it should look like an accident

End

2008-08-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

So, from now on, things are happening here, with probably equally inefficient irregularity:

www.timatack.co.uk

God bless you, and all who sail in you.

How

2006-07-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

No more mystery. It's official. The angel tech working method: ANALYSED. CATEGORISED. FILED.

[Click to enlarge. You'll need to, unless you're some sort of multi-eyed insect. In which case: how's it going? Been eaten by any mammals/birds recently? Good for you. Incidentally, do you realise you're currently hanging around on someone's brand new TFT monitor? Yeah, I know. It's the bright lights. The changing colours. So pretty. So hypnotic. Well, I'd buzz off quick before someone gets annoyed at you and ---- oops. Too late. Eeeesh. There goes, like, your entire thorax. Oooof. That's gonna sting come the morning.]

Standard

2006-04-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

Ok, OK, sorry, I’ve no time. No time. I’m gonna be late. Sorry. Really. Rushing! Um. Angel tech LP? YES! Yes. Almost ready. Out early June. Deadlines! You know, deadlines. So I’ve got to go. But. Um… tell you what, I’ve got this… form… here. I’ve filled it in. Well… I’ve filled most of it in. Hope it gives you the picture. It’s a standard form. Sorry. Impersonal, I know. But… um… anyway, sorry. Here it is. Bye!

------------------------------------------------

INACTIVE BLOG FORM # 223
FOR USE IN THE EVENT OF A SPARSE OR NEGLECTED BLOG
SECTIONS MARKED * ARE MANDATORY

Hello [recipient]. With regards to *[It should look like an accident, an irregular journal concerning the creation of a new angel tech LP] many apologies for not posting any [delete as appropriate amusing / informative / sexy] entries for over [17 million years] now. I imagine that in the time I’ve neglected this blog, you’ve probably [had children and died]. I hope all is well with you, your friends and loved ones.

I am [fine] thankyou.

My excuses for not posting are [delete as appropriate personal / related to time restrictions / due to boredom / mediocre and suspect / shifty and evasive / a whole long story, seriously, I just can’t tell you]. I have spent most of the last [17 million years] engaged in the activity of *[editing a really big waveform]. Rest assured, I’ve been spending my time [delete as appropriate wisely / industriously / sexily]! Pretty soon I’ll be posting up all sorts of [crap] for my [6] regular readers!

Anyway, I’m sure [delete as appropriate no-one reads this stuff anyway / you’ve found a younger, prettier blog / you don’t fucking care and were only visiting this page to check whether or not you were definitely going to remove me from your bookmarks, you faithless, fish-faced fuck / you’ll understand and bear with me].

Seeing as this is a *[semi-regular] blog all about the world of *[the new angel tech LP], I actually have an amusing *[the new angel tech LP] related anecdote for you today. Here it is:

*[Category – Observational minutiae. I’ve said before that one of the reasons why I think angel tech works so well – and also takes so long about it – is that at various points all 3 of us get different bees in our bonnet. A different species of bee, if you will. One of us will suddenly be concerned about something the others really weren’t at all focussed upon and that person will then hammer away, forcing the issue, until it’s sorted to their ears. Well… there comes a stage when the deadline’s looming and you’ve got a matter of hours left until the LP has to be finished (at time of writing it literally is a matter of hours) and you have to decide what bites the bullet. What’s the most important thing? What can you let ride? Because with angel tech, perfectionists that we are, there will always be something not totally right. Something you’ll have to ‘live with’. A sibilant here, a precise pan there. Let’s put it another way: if this album was to be made in the style of daytime TV programme Ready, Steady, Cook with its 20-minute time limit and restricted ingredients, angel tech’s team would start off making a soufflé, and then change its mind five minutes before the bell and suddenly construct a Cornish pastie. With 20 seconds to spare we would then have to decide whether or not it mattered that the pastie had an egg glaze, and that’s when the shit would really hit the fan. Emails and text messages would be exchanged. Research would have to be done into the best type of egg. We’d have to decide upon the thickness of the brush used. Tim would walk to the back of the studio and hit his head repeatedly against the scenery. Neil would threaten Doug with a fork he'd just heated on a blowtorch. Each of us would make 38 pasties in 13 different sizes (with and without glaze) and then decide that we liked an impossible combination of doug 3 (glazed) and neil 21 (unglazed.) But ultimately you’d always have to bear one thing in mind, above everything else: namely, that you’re making a pastie, and that sooner or later, someone’s going to have to eat it. Where was I? Oh, shit, look at the time -]

What I think this says about *[the new angel tech LP] is something very [delete as appropriate important / interesting / stupid / horny]. What it says is: *[I’m hungry]. And I’m sure you’ll agree.

Well, I’ll be sure to keep you up to date with anything else I have to say regarding *[food] in the near future. Just watch this space! [ ]

Your faithful blogspote

*[T X Atack]

Revision

2006-01-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

I've had a request from M. Anonymous of Anonymoville, Nonameland, Planet Namenverlassen in the Galaxy Sans Moniker. It goes like this:

Anonymous said...
Dear Sir,please could you be so kind as to provide a potted history of the band 'angel tech'?Thank you.

So of course I'm only too keen to oblige.

ANGEL TECH ON THE MOON 1995 - 2006
The second in a series so incredibly dull, you'll find yourself wanting to shove an anglepoise lamp up your own urinary tract just to relieve the brain-battering tedium of it all. Seriously. I mean it. Skip this whole post if you don't fancy ending up in A&E, explaining to the bewildered consultant why there's bits of lightbulb and retractable spring wodged up into your gall bladder.

1.
Doug Bott and Tim Atack first met whilst composing the music to a cycle of medieval mystery plays. They spent some time searching for a sackbut but ended up with bupkiss. On their travels they met Neil Johnson busking Billy Bragg songs, "Her husband was one of those blokes / The type that laughs at his own jokes." They formed a band, what with being interested in odd pop music like Seefeel, Stina, Bjork, The Cure and that. Tim's ex-girlfriend insulted his newly designed keyboard noises, and in a string of slurred vitriol he vaguely heard the words "angel... tech..." obviously meant to berate what she perceived as some sort of hippy shit. Years later the group discovered that there is in fact a book called "angel tech" and, yes, it's full of some serious San Francisco-school hippy shit and no, we do not endorse it in any way.

Revision Notes: Section One
Sackbut
Bupkiss
Busking
Blokes
Jokes
Seefeel
Keyboard
Hippy

2.
angel tech were invited to Freiburg, Germany, in order to be composers in residence at an environmental conference. They met a mad German called Wangler (later Melchior) and returned to Freiburg to record songs on the railway track outside his studio, and be stung by wasps. They went into the black forest to collect mushrooms and found a high wooden chair in a clearing with no apparent function. Tim thought he could maybe climb to the top in order to make some sort of Faustian pact, but he waited for twenty minutes and nothing happened. Back in Bristol, angel tech did shows where they borrowed TVs from EVERYONE THEY KNEW and plugged them in to each other using signal splitters so that the images slowly degraded across the length of the stage, nothing but static on some of the screens. It looked like an Eastern European branch of Tandy's up on that motherfucker.

Revision Notes: Section Two
Hippies
Germans
Wasps
Mushrooms
Faustus
Faustus
Faustus
Bupkiss
Motherfucker

3.
angel tech began to develop a taste for unusual production methods and the deliberate pushing to extremes of any technology they could get their grubby mitts on. This led to a work ethic best described as "protracted," and Doug, on several occasions, wondering about SHAVING HIS FUCKING HEAD AND GOING TO LIVE IN A HUT IN THE FUCKING ANDES. A soundtrack was composed to a silent film (Metropolis.) A manager was employed with a moustache like the kaiser (but no matching helmet, despite our best efforts.) A recording contract was signed. In a fit of excitement, Doug broke his arm skateboarding, at which point he officially became TOO OLD TO SKATE TM. National and international tours were undertaken. Gigs were played to an audience of two men and a dog... but that's normal and OK... in those sorts of situations you're only really in trouble if the dog walks out. In the famous Realworld recording studio angel tech met some famous people whilst recording an album which is not yet at all famous in the slightest bit. Whilst discussing vegetarianism Kylie Minogue put her hand on Neil's thigh and kept it there for some considerable time. As a result of this, you can quite happily run Neil through with a scimitar (or similar) any time you like, he will die a happy man.

Revision Notes: Section Three
Protracted
Andes
Metropolis
Helmet
Dog
Studio
Kylie
Thigh
Scimitar

4.
People often wonder what happened to us after our recording contract ended. Truth of the matter is, we went to the moon. It's typical of angel tech to go to the moon in order to make a minidisc recording of the "atmosphere," only to find that the moon doesn't have one. Picture the scene...

Neil: Oh. Shit.
Tim: We came all this way, and never thought to check whether sound travels in a vacuum?
Doug: Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum.
Tim: That's what I'm saying.
Neil: Well, we know that now.
Doug: That's what I'm trying to say. Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum.
(Pause.)
Doug: Look, switch the minidisc onto record anyway. We've come all this way. We might as well just switch it on and see if we can get something.
Tim: Seriously, all we're going to be able to record is the inside of this... fucking... pod.
Neil: Oh SHIT.
Doug: What?
Neil: Nothing. Nothing.
Doug: No. Tell us. What?
Neil: I've run out of rizlas.

