we completed start to finnish, and it remains one of my favourite ones from the 'Fine' sessions.

I'm really excited to release the whole album and get some feedback, it was a blast to make and introduced me to a whole new world of music that had previously eluded me. It is a real pleasure to learn more about Hip Hop and it's world and I look forward to the adventures it has in store for me.

Thanks for reading my blog, I love you dearly.

Peace and infinite love

[adj] - Andy D Jackson xx


Thursday 26 April 2012

Ignore Them! (the answer to Occupy)

Hello friends and other lifeforms,

The Occupy movement is old news now for sure, but it is still going strong as I write this here blog. Many months after it's inception into the mainstream media it has now reached the heights of any movement, having been parodied in such greats as South Park. The movement itself spreads most of the way around the world, but it's heart is in Wall Street, the same place as the heart of the beast the movement is trying to destroy. So the corrupt financial world has let people cancer spread to it's heart, now I am no doctor but surely once cancer has got to the heart it must surely be game over time for the world. The 'occupy cancer' can be found all around the worlds body. The Occupy movement itself would prefer to think of itself as the cure to the financial cancer that has been killing the world for the past few hundred years. But if that's the case then I like to think of the Occupy movement as the scientist working on the cure for cancer. So the people in charge of curing the worlds cancer all live in tents...hmm, not a great start. Scientists need some kind of lab to study rather then a plastic sheet and a handful of leaflets.

2 V's from V for Vendetta having a camping
holiday in the centre of town
Ok, perhaps I am being a little harsh to the movement here, I should relax and see the benefits of this situation. I just can't help feeling like it's all one big self perpetuating machine, and the people are just cogs holding it all together. The financial crisis is as much a reaction to the idea of a crisis as it is an actual crisis. Take the current petrol crisis for example, there was the possibility of talks, and this possibility led to the media creating the panic, people didn't panic to begin with, but like dominoes they fall one by one, not wanting to be the one fool who didn't heed the warnings of the almighty media. The same is the case with the financial crisis, it is a load of old hookem bullshizzle that has been created by the very groups that will benefit from it the most. But people seem to lap it all up.

Now, there are many different proposed solutions to the problems at hand here that all involve some kind of new system to replace the old one. Great ideas they might be, but at any point if you try and take the castle from the kings, the kings won't just sit idle to the side and let you. No, they will fight to keep the castle. I think there is another way around this problem and I beg you all to consider this age old advice when faced with the next imaginary crisis.

Ignore them. Plain and simple, just ignore them. When they want to throw the toys out the pram, or kick and scream and fuss and fight, just do like our parents did when we went ape shit and started acting like the children we were, they ignored us until we stopped.

Financial crisis? What financial crisis? I don't see any. I'm just going to get on with my life and ignore it. Just like I ignore politics, the media and anyone that I don't like. It isn't ignorance, oh no, that's something very different, this is ignore-thems. I so often hear people saying 'They do this, or, They want me to do that', well I say, grow a pair and stop reacting to them and their invisible swords.

Ok, now just ignore this blog as your first test towards ignore-thems

Listen to this song now

Peace and infinite love

[adj] - Andy D Jackson

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Super positive affirmation blog

Hello friends,

I have been feeling pretty down in the dumplings of late (for various reasons that I will not go into here) and I can't help but feeling that this feeling is self perpetuating. The spiral of unhappitude goes down deep, a never ending staircase where each step down gets dirtier and dirtier, covered in more layers of grime and faecal matter. Now I'm going to turn this feeling around, it's time to start running up that imaginary staircase towards the uplifting orgasmic buzz of 'the top'.

Future instalments of this blog will slowly chart what I am about to outlay, it's going to happen spookily close to my affirmations and as each thing pings into existence I shall blog about it with the tenacity of a teenage girl showing their love for the Beibernator. I might even start video blogging, if I can get round the idea that people might actually be willing to sit through vids of me blabbering into the camera.

Okay, let's get on with this...

[adj] Positive Affirmation Mega Future 2012

1. Offers came in, music writing offers. Lot's of them, with money attached. As a song writer [adj] established himself as 'The Chorus Guy' for the dying industry. The industry threw money at him left right and centre to provide the catchy choruses that music was lacking.

2. Working with his crew, [adj] helped establish a collective of talented musician/writers who worked in the background, taking their cut of profits from their contracted work to others while working hard on their own musical projects.

3. 'Fine' sold much better then anyone expected and helped establish both Donny Stax & [adj] as artists.

