I should really do the ‘Hide the Decline’ story-behind-the-song entries too.

But anyway, this entry is keep you updated on what’s going on with this new stuff I’m working on - the ‘Deus Ex Robotica’ album. Well, it’s going pretty frakkin’ well. I know I told myself it would take two years, and a part of me still thinks that’ll happen, but I’ve had such fast, excellent progress to date, it could very well be done by the end of the year. It’s that kind of thinking that will ensure it will actually take two years.

I’ve worked on a bunch of songs - mostly ones that were on the old luna spark version of the album, but a few new ones, since it’s gonna be a double album and all.  The new ones include Basically Slaves, which if you follow me on Twitter is the one I was saying sounds like a cross between Weezer, Gary Numan, Nine Inch Nails and Led Zeppelin; and The Saviour, which wasn’t coming together till I took out its bass and guitars, and made it sound like Devo.

I’m thinking I’ll release the album one song a month too - that way, my impatient side is satisfied, and I can spend more time on the later stuff. And I can write  a serial novella or something. I know that’s a good idea - well, maybe not if I wrote it myself - but whether it’ll happen, who knows.

I guess releasing the album a song at a time means I’ll be able to justify emailing my mailing list 25 times instead of once, haha! It’s a no-brainer this stuff is by far and away the best-produced stuff I’ve ever done. ‘Battletech’ was me jumping up a level, ‘Hide the Decline’ was experimenting at that level a bit, and now this is the real deal. Remains to be seen what happens when the vocals - always the hardest part - are in.

Anyway… if you haven’t already, check out the Circle Jerk 2010 EP of covers. Free download!

So last month I played the annual Htown Circle Jerk gig, where Hamilton musicians past and present get together and play covers of each others’ songs (hence the title). Since I perform live with a laptop loaded with pre-recorded samples, it was a logical step to releasing studio versions of the songs - so here they are!

You can download the three-song EP for free using the widget below, or clicking here.

The songs were originally by Love and Violence, Tweeter and Amy Racecar. All three are now defunct (I believe so anyway… though I could be wrong), but were great bands in their time.

Maybe in another couple of weeks I’ll get the chance to finish it of…

Started work on ‘Deus Ex Robotica’. Spent about two nights working on the drum patterns for the opening song, only for a completely new arrangement land in my head almost fully-formed last night whilst walking home from the local supermarket. I’m banking on this album taking a long time, so have to learn to let go of what I’ve spent time on and go with what works best…

Yes, I’m thinking it’ll be called ‘Deus Ex Robotica’.

But here’s the first song - ‘Satan’, originally by Amy Racecar. If you’re keen to hear the original, it’s on their album ‘Conclusions’, which you can buy it from Amplifier.co.nz by clicking on the album cover to the right.  It’s a great album, highly recommended.

Click here to download ‘Satan’.

The other songs will be up sometime next week - maybe.

Let me know what you think - @radioovermoscow on Twitter.

Will finish the EP tomorrow if it’s not raining!

I won an iPod Nano at work yesterday, and I wasn’t even there. We hit some target, and we all went into a draw, and I got lucky. Apparently they shoot video now, which is awesome.  My current iPod, an 80GB Classic, isn’t on speaking terms with my desktop. The computer freezes up when I plug it in, then when I unplug it, it’s all, ‘Oh! You want to access the iPod? Nah, it’s busted.’ But it works fine with the laptop, but all the music is on the desktop.

So a Nano could be very handy. I see some odd stuff on my walks to work some days, so a camera could come in handy too. Never been keen on cellphone cameras, as they always make it so hard to get anything from the camera to the computer.

Much like my old iPod.

In other news, I went to update my weight loss chart this morning, and found I’ve fallen off the bottom of it. That’s a good thing, I guess?

I’m still going to do the Behind the Scenes entries for the Hide the Decline songs, since they’re still fresh in the memory for the most part, but consider this pre-done entries for the next EP or album or whatever I end up doing. Might even post rough MP3s… we’ll see.

Anyway. Today I worked on a recording for a proposed interim, ‘rock’ sounding EP I wanna get out of my system before I venture down the rabbit hole of recording my double album, provisionally titled ‘Deus Ex Robotica’. Okay, that might change.

So, this song is either called ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’ or ‘Collider Stop’. The second title is perhaps more original, but there’s a chance a song called ‘Stop’ could also make the EP, so we’ll go with ‘Flashes…’ for now.

It was one of the first songs written in my current burst, which is proving rather fruitful. Haven’t had one of these bursts in a couple of years!