Revision Notes: Section Four
No
Rizlas
In
Space

5.
angel tech composed and performed theatre soundtracks, doing a show which involved running across a room one hundred times and sweating a lot. Whilst touring in Singapore, Neil vomited his entire body out of every available hole in his body and was taken to a hospital where everyone was impressed with his circular vomiting technique. Doug and his wife looked under a cabbage in the cabbage patch and found Milo (current age 2.5) Tim tried to teach Milo to say "Vagabond" every time Neil walked into the room. Neil tried to teach Milo to say "Weirdo" every time Tim walked into the room. But enough of this, what did we, as adults, learn? Well... we learned how to drag sounds through a computer backwards. Films were made using our music. I started this Blog just over a year ago. For further information go to the first post on this Blog, and work your way... up.

Revision Notes: Section 5
Runaround
Dodgy Mushroom Sandwich Esplanade Mall 26/10/03
Cabbage Patch
Patchbay
Logic Pro
Ableton Live
Reason 2.5
Boring Boring Blog

And as for the future? Well, as I'm sure you'll have picked up from this journal, what we're doing right now is building up strength in our pectoral fins so that we can eventually haul ourselves out of the water and onto the rich, dark mud of the primordial swamp. We intend to be crawling on land by March 2006, and by September we hope to be breathing oxygen.

The End.

German

2006-01-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

We sent the raw sound files for one of our songs, Molotov, to a friend by the name of Dirk Melchior, to see what the crazy German might make of it in terms of a mix. Molotov as it stands is the collated results of about seven different recording sessions over the last seven years, piano, bass, guitars, drums (both live and sampled) woodwind samples, re-routed guitar doodles, 40 vocal takes etc etc etc... All of this winged its way to Freiburg, Germany via the magic of t'internet. And a few days later, I received this email, with some ideas as to how an extremely frustrated Mr Melchior might deal with such a huge steaming spewforth of noise:

Dear Mr. Molotov, sorry ich muss das jetzt fragen: Ihr meint das ernst, oder ?!

ok, kein Scherz, ERNST!

ok, ok ich hab es auch ernsthaft versucht, aber... schwierig-

Mischen impossible

1. Strategie:

Open up as many Plug-ins as you can, make sure they look serious and important.
Cover the whole screen with their windows and hope nobody is able to find the play-button. Shit! Keycommands! Ah- Keycomandeditor!!!
Change all the Keycomands, f.e. press apple/q to start. No! song will start if they gonna close Logic, witch will happen very soon. Better delete all Keycomands.

2. Strategie:

Send them a attached virus called Molotov 22. Shit! No virus on Macs! Create a Virus!

3. Strategie

Declare war on Britannia! Arrgh, don't mention the war, i am German!

4. Strategie:

Find as many drum-machines as there are at lagerhouse, sync them to Logicsong Molotov21, make them play Acidtrancedrum'n'basshouselambadaspeedmetaldub.
Press play. Mute one drum-pattern after the other. That makes the song much clearer after a while. Not clear enough.
De-mute drum-patterns and open as many Quicktimeplayers with as many kinds of rhythmic sound-fills as you can. Open the real live window for real live noise. Arrrgh Live! forget the Drumachines . Open every sound-file on the computer in Live Pitch and sync it to Molotov in Rewire Mode. Make Michele scream at you. Press stop to make song much clearer, and to listen what Michele wants. Can't understand Michele 'cause of the noise in my Ears. Tinitus? No, Helicopter flying to the airfield beside the Lagerhouse.

5. Strategie

Take iBook, Headphones, hire Helicopter. Mix during Flight.
After you stop feeling sick... Ask Helicopterpilot to fly round your studio. Enjoy Bass-response never heard in studio before. Start thinking of song-lyrics...

6. Strategie
Asking Songwriter about Strategy
"Songwriter, do you have
a) an idea about the song molotov
b) an idea how to get the song molotov out of my head by doing a really good mix (clear you say)
c)A camera- so we could meet @ web and talk about the song molotov, drink beer and be quiet?" *

Liebe, Grüße

d.

It's easy to forget that hidden in the layers upon layers of ideas that constitute each song on the LP there is a chain of agreements between myself, Neil and Doug; the majority of them unspoken, and indecipherable from listening to the recordings alone. Every now and then over the course of our 6 years making this record we've sat down, had a drink, and talked about some song or other (just as Dirk suggests we should do at the end of his email) in order to decide where that song might travel next. These conversations have led to mixes and arrangements that have, in turn, morphed into different things as our interests have altered... And so - in my opinion - one of our problems is that we've spent a lot of the last 6 years making the LP we were interested in at the time, according to the whims of our current listenings and technical interests, only to see it shape-shift as those interests and favourite records have changed. (We're all magpies in angel tech. We swoop for whatever shiny thing presents itself.)

Two months ago -when Dirk sent the email above - the LP was overpowered by its electronica. It was definitely a sample-driven record with a large element of "look at me!" in its programming. Upon Neil's insistence we took the songs into the rehearsal studio with live instrumentation, and systematically went through each track, finding a satisfying way of performing them. Whilst it hasn't changed the fundamental nature of the songs, it has definitely given the LP a more focussed feel, and at the moment it has the sense of record played by a band. Which is something it didn't always have before.

Molotov is a good example of this shift. It used to begin with a cacophony of furious beats, three versions of the same rough-cut sample of me drumming, detuned and filtered in different ways, frequencies battering against each other. In theory, on paper, this sounds fantastic... and it was a great start to the song in some ways. But in others, it was self-concious, flashy... and this was not a good thing for the song. An artist friend of mine called Alex Bradley listened to a rough mix having never heard Molotov before, and within seconds of it starting said "Ah. Right. So you've re-mixed your own song." Ultimately, we stripped most of the beats from the track altogether, only giving them a look-in towards the end of the song, where suddenly they take over and the entire shebang collapses under its own weight. But in the version we now play live, for a good 75% of Molotov it's just me singing over some woodwind samples. You worry about this sort of thing when you perform in front of an audience... you worry that it won't seem honest somehow, or that it will look like a horrible sort of wanky karaoke. But here's the rub: it is honest. We've spent 6 years wrangling this fucking thing, slapping all sorts of crap onto it, and this is the conclusion we've come to. There's no other way of doing it.

On December the 13th last year we performed our first plugged-in gig (outside our theatrical work) since January 2000. It was a small sort of affair for a friend's birthday party, unadvertised, in the back of noodle bar in central Bristol. The sound man walked out during one of the earlier bands ("I find this musically offensive" is apparently what he said. For fuck's sake. You're a sound engineer. You expect to go through life and never operate a desk for a band you don't like?) but luckily there were people in the audience capable of running the show, who weren't offended by certain unexpected frequencies. The monitoring proved a bit of a puzzle, and throughout the evening it seemed to be intent on ripping Doug's head off with sheer volume. But all this considered, the gig went extremely well. There were cheers when we name-checked favourite albums or songs in The Jukebox Will Tear Us Apart, some folks sang along to songs they'd only heard before as acoustic versions, the faces in the audience were those of people either getting swept up in the music, or people intrigued by what this odd-looking set up was doing with its Voyager Space Probe drumkit, violins, coffin-shaped stomp boxes and skittering laptop. All in all? I felt we'd got back on track.

(With many thanks to Dirk for letting me reprint his email, and for all his head-scratching over our reprobate mixing skills. Happy New Year.)

* In answer to Dirk's questions:

a) Yes, I do have an idea about the song. I read a book recently about the riots which happened in St Pauls, an area of Bristol, in the 1980s. One of the people interviewed in the book (a Doctor, who is currently my GP, strangely enough) said that one of the most remarkable things about walking around St Pauls during these riots was that certain streets were fantastically calm and quiet. You would never have known acts of extreme violence, pitched battles between rioters and police, were taking place only a couple of streets away. Molotov is the quiet streets during a riot, and it's knowing that just around the corner, people are smashing windows and burning cars.

b) Do a good mix of Molotov by taking everything out, and only putting back in the stuff that you like. Scrap the rest.

c) Webcams/webchats. Now, we've done this. We know that what happens is that we pull stupid faces into the camera for half an hour, then say goodnight. Shall we do it again sometime?

Deadline

2005-12-05T04:51:00.000-08:00

At last, we have a current ETA on the angel tech LP! It's an intractable deadline, and here's why: If we haven't got the album finished by 31st January 2006, we're going to invent a time machine, go back in time, and kill our past selves - the feckless, procrastinating bastards - in order to ensure that we get the album finished in time for the 31st of January 2006. We will do this AS OFTEN AS IT TAKES.

AS OFTEN. AS IT TAKES.

Lies

2005-09-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

You realise I’ve been lying throughout this entire blog, don’t you? Lies, lies, lies. Nothing but lies. The truth is as follows: The angel tech album was actually recorded in 2 days, using only 4 chords, a banjo, and a tambourine.

No, that is not true. I’m a liar once more. The very worst type of liar. In fact, the angel tech LP was recorded using telekinesis, rendered as grooves in a huge flat bed of polished stone, amplified by the three of us manually running a giant silver needle over its surface. The needle was wired up, illegally, to the PA at Birmingham New Street train station. We were arrested, and subsequently skipped bail. I’m writing this from a cheap hotel room in Guatemala, riding the wireless connection emitted by the German embassy up the road.

