Busy Busy

Collaborations

It's been a hectic month or two, mostly due to the day job, but there has been a little progress on various musical fronts. Non-Lunacy Board collaborations are ticking over very slowly. One is a duo with an electronic musician from Manchester - so far I have a handful of his pieces that I'm working through - adding, warping and generally abusing to create something new, and we'll also be meeting up occasionally for more spontaneous creations. The other is a local band which is in a fairly embryonic stage at the moment - still waiting to confirm the final line-up - playing original blues/rock material. Something of a change for me, but as they say, a change is as good as arrest.

The outside world is still holding up things in the world of the Board, so in the mean time I have been working on some basic tracks from a few songs we've put together over the last year or two, but only played in rehearsal. Fairytale Propaganda had a live airing at last year's "Hands Off 2007" gig, but the studio version builds more slowly and is a bit more complex than the original rocky take. The other song is a bit of a prog epic - the demo comes in at around 15 minutes long. We've practiced it in sections so far, and I did prepare a cut-down version for HO2007, but the looper packed in before I got to it, and as a solo piece it needs the looper to pull it off, as there are about 5 main sections to it, most in different time signatures. Once I have these together it should make the recording sessions for these run more smoothly and hopefully let us catch up some lost ground in time for...

Project Quintilis

Just a working title... suitably pompous? I'm really quite excited about this, if we can pull it off. I'm just working on the plans for it, but I need to keep it under wraps for the moment until I know we have the time to make it work. Let's just say it involves our first album and related activity. More details in June if it is going ahead...

New Songs

And finally, a significant number of lengthy roadtrips over the last two months have given me various bits of inspiration for some new songs. I have vague outlines for 5 new songs and another is almost complete. They are all character-based, rather than my other recent songs which have had a large element of social commentary. Two of them are Dunoon-centric - yes, I'm rapidly heading towards having a whole album's worth of Dunoon material, which seems to be almost writing itself. I suspect my muse is trying to tell me something...?

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Tags: The Lunacy Board, Songs, Dunoon, Quintilis, Fairytale Propaganda