There's another of my short stories available to read or download and listen to over at Great Hites this week.
This one sets up a tale of lost love, interplanetary travel and homecoming around the recently discovered primate fossil, claimed by many to be the 'missing link'. Does it seem like I have a thing for ancient, advanced civilisations? You might think so.
There is some very subtle sci-fi background music in this latest tale. It comes courtesy of The Lunacy Board, and is called "Japan In A Trashcan". You'll find it on our third album, the entirely instrumental Stockholm, which is available to buy on CD or as a digital download. Follow the link for most information about the album, a couple of samples of other tracks and an order form.
There's also a new episode of 'Some Other Scotland' ready for download. There seems to be a link between Charles' letter and another letter written to William Wallace - interesting, since around 400 years separates them. We also learn a bit more about the object Razer found in the underground tunnel.
The Euro elections may have passed, but there's still plenty to vote for. Both 'Great Hites' and 'Some Other Scotland' feature polls that affect future episodes - if you are enjoying either of these podcasts, please take the time to vote and make your choice count!
I've been away for a week, removed from phones, TV, internet and the World in general. It's been bliss. I took along my guitar, uke and micro-studio, but neither wrote nor recorded anything new. Just doodled. Sometimes that's just what is needed.
You may have noticed a couple of changes here. Firstly to the look and layout of the blog. I've moved over to the newer Blogger templates which supposedly offer more flexibility and nifty add-ons, taking the opportunity to make the blog fit in with the Lunacy Board site, thanks to the colourful header image provided by my daughter (she did this when she was just five).
You'll find a new section titled 'Common Topics' to the right hand side - this will let you look at all posts dealing with certain topics, e.g. click on 'Deserters' to see posts relating to the Deserters in some way, or for more detail about the steps leading up to the first Lunacy Board album, click on 'Eponymous Debut'. It's also a quick way to pick out all the posts with links to downloadable music. Hopefully it will make this blog easier to navigate around. You'll find these 'labels' at the bottom of each post as well, so you can skip between related posts quite quickly.
On the subject of blogs, when I first started this blog I simultaneously started a couple of others with the same content. The idea being to see which one generated most interest, was easiest to use and read. Blogger won. The others have not been updated for a couple of months now, and most likely won't be again. It's a pain in the neck to copy & paste all the details between them, but more importantly I don't think it's a great idea to have several copies floating around the web - hopefully anybody following the others will pick up from here, which will be the definitive place for my waffle outside the Lunacy Board and Deserters sites.
I've had a few queries about making the Lunacy Board albums available on iTunes or similar, which I can finally answer, having looked into a number of possibilities. iTunes is not really an option for us at the moment, though I wouldn't rule it out forever. For the moment we're going with a crowd called 'Scotloads', who (surprise, surprise) focus on Scottish bands.
I say 'for the moment', because they have a pricing scheme which I think is too steep for downloads, with a fixed price of £7.99 for an album. This is pretty reasonable compared to high street CD prices, but is actually more than our standard CD price for UK buyers (though it is a bit of a saving for overseas listeners).
What is good about their system is that it will allow you to listen to a clip from every track on both albums before buying, as well as letting you buy single tracks for 79p each. Hopefully a more reasonable alternative for album downloads will be available soon, but if you just want a couple of tracks - go for it!
Just click on the scotloads logo above to see The Lunacy Board on their site.
The final day of voting for round one is here, and I think I can safely say that it's the end of the road for this song fu disciple as far as the official competition goes. I enjoyed the challenge, though the song is not a great piece of work - certainly it didn't deserve to be in the top of the pile, though I did personally prefer it to a couple of others in the competition. Of course, my tastes are pretty far from normal songwriter fare, so I'll not name names.
So thanks to those of you who voted for my efforts - 1% of the vote may not seem like a lot, but it means that almost 20 people thought my song was better than all the rest, which is fine by me. Or maybe I just got the 'pity' vote.
Whatever the reason, thanks, and you'll maybe be pleased to hear that I'm planning on continuing to follow the challenges even though I'll be out of the official competition. I think it's a good way to keep flexing the old songwriting muscle and building up my Fu for the next time...?
Yes, this is the 100th post to this blog. I'm really pleased how far things have come since I kicked this off a couple of years ago. Thanks to those few of you who pop back for a visit now and again, and also to my family who put up with my musical meanderings.