Bollocks. Claptrap. Why do you trust me? I only lie. I only ever lie. In fact, angel tech is not really a band at all, we’re go-getting prospectors in the corduroy business. We’ve sunk our life savings into a struggling trouser factory (the factory is struggling, you understand, not the trouser.) We’re also thinking of making corduroy waistcoats. Our arguments are not about “guitars” and “EQ,” “drum” breaks and “string” arrangements. No, we only ever argue about one thing: The THICKNESS OF THE CORDUROY. It occupies all our available time, a constant low-level bickering which defines our professional relationship. Neil thinks the corduroy should be thick. Doug thinks the corduroy should be very thick. Whilst I think the corduroy should be quite thick.

It’s a fucking stalemate. It’s driving me mad.

It’s also completely untrue.

OK, you want the truth? You think you can handle it? Very well then. Truth thus: Last night Mary cooked the angel tech boys some lovely food. Noodles with vegetables, hoi sin and plum sauce. Doug opined that Sharwood’s hoi sin and plum sauce was their finest sauce, and possibly their only genuinely good sauce. Mary felt that the combination of sauce and crinkly Kale made the Kale taste like liquorice. I agreed, and thought it was a serendipitous culinary discovery. Mary wasn’t best pleased, though, as she doesn’t like Liquorice. She didn’t eat her Kale, which was a sad moment for everyone. To cheer things up a bit Doug then did an impression of the Hermit of St Werburghs, a mad old man who hangs out at the local off-licence and tells angel tech we’re “ALL WINNERS. EVERY ONE OF YOU. WINNERS! LOVELY LADS!” each time we pass. He also shows us his very shiny black trainers, and explains that he cleans his shoes regularly so that “they’ll let me into heaven.” Later on Neil did a fart in the studio, a fart of such terrifying viciousness that in 12,000 years time archaeologists will be able to dig it up and carbon-date it. Later still, I hit the studio ceiling in a spasm of excitement. I was excited because the angel tech LP made me so. That is the truth.

Compression is still the name of the game at the moment*. It works a bit like this: you’ve got a swathe of spasmodic, clattering, insane electronica that invades one particular song and takes it over (I’m talking about YOU, My Part In Your Downfall. Yes I am.) You love it when the madness is dipped in and out of, but playing the whole song, it doesn’t quite gel. There’s too much of it. Too much silly buggery. Too much bucking bronco. So how come you like it when heard for a few moments out of context, so much so that it gets you drumming along with a shit-eating grin on your face? The theory we have at the moment is that there might be 10 seconds, 15 seconds here and there that could be cut from certain tracks. Tiny snips. A haircut, not a decapitation. Certain tracks seem to be wearing their length well: Molotov wouldn’t sound right unless it took its time. But others make you feel as if, in Doug’s words, “They’re trying too hard.” A bit like the Hermit of St Werburghs, they go “Look at me, I’m mad. I’ve got one tooth! I’m in your face! I’m fuckin’ crazy!” and something about his demeanour means that you’re not sure how much he really means it… what that big front might be hiding.

Heh heh. Almost had you going for a second there, didn’t I? Bullshit, of course. The LP is actually going to be 53 minutes of sporadic duck noises and sudden explosions. We’re gonna call it “Quack Quack Boom.” See you in the album charts!

*Imagine a board game called “Compression” in which contestants were forced into unfeasibly small spaces. The winner would be the person who didn’t die from lack of oxygen. It could have a catchphrase: “I’m gonna haf to compress yo ass.” Possibly said in a voice resembling Mr T. Think about it, Mattel toy company. Come onnnnnn. Think about it...

Indentation

2005-09-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

I don't know if your computer screen is as dirty as mine. Mine is filthy. It's a G4 powerbook, and I need to get something to put between the keys and the screen whilst I carry it around. It's causing indentations.

(To the tune of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Pie Jesu)

Indentaaaaaa-tions...
Inden-taaaaaaaaaa-tions...

Enough of this gay banter. How's the LP going, you ask? Neil says that every time someone asks him that selfsame question he's responding with the phrase "Well, we appear to have had another breakthrough." 'Tis true. God knows how many breakthroughs we need until the damn thing births in a gush of amniotic fluid and baby screams... but we're certainly having 'breakthroughs' at the rate of one every 2.6 hours. The Jukebox Will Tear Us Apart finally gave way a couple of weeks ago, with a late night cut-and-paste session that ended with me playing the laptop like a keyboard. Skewered finally sounds like the snarling, beautiful wreck it ought to be, with an ending that turns a whole bunch of disparate elements into a massive, see-sawing pad of sound.

We all have jobs to do: Lists have been drawn up, tasks assigned. Essential surgery is being performed on select tracks, but a good 50% are pretty much being left alone, awaiting the final addition of properly recorded vocals. This will hopefully be the final element which unifies the album (if not sonically, then at least in our heads, an action that seals the process.) We'll be paying cash money for time in a fully equipped studio, with a big ol' room for vocals, a big ol' window through to the control room... we'll essentially be shelling out dosh for a professional vibe, a sense of urgency. We won't neccessarily use all the results; whilst the vocals so far have been recorded merely as guides (using hand-held mics with little care for clipping or popping or background noise in living rooms and bedrooms all over the country,) some of these rough takes have a vulnerable quality that we might want to keep. All the same, we'll be re-recording every vocal for every song, which means lots of strain on the voice and various essential prevantative measures: getting the lemon and ginger tea in, for one. And humming. Lots of humming, all morning, to warm the throat up. People tend to look at you funny in the street or in the shops, but the alternative is little nodes all over your vocal cords for weeks. Who wants nodes? Nodes are bad. No nodes for me, thanks.

We're also addressing the thorny issue of how to translate the fruits of four years studio knob-twiddling into something that is playable live. Doug recently recounted the story of seeing the wonderful My Bloody Valentine in his late teens. He remembers the entire gig as sounding "like the inside of a seashell" with no discernable connection between the band playing on stage and the sound coming out of the PA. Sure, those guitars were being strummed. Sure, the drumkit was being battered somewhere at the back of the stage. Sure, some people were standing behind microphones and maybe, just maybe, their lips were moving. But did any of it connect with the overall noise the audience could hear? Did it buggery.

Our problem is not so much that you can't connect between what happens physically on stage and the sound we produce: it's simply that in its recorded form, most of our material is the result of so much manipulation and digital warping that it has become impossible to play on conventional instruments... and we don't necessarily want to be three blokes standing behind laptops throughout the entirety of our gigs.

Qualifier: there's nothing wrong per se with three blokes standing behind laptops. Or even four blokes standing behind laptops. Hell, even five blokes, a rhesus monkey and a bag of salt behind laptops is fine. Or two women behind three laptops. Or just a kid with a calculator. It's all good. I'm not getting fascist on the asses of laptop groups, 'K? It's just... that I'm not sure we're that sort of band. One likes to hit stuff. One likes to chuck oneself around. One likes to sweat one's arse off. I don't, however, want to spray streams of sticky sweat all over my powerbook. The fucker's dirty enough as it is, you know?

Smoke

2005-08-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

There are many odd things about being in a band, and here's one of them: making music collaboratively involves a whole bunch of people trying to "agree" upon an abstract idea. It’s like trying to hold a bunch of smoke together, using ropes. Success within your number (however small that number may be, two people is difficult enough, three? Hah. Impossible) depends upon somehow reaching a consensus about where a song ought to live in the imagination. You’re catapulting this… thing… at the listener, and you have to decide how high it ought to arc before landing mightily on top of them.

On the other hand, maybe I’m thinking about it too much. Maybe an LP is in fact like a bunch of shelves and should just be nailed up to the wall, bracket after bracket, and left for the listener to dump stuff on as they see fit (stuff they’re going to come back to regularly, or forget completely, or occasionally unscrew and use a pinch of, whatever.) I’ve been in bands where recording and playing is like that, instinctive, animal. And it’s incredibly satisfying. But then so is gradually and painstakingly chipping away at something that changes beyond all recognition as you work.

As if you hadn’t guessed already angel tech is very much the latter type of outfit. It’s no longer about three blokes playing their instruments in a room. The working consequences of delving as far as we have into our technology and abstract concepts are very easy to mock (there’s certainly more than a little of Spinal Tap about the whole thing) but it’s not as if the final results are measured with strict reference to textbooks and aesthetic manifestos. They’re measured by whether they make us grin, dance, bash the table in excitement or laugh until our wigs fall off.

So, back to the quantity of smoke, and the attempt to contain said smoke using a system of ropes, perhaps some pulleys, maybe also by running around the smoke quickly, in a little circle: this is known as “mixing.”

Mixing is the stage at which your disagreement about what a drumbeat “means” raises its ugly head. Mixing is where you discover that everything sounds better on its own and you begin to consider turning the song into a long procession of isolated elements lasting four and a half hours. Mixing is where a chord is “angry” to one member of the band, “kind” to another member of the band, and the third thinks it sounds like “Tuesday.” Mixing is trying to kill the Hydra, the fucking heads just keep sprouting back up at you, you’ve sorted the bass guitar sound but it messes with the hi-hats, you’re hacking away, gasping, up to your knees in bits of snake. Mixing wrecks marriages and turns old friends against each other, all at the whim of the high-pass filter. Mixing asks you to “turn it all up, that’ll sort it, just make it louder,” but it lies, lies, lies. Mixing is never finished, because every system you play your record on will make it sound different in some unexpected way. Mixing sits at the bottom of your bed and laughs at you when you wake up in the morning. Mixing costs, and right here is where you start paying, in sweat. Mixing makes you quickly realise that you wish you had the hearing abilities of a Labrador, because there’s not enough to room in the human range to cram all those sounds in. Mixing is starting with a beautiful palette of vibrant colours, and ending up with a canvas completely covered in BROWN. Mixing is the compression of what you hoped the tune would be into something you think you might be able to live with in the future, and it all hinges upon blind fucking faith. Mixing blows. It blows like the wind. I hate mixing.