Anyway, it’s a stop-start kind of thing, with a simple two-chord riff in the verses, a big chunky riff heading into the chorus, which has a simple chord progression punctuated by distorted guitars on minor seventh chords, ending with a powerchord run down the fretboard, back to where it began.

I spent ages trying to get the instrument arrangement right - tried acoustic guitar for the basic riff, ditched it for a synthbass, back to acoustic guitar, switched to electric guitar like the demo, then eventually settled on acoustic guitar, because it kept the song pinned to the ground where it needed to be in the verses, and also it felt funkier locking in with the quiet drum machine parts than the other options.

The electric guitars were much easier - I’ve got this nice fuzz sound I’ve programmed into my Boss digital studio, it works well with both ‘live’ and synthetic drums, which I’ve always found difficult to pull off. It also has the advantage of covering up my limited technique, which is even more limited these days with my bung wrist.

My wife works for a magazine distributor, and sometimes brings home goodies - last week it was a MusicTech magazine DVD with all these synth string samples, a lot of which sound like they’re straight off the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Grabbed a couple of those to fill out the middle 8. Speaking of the middle 8, it wasn’t a part of the song that came naturally - when I wrote the song in March, I needed something that started on D, and went through all these old unfinished songs I’d scanned into my computer. Came across this simple, catchy piece from circa 2001 that was in a slightly different feel, but it slotted in nicely once the melodic bassline was added. It’s not often my middle 8 sections are where the song breathes and coasts along nicely - normally I use them to amp things up, or go off on a tangent - but ‘Flashes…’ has intense bursts on a regular basis, so yeah.

The main synth lines were recorded in two parts, in completely different ways - some of it was pre-programmed so I could use it as a sonic guide while recording the guitars and bass, and the rest played live. Ironically enough, the easy parts were programmed and the harder parts played live. I do things backwards more often than I should, really.

I’m going for a less electronic sound with these recordings, more live and rocking - so getting a good, punchy and dynamic drum sound is key. I’ve got a few settings I’ve discovered work well with the kit I’m using, a bit of convolution reverb here and tube-modelled compressor there, not being afraid to radically tweak the EQ or the amplitude. Of course, I’m still chucking in little electro beats in the quiet parts, booming snares on the second beats, as I do. Part of my sound and all, I guess.

Lyrically, not really sure what it’s about. A bit of Lost there, techno-paranoia there, we’ll see when it’s done, eh? It’s not going to be the deepest song in the world - just a quick, unpredictable and unpretentious (despite the blog entry…) indie rock song to ease my way into recording this EP. I’ve got better songs lined up, but wanted to start with one I wasn’t too sure about, kind of like a practise. I still wasn’t sure about it right up until I had everything loaded up and started mixing - and it all fell into place pretty quickly. At least to my ears after seven hours of recording it!

And all this before work! Couldn’t get back to sleep once Parker was in bed, and I didn’t start work till 4pm… Energy drinks are my friends, but in an hour or so when I’m trying to sleep, they won’t be. Flashes before my eyes’ indeed…

Enough. Here’s a demo of the song, which was recorded back in March.

♫ Flashes Before Your Eyes (Demo, March 2010) ♫

I started with ‘Dis Guy’, by Tweeter - a kind of synth-guitar-pop band from the late ’90s, early 2000s. I was a big fan back in the day, no idea what happened to them. I think they moved to Auckland and split up soon before I got up here. I saw them play an Auckland show once about seven or eight years ago, and that was the last I heard of them.  Christian, their guitarist, was in the Datsuns. I guess he left when the Datsuns hit the jackpot? I used to live next door to their bass player Fran, who mastered the very first piece of music I ever released, an EP called Sarah, in 2001 under the name luna spark.

I accidentally hit the wrong button in the second verse, causing the music to stop dead. Funnily enough, it was on the lyric, ‘I made a mistake, what a bad, bad guy…’ After a second or so of panic, I made the best of it, restarting the verse, hamming up the line, and changing it to, ‘what a bad, bad Dan…’

Second song, my own ‘Hide the Decline’. Apart from a habit of triggering the fills half a bar late, it came out alright, I guess. There was a Kanye moment when the Auto-Tune took on a life of its own in the outro, causing me to stop, laugh, and try it again.

Third song, a quick run-through Amy Racecar’s ‘Satan’. I kept it short, since I was bending the rules playing four songs as it was. I love their album Conclusions - some people have said at the Circle Jerk gigs, people play too many songs by Amy Racecar, but I have to say in that one album, they had more great songs than many local bands put together in their lifetime.Great stuff, and I chose that song because the vocal was easy. That simple, ha.

