It’s finally done.

You can download the whole album - for free - from the Bandcamp page here.

If you’re a music nerd, get the deluxe edition instead - you’ll not only get the 24 songs that make up the normal version of the record - in a more dynamic, less compressed mix, no less - but also 22 demos and old recordings which without, this album wouldn’t have been a tenth as… good? Whatever you think it is.

If you want to chuck a few dollars my way, use the deluxe link and write in whatever you want. They’re both free, anyway.

When I started recording the songs that would make up this record, back in mid-2010, I thought whether I make a single dollar from it or not, whether a single person cares or not, it doesn’t matter. This would be my ’statement’, my big ‘fuck you’ to anyone and everyone who ever said the same to me. Probably in more polite words, like, ‘Dude, you can’t sing. No offence.’

I know that already.

But I like to think whatever my technical limitations, I can write like a motherfucker, and this is what this album is about - well, not really, ’cause it’s actually about a dude who’s injured in a car crash and rebuilt as a cyborg who embarks on a career in politics - but you know what I mean.

I write songs. I write a lot of songs. I didn’t realise this until quite recently. So many others waste their talents not writing songs.

No, I can’t play a scale, fingerpick or carry much of a melody without technological help (how ironic, considering the album’s subject matter), but I can put together a tune, write a lyric and make it work. At least, I think I can, or I’ve really made a huge mistake in even attempting to single-handedly write and record a double album whilst holding down a fulltime job, being a dad and husband, and dealing with insomnia.

Not that I had insomnia when this thing kicked off. It’s been the fucking bane of my life since about May or June 2011, and probably the #1 reason why the album isn’t quite the knockout blow it could be if I had, you know, perfect health, Abbey Road studios at my disposal, sessions musicians like Matt Bellamy and Martin Gore, and Dangermouse manning the mixing desk. And some friends at the NME or whatever.

That, and you know, I can’t play any of it live, haha. I’m not much of a technical musician (what, you didn’t guess?) and half the songs - particularly the older ones - I had to teach myself how to play them from old demos, badly-scanned sheets of stained A4, etc. It lead to some hilarious fuckups where I’d literally record an entire backing track, only to realise when it came to doing the vocals, I’d got the chords completely wrong.

Anyway… I was obviously horrendously optimistic in my thoughts the strength of the material itself would catapult me to megastardom, without promotion, playing live, being able to sing properly etc…

The first problem, from the perspective of the record itself, was ‘The Car Crash’. Personally, I think it’s one of the best songs on the record, but with a catch - I just can’t sing the damn thing, no matter how much technology I throw behind the vocal. A few months after it was released I re-uploaded it with a slightly re-arranged mix, but kept the same vocal. If I ever redo one of the songs off this album, this will be the first in line.

Most of the songs up until about ‘All Up To You’ had been mostly done well in advance, and it was around that song’s release that things began to fall apart with my health - insomnia isn’t the joke it’s usually made out to be. To be honest, Fight Club probably got closest, as ridiculous as that sounds. Don’t worry, I don’t have access to high explosives. Or massive amounts of soap. And I can’t fight.

Deus Ex Robotica was largely based on a previous attempt at recording the story of the cyborg politician mentioned above. I uploaded it to the internet in early 2007, and it’s atrocious compared to this version, haha. But the best part about redoing it was that it was now a double, so I got to include a whole lot of new songs - my favourite being ‘Except’.

Its ‘four-to-the-floor’ sounds obscures it, but personally I feel it’s one of my strongest compositions. I wrote most of it in 2001, and it spent almost a decade as an acoustic dirge with a few orchestral elements, until its radical reinvention last year.

So that’s a highlight, followed up by probably the worst song on the record, haha, ‘Voting On Zero’.

‘All Up To You’ is one of those songs where I wish I had Chris Martin on hand to sing it. Just sing it, mind you - not write the words.

Insomnia and general laziness aren’t the only things to blame for the record taking slightly longer than normal, though. In February 2011 I took part in FAWM - February Album Writing Month - and decided to stave off any problems with lyrics by just writing every song about the greatest TV show in history, LOST.

I hit a vein of something awesome, so have spent much of the past year working on a concept album about LOST - I kid you not - whilst working on this Deus Ex Robotica concept album, haha. Fuck, it’s like I think I’m Rick Wakeman or something.

Anyway, this new stuff is very electronic, and that kind of bled into Deus Ex Robotica, mostly on ‘Left Out’, which was something I’d had lying around in acoustic guitar form for years.

This blog entry is dragging on, isn’t it? Well, this song - ‘He’s Gone Too Far’ might be appropriate. ‘Drinking my wine…..’ Perhaps the only song which celebrates a few wines, whilst at the same time laments ‘64kb errors’ and attempts to cross the early Beatles with Devo.

And ‘Tabula Rasa’ probably has the best production of any track on the record, and considering it’s one of the last done, that bodes well for the future! Woot woot.

“So, what is this future?” I pretend you ask. It’s here: Dharma Police. At least for now.