At least, that’s what I thought until recently.

In the past I would often leave the room when the mixing process began. My ears would fail me. I'd begin to hear everything in component parts and never be able to get a clear overall impression of how the music was sounding... in other words, I couldn't see the wood for the trees. But there's been a gradual shift in my attitude, and it's all to do with giving each mix an imagined story, a narrative all of it's own.

When I was younger I had a real problem with Mathematics, a mental block which I still struggle with today. The only way of defeating it was to give the numerals individual characteristics, personalities, to make equasions like conversations, graphs like maps, prime numbers proud and arrogant, obtuse angles literally obtuse - It's an approach that I've been told bears some relation to the ideas of educationalist Rudolf Steiner. So I've started using these ideas to get over my hurdles with the vagaries of EQ and panning, with the flow and balance of a piece of music. It sometimes produces interesting results in that I'll latch onto one aesthetic principle and not let go, revelling in the sound of music presented as though recorded inside an oil drum, or through a wall, or on a fucked-up hard drive. I adore music by, say, Tom Waits, where you hear roosters crowing in the background, the devil-may-care hiss of lo-fi, the creak of the piano stool, coughs, buzzes and clicks. Then there's the segments of "There's More To Life Than This" by Bjork where she walks into different rooms during the song. You hear doors slam shut, and acoustics change, and then you walk back with her to where you originally came from.

The latest batch of angel tech mixes are sitting on my minidisc player, on random play, and I'm very pleased to say that they're beginning to take on similar qualities. Angel Tech RIP starts like a squeezebox whirring to life and suddenly shifts gear, defiant, maddening. Molotov seems to have two bands playing the same song on different sides of the world, before being flattened by the loudest guitar in the universe. Compatible just sits in the corner of the room with a funny little smile on its face. Calm Down is the noise of a band of robots getting ideas above their station. God, I can't wait to hear this whole record from start to finish.

Fader

2005-07-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

We played the Ashton Court Festival at the weekend, and the programme notes stated it was to be our last acoustic performance before the release of the album. Heh heh. There's nothing like announcing a random deadline in public to really push you into producing something. Backstage, Doug spoke to Adrian Utley from Portishead and told him of our resolve: No more side-projects, no more faffing around with cinema, acoustica or marginalia, the album was to be nobbled, and nobbled post-haste. "Hmmm..." was Mr Utley's reply, "That's a good idea. Maybe we should do that..."

So it's official. We're in quarantine. Locked in a room, just us and the LP. And here is our shortlist of songs, 10 of 'em, (they're not listed in any ratpiclaru drero):

Calm Down
Angel Tech R.I.P.
Polaroid
My Part In Your Downfall
Compatible
Molotov
Embers
The Jukebox Will Tear Us Apart
Nervs
Skewered

It looks good, lining them up like that, toy soldiers / a royal flush / a line of shots. So we do it constantly. What an irritating bunch of chin-strokers we are… The list of songs is set as a desktop image on every computer we own. It's laid out like a test-card.

(There's documentary footage of us during the making of our last LP at Realworld studios, strips of paper bearing song names scattered across the floor, arranging and re-arranging, arguing over running orders. We chastise our engineer for suggesting that a song from one subset should migrate to another subset. "That's the thing," shouts Neil, "Don't touch the thing." He then proceeds to elucidate upon the geometry of Paris' geographical placement in France. Trust me, it's like Spinal Tap for failed academics.)

Of the ten, Jukebox, Downfall and Polaroid are the least fully formed, and as such are coming to represent how we see the album. They're the songs which have to provide colours the other tracks don't; they're the songs which form a culmination to the way we've been working for the last 4 friggin’ years. Downfall was the first to click. It's a very simple, chorus-less song - a sort of cycle, like a folk song - but it's now surrounded by a forest of 1 million tiny glitches, handbrake-turn drums and suzuki violins.

The way we did it was by trying to short-circuit all the decisions we made concerning samples and electronica. Processes that normally take weeks (the endless tweaking and cut-and-pasting to achieve results that sounded fluid and alive) were concentrated into one single session: Doug set up some equipment so that myself and Neil could flounder through the track several times, each of us assigned a piece of software and a controller, their functions relatively unfamiliar and unpredictable. As we tweaked the dials and faders, grids of coloured lines would appear on the screen (but we had no idea what they represented,) effects would drop in and out, instrument volumes would fluctuate… sometimes it was small and subtle. Other times we’d press a button and all hell would break loose.

It was almost comical at first. Downfall has a 32-bar cycle and the melody creeps up the scale throughout, building in intensity. This would mean that we’d use our controllers to experiment with subtle curves and dynamics throughout most of the chord sequence, and then at its climax, suddenly, both of us would hit as many buttons as we could, almost ripping the speakers to pieces. We’d laugh and lose concentration, and spend most of the rest of the subsequent cycle trying to work out what the hell we’d done. At one point half the elements in the track shifted an entire 3 beats. Backwards. “I don’t know where I am...” I muttered. Neil helpfully replied: “Yeah. Fuck it,” and flicked a switch which made that old, familiar and reassuring noise of an army of 7-legged green ants doing the Charleston inside a working microwave oven. CHKchckt! CHKchcktttt! CHkkkKchckt! CHKChChchckt! FOOOMP!!! CHKchckt! CHKchckt! CHKchcktttt! CHKchckt! (etc)

Stranger still, over the next day or so this indulgent mess was edited by Neil into something intricate and engaging. The lyrics to My Part In Your Downfall are about a drunken night out… the detritus… the consequences. The pairings-off and the freakings-out. Finally the song sounds that way as well.

Questionnaire

2005-06-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

To be completed by the new angel tech album. You are asked to give a response to each numbered question or statement, please tick one box only per number. Please also note that none of these are “trick questions.” Answer as quickly as possible, without too much prior thought. Thankyou for your time.

1. You are in a room with lots of other albums. All the other albums are very cool and some of them are spoken of in hushed tones by people in the know. These albums have their cliques and cartels: you are on your own in the room, without a date. You must now decide whether you want to mingle or sulk.

Mingle ............. [ ]
Sulk ............... [ ]

2. Whilst you have many short, concise and focussed tracks, you are not averse to wandering off somewhere occasionally and maybe making a cup of tea, or just looking at the lovely view.

I agree ............ [ ]
I disagree ......... [ ]

3. There is such a thing as too much distortion.

I agree ............ [ ]
I disagree ..........[ ]

4. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH DISTORTION.

I agree ............ [ ]
I disagree ......... [ ]

5. Which would you rather deliver?

Beats .............. [ ]
Laughs ............. [ ]

6. From time to time I may require of you something predictable and / or conventional. How would you feel about that?

Comfortable ........ [ ]
Uncomfortable ...... [ ]

7. You’re probably not going to have an album title, are you? You’re probably just going to be called “angel tech,” right?

Right .............. [ ]
Dunno .............. [ ]
Nope ............... [ ]

8. Are you a “made in a cottage in the countryside, with leisurely daytime strolls in the forest and a log fire at night” sort of album or a “found in the bins behind a kebab shop” sort of album?

Cottage ............ [ ]
Kebab Shop ......... [ ]

9. Are you even the slightest bit funky? Ever?

No ................. [ ]
Moderately ......... [ ]
HUH! Kiss myself ... [ ]

10. Fragment (consider revising)

I agree ............ [ ]
I disagree ......... [ ]

Mercy

2005-06-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

> Mary, Doug’s wife, has been filling in a questionnaire whilst we work. It’s for her high-falutin’ job in marketing, and involves questions such as “Which would you rather deliver: Justice or Mercy?” Every now and then she’ll look up from the page and, to a background of electronic ambient wurbling, ask one in a series of vague but loaded questions. We begin to add our own variations, increasingly nonsensical (“Who’s your daddy? Answer yes or no.”) I begin to think about writing a list of questions directed at the album as an imaginary entity, or for particular songs. Dual option. No evasions, no excuses. Answer quickly without thinking.

> Doug discovers a piece of software which can potentially stop our studio having the acoustics of an empty swimming pool. He calculates the point at which frequencies strike the walls, and what reflections are caused. He’s marking out bass notes in thin air with a retractable tape measure.

> Neil has taken delivery of his brand-spanking-new Apple Mac G5, but a week later the stupid bugger still hasn’t unpacked it. I had precisely the same experience two years ago when I bought my Powerbook. It sat for several days, wrapped in plastic, untouched, and I did my best to find all sorts of reasons not to plug it in. Neil knows, as I did, that once you open that box you’re going to be incommunicado for the best part of a month. Just deciding what cool amazing brilliant and cool picture you’ll have on the desktop is gonna take you two and a half hours, then once you’ve settled on something (the Last Supper done in Lego, or whatnot) you’ll spend twenty minutes walking around the room admiring it from a variety of angles. Software installation, the reading of manuals, calibrating of hard-drives; that unopened Mac box is actually a bumper pack of glowering portent. Yes, it’s full of adventure. Yes, and mystery. It might as well be a huge ancient metal trapdoor that has inexplicably appeared in the middle of your living room, the surrounding floorboards splintered and cracked as if it had just been hammered in by a pissed-off Norse demon, a massive rusty ring on its central panel, waiting for you to heave it open on un-oiled hinges and stick your stupid fucking head in…

> Milo will be 2 years old in July. He is definitely his father’s son in that more than anything else in the world, the kid loves pushing buttons. Let loose in the studio he can produce some interesting results. On one occasion he manages to re-program a controller keyboard so that it operates purely in random atonal clusters. Not only that, but it plays those clusters on a MIDI channel no-one has ever heard of before. I say to him: “It takes Karlheinz Stockhausen months to come up with this sort of bollocks,” and he replies by shouting “OUTSIDE!” before suddenly running into the garden.
Well… That showed me.