4. [adj] moved to Amsterdam with his Beauty, Mr. Stax moved there too. They set up two studio's, one by Amsterdam forrest, and one in the centre of the city. They continued to release top notch music.

5. They all lived happily ever after

That will do for now, that sounds like the future I want for myself and my music. I don't care if lots of people buy my music as done by me, if they are willing to buy it when other artists do it, then so be it. I just want the monies now, it's been a long time and a lot of hard work. My last blog of december will be called 'They all lived happily ever after' in honour of the future I wrote for myself back here in April.

In summation it seems that I want to make a living from my creative expression, plain and simple. The money world might be collapsing, but it still exists for now, and I need me some of it.

Peace and infinite love

[adj] - Andy D Jackson

Monday 23 April 2012

Blog like nobodies reading...

Hello friends,

You there? Hello.... HELLO!!!!

Nope, no one's there, so I am safe to blog as if nobodies reading. I mean, hopefully there are people reading, but I never get much indication that there is. I never get a comment, haven't had one since the first few blogs I posted. Ok, I do sometimes get a comment when I link it on facebook, but that's a facebook comment and we all know that they are worth jack'o'little in comparison to an on blog comment.

I do get some thumbs up every now and then, which makes me smile...yes, that's how sad and loserish I am, I get happy for the thumb up, so happy that I take a screen shot of it and post it to all my friends. "Look guys, someone likes me!"...to which my friends click 'like' as well, and another smile graces my face(book). It is an infinite regress loop, one of ever increasing smiles and happitudes.

This is what my life has become, simple joys from my hours of labour. It's just like having a normal job, except I don't get paid, and don't have a boss that I need to secretly torture with various bodily excretions in her sandwiches. I have become an internet nerd, not even a very good one. I can't seem to get many views of my vids on youtube, no matter how good they are. I will never ever compare to finger biting Charlie, or that girl who really really likes cats, or someone who does impressions of famous things, or anyone that just talks into a camera about pointless muffin. I try to make thoughtful arty pieces, usually to go along with my music...but no one watches them!


See, was that video not clever? It threw all health and safety regulations to the wind and there was a very real chance I could have got seriously injured making it...I didn't, I was fine. The saddest part is, that if I had hurt myself and set fire to my clothes or one of the cats, it would have become an internet sensation. 'Watch this stupid idiot set himself on fire with burning toilet paper'...instead, I successfully pulled off my cheap to make backwards burning toilet paper stunt, and managed to get a tiny 260 views in 5 months while people line up around the block to watch the next shitpile video by some miming pop artist.

Ok, I should stop this moaning, I am just making myself look bitter...which I am, but I should try and give a better impression. Oh, no, wait, no ones reading this are they, so I might as well just write 'Blah blah blah' for the next blah blah blah

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blaaaah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blahhh, bblah, ahabl

Time to go work on another video project that no one will bother watching. Horray for me!

Peace and infinite blah

[adj] - Andy D Jackson

Wednesday 18 April 2012

how time flies when you're....you know

Hello friends,

I don't want to sound like an old geezer while I write this, but, doesn't time fly? I mean, come on! It seems like only yesterday that I was leaving school ready to face the world with all my super amazing GCSE's which proved I was capable of adding some numbers together, remembering some dates and knowing the difference between a bunsen burner and a text book (science lesson year 9, 'books are flammable and some of the ink used to print them is highly toxic when subjected to full power bunsen action').

Perhaps years of toxic text book sniffing did something to my internal clock. When I was a kid, I remember days feeling like they would never end. An hour felt like a mini eternity that was holding me back from achieving something really important like getting ice-cream or smashing up my brothers pirate fort with a hammer made of play dough. The green and red hammer of justice felt like it was forever locked in a time matrix from which it could never be freed to perform it's fort smashing duties. Waiting for anything for as little as 5 minutes felt like some biblical trial of endurance, as if God herself were casting me into the pit of eternal suffering.

Where did that eternity go? What the funk happened here?
Cast into memory, along with everything else. Life happens and you can't slow it down. Also, as each year of life comes and goes, it feels like it's getting faster and faster. As if you are test driving a super awesome car (add your own model, make, fancy car image here) and at the beginning the course seems confusing and long, so for the first few laps (years) you take it slowly, learning the corners and sharp turns, getting to grips with the controls and the different weather conditions. Once those first sixteen laps are done, you are forced to press on the accelerator, and with each lap press harder and harder until the whole course is a blur and you forget which lap you're on. If you are lucky enough to reach 70 or 80 laps then you really start losing control of the car, bits start falling off, leaks occur, but the accelerator stays firmly pressed against the floor, getting faster and faster. To round off this analogy the car either runs out of petrol and screeches to a halt, or control is lost and the car is smashed into a wall.