There is now a video to accompany the song 'Choices' from 'Difficult Second'. You can view it in miniature above or at the Lunacy Board site, or click here to see it on YouTube - please leave your comments and feel free to give it a nice high rating!
To give a little more insight into the Board's songs, the lyrics from all the songs in the first two albums are now available on the website.
Simply click on a song name on either the Eponymous Debut page or the Difficult Second page to be taken to a more detailed view of each song showing the lyrics and credits for the song. Over time we'll probably add to these details to give some more background about the songs and their inspiration.
I thought this blog would be very busy over the time we were putting together our 3-album release, but in fact the whole process has been so demanding of time that nothing has been posted here about the albums. So over the next week or so I'll try and rectify that with a series of posts about the albums, starting with a quick run through of all three before I go into more detail in the next post.
Some artwork problems (of my creation) created a delay in getting this album completed, and there was some to-and-fro between the duplication company and myself to fix it, but once sorted and the CDs arrived I was very pleased with the results. Thanks to Stuart of Gillies Audio for providing a great service and being patient in the face of my errors.
There was a lot of preparation involved to make the 'Album-in-a-day' work smoothly, but it paid off and despite a couple of glitches (no sound on the webcast and me falling asleep unexpectedly) I think the results speak for themselves. The finished result is certainly rough around the edges, but we came up with some tracks that I'm really quite proud of that could easily sit beside anything on the first album were they subject to more rehearsal and a less rushed recording process. There are elements of everything from progressive rock, folk and blues through to the avant-garde, music hall and even country all tinged with a bit of a punk spirit.
To mirror the collaborative nature of the first album, we put out a call for guests for this album, resulting in an album with three different theremin players. Gordon Charlton of Beat Frequency and Wilco Botermans added a wide variety of theremin parts, from simple melodic accompaniment to wild and weird sound effects, to six of the nine tracks - thanks go to both of them for taking the time out to join us.
All the music on 'Stockholm' is improvised instrumental music, but some of it was recorded as far back as our second rehearsal on fairly basic equipment, so some editing and noise-removal was required to bring those pieces up to a similar sound quality as the more recent recordings. There are a few tracks for which only a few seconds will be audible in the film of Stockholm, but the whole track is included on the CD for the sake of completeness.
Incidentally, the picture above shows the artwork for all three completed albums in almost all its glory. What you don't see in the picture are the insides of the CD booklets - all three have two pages of liner notes about the songs, including a short extract from the Stockholm script in the case of that album.
And finally, the pre-order offer was due to end on the final release day, but with the delay to 'Eponymous Debut' we decided to let it run until we had sent the first batch of discs out. In that time we got a few more orders for all three discs, so I'm going to let the offer run until the end of this month or until the 'Difficult Second' discs run out (which won't not be long as only 50 were made). Once they are gone we'll not be producing any more, so the only way to get the second album after 31st of August will be by download.
Click HERE to order the 3-disc collection before they're gone.
This just about marks the halfway point of the Album-a-Day project, "Difficult Second", and I'm pleased to say we have an album's worth of material. It is perhaps a little rougher around the edges than our usual fare, but such are the constraints of time under these circumstances.
I'm pleased to say that we've already had some submissions from some of our previous collaborators, Beat Frequency and Wilco Botermans, which will be included in the tracks already recorded, and hope to have some more by the end of the 24 hours.
Having been out last night until 4am doing live sound at a wedding, I'm feeling more than a little tired, but now comes the time to sit down and work through the various takes we've had at the new songs and instrumentals, adding the occasional overdub and getting the final article into a shape worthy of the Board. In just over 12 hours you'll be able to download the album for free and hear the full effect of our labours.
Finally, apologies for the lack of sound on the webcast - it was working this morning, but the PC froze and now I can't seem to get the sound back. you're still welcome to drop by and watch or chat!
This is the news I've been waiting to announce - it's a big undertaking, so we wanted to make sure it would all come together and so far everything is going to plan. As you know, there has been a flurry of recording activity for The Lunacy Board's first album - plenty of details here in posts over the last few weeks, but what hasn't been mentioned is that the soundtrack material for the Stockholm film is also completed, having been recorded alongside the main Board album. It made some sort of sense to release these together, so why not make it a trio of substantially different, yet complementary albums?