Baffle

2005-05-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

Our first evening back in the newly renovated studio.

You might be forgiven for thinking that sound just goes from A to B: that it leaves its source and travels neatly to your ears in an orderly fashion but, ah, no. No, sound is a tricky little lizard. It hides. It wanders, loiters with intent, sulks, zips behind your back when you’re not looking. In any given room there will be traps, echoes, reverberations, hotspots. Sound will find them and screw up your plans accordingly. It doesn’t help matters that in a bout of inexplicable masochism some years ago angel tech chose a pair of speakers* as our principle monitors which are so flat, so harsh and unforgiving, that by the time it squeezes out of the cones any sound is so royally pissed off it will deliberately vandalise your mix. Snarling and fractious, it will either flop to the floor and play dead or shear the top of your head off in a fit of pique. “I didn’t put that frequency there!” you’ll exclaim, “It’s not my fault! Not my fault!”

Here’s the main problem: Before its redecoration the walls of the studio were covered in shelves full of CDs, videos, reel-to-reel tapes and musical instruments, rackmount units, little toy clowns, Geiger counters, stethoscopes, etc. These relatively complex surfaces and the generally absorbent nature of the material actually did the overall acoustics some good; with lots of clutter, the sound has a lot to 'deal' with… it quickly gets tired and stops acting the giddy goat. But now, post renovation and without the distracting mess, working in the studio is - sonically, at least - like working inside a giant cowbell.

Whilst annoying, it’s hardly the end of the world. Hanging a bunch of cushions or carpets in carefully chosen places around the room will create rudimentary versions of what are known as “Baffles” (so called because they confuse the sound into submission) and dampen the echoes. Knowing Doug’s DIY fetish this might even involve some clever-clever stuff with foam or varying lengths of wood. All I know is that by midnight last night we were successfully ignoring the room’s minor shortcomings and making full use of its pretty solid soundproofing. Warping, phasing multiple keyboard parts were played at volume into the small hours, and what might well be the last song to be added to the album’s playlist is now well under way.

*Yamaha NS10s, nearfield monitor fans! We’ve had to buy new cones** for these recently. In reggae sound systems you’ll often see that the cones have been deliberately ripped in order to give the bass frequencies a forceful pumping effect. However, I doubt they achieve this effect the way angel tech managed to: by merrily walking the speaker directly into a door handle. Long story.

**The cones are no longer made by Yamaha, and are pretty scarce. There’s a rumour that the paper they are made out of is cut from an endangered species of tree. Given that the Piano*** I inherited from my Grandfather (which I’m beginning to suspect has genuine ivory keys) has now been installed in the room above the studio, I’m estimating Doug and Mary’s house has now become 11% less ethically sound thanks to angel tech. Next, we’ll no doubt discover that Apple Macs are made from dolphins, or something.****

***It’s a beautiful instrument. Tom Waits once said that even a beaten-up, broken piano is infinitely playable. Whilst this one has a “Jerry Lee Lewis” factor of approximately 0.3 out of 10, (hammering it frantically with the fingering style of a grey elephant ain’t really gonna work) it’s a gentle, graceful thing. Perfect for those vaguely hymnal progressions***** and tentative, murky 4am tunes where the chords bleed into one another.

****This is how trouble starts. Someone, somewhere is going to google the phrase “APPLE MACS MADE FROM DOLPHINS,” it'll lead them here, and I’m gonna get sued. Listen: Apple Macs aren’t made from dolphins. Stop googling crap.

*****Speaking of hymnal progressions, alongside the Piano we took delivery of my parents’ Harmonium, a tallish foot-pump affair of the type you used to find in small parish churches. Its bass tones are exceptional, real rattle-the-windows, false-teeth falling-out type stuff. Doug and Mary’s 22-month old son Milo****** took to it instantly, and worked out how to use it in seconds. He stood, both feet on the foot-pumps, paddling away, reaching vainly for the keyboard. Of course, at his size, it looks as if he’s on the cross-trainer in a gothic gymnasium.

******Milo is influencing the LP in various subtle ways. The knock-on effect of having so many toy instruments to mess around with has given some of the album’s textures a child-like quality. We’ve even developed a process for recording Doug’s violin that can best be described as “one-man Suzuki orchestra.” The Suzuki technique teaches children to play an instrument in large groups, having them perform their scales, sketches and exercises in unison, and in the early stages of the learning process this often produces a dense, somehow rickety sound. We ape this by having Doug play his violin parts over and over again on a loop, recording every pass whilst slightly altering the mic location each time and getting Doug to throw in the odd deliberate mistake or odd tuning. It’s a sort of distortion… but without the blunderbuss of sheer volume. Of course, it also means you run out of hard-disc space about twenty times quicker than any normal, sane outfit would.

Instructions

2005-05-06T18:33:00.000-07:00

So, what? Let me get this straight… your instrument bores you? Wow. Hmmm. Yes. And you’re worried that you’re settling into a series of favourite patterns when you play, that you’re no longer inspiring or inspired? Terrible. Yeah, I know how you feel. I sympathise. It’s got to the point where I can’t sit down at a piano without instantly tapping out the same old chords, with the same old comfortable arrangement of knuckles and the same stooped posture. So to help both of us, a few ideas:

Instructions for drummers

Take your drums to the beach, plus some recording equipment. Whilst the tide is out, partially bury your kit in the sand below the high tide mark. Wait for the sea to start washing back up the beach again. Now, hurry! Make sure to record your drum track before the tom-toms fill up with brine.

Find between five and nine friends. Get each of them to hold a component of your drum kit. Play as normal, but tell your friends to move around in a random fashion at irregular intervals. Perhaps provide your friends with earplugs and thick gloves, especially if you tend to drum like a cunt.

Play the drums whilst also hiding behind them, as if attempting to conceal yourself from the unwanted attention of your bandmates. Keep a low profile. Present as little body mass to open fire as possible.

Instructions for bassists

Get a boffin. Pay the boffin to wire up your bass so that certain combinations of frets and pickups will channel an electric current straight into your fingertips, and thence throughout your entire body. Different melodies will produce different intensities of delightfully heart-skipping electrical surge. Perhaps get the boffin to customise your fretboard so that playing the riff from Temple Of Love by The Sisters Of Mercy will fry you like a pan of chips.
nb. boffins can be found on the internet. If you’re lucky they will sometimes accept payment in the form of interesting Diodes and / or cans of “Dr Pepper.”

Play the bass whilst walking a tightrope. This will hopefully provide you with some considered, fluid and fearful bass lines. A possible variation on this instruction is to actually make the “E” string on your instrument a component of the tightrope itself, so that whilst journeying the length of the rope you’re also sliding the bass along beneath you, bent double like some sort of fucked up tightrope-twanging Chuck Berry, grinning like a loon, sweating, trying desperately not to look down…

Instructions for guitarists

You are legendary Blues guitarist Robert Johnson. You have gone to the crossroads at midnight, to meet the Devil and make a deal; a deal which means you will play guitar like a God for all your days remaining, in return for your immortal soul. Unfortunately the Devil doesn’t show up. You hang around all night, and by 7am you’re cold and hungry. You go and buy a hot dog, then catch a film. The film is Die Hard II: Die Harder, and despite having its moments is not as good as the original. Play guitar as if you are actually Robert Johnson and this has recently happened to you.

Feed your guitar through so much reverb that when you strum a chord it plays yesterday. Invite Albert Einstein to “stitch that.”

Sit on your hands for about 45 minutes. It’ll feel like someone else is playing the guitar for you.

Instructions for keyboard players

At length, contemplate your keyboard. No, don’t play anything yet. Sit for a while. Give it time. Sure, allow your hands to hover in possible formations over the keys, but play nothing. Play nothing. Sit and imagine the consequences of the first chord your hands drop upon. Play nothing, but think about the spiralling possibilities, the chaotic shift of the universe once your mind is made up and your fingertips land, once the notes sound out definitively. What wonders await, what outcomes are denied, what tangents meet? There’s no right or wrong. It’s mathematical but it’s unthinkable. It’s the most important thing you’ve ever played. Let it drop… let it… oh. Right. D Minor? Right. Yeah, D minor…yeah, that’s interesting. Right. No it’s fine. Fine.

Chimney

2005-05-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

Yeah yeah yeah. It ought to be explained that, at the same time as putting together this album, angel tech have been simultaneously working on other projects. As a result the LP is a sort of constant background hum beneath the bursts of more focussed, time-conscious work: shows constructed with our collaborators in the performance group “Bodies In Flight”; film soundtracks; radio broadcasts; educational work. In addition to this we have our own self-contained alter ego called “El Hoover” which involves recording obtuse and often bizarrely comic electronic music inspired by the stuff that never quite makes it onto an angel tech track. We have a whole album of this stuff kicking around.