Ahh, what a beautiful metaphor. Anyway, there was reason behind all this pontificating, it has been five years since I released my first proper album. I was 25 at the time, with the second half of my twenties all gleaming in front of me. Fame, fortune, success, riches, bitches and extreme living...err, hmm. What happened? None of that stuff, the fame and fortune and stuff. None of that happened, instead the album just disappeared into the ether with all the other albums made by unknown artists. I wish my story was a unique one, but it isn't. In fact, it's a way more common story for musicians then stories of riches and success. So for the past 5 years I have continued to work, putting out free music on the internet, doing podcasts of music, playing in the streets, doing gigs, blah blah blah...

Now I sit waiting for my second proper album to release...will it be the same story?

Peace and infinite love to you all

[adj] - Andy D Jackson

Sunday 15 April 2012

In the Cyber-Space Between Us

So friends,

We live in an age of communication, an age where almost everyone on the planet can have access to as much information as they could possibly jam into their face holes at any given moment. Right this second I have access to more information then any library within a hundred miles of me, in fact, all them libraries and all them librarians put together would still not be more information then I have access to right at my finger tips. On top of that, the libraries don't have hours and hours of amusing cat videos for me to watch, or people fighting on the bus, or transcripts from some dodgy underground radio interview with the Devil herself, no, the library ain't got Jack on the internet. In fact, they all have internet points in the damn libraries now.

A map of the whole internet! Wow, it's colourful!
So with this much information available, why would I ever need to turn on a TV again? Why would I need to read the world as filtered through advertised puppet media? Why do I need to be shown the stream of masturbatory adverts jacking off their pointless products all over my face? ... the answer, I don't. I have access to the internet.


The Cyber-space between all people, that intervoid, the melting pot of ideas from the truly inspired to the tired and old raggedy ideas that would be better left behind the fridge chilling with the defrosted sausage rolls from last years big cook out. The internet connects us all, and lets us be a version of ourselves. And the system don't like it, because we have taken charge of who we are and are putting our views across. Oops, system shouldn't a gone done that! Now we all have an opinion, and we all can voice it. And we do, on any subject that we like. You can search the internet for anything from Jellyfish lovers to Hotsauce haters and you will find at least one fanpage, two hundred dedicated videos and a blog from the president of Jellyfish Hotsauce magazine. That guy blogs about everything, but mainly Jellyfish, and sometimes Hotsauce, and sometimes both in the same article.

Sometimes the internet can be just as dividing as it can bonding. For example, you may have many facebook friends, but how many of them would you stop and talk to in the street if you saw them?
It's so easy to click 'like', or leave a little comment, but life is more then a series of likes and comments.
It is important to keep both an online life and a real world life going, because the internet doesn't always help in face to face contact situations. When you have to converse with another human being it can be quite important to be able to string a correct sentence together, something that internet condensed language doesn't always help with.

The picture for our next song 'In the Cyber-Space Between Us'
So go read a book, free online, there are millions of them, some of them are probably really good as well. I don't have any to reccomend, coz I'm to busy watching funny cat videos and reading Jellyfish Hotsauce blogs. Now How Bout That!

Time for levitating cows...

It's song time, as is the tradition with this little blog of mine, and this track is from Donny Stax & [adj]'s upcoming album 'Fine'. This song is all about the internet! just like the silly blog you just wasted a few minutes of your life reading.

Please have a listen and like and comment!


Peace and infinite love

[adj] - Andy D Jackson

Tuesday 10 April 2012

Global Yawning (the true effect of Global Warming)

Hello friendilineeeees,

I hope you have been having a good time lately, coz life can be a bit of a bastard when it wants to be. This year especially seems to be testing everyone I know to their limits to see if we are worthy of staying on this planet when the liberation army comes from the sky....((what? should I not have mentioned that! I thought we had told the humans that the space army were coming to free them?...well, why not?...they have a right to know, it's their planet after all...what? It isn't theirs?! whose is it then?...oh right, well, I am in the middle of blogging at the moment so could you leave me alone for a bit...yes, I will be up for dinner...look please, I'm trying to write here and all I have written is my stupid conversation with you King Jesus,... gheeze ))

Anyway, hopefully that little crazy aside there will have got rid of anyone that accidentally stumbled across the blog and is not prepared for what I am about to say next...

err...the Earth is on fire! Quick
call the space fire brigade 
Global warming is a scam, a big fat corporate scam to make the little people of the world think that they can actually have some effect on the eco system of the planet. We can't, it's freakin' impossible. Now, I don't mean EVERYONE here, I mean the average joe public, the ones that buy a bag for life and recycle their packaging in order to slow the melting of the ice caps. Joe public has no effect on the atmosphere of this planet...big corporations and weapons testing on the other hand, now that screws the pooch.