Lastly, I chose a 17-year-old song by Love and Violence, called ‘Violator’.  Scott Newth, singer in the short-lived group, has been an Htown mainstay for almost as long, as the singer of Rumpus Room, soundman extraordinaire, student radio legend and all-round nice guy. This song to me always sounded like a complete indie mashup of New Order and Depeche Mode (even down to the title), and since badly ripping off New Order and Depeche Mode is my calling card, I thought hey, I can do this song. I won’t even need to change it that much! In the end, I couldn’t work out a few of the keyboard parts, so simplified it a little, gave it a heavier, more distorted sound, and replaced the middle eight with the drumbeat from ‘Blue Monday’ for laughs.

Scott told me afterwards: ‘You were supposed to do a shitty cover of someone else’s song, not a better version of one of mine.’ Buahaha!  A better compliment I’ve never received.

Had a great night, though had to leave around midnight since Parker - sleeping at his Nana’s - would be up soon enough. Missed a few bands I’d like to have seen, but you know how these things are.

In other ROM-related news, I’ve been writing a lot just recently, it’s one of those once-a-year-or-three bursts that provides enough material for the year’s quota, that stops me wholly relying on songs I wrote 10 years ago when I had 16 hours a day to do it and nothing else, ha.

It’s a free download, as always, but if you’re willing to throw at least NZ$5 my way, there’s a Deluxe Edition that includes a less compressed, more dynamic mix and other bonus goodies.

In comparison to last year’s album, ‘Battletech’, ‘Hide The Decline’ is a more electronic, polished, punchier album. It’s more focused, less sprawling  and could probably be fairly described as poppier. Less guitars and more synths, since for the past year I’ve been dealing with a busted wrist that’s resisted all efforts at diagnosis.

The songs, pulled from different periods of my writing over the last 12 years, cover the usual topics - you know, girls, politics and err, ‘Lost’.

So ah, if that sounds like your thing, download it today!

PS. When I started recording the album last October, I weighed 15kg more than I do now. That’s not really relevant, but hey. It’s my blog, I’ll write what I want, etc.

It’s AAC format, 256k quality I believe, which is equivalent to iTunes Plus. You’ll need a BitTorrent program such as uTorrent to download it.

If you feel like paying me though, that’s cool - just download it using the widgets on the music page instead.

I played my first solo show on Saturday night at the Live Bar, Yep, the Live Bar, apparently. Was first on the bill with God Bows to Math, Cat Venom, Wilberforces and Sherpa. Almost didn’t happen though.

There was some kind of problem getting my sound to come out of the PA properly - was all mushed up and distorted, and we had to do some lead juggling and gear switching to get it to work. Not sure why really - it’s just a stereo signal out of a laptop… but the sound guy got it going in the end.

It was a real learning experience - I’d told everyone I had no idea if it was going to ‘work’ beforehand, and was as surprised as anyone when it kind of did. I was nervous as hell, completely screwed up a couple of the songs by pressing the wrong buttons. Didn’t help that my fingers were shaking like Polaroid pictures, and the colour-coded stickers on my keyboard had faded so much, I could barely see which was which in the dim light on stage.

I spent far too much time looking at the computer screen, which is silly since 99% of what I need to look at is on my keyboard and in my instruction book. Also, it was hard to regain pitch once I’d lost it, since I have no way of making the vocal louder independent of the overall sound it’s all linked through the laptop so I can apply effects (ie Auto-Tune). Next time I’ll wear headphones, since I had no such troubles at home!

People said nice things though, and asked when I was playing next, so that was cool.  I played ‘Fiction’, ‘Anti-Human Nous’, ‘Images of Bliss’, ‘Killer on the Island’, and ‘Purpose Of Man’. It’s been about 12 years since ‘Purpose of Man’ was played live with Sequester, haha! Oddly enough, ‘Killer’, the newest track, went down the best. At least in my view.

Anyway… been making progress on the new album front. When I was recording Battletech, one of the songs was proving so difficult to sing, I took what I had, sat down with some fancy software and rearranged my off-key warblings into a coherent melody, loaded that back into the hardware studio thingee I use to record, and sang along with it - and I had a satisfactory take within 10 minutes.

So this time around I spent a couple of days recording guide vocals, which I then processed into the exact melodies I wanted, regardless of what I’d sung, and am singing to it as a guide - and it’s proving to be a massive time-saver. Who knows if what I recorded today will suffice, but if so, I managed to get through six songs in under four hours, which is lightning fast by my standards.

No doubt it’ll all turn to custard in the mixing process though! Always does.