Meanwhile the studio is currently undergoing serious renovations. The ceiling has been ripped out and stuffed with rockwool… new doors are being added (they lead to the same places, but it’s all framed differently. Which is nice.) The chimney against one wall has been torn away and replaced with a series of magical devices to ensure that the entirety of Doug’s house doesn’t collapse and flatten us beneath a mountain of Edwardian brick and baby toys. And as we’re currently involved in a theatrical tour on top of all this, it feels as though our equipment, resources, time and energy have been burst across the face of the city like a series of giant life-changing zits.

The majority of the recording equipment is now set up in my flat in Central Bristol. This would be fine were it not for the birds outside my window, which - now that spring has finally made its mind up, and sprung - have developed fantastically loud chirrups, cackles and whistles in order to compete with the city rumble. I’m thinking of some sort of air rifle… or maybe a powerful bow and arrow, with the arrowheads dipped in pitch and set alight before being let fly. You’ll be able to spot my house for miles: it’ll be the one surrounded by flaming blackbirds, charred, plummeting chaffinches, and the RSPCA.

I quite like the fact that our music is briefly aping the rupture produced by packed diaries, fuck-you birds and a general lack of sleep. We’ll grab little moments here and there in some provincial theatre to suddenly burst into a series of angry riffs, and these will then find their way onto the latest mix of one of the album tracks. I’ll be up at 6:00am editing a radio ident and it will suddenly strike me that Molotov should collapse under its own weight at the end, struggling, drowning beneath scuzzed-out guitars. So I feed the whole track through a distortion pedal Neil has left lying around called a “Jekyll And Hyde.” It’s silver and shaped a bit like an axe head. Maybe over the top I’ll add the noise of the birds outside, compressing and distorting them until they sound like hellish choirs of bad ringtones. Maybe at 7:30am I’ll crack open a beer. Dammit. Sleep is for tortoises.

Small

2005-04-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

I got to wondering last week whether watching people do intricate technical work was sexy. No, don’t run away! Think about it…The delicate placing of a silicon chip; blueprinting a skyscraper; rows upon rows of sexy bald monks illuminating a sacred text. No?

If it is even remotely sexy, then angel tech has a specialist porn film on its hands. A quick visit to our studio will currently reveal a selection of thirty-something gentlemen hunched over two or three macintosh computers, drawing the blips out of waveforms, routing devices in and out of the mixing desk, trying to cancel the hiss from an ancient rehearsal recording. Occasionally someone from the outside world will drop by and offer opinions. Occasionally a spliff will be rolled with equal care and attention to detail. Occasionally a whole tune will be played and three heads will bob along in time to the distorted drumbeats.

Introverted, maybe. But not sexy, right? Right.

In Prague last October I visited a museum of miniatures. A single driven individual had produced several rooms full of miniscule curiosities, viewed through assorted magnifying lenses and microscopes.
The Mona Lisa on a poppy seed.
A flea carrying a tiny handbag, padlock and key (where was the flea going? What was its terrible purpose?)
Part of the lord’s prayer inscribed on a human hair.

The latter certainly suggested a man fuelled by religious fervour of some kind (and many of the images on grains, seeds and buttons were of a Christian nature,) but this may just have been compounded by housing the museum within the grounds of Prague’s oldest monastery. Looking at a picture of the bloke responsible for this pernickety marvel, he seemed to match up to the stereotype: hair not quite long enough to be making a statement, slicked back over his scalp, wide, thick glasses, a librarian’s moustache… you could imagine him scampering home from Mass with the latest idea in his head, “Yes! A ladybird,” he’d mutter to himself, “A ladybird, standing upright, playing a mandolin…” Straight out of a short story by Angela Carter, he would ignore his wife nightly for the satisfaction of straining a single eye through his magnifying glass onto a brightly lit patch of desk… Tweezers in hand… Wheedling away…

This is the point about the museum: it was filthy. Something about the exhibition reeked of illicit pleasure. The very act of getting so intimately close to the display, the way tourists would take a peak through a lens and suddenly back off laughing as if confronted by the image of a half-nude nun on a washing machine. We waited until it was relatively quiet and we could progress calmly around the two rooms.

Presently, angel tech stares down the microscope at each song in turn, messing with its fundamentals. It’s sometimes difficult to keep focussed when doing something as simple as isolating a couple of instruments seems to suggest the birth of a completely different song… but most of the time, it’s just about dealing with a list of tasks attached to every tune. We’re bloody-minded about it; we’re getting the fucking ladybird to hold the fucking mandolin, thanks very much. Can you lose a sense of perspective when doing work as brain-crawlingly fussy as this? Yep. 'Course you can. But that's when having so MUCH of it helps. After a while you simply have to leave it alone, work with something else, and return to it later. Have a cup of tea. Go for a walk. Go to Prague.

We played another acoustic gig at the Cube Cinema, Bristol, last week. Neil has been very concerned that our acoustic shows feel succinct and confident in their quietness as opposed to doling out the waves of noise we're more likely to produce with electric guitar, bass and drums. So I tried to make myself small on stage that night, intricate and of dubious provenance, as if gazing up at the audience from the microscope slide. As if every tap of the keys was likely to be amplified tenfold. It seemed to make more sense of some of the newer songs, like "The Jukebox Will Tear Us Apart," which otherwise can easily turn into a sort of cheesey bombastic dirge with its big ol' list of bands, songs and LPs. Maybe it's an idea for how it should sound on the album: like following a tiny piece of electronic equipment on a factory production line, trundling along the conveyer belt, slowly watching the device being put together by people with anglepoise magnifying glasses and hunched shoulders.

Hexagon

2005-03-09T14:01:00.000-08:00

There's an LP appearing. Deep in the fog. Somewhere in all this - amidst the broken patch leads, multiple plug-in windows cluttering up every monitor, ancient synths lying upside down on shelves with their batteries dead and power adaptors fucked, useless bird-imitating whistles Doug bought off a bloke in Broadmead, lovely old electric guitars with snap-happy electronics, wine, scrap paper and kazoos - there's a record getting unearthed.

We've got about a month before something has to be committed to a CD-r, and there are still so many mixes, so many ideas.

Mrs Rorschach's favourite word at the moment is "Problematic." She uses it constantly. It is wheeled out first thing in the morning when searching for missing cardigans. It makes regular appearances in pub conversations concerning subjects arty, mundane and social. It is deployed in relation to holiday plans, christmas presents and computers. "Problematic." Say it again! "Problematic." Amen! Rolls nicely off the tongue. Pronounced slowly, it makes you think of a garret room in which all your worries could be filed away in mouldering cardboard boxes. "Problematic."

Writing about the album at the moment is problematic. Having recorded pretty much all the material and made rudimentary arrangements of each song, it feels like we now need to assemble every last bit of data and break the overall 'code.' Our curiosity could lead us in so many weird and wonderful directions, but right now I'm more interested in discovering whether we're capable of making a cohesive final work out of these tumbling, spinning things. Hopefully we're experiencing our last truly nebulous phase, one in which we experiment with the overall 'feel' of the record before knuckling down to some serious mixing. But it is nebulous. And describing the operation is problematic. So I offer the following few vague documents by way of explanation; and hope to emerge from the attic sometime in the near future, having individually boxed, sealed and labelled my gripes.

----------------------------------------

The story of the addendum
Neil and I are playing around with some drum loops and piano samples for Cut Down The Middle. The pianos are loaded up accidentally from the wrong project and don't match the beats. Intrigued by the lack of any discernable pattern amidst all this I begin playing a second piano part against it. When the loop sticks on a certain chord, my hands do one of those instinctive - usually annoying - things familiar to many musicians, and settle into a favourite progression over the keyboard. Suddenly I'm playing a very familiar piece of music which we last used as part of our film score to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It fits perfectly. Long-lost vocal lines rise slowly to the surface. At random, we've got exactly what the song needed: a third section. And - unusually for us - it doesn't at all feel like pointlessly grafting, say, a steam train onto a badger.

----------------------------------------

The story of the hexagon
Charlie and Colin, friends of Doug's, lend us some electronic drum kit. Colin's bass drum is largeish and has that whole 80s thing goin' on. It's a shiny hexagonal black plate not much smaller in diameter than my acoustic bass drum, but only about 10cm thick. I'm convinced that were you to heat it to the right temperature it would be possible to griddle beefburgers on the fucker. It sits beneath the sparse remainders of my acoustic drumkit (hi-hats growing a copper-green moss from lack of proper care, snare drum with the words "One day I will hit back" written on the skin in permanent marker.) I can now plug into the computer and play a bassdrum sound that goes "Smmmmmmmmmmnkk," "UOUPT!" or "DOOOOOOOOOOOMF," instead of just "Bp." Doug looks at my rickety gaffa-tape-and-bits-of-string set up, spindly, mismatched but still somehow solid, and says that he'd like the band to sound how the drumkit looks.

----------------------------------------

The story of the song made of lego
Molotov squats in a corner of the hard-drive and we've no idea what to do with it. Doug has been building a palette of samples (all of them our own, live instruments recorded aeons ago in various studios and rehearsal rooms) from which to build up a coherent whole. It's a mass of coloured blocks on the screen and I don't know how to stick 'em together. The music sounds like so many different bands. I leave it for a week, and when I return for our next rehearsal Neil has found a solution. To do so he's returned to the exact principle upon which we began angel tech: he's given the song space. It breathes, instead of gabbling out idea after idea. And the beginning literally sounds like breathing: an oboe, long, drawn out, pitched unrealistically low, which oscillates for ages before suddenly dropping away, a sheer cliff, straight down into the first word of the song.