If you’ve taken the time to listen to Deus Ex Robotica in any capacity, or read this far into this rather self-involved and wanky blog entry, thank you. This is why people like me keep doing stuff like this.

If I decide to isolate the Dharma Police moniker to ’80s-inspired electronic pop about LOST, then Radio Over Moscow will be back as soon as I get the guitar out again.

If however, Dharma Police blows up big-time and I have cocaine on tap, etc, fuck knows what will happen. I’ll probably buy bouncy castles for everyone who’s ever paid to hear a song of mine!

So! Here’s the top 10 albums of 2011 that I heard, listened to properly, and enjoyed. To be honest, I spent more time this past year listening to podcasts and remasters of old albums… hence why my top few most-listened to artists of the year (according to Last.fm) included REM, Suede and the Smashing Pumpkins…

(I haven’t heard the Black Keys’ latest one yet, but from what I have heard on TV and the radio, it sounds pretty cool.)

1. The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar
2. Ryan Adams - Ashes and Fire
3. Duran Duran - All You Need Is Now
4. The King of Limbs - Radiohead
5. Young Galaxy - Shapeshifting
6. Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
7. Yacht - Shangri La
8. Battle Circus - S/T
9. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds - S/T
10. DangerMouse & Daneile Luppi - Rome

So what else was there?

My top 10 most-listened to albums of 2011, according to last.fm were:

1. Blonde Redhead - Penny Sparkle (2010)
2. Duran Duran - All You Need Is Now
3. The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar
4. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
5. Beady Eye - Different Gear, Still Speeding
6. Duffy - Endlessly
7. Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream (1993)
8. Michael Giacchino - Lost, Season 3 soundtrack (2007)
9. Manics - Postcards from a Young Man (2010)
10. Miles Kane - Colour of the Trap

Hope you like it!

The previous 17 tracks from ‘Deus Ex Robotica’ available here.

I know I’ve been a bit slow in getting it out, but it’s been a bitch of a track to complete - art is abandoned, never finished as they say - and I’ve had a lack of time. Hopefully I can get the album completed by the end of the year!

\m/

Listen with the widgety thing below!

And a reminder - if you’ve missed a track or two from the album so far, they’re all available here - now in remastered form! Some of the tracks - most noticeably The Car Crash and It’s Not Worth The Pain - have been significantly remixed too, with vast improvements.

In ‘Ghosts’, our hero’s plan begins to unravel.

Hope you like it!

If you’ve missed a track or two so far, they’re all available here - now in remastered form! Some of the tracks - most noticeably The Car Crash and It’s Not Worth The Pain - have been significantly remixed too, with vast improvements.

If you’ve missed a track or two so far, they’re all available here.

In ‘All Up To You’, our hero begins to understand the level of pressure he’s under not to screw everything up.

Why post it here, and not to them directly? Trust me, I’ve tried letting them know - via phone, Twitter, and even a formal complaint through their formal complaints process, and nothing gets done and usually, no one gets back to me - in fact, as you’ll see if you read on, it’s as if they’re actively trying to be the worst possible phone and internet provider in history.

I’ll start at the beginning, ’cause why the hell not. Saw these posters for Orcon around work, offering this great deal for employees of my particular workplace and thought hey, why not. It’s a chance to finally cut the cord with Telecom and support a smaller company - not to mention save about $40 a month.

Switched over just fine, a lot easier than I expected actually, and noticed a speed boost right away. Our speed was literally double what it was when we were with Telecom. Yay! For now, it seemed like we’d made a great decision.

Until it was time to move house.

I called Orcon three weeks before we moved to organise getting the internet and phone switched to our new house (they say to give them at least 10  days’ notice). The woman I spoke to sounded unsure of what she was doing, so I was a little suspicious that perhaps the move hadn’t been done properly. I used to work in a call centre, and can usually tell when I’m being dicked around or the person isn’t doing their job properly.

So I called back to speak to someone else, just get to get them to check it was all organised and ready to go for moving day - May 13. They assured me it was all ready to go, and would be switched over on the day. Alright, I was just being paranoid, and so far so good.

Moving day was a Friday. On the Tuesday beforehand, I called Orcon just to double check everything was still good - the person I spoke to said yes, it will all be connected up on Friday. Alrighty then.

This is where it all starts falling apart. On Thursday night I got a text message from Orcon saying the connection was all ready to go - on Wednesday, May 18. Umm, what?

Called Orcon the next morning whilst in the middle of trying to move house, spoke to several different people who all blamed Telecom subsidiary Chorus, saying a Chorus contractor changed the details of the connection the night before, and none of them knew why.

Nor were any of them willing to call Chorus, or give me the number to do so - so I called Telecom, got a number for Chorus, which no one ever answered. I’d almost prefer that to what Orcon was about to put me through.

Orcon promised a team manager would call back - none did that day (this would soon become a theme).  I eventually gave up on getting some kind of answer out of Orcon, because while unpacking we found a 2degrees mobile stick, which would do the job until Wednesday.

