Still hear it. Try again. Nope, that didn’t work. I can still hear it. Try something else. No, no – that’s worse!
Oh, hi. Yeah, still working on mastering, but there’s this bloody tick-tick-tick that’s coming up through the floorboards or from behind the drywall (not that we have drywall) and it’s seeping into the works somehow. Sounds like a freaking metronome, and god knows we don’t use one of those. (I prefer to call it free-time rhythm, rubato, whatever.) Never realized how damned noisy this old mill was until I started trying to assemble an album within its dank, condemned brick walls. A word of advice: never master your own album! Hire some fucker. And here’s some more advice, free of charge: don’t live in a squat house (even if it was once a working hammer mill). You heard it here first. I think it’s all this squatting that’s wrecking my back. But anyway…
Our dear friend, mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, is getting settled into his old digs, up by the belfry. (Run for your life, Mitch! We don’t have a belfry!) Once we got 
his gear all packed away and his mad science experiments reconstructed to his satisfaction (there was the one with the bishop’s head transposed onto the body of a ginseng root…. not sure I want to know how that comes out), Mitch was ready to start ordering the help around. He started with Marvin (my personal robot assistant), which was a good choice, because that gave him the opportunity to see just how screwed around our mechanical friend’s mind had become since last Mitch saw him. I think there was a certain amount of shock involved. (Marvin isn’t properly grounded. I’ve talked to him about this a number of times.) Hopefully Mitch can work through Marvin’s serial issues. (No fruit loop jokes here – I can spell, even if you can’t.)
Got to tell you, though – this ticking is driving me mad! Maybe it’s because I’m so easily distracted. Not a natural mastering engineer, you know (not that anyone is), and I’ve been over this material a whole lot of times. Anyway, my tiny mind wanders at the smallest instigation, and before I know it another week has passed without product. 
Matt and John both know it’s my fault for signing on with Loathsome Prick Records – a label too cheap to pay for mastering. It’s getting so that the only one talking to me around this lousy place is Big Zamboola, and his conversation tends toward the tedious, to put the matter delicately. (Always going on about gravitation. I guess planets have kind of a rivalry going on that point – a “mine’s stronger than yours” sort of thing.) I mean, even the man-sized tuber is pissed off at me! (Not enough plant food in the watering can.) And the Lincolns prefer Booth, frankly.
So anyway – got to get back to it. Bloody ticking. Sounds strangely familiar. Not unlike the sound made by a certain variety of … of…. of…. explosive device. Mitch! We need to take one more look through that steamer trunk! And I mean NOW!