I am not a scientist, but I have had conversations with Mother Earth while tripping my balls off, so I have it from a reliable source that everything on this planet is just fine. She explained it to me like how a parent would raise their children. When the children are young, they have little to no regard for their environment, in fact, they like to mess it up, throw things around, break things and generally be as messy as they can...Parents might try to keep order in the beginning, but after a few years of relentless toy throwing, food up noses and make up used to decorate walls, parents have little choice but to give in and let the chaos rule. If the parent doesn't give in, the child will never learn through experimentation, they will become little book trained robots incapable of making decisions for themselves and blindly following the silly rules of the outdated elite. The child becomes a tool rather then a free thinking individual. The parent themselves become objects of experimentation through which to learn the world and they suffer for it. Once a woman gives birth, her body changes in many ways. Mother Earth is the parent in this little analogy, and we humans are the children throwing things about.

Mother Earth, oh yeah, what a MILF!
Children grow up, just as we are trying to do as a species. When the child is old enough, it leaves home and goes out to make something of itself. The parent has ambivalent feelings about this, both missing and applauding their child's efforts as they go out and explore. Mother Earth feels that way about us humans, it's time for us to leave the nest, go out into the stars and make something of ourselves. We have been sitting at home on our computers for too long, we are starting to collectively become a loser forty year old that still lives at home always taking out of the fridge but never stocking it back up again.

Mother Earth will be sad when we leave, but she still wants us to go, for our sake as well as hers. We have been taking from the fridge too long, she needs to replenish it, since we won't.

Here is a little song I quickly rustled up about it...coz that's what I do, rather then trying to save the planet. You can download it for free if you like, no pressure, just saying you can as all.


So there you go, my completely non scientific take on the global warming problem. I just hope we can get off of mum before she goes into menopause and starts hurling furniture at us.

Peace and infinite love

[adj] - Andy D Jackson xx


Sunday 8 April 2012

'Live Up There' on the radio and video...and itunes!

Hello friends,

Last week on Sunday the 1st of April, 'Live Up There' by Donny Stax & [adj] was played on BBC Radio Sussex Introducing show. The show goes out every Sunday evening from 7 till 9, or 19:00 to 21:00 for 24 hour clock enthusiasts (you know who you are). It was the first time that one of our songs has been played on radio, and both Mr Stax and myself were extremely excited to hear our little tune about space on the airwaves, so excited in fact that we sat through the entire two hour show taking the pickles out of all the other music on there ("listen to this shitstain, gheeze, they think they are adding something to the musical experience by copying the Kings of Leon?! FFS! Learn another chord before you start committing your droolish hampster urine music to record").

Oh how we laughed, for it makes one feel good to belittle and degrade others in the same line of work, just to make oneself feel as if they have achieved something more special then all the other people around them doing the same thing. We HAD of course, coz we was on da mutha flickin' radio yall!...just like all the other musicians we were sitting and ripping, but unlike all the other musicians, we were the best...uh hum.

You can hear the show on the link below, I have set it to start where our song is so you don't have to sit and take the pickles out of all the music before our track, you can just take some pickles out on our song for your own amusement instead.
Listen to it right here - It will start where we appear :)

Now obviously we are amazing, otherwise we wouldn't have been selected to be on the radio, I mean, come on, they don't just let any old rubbish on the airwaves do they?...oh, wait, wait, err...yeah they do don't they, they let on all that crap we laughed about before our tune...hmmmm, I expect all the other musicians listening in probably ripped on our song as much as we ripped on theirs, probably more so, I mean, I distinctly remember complimenting one or two of the other songs for actually having something to add to the musical world that Radiohead hadn't already ripped off of Bjork.

Oh well, such is life I guess.

Anyway, there were a few texts and emails in to the show after our song that sung our praises...we had nothing to do with that...honestly...unless you count texting and emailing all of our friends and making them email in for us (well, Mr Stax did, I didn't have any credit to text, and no friends either). Much amusement was had making the presenter read out my soundcloud address http://soundcloud.com/productsofmonkeylove
so we made sure she got a message to read it out again before the end of the show, you can never hear the words 'Products of Monkey Love' on the radio too often.