Yes, we're releasing three full albums in three days.
The first album will be released on the 13th of July 2008. This is the one with all the songs, including a couple that have been available to download from www.lunacyboard.com for a while now. It has unexpectedly turned out to be a concept album, or at least to have an underlying theme. Full details are available here, including the ability to pre-order a copy now to be amongst the first to hear it.
The second album will be released on the 14th of July 2008. It will be part of the 'Album-a-Day' project, being written, recorded and published within a 24 hour period immediately following the release of the first album. Sounds like a suitably daft thing to do, but the idea is to open up the improvisational and collaborational nature of the Board so that anybody watching the live webcast can contribute an idea, as well as keeping us well-and-truly on our toes for the day. I can't describe what will be on it, as it will all be inspired on the day, but you're welcome to be a part of it!
No risk with this one - not only will you be able to hear it being constructed, but it will also be available as a free download at the end of the 24 hours. If you really want it on CD, we're doing a very limited run of signed, numbered copies for anybody who pre-orders both the other albums. Further details are available here.
Our instrumental soundtrack album will be released on 15th of July 2008. Featuring almost entirely improvised pieces recorded over the lifespan of the band, which form the soundtrack to the forthcoming animated film "Stockholm", this album travels from rhythm-led rock numbers via jazzy interludes to sinister ambient soundscapes. Full details, pre-order information and downloadable samples are available here.
It's been hard work and a lot of fun getting this all together, so get your pre-orders in and put the 13th/14th of July in your diaries to join us at the webcast!
Over two years ago I mentioned a re-mix that I had completed, but no more was said. Unfortunately the album it was destined for, a special re-mix version of Ninki V's album "We Can Fly", is currently on-hold, so the song, called "Count the hours, Fix the Wings", will appear on our debut album.
The song is based on Ninki V's original solo melodica piece, which has been warped and extended before adding several layers of theremin, guitar, mandolin and vocals. I have now also re-recorded the vocals and added some de Florette drums through the process of xenochrony, and so we now have another Lunacy Board track to add to the growing collection.
Ninki V's style is certainly as eclectic as our own - she composes for a Wakemanesque collection of Casio keyboards, theremin, flute and melodica, whilst her stage show includes playing the theremin with her hair and extensive use of puppetry. Jump over to her website for some samples.
In a similar vein we're pleased to be including our first foray into xenochrony on the album. "Xenochronous Requiem For A Head Laying In A Field In Butler" was based on a bass solo by Board collaborator Doug Boucher and was originally destined for the "Stockholm" soundtrack album.
Since the track fits within the style of the first album so well, and has already been regularly featured on Spellbound Radio, it has been placed where it belongs. Doug has been pretty busy writing new material for his solo shows lately, so a trip to his Myspace page is worth a regular visit as he swaps new material in and out on a regular basis.
We had a pretty long, and fairly intense, recording session today, getting drums, bass and lead vocals completed for all the remaining album tracks. Since we've done most of these in practices for over a year now it was not a case of learning things anew, but rather laying down the definitive takes. After a slightly creaky start we got well under way, with Sean adjusting to playing along with a click track on some songs - not something we've ever done before, but a necessary evil of doing the initial base tracks that I've been working on over the last couple of months.
We got some good recordings for the three 'big numbers'; "Performance Evolution" where we managed to navigate through several time signature changes and vocal styles, "Fairytale Propaganda" which we've tended to play too fast in the past, but settled on a more laid back tempo today, with a long building introduction partly inspired by Pink Floyd's "Shine on you Crazy Diamond" and the new song "Freeman" which came together quite naturally and took on a new life with bass and drums.
The two atmospheric spoken-work songs, "PKD Dum Dum" and "The Bell Curve" had a few layers of percussion and vocals added, which I'll be editing down to fit into the style of the music. "The Parallel Curve" also started life as a slow spoken-word thing, but we've tried a number of approaches to it over the last year without success. Today Sean started singing the lyrics at a much faster tempo and it fit well, so we quickly pulled together a rhythm part for him to sing along with and we finally had a recording of the song that actually works.
With all that put together, I have some further overdubs to add, then work can begin on mixing, so I'll probably not be reporting back on here until I have some completed songs to comment on (i.e. Hype!)
