Weekly

Neil's in town for his weekly visit. So. 3 things to work on tonight.

First, a bit of acoustic strumming to keep our act together for some upcoming gigs.

Secondly, the recording of a track we're submitting for Bjork's charity album: www.indian.co.uk
I'm overseeing the mix of this later on in the week, as we only found out about the project 2 days ago, and the blinkin' deadline is Monday, innit?

Thirdly, a look at angel tech r.i.p.
In 1999 I'd been listening a lot to a Mogwai track called Mogwai Fear Satan and decided that self-referential song titles were the bomb; hence this little paean to our own demise.
At the time some people thought it was a suicide note concerning our relationship with all things corporate, or maybe even a splitting-up song, period. Bah! Couldn't be further from the truth. I don't whinge about stuff like that... well, not in song, at least. Bigger fish to fry.

We're on the 4th fully-fledged version of this tune. We've had: chiming electronica with a sampled vocal riff bleating all the way through it; gone down a sort of Pixies-ish route combining thrashy, badly tuned guitars with clattery, overpowering drums; done something with kalimbas and heavily processed drum machines...
It all sounded fantastic and had us very excited at points, but somehow didn't hit the nail on the head when you began singing over it. This perplexed me for a while and we went in all sorts of strange directions, for instance...

Doug works for a charity which helps people with disabilities of various kinds to make music through new technologies. As a result, at one point we had a touch-screen pad hanging around the studio which enabled someone without a voice to speak, pretty much like the type of thing Professor Stephen Hawking uses. Except this one could sing. You dropped notes onto a stave and typed the words beneath, and away it went.
I spent a very long afternoon teaching the bloody thing how to do angel tech r.i.p., cutting the tune into sections so the machine's limited memory didn't continually dry up, doing all sorts of odd things with the timing to see if it would throw any subtle nuances into the way the computer interpreted each word.
Sometimes you hammer away at things like this against your better judgement because it seemed like a good idea to begin with, and even when the results don't sound so hot, you carry on all the same in order to avoid having to confront the essential problem. It's like a flowchart in your head, which goes:

IS IT DIFFICULT TO SING THE SONG OVER THE MUSIC? >>> yes>>> DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE THE MUSIC? >>> no >>> FANCY GETTING A ROBOT (or something) TO SING THE SONG? >>> yes >>> YOU'VE JUST SPENT 3 HOURS PROGRAMMING ONE VERSE. DOES THE ROBOT SOUND GOOD OVER THE VERSE? >>> no >>> DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER IDEAS? >>> no >>> FUCK IT OFF? >>> no >>> DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE THE MUSIC? >>> no >>> FANCY GETTING A ROBOT (or something) TO SING THE SONG? >>> yes >>>

etc

So somewhere on my hard-drive there exists the entirety of this track sung by a (slightly nasal) learning aid. No doubt its time will come on a remix somewhere. In its own right it does sound quite beautiful, in a lost, lonely and fucked-up way.

Then, a few weeks before Christmas I sat down at one of Neil's old, dying keyboards (a Farfisa, as it happens. Lots of big clunky switches, mmmmmm switches) and padded away at the chords to angel tech r.i.p., quietly, absent mindedly, because I was bored and couldn't think of anything else to play. Neil pounced on it. "We should use that." He said. "We should build it up from that."

Another good argument for short-circuiting yourself and fucking the flowchart.