The emails to the show didn't stop once the show was over, oh no, they continued for sure, because on Thursday we got an email saying that we would be on the show again this week! Today in fact (8/4/2012 or 4/8/2012 if you are American). So further radio exposure for our tune is happening :D
((If you are reading this at any time after the day it was published then please ignore this paragraph as it will be contextually out of phase with your current time matrix, you my friend are in the future, well done, you made it).))

The single is also now available to buy on itunes http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/live-up-there-single/id516440827 for just a little bit of currency...go on, you read the stupid blog, might as well buy the stupid tune as well :D

And finally, I made a little video to go with the song as well, we had originally planned to make a big elaborate green screen affair with spaceships and aliens and amazing futuristic animation that would make your eyes melt and your brain bleed out of your ears...but the Men in Black came and informed us that we were not allowed to do this as it would have profound effects on humanities evolution and could possibly lead to the Cats taking over the planet. So instead I made a less brainbleeding video using old copyright free video material...and here it is...



So now all we need is some national radio play, then some international radio play, then some inter planetary radio play and we will be well on our way to being the most successful musical collaboration in the history of the galaxy, bigger then 'Lxxx-r%£@ee-4737' from the Doofer nebula. The spooky part is that we are already getting offers from Orion to go do a tour there...we have asked for Oxygen in our rider...they haven't got back to us yet.

Thanks for stopping by,

[adj] - Andy D Jackson xx



Sunday 1 April 2012

Money Zombies

Hello frienduladi's

I am in a bit of a pickle, not literally, there is no such thing as a man sized hollow pickle that could contain me, and even if there was such a giant mystical pickle, I would not climb into it in order to write a blog, that would be just silly, literally!

Anyway, the metaphorical pickle I find myself in is a financial one, and given the state of the money market at the moment, I don't think I'm the only one. As you may already be aware if you follow my blog, I have been working hard on my passion of music, and it really is hard work at times, in fact it can be very frustrating at times, for one main reason relating to income/outcome.

If you work in an office for either a big faceless company or a small company with a face, you are compensated for the hours of time you dedicate to furthering the agenda with a wage cheque once a month. A chunk of this will be taken before you see it and given to the government to be redistributed to the armed forces, who will spend it on bombs to kill people far far away. The rest of it, is yours, to spend on vital survival things and non-vital entertainment things. Although I have classed these things as non-vital, they are important to help one maintain a life worth living. If you couldn't go for a few drinks after work at the end of the week, it would only be so long before the twelve gauge shotgun was pointed at the managers face and unique manager brain wallpaper gave the office a more 'grizzly' look. Now I am all in favour of radical redecoration techniques, but this could be taking it just a little too far. So, we are given the wage cheque to keep the murder rates down.

I have been without a wage cheque for quite some time now, coming up for a year. The big plus of this is that I don't have to drag myself out of bed to go and sit in an office and pretend to work for eight hours a day. I was getting close to shot gun territory towards the end. The downside is that I have no money whatsoever. Not a bean to my name, baked or otherwise.

I do however, have loads of songs that I've written, loads and loads of them. It's a long shot, but what is life if you can't aim outside your reach, just treading the boards day in day out to service a cause that ultimately only has your attention because it provides you with the beer money (and the shotgun money should you get to that point). I have worked hard on these songs, spending many hours every day playing my instrument (oooh errr, you dirty minded thing you!) and writing lyrics to go with them once I've strummed out a new one. I've paid my dues too with it, playing in the streets in front of indifferent strangers and lolly-gaggers, belting songs by other more well established artists then me in the hope that someone will be compelled to throw a coin or two in my hat. I've done it on the streets, literally, with the literal meaning of literally in place, rather then the literally overused 'literally' when being metaphorical in writing or speech. So now I could do with some money, for my work you know...

Rather then asking a company for that money, I am asking the people, the other poor souls such as myself who live in the real world, not the plastic covered dull lifeless 'reality' painted by the media, to possibly give a few pennies to a struggling artist. Don't cry for me, your tears won't help me, but your money will...click here to be whisked to itunes to purchase a track...

Okay, my pleas are done, I won't badger you for more money anymore, instead I will give you something free to listen to, because that's the kinda guy I am, a giving one, with a beard.

I think this song speaks for itself, so I won't write any waffle to go with it.
Money Zombies by [adj] - Andy D Jackson

Peace and infinite love to you

[adj] - Andy D Jackson xx