There will also be some lead-up PR work being done over the next few weeks to let people know what's coming from The Board, including the cover for the album, which is now complete and agreed and the ability to pre-order the album with a special incentive!
I've just finished off the first of the three songs that have been worked on for the last week or so, 'The Winning Smile'. I ended up taking out all the midi tracks and keeping everything analogue - vocals, guitar, ukulele and the Crumar Performer string section - it sounds totally different to the first attempt.
Then, after posting this and looking through the lyrics to the song it dawned on me that I had missed a whole section out, which explained why the song had ended up about a minute shorter than I had expected.
Currently busy with the artwork for the new album...
In preparation for finally getting this album out, I've given The Lunacy Board website a bit of a makeover. It's not quite as haphazard as it once was, and should be a bit easier to find your way about.
No update on finished base tracks, as I ended up working on three at once, two of which are our longest songs, so are taking a while. The other day I spent a lot of time on the introduction to 'Fairytale Propaganda', which builds up gradually from a quiet and gentle start to a full-blown rocker. When I returned to work on it at the weekend I realised that it was just too ornate and over-orchestrated, so it will need to be stripped back a fair bit.
'The Winning Smile' also had to be changed, as I had set it up with a simple piano backing, but it just didn't sound as good as it had done previously, so it now has a gentle guitar backing to start it off, but is still in the early phase of construction, so will also be getting some bass and strings.
'Performance Evolution' is our big concept number in about five sections which vary in style from ethereal dream-like harps and strings via neanderthal punk waltz and sugary pop to aggressive guitar serialism. Needless to say, this is taking a while to come together, though all the basics are there - it's really only needing drums, vocals and lead guitar parts added. More on this when it's done.
This was a very productive evening, following a bit of research over the last few days, I have written and recorded the basic backing parts for a whole new song. It is an upbeat, almost 50's style, song about the antics of neurologist Walter Freeman. He came up with the idea of the transorbital or 'ice pick' lobotomy, featuring the practice of inserting sharp implements into the eye sockets of patients and waggling them about inside their brains. No, really.
What I think is more jaw-dropping is that he traveled the USA in his lobotomobile (yeah - see what Batman was missing!) performing this procedure without surgical equipment or even any surgical training. Sometimes it worked, but there are many documented examples, of over 3000 he carried out, where things didn't exactly go to plan.
Although lobotomy in general has been widely banned and replaced by antipsychotic drugs, there are still a few places in the world that practice a more refined variation. Like Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, just up the road from here.
Nice to know.
Another set of backing tracks have been completed, this time for a short spoken-word piece by Sean, called "The Bell Curve". It is a very laid-back track, starting with an atmospheric build up of synth textures which give way to a gentle string-based backing. This was the first time I've extensively used my 'new' Crumar Performer on a recording - the resonant synth-brass sound sits in the background of the introduction, then the string sound was used in the main part of the track. It can be quite noisy compared to modern synths, but has a great feeling of movement which helps keep the fairly simple chord pattern interesting.
Some of the effects noises in the introduction came from the depths of my old TX81Z sound module, several of which were originally designed for the instrumental "Mick's Astonishing Megamix (parts 1-4)" back in the Deserters - slowly evolving drain-like sounds. Great fun to revisit those things and find another use for them.
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...
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...
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...?
Anybody wishing to get their hands on the first CD appearance of The Lunacy Board, before any official release, now has the chance with Splinters 3.
This is a double CD compilation of artists influenced by Roy Harper and includes everything from progressive rock extravaganzas to simple folk songs in a single package. At only £6.50 it's a bit of a bargain, too.
The Lunacy Board track featured is 'The Unofficial National Anthem', so if you like the song and want a copy in its full CD-quality glory, rather than the mp3 version on the website, get yourself over to stormcock.net now to order it!
Other news from the Board... Not so much to report - we've had a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get together for more recordings, but various factors have conspired against letting these happen, so no new songs or recordings to report. Work on 'Stockholm' continues, though at a fairly slow pace. More news on that front when it arrives.
Finally, I may have another slow-boiling collaboration on the way - something quite different to the Board, but it's all a bit tentative at the moment to let any more out of the bag at this stage.
The latest Board recording session was a bit of a mixed bag - partly due to technical problems with the monitoring of the sound and partly due to a lack of planning, perhaps. We ended up with a single recording, albeit a 20-minute, multi-instrumental one. This was a bit of an attempt to recreate some of the live experience in a studio setting by recording an extended improvisation tying together The Unofficial National Anthem and Morning Rolls in one long track. However, neither of the two songs were a patch on existing recordings, so I doubt we'll use them. Some parts of the instrumental worked quite well, and I would reckon we could probably get it edited down into a pretty decent four or five minute piece.
I have done a bit more writing over the last few months - putting a better structure to The Parallel Curve, a song about corporate lunacy, which we first tried recording back in March this year. I'm hoping to put a new demo together for it in the next week and possibly record it at the next session. I also have some bare bones of a song started which covers some themes about power, leadership and control through the ages - a verse, a chorus and some chords exist so far, and even a little bit for the celtic flute. I'm still struggling to get Jim Crow into a finished state - it rolls along rather nicely in its new doo-wop styling, but needs another couple of verses to do the subject justice.
That's about it for the moment - I've been without a studio for a couple of weeks as I'm shuffling it around a bit now that I've had some time to live with it and can see improvements to my original plan. I've also got a very cool new-but-old keyboard which I needed to make room for - more to follow on that shortly!
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, those of you too tight to buy tickets, those too distant to travel, those too drunk to care and everybody else can now see The Lunacy Board's performance last week from the comfort of home.
It was a night of mixed emotions, stress, compromises and arguments, but above all a night of music in various guises...
It's been a while since I last drove around Glasgow and numerous new one way streets (as well as unexpected roadworks en route) meant that I didn't arrive as early at the Classic Grand as I had intended. A rant for another day, but it added unnecessary stress before the show was even underway. As it turned out Glass were still setting up, so we had a bit of time to unload and prepare to shift our gear on-stage. With four bands on stage over the course of the night time was tight for soundchecks, and as first-on we drew the shortest straw with a check that everything was making a sound without the luxury of any fine-tuning. Not to worry - the doors were open and people were arriving, so we took to the stage to kick off the evening.
The intention had been to play a new short song, Morning Rolls first, followed by an instrumental improvisation, then finishing off with The Unofficial National Anthem, but the time restrictions meant that we had to drop something, so Morning Rolls got the chop. The improvisation we started off with was based around a delayed loop on guitar which I varied between a gentle acoustic sound and a slow e-bow background pad. I knew we wouldn't have the luxury of time to set up the 'Sooper Looper' system I used at the Theremin Symposium, so the loop came from a standard effects pedal, meaning the sound looped, but gradually degraded in clarity and faded away so that the piece changed texture as the looped sounds piled up. Having rehearsed this method a good few times over the last couple of weeks and come up with some interesting and varied music (different every time), we knew this could work even though the risk of it being a total train-wreck was high. On the night I don't think it worked as well as it had in rehearsals, but these were really just wobbles on the corners rather than full-scale derailment. The fact that we had to keep it fairly short instead of building the piece up gradually meant that there were a few places where we changed directions earlier than we would otherwise have done, so I don't think the piece flows as well as it might have, but neither does it stand still for long.
The Unofficial National Anthem mutated out of the dying echoes of the improvised track, and we kept it simple with no instrumentation apart from guitar, drums and voice. We had tried a number of variations on the song recently, including with a full drum kit, but the little set of digital drum pads just seemed to be the right sound for this song. I built a mount so that it could be attached to a mic stand which meant that Sean could stand at the front of the stage to sing instead of being hidden behind a wall of drums, and was also able to easily switch between drums and bass guitar where necessary. Since there are only two of us, this arrangement means we're both up-front and visible, even if we need to play on a relatively small stage area.
As is usually the case, the venue didn't really start to fill until nearer the time for the headliners to take to the stage, so we weren't playing to a crowd by any means - probably a few more people than were at the Theremin gig, but it was more of a toe-dipping exercise for us. We wanted to see how we'd do on stage, how the songs would hold up to being stripped down from multi-layered arrangements into more direct and raw pieces of music, if we could pull off a totally unstructured improvisation live, and finally if anyone would even listen. As with my previous stage outing, we did get some positive comments. We know we're only likely to appeal to a tiny section of the population, but if just one person enjoyed what we did at a gig, then our mission is worthwhile.
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