Penal Colony

Last night was the 30th anniversary of Penal Colony’s first show. Good thing Chris Lyons capped it!
🤯🤯🤯

This guy sitting next to Jason is our buddy Ian McLendon. Ian fronted a really great band from the I.E. back in the day called Fun Truckin’ With Jesus. We played many shows with them, and they were among the bands in that scene I always looked forward to playing with. He’s been tight with Jason Chris and Andy going back to Texas Vamps days. Jason has remained friendly with him and his wife, Sophia.

Ian got into a terrible accident with Sophia on the 91 freeway in LA a few weeks ago. Sophia lost her life, and it left Ian in a coma up until a few days ago.

In addition to the hospital bills, he’s going to find himself in a very tenuous and complicated family situation when he leaves the hospital, and he’s going to need help he can get.

His family setup a gofundme to help him. Me and the guys in PC have decided to pledge 100% of all our Bandcamp profits from “Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994” to Ian’s gofundme, from now until he can get back on his feet.

If you’d like to help our Brother, buy the album on Bandcamp, or donate directly to his gofundme below.

Thanks all.
Dee, Jason, Chris & Andy

https://www.gofundme.com/f/26mlehn500

In contrast to the "Anaheim Trailerpark" recordings, the "Brea Rehearsal Space" demos from "Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994" was the first time we attempted to print anything we had going on to tape - VHS tape, to be specific - in a formal manner. More on the VHS tape part later.

We had our first show at Spanky's in Riverside on Halloween in 1991, which will be 29 years ago this Saturday, I'm just now realizing. By early '92, we were creeping out of our Inland Empire shell, expanding to book shows in Hollywood and were getting asked by bookers for things like demos and press kits. It was time to do some recording.

Being almost 30 years ago, the sequence of events are fuzzy. But somewhere around this time, I got to talking to our old friend Michael Hateley about how to set about recording a demo. I have long abhorred doing anything in a proper studio, even those days. Then and now, I have only been in a proper one to record anything twice in my entire life. Never been comfortable working in them, I avoid them like the plague. So I was trying to figure out with Michael how we could do it without having to go into a studio.

We took inventory of what we had. Andy, Chris and Jason already had this awesome rehearsal space from Vamps days, in a sleepy little business park, nested in the equally sleepy town of Brea in Orange County, which we continued to use as PC. Hateley figured we could do basic tracking there.

The next problem was equipment. We knew we wanted to track it as live as possible, and keep overdubs to a minimum, which meant we were going to need a 16 track, mayyybe get by with a 8 track recorder to make it work, plus mics, cables... Tape... Ampex 1 or 2 inch tape alone was/is super expensive... and everything else. We were still living in the days of analog multitracks, and no one was going to rent us an 8 or 16 track Otari long enough to record what we needed to record to 4 kids with no money.

Despite all of this, somehow, our timing couldn't have been better. Our saving multitrack angel came in the form of a company called Alesis, who, up to then, was known for making inexpensive effects processors and mixers, not much else. Literally months before we started thinking about recording a demo, they did something that completely transformed the recording industry at the time. They introduced an 8 track recorder, enclosed in a 4 space rack case, that recorded 8 tracks of 16 bit, 48k digital audio to VHS tape. They called it the ADAT. Not only could this thing record 8 tracks of digital audio, you could link up to something like 3 or 4 together, giving everyone access to something only very expensive studios could provide - 24 tracks of digital audio recording. And it was cheap. Much cheaper than any equivalent analog 8 track, and the only digital multitracks produced at that point were these 24 and 48 track beasts Sony made, which cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The next bit of great fortune came with OUR angel in black clothing and tats, Michael Hateley. At the time, Hateley was working for a company in Hollywood that rented out high end recording equipment to all of the big studios in town. Turns out even big studios need to rent additional equipment for recording projects now and then, and when they did, they'd go to this company Hateley worked for to get it. As luck would have it, his company had_just gotten some ADATs in, and he could set us up with one or two in order to record. Renting 2 of them was still too prohibitively expensive for the aforementioned 4 kids with no money, so we had to settle for renting a single ADAT, plus all of the gear to run it, from Brother Mike. We rented it for 2 or 3 days, and Hateley would run the session.

Now, we had the gear, we had access to the gear for several days, so why bother recording 4 songs for a demo, when we could record our entire set? And if we could record our entire set, maybe we could just put out our own album? The last part still felt pretty lofty, because, you know, we were poor, but the recording of the entire set felt attainable.

Without boring you with all of the gory details, we technically only had 7 of the 8 tracks to record to, because we needed to dedicate one of them to a SMPTE track. To facilitate recording live drums/bass/guitar on 7 tracks, we came up with some clever techniques to augment our number of tracks through recording the overflow as live MIDI data into my Atari 1040st computer. It all worked beautifully.

Once we had everything tracked, the next problem was mixing. We didn't have the gear necessary to give this material we just tracked the love it deserved. Enter guardian angel Hateley once again. Turned out, this place he worked at, that rented out the fancy recording gear, also had an equally fancy demo room, with a really nice mixing console and tons of outboard effects. Mike arranged for us to use it after hours, over a couple weekends. After 2 long weekends, it was all done. Fast forward several months, we got it into the hands of several labels, Cleopatra got a copy, and the rest, as they say...

This here is a track from those sessions that none of us had listened to since it was recorded, completely forgot it was even a song we wrote or played in our set. None of us remember exactly why it fell out of the set and the PYHD recording sessions later on, but it did. We all loved hearing it again, and we were all happy to be able to share it with all of you.

It's the one called "Serpentine":

https://penalcolony.bandcamp.com/track/serpentine-brea-rehearsal-space-demo

My old pal Heresy with Adz on MMH - The Home Of Rock Radio gave the sons of the P to the C some love on his show Saturday night. You can find it as a podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite Android podcast app!

Heresy with Adz 24.10.2020 Goth Industrial Post Punk Listen to the pdocast of the latest Heresy on MMH The Home Of Rock Radio. Goth Industrial Post Punk Alternative

After decades of promises, it's finally here. "Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994" is available NOW on Bandcamp and all of your favorite steaming outlets! Recordings by the original lineup, made available for the first time.

"Anaheim Trailerpark" demos - These are the last recordings we did as a group. Recorded on a 4 track at Jason's mobile home in a trailerpark in Anaheim

"S. P. D. T. T. S. F. W. R." - A one-off we did for a Reconstriction comp recorded on a 4 track in my bedroom in Garden Grove

"Brea Rehearsal Space" demos - Early recordings done in our practice space in Brea, done with Michael Hateley on a single ADAT 8 track

"Laurel Canyon" demos - Early 5 Man Job recordings done at my sister's house in Laurel Canyon, on a single Tascam DA-88 8 track.

The "Instrumental" tracks are basically the Jason and Justin show. The first group is everything Jason would perform from his DrumKat live. At some point, Jason recorded what he did to DAT as a backup, so what you hear in these is everything he would play from samplers via his DrumKat. The "5MJ Live" instrumentals are slightly different. These are playback arrangements used by Justin Bennett (he of Skinny Puppy fame) when we did the 5 Man Job tour. 10 tracks of fun artifacts for the DJs and remixers/producers.

More details about these recordings to come in later posts!

https://penalcolony.bandcamp.com/releases

https://open.spotify.com/album/7xAFQDkyYHosiZL2esVQpS?si=wzPAV6XBS4WRtocRNiPWVA

https://music.apple.com/us/album/exhibitions-in-survival-demos-1992-1994/1536037747

Exhibitions In Survival: Demos 1992-1994, by Penal Colony 30 track album