Wheelie

2005-03-01T11:04:00.000-08:00

I'm pissing myself off.
I'm pissing myself off because it's proving very hard to shake this desire to re-invent the wheel with every single track we do. To create neat tricks and special effects. Making a film that consists entirely of stunts, 90 minutes of 'em, bam bam bam bam bam bam. Writing a book full of clever puns but nothing much else. Painting a portrait where the eyes literally - and annoyingly - fall out of the frame and follow you around the room.

It's hard to remind yourself that the fripperies and novelties aren't at the heart of what you're doing. When the three of us first had a conversation on this subject a few years back we came up with a phrase: "Everything's already been done... except the washing up." It was a sort of resolution not to get distracted by unfounded and egotistical notions about our own artistic greatness. But this wasn't helped by Mister Brian Fucking Eno, ohhhhh no. A year or so after making this decision, we got 'into' his Oblique Strategies cards (briefly, this is a deck of cards designed to be drawn at random in order to short-circuit some of the conventions of your creative process. They are clues or instructions, depending on how you want to interpret them, and proved very useful to us in situations where we had to work to tight deadlines.) We were horrified to discover that one of the cards contained the instruction: "Do the washing up."

I don't want to do the washing up, dammit. You do it.

What next, an instruction that reads "Gild the Lilly?"

I suppose he might always have meant to literally do the washing up.
...nah. Brian Eno? Do the washing up? He probably has a big polyphonic dishwasher. Bono gave it to him. Along with that digital egg whisk.

Working on the lyrics has been great. I've been taking a central phrase from each song, scrawling it at the top of a page, flicking between pages, scribbling things out in random places beneath the principle line. Different pens, different degrees of legibility. It looks like staggeringly pretentious graffitti. See this on the back of a toilet cubicle door, you'd run screaming from the pub. You'd scramble into the street, throwing yourself onto your knees in the middle of the road as traffic swerved around you, horns blaring. You'd lift your face to the sky, and yell "THEY'RE COMING! THEY'RE COMING TO GET US ALL! IT'S NOT ART, IT'S WANK!!!....... AND IT'S........ MUTATING!"

Yeah yeah, it looks bad, but it's fun and it sifts the wheat from the chaff. You've got to go through these larval stages, crawling around on yer belly, munching at the undergrowth. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Neil is fond of paraphrasing this as "You can't make an omelette without being a cunt."

Words

2005-02-18T13:53:00.000-08:00

It's crunch time for lyrics. Having decided that a few of our songs (Jordan Baker, Embers) can't really develop without some lyrical wrangling, yours truly gotta knuckle down to the wordy-wordy.

I work part time at the BBC. Down in the dark vaults of Broadcasting House they have a store of all the rushes shot for their ketchup-happy "999" series, in which terrifying accidents are merrily dramatised for your viewing pleasure. I'm fascinated by these shelves, labelled up in amateur fashion with yellow 'post-it' notes detailing the nature of the tragedies enacted upon each set of tapes; "Hand Crush," "Long Horse Crawl," "Snooker Cue," "Spanish Heart," "Rusty Bolt," and intriguingly, "Pub Surgery."

There are others...

"Bell Tower"
"Tree Surgeon"
"Dinghy Girls"
"Bike Fork"
"Lead Mine"
"Coat Hanger"
"Paddling Pool"
"Surrey Drain Rescue"
"Insect Demo"
"Rotherham Treefall"
"Wheelchair"
"Neck Break"
"Escalator"
"Snow Girls"
"Blind Swim & Plumber's Mate"
"Harbour Drowning"
"800 ft fall"
"Ice Trap"
"Taxi Hero"
"Wasp Man Testimony"
"Devil's Bridge"
"Asthma"
"Lightning"
"Railings"
"Smokey Joe"
"Penn Hotel Fire & Rotivator"
"Wet Leaves"
"Spanish Trawler & American Cormorant"
"Lift Shaft Testimony"
"Jaffa The Pony"
"Trench Man, Indian Earth, Dangling Baby & other bits"
"White Knuckle Worker"
"Shocked Farmer"
"Interactive Choking"
"Inverness Car Crash"

Each is a little story that leaps from the label at you and spirals off on its own. It sort of reminds me of Forced Entertainment and the shows they do in which home-made signs are whipped onto stage at speed, with the performers briefly doing a pose or action inspired by whatever's scrawled on the scrappy bit of cardboard they've picked up:
CHAS (IN PERSIA)
A STEWARDESS FORGETTING HER DIVORCE
A GOOD COP IN A BAD FILM
SPIRAL JENNY
etc.

I can see something similarly fleeting but powerful in the "999" post-it notes. I'm imagining a love song written around a series of appalling accidents. "A Lift Shaft / A Taxi / A Wheelchair / An Ice Trap / A Car Crash / A Doctor / And you..."

"Baby you're so good at getting dead /An amateur like me, well... / the ice refused to break / the sniper got distracted / the guillotine was fake"

Factory

2005-02-09T08:30:00.000-08:00

Drum problem solved. I won't bore you with technical details except to say that it involved the use of some reclaimed polystyrene and the electric motor from a toy Dalek.

Last night we dragged all our live backline kit into a new rehearsal studio. It's a half-empty converted factory in the middle of nowhere: this is part of a pattern, in that over the last few years we have moved into a series of different rehearsal spaces which have taken us further and further away from any recognisable civilisation. And with good cause.

angel tech rehearsal spaces 1995 - 2005
The first in a series designed to bore you so much you'll want to eat your own neck.

Number One: The "V.A.R."

Our first room was a green hut next to the Bristol University Institute Of Grinding Technology. The University's Drama and Film department had claimed it as a sort of theatrical outpost equipped with basic lighting rig, wraparound black curtains and a pair of huge Orange speakers haphazardly wired up to a domestic hi-fi. It was inhabited by a) Drama Students and b) Cockroaches. The drama students would hang around eating the remnants of food purchased in the nearby ESSO garage, and the cockroaches would put on productions of Mother Courage and Waiting For Godot. During the quiet summer months we claimed the hut for the greater glory of angel tech and stayed up all night trying to find our "sound." Doug was in love with the fact that our rehearsal studio had a lighting rig, and spent most of the time doing "smooth fades."

And here is the key: this rehearsal room was too interesting. Never have anything even potentially interesting in your rehearsal room, like a pool table, or a lighting rig, or a series of periodicals telling you how to make a scale model of the Cutty Sark. It will distract you from the proper business of being in a band, such as arguing about where exactly, and with what force, the guitar should be stuck.

Number Two: The Student Union

In common with most student unions throughout the country, Bristol University's was run on a "fuck off, you fucking students" policy by staff who would have been happier working in an unregulated abattoir pulling BSE-infected spinal cords from month-old carcasses with their own teeth. The "rock band rehearsal room" was a converted chair-stacking facility ON THE TOP FLOOR of the six-storey Union with a dirty glass roof that had the combined effect of broiling you alive whilst not actually letting you see any proper daylight. In order to book it out you first had to persuade the porter staff to let you have the relevant forms, and then countersign them in three different places, leaving your student identification, 3 examples of domestic billing as proof of address plus a blood sample, before swearing an oath of allegiance to the Queen and giving a "secret handshake." In the event of ever successfully entering the room, you also had to retrieve the cheap-ass PA from the depths of the porters' office and lug it to the top floor (the lifts were often out of order) where, upon plugging it in, you would realise that you'd get better results amplifying your vocals by singing into an empty plastic dustbin. The room had no furniture at all and its walls were made up of rickety banks of wooden "lockers" in which bands stored their equipment. This meant you were surrounded by a forest of padlocks, and every single one seemed to vibrate whenever a 'D' was played on the bass. Look at all the early Angel Tech songs. How many in the key of D? None. That's how many. Padlocks. That's why. Padlocks.

On top of everything else, the room would often revert to its ancient role as a storage space for piles of drab stacking chairs. It would do this randomly and without notice. So, in brief, the problem with this space? It was so terrible and unpleasant that instead of writing anything, we spent most of the time in the student bar downstairs; the irony being that the student bar was similarly terrible and unpleasant.

Number Three: The Oil-filled Basement

Next we moved to a space in what used to be a picture framing factory in Easton. We were directly next to rooms that had at one time housed several huge cans of oil used to heat the building, and the odour impregnated every last part of the studio. As a result we would emerge from rehearsals smelling like the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. Bored conservationists would scramble down the street after us, offering to "wash it off."

Our basement room had a very low ceiling with all sorts of interesting hanging pipes ideal for an average sized person to smash their unprotected forehead upon. For a while, Doug (obviously pining for the lighting rig that accompanied our first space) imported various domestic lamps and gizmos in order to try and improve the ambience of our white-washed-breeze-blocked bunker. But the lack of "pinspots" with "gels" or "a decent fucking fresnel with a motorised gobo," or even some sort of "crappy little lighting board I could use to get some smooth fades going" seemed unlikely in a room where just switching on a lava lamp would blow the arse off your fuse. Conclusion? You can't relax in a place where you're scared to light up in case it sparks off residual petrochemicals in your own hair.

Number Four: Thorndale

Another basement, this time beneath an electronics repair shop in Clifton. For those who don't know Bristol, the Clifton district is populated almost exclusively by Trustafarians, Lawyers and TV Producers. It's extremely affluent. Should Clifton ever get hit by a rogue asteroid the number of "Tristams" in Great Britain will be immediately reduced by 68%.

With record company money, we had a dream of setting up a joint studio and office space. It was the dream of geeks and saddos, but it was our dream, and we wanted that dream made flesh. The basement had been designed as a control room and live area, complete with a large glass window and heavy door in between. The idea was that we would put our computers, faxes and film equipment into the control room and set up a lah-dee-dah integrated music studio in the adjoining space. For about 10 days it felt equally decadent and productive. But what ultimately happened is that we spent most our time in the office, on the phone to our manager and record label, staring resentfully through the glass at our unused instruments. We felt like bored kids at a musical zoo, looking into a dingy reptile house run by Future Music readers. We should have put little placards on the window with handy guides to the inhabitants: "What am I? I am a MIDI Cable. I only come out at night. I average one to two metres in length. I am not poisonous. I have 16 seperate channels and can eat a goat whole."

Number Five: West Street

Our next move was facilitated by a kind member of Bristol bands Gagarin and Dalmaine, and produced our first regular rehearsal space with natural light, above a car repair shop. As such Doug's lighting designer role fell by the wayside, and he was only occasionally to be found wistfully redirecting an anglepoise lamp. He also managed to refrain from describing the sunset as a "Master Fade" on all but two non-consecutive occasions.

The move made sense in that at the weekends Bedminster offers few distractions, unless you're interested in buying some cheap meat. The pub over the road was rarely open. Food was only available locally from Iceland, which meant your one option was to place a frozen pizza on top of Neil's valve amp and wait for a few hours until you could safely pierce it with a drumstick. In fact, during winter, the place was freezing. On one occasion Neil went to the toilet and developed what can only be described as an "instant icicle." Its disconnection was a complicated procedure (as, obviously, we weren't going to touch it) involving some old bass strings, a bin liner and 2 allen keys (one of which was permanently lost during the operation. Neil sets off airport metal detectors to this day.)

Our conclusion was that what we really needed was somewhere completely removed from civilisation, but warm. It would be out in unmapped territory, far from anything that could be described as culturally diverting and potentially distract us from music-making; barren, lifeless, remote. Doug did a big ol' search, looking for rehearsal studios in the Gobi Desert, but came a close second when he found somewhere in Fishponds.

Number Six: The Factory.

There ought to be a local competition to find anything of interest to do in Fishponds. The prize? You get to move out of Fishponds. You want to know how boring Fishponds is? There isn't even a fishpond.

As we were waiting to load our gear in last night I took a quick look at the mailboxes for all the businesses that had moved into this converted factory we were in... minicab firms, double-glazing specialists, and of course, Graphic Design Companies. It doesn't matter how far away from intelligent life you get, there will inevitably be a graphic design company nearby. There are motorway service stations in Poland that won't even sell you fucking Petrol, but will have a small office willing to do a quick run of laminate A5s for your drum'n'bass night with a cool blurred font and some grainy image of a Ford Capri driving past a streetlamp.

Anyway. It didn't matter, cos the rehearsal rooms were cosy, comfortable and decently equipped, and they were willing to store our gear there. The drums sounded good. The PA was up to the job of having angel tech bloops, blops, skreeks and thzzwpps thrown at it. The only downside came with the late arrival of the owners. It wasn't so much the fact that they were 40 minutes late, but their given reason for it: they'd been picking up a pool table.

Drums

2005-02-02T13:50:00.000-08:00

I spent a good seven hours yesterday trying to lay various low-frequency drum patterns on untitled pop song to no avail.

what do the drums do?
what could the drums do?
what don't i want the drums to do?
why are the drums so boring?
are they always boring?
do i imagine drums at all on this song?
do i ever imagine drums on any song?
do i just add drums out of habit?
do people like drums on pop songs?
do people expect drums on pop songs?
were drums not present, would people miss them?
would there be a petition?
would there be union trouble?
do drums have to be there all the time?
could the drums have a short holiday, then come back?
what if the drums were later than expected?
do the drums sound like they're enjoying themselves?
who are we to judge the drums?
what would change the drums (apart from having no drums)?
will the drums ever sound like a part of the song now?
have they seemed distant lately?
has the drums' time passed, like a fleeting glimpse, a fancy, a wink lost on the breeze?
what is this, anyway?
shouldn't you be better at going with your gut instinct by now?
eh?
fucking loser.

So, yeah, what of it? I'm having a problem with drums. I'll admit it. I've been taking my kit to pieces and re-welding it into unsual and physically dangerous arrangements, because my god, I'm so bored of the drummy thing. You can construct the most gorgeous set of interlocking textures, shifting chord patterns and biting melodies, and then you slap a drum kit on and suddenly it's all

- snare
- snare
- snare
- diddly diddly
- snare

Dull, dull, dull, (cymbal crash) dull.

I'm more interested these days in drum parts that sound like background interference. Odd hits, rumbles, scrapes, at unpredictable volumes, now and then. This would all be well and good if it weren't an extremely introverted and selfish tactic: you end up with a pleasant enough song marred by what seems to be the soundtrack to an episode of DIY SOS underneath it.

It helps that Neil and Doug are so good at programming interesting, fluid electronic rhythms. I saw a local band called "A Lion" last week and they were a prime example of using a drum machine to good effect, in that they did it with no shame whatsoever, not attempting to emulate a real drummer, not hiding the machine's inadequacies. "Hear that snare? Sounds awful, doesn't it, but slam these two guitars on top, sounds reet smart. Wait a minute, wait a minute... it's about to do something massively over-programmed and mental... here we go... WAHAAAAY!" Afterwards, a few of my friends were saying that they would be interested in hearing the band with a real drummer. I was against it, in no uncertain terms. I thought it would remove a particular slice of their magic.

So we've begun to try and merge the electronic and the live drums more completely, with varying degrees of success: Some of the more complicated off-kilter patterns are difficult for me to keep up with because I'm not the best drummer in the world (to put it mildly. Ask me to do a paradiddle, I dunno what it is. Go on. Ask me. Ask me now. A what? No fucking idea, mate. See? Not a clue. Complete waste of time.) In the end, it's more likely that I'll "complement" the percussive arrangement. Like a bread basket. Or a side order of onion rings.

Sync

2005-01-26T01:21:00.000-08:00

We are the clipboard kings! Word documents, sub-folders, two big bottles of beer and a comprehensive audit. Plus crisps. Lots of crisps. How much more rock’n’roll is it possible to get?

Tonight we’re opening up all the files we have on every potential album track, and trying to get ourselves on the same wavelength. Sure, it's all very well adding that fantastic series of interlocking piano riffs to Cut Down The Middle, but if no-one else in the band knows that you’ve done it (and you’ve sort of forgotten yerself,) what’s the use?

On most of the music we've ended up chaining many different bits of recording software together... it’s fun because each program gives you a fresh take on the song, a new approach, and between the three of us we often surprise ourselves with the combined impact of ideas generated miles or even years apart. But it can also trip you up; often it's hard to keep track of what's been added or amalgamated in any given arrangement. Imagine living in a house where new rooms keep appearing at random... you open a door and suddenly you’ve got an indoor heated swimming pool you knew nothing about.

"This song has a swimming pool," you say. "Why didn’t somebody tell me?"

"Oh, yeh. Sorry, should’ve mentioned that. I installed it a while back but it makes the whole chorus smell of Chlorine. So I just sort of shut the door and left it there."

"You know," someone else says, "That’s funny. Just the other day I was thinking that this song could benefit from 20 lengths of backstroke."* ...And you all nod sagely.

This is how art gets made, people. It's like walking fully clothed into a swimming pool you haven't got: Inexplicable and largely unscheduled.

So I’m not going to write about the hours spent slowly sifting through guitar takes we couldn’t remember recording because we were drunk or stoned or maybe even not actually there, or the analysis of serial piano parts where one note changes every 34 seconds. No, I won’t bore you with that, or any accounts of the painstaking re-loading of projects in order to line everything up to 115.84 bpm (rather than the troublesome 116 bpm it was beforehand. Integers? Fuck ‘em) which just wouldn’t interest you in the slightest I’m sure, and I’m not even going to mention the intriguing sine waves that suddenly cropped up all over Compatible, I wouldn’t do that to you, in the same way that I wouldn’t bang on and on about experiencing the dawning realisation that half of untitled pop song only exists as midi files and nothing else, and that the DPS12 and MPC2000 for all their good points have got - how shall we say - less than perfect MTC synching. The crisps? They were Sweet Chilli flavour, since you ask, and we ate the whole goddamn bag.

* You might like to know that I originally mis-typed this as "This snog could benefit from 20 lengths of backstroke" which is altogether a far better sentence, resembling one which you might read on a much more interesting blog somewhere else.

Helicopter

2005-01-21T01:16:00.000-08:00

Police helicopter
Your wonderful searchlight
You lull me to sleep at night
I can't sleep without you

By grace of your bass response
By grace of adrenaline
I'll fall flat upon my face
To fireworks and soaring strings

This is the first verse of our song Molotov, which will hopefully be making an appearance on the album.

The lyrics were written in a flat I used to live in located slap bang on one of Bristol's busier arterial roads. The regular presence of a police helicopter wafting around directly above our house was surprisingly calming (I've always found it easier to sleep with some sort of white noise burbling away in the background) and I was fascinated by its contradictory aspects: a weapon of oppression, a measure of security, a public nuisance, a watchful presence, a horrible racket or a lovely, shifting droning vibe high above your home... all of this inspired the song.

Mrs Rorschach and I have now moved to the centre of Bristol, which means - if anything - more police helicopter action. But tonight when I heard the slow buzz overhead, with the album in mind I grabbed my