To my surprise, a manager did call back this once - sometime on the weekend, Saturday I think. They couldn’t do anything, so it was a waste of my cellphone battery anyway.

On Wednesday, there’s still no phone or internet.  Called them when I got home from work, just after 5pm, and they said it was connected - but some doohickey needed to be activated before it would live - and the team that had to do that had already gone home.

On Thursday, I called Orcon about lunchtime. They told me it still hadn’t been activated. The call centre person went away for 10 minutes, came back and said it was done.

You can probably guess now, it wasn’t. Still no phone or internet. Once I got home from work, I called Orcon, got a guy who asked me the dumbest questions - like, ‘Have you turned your modem on and off?’ as if that would fix the lack of phone. Wouldn’t put me through to a manager (to this day, I’m yet to successfully be put through to a manager).

Eventually he said it must be a Telecom/Chorus issue, so would send someone around to take a look - but it could take another week! WTF.

It was at this point I sent in a formal complaint, using the process on their website - a week ago - and I’m yet to hear back from them about that, not even an email (or text, ha) of acknowledgement.

On Friday they informed me someone would be around midday Saturday to connect it all. A Chorus guy showed up on Saturday morning about two hours early, and half an hour early we *finally* had our phone and net on.

But that’s not the end.

After being promised my next bill would take the lack of phone or internet for a week into account, I expected it to come to around maybe $50-$55. On Tuesday I received the bill in my email - $224.78. For three weeks of internet and phone, and one week of dealing with the world’s worst call centre (except perhaps that hopeless Vodafone one in Egypt), Orcon were going to charge me $224.78.

Well, it was actually $241.08, but somewhere they came up with an overpayment from previous months of $16.30, which was also news to me. Or even $251.58, since they’d credited me a whopping $10.50 for my eight days without any connection. Whoop-dee-do.

So I called them again - this is Tuesday, May 24 - and got a guy who told me there was a ‘connection fee’ that should not have been applied. That accounted for $149 of the problem (or $99, according to another guy), and wasn’t listed seperately on the bill, which still left the bill higher than it should have been.

Of course, there were no managers available, and one would call me back. None ever did.

Found another Orcon customer on Twitter who had the same problem - he later told me they said it was sorted, and he believed them. I don’t want to call him naive, so will just assume he’s very, very lucky, and got the one person at Orcon that knows what they’re doing.

Called them this morning (Thurs, May 26), got a guy who recalculated the bill at about $142 or so. I told him I’d like to speak to a manager, and he said no, and instead offered to put me through to someone who could actually help - or so he said. Instead, he just sent me back to the start of the phone IVR system, so I had to wait on hold another 10 minutes.

Got another guy who didn’t know what to do, so he said he’d get a manager to call me. I told him no one ever calls back (except that one time), but we weren’t getting anywhere, so gave up - but not before asking him to take my credit card details off the account. He said he did. I asked him if they tried to access my account and couldn’t get any funds, ’cause they don’t have any credit card details, would my phone and net be cut off? He said no, which begs the question why anyone pays them in the first place.

Anyway, I soon got a call not from a manager, but someone from their Twitter team. The guy said he’d go away and ‘do the maths’ to work out the proper billing. I told him not to come back until the balance was under $55, which it should be if you bill someone for three weeks of a monthly bill of $70.  He came back with a balance around about $130 or so, saying it was high because I didn’t pay a previous bill.

I didn’t believe this, so checked - and sure enough, I had paid my previous accounts just fine.

He then changed his story, and said because it was a new connection, I had to pay a month in advance. Um, it’s not a new connection - it’s a current contract that’s merely shifted houses - and I was never advised on any extra fees, or having to pay a month in advance, just ’cause I moved house.

He then told me he was sick of talking to me - probably because by this stage, I was swearing like Peter Capaldi in the movie In The Loop, completely exasperated with the shittiest customer service I’ve ever experienced in my life.

Still waiting for that call back from a manager.

So tonight, I’ve written this, in the hope it will warn others off joining Orcon. Might even get their attention. Why haven’t I quit yet? Because the deal through work does make it significantly cheaper than everyone else, and the internet itself - when it’s on - is fast and reliable. Patience is being sorely tested…

Their customer service is just so absolutely woeful - thought I’d give them one last chance to fix it all tonight before posting this, but their call centre is so overloaded, the prerecorded voice just said to call back later. Wasn’t even the option to go on hold, leave a message, nothing.

So fuck ‘em.

UPDATE: $199 of credits have been applied to my account, so they’re now asking for $25.78. Finally… but I’m still on the wrong plan, so I guess we’ll do this all again next month…

<a href=”http://radioovermoscow.bandcamp.com/track/the-election” mce_href=”http://radioovermoscow.bandcamp.com/track/the-election”>The Election by Radio Over Moscow</a>

If you’ve missed a track or two so far, they’re all available here.

In ‘The Election’, our hero awaits the results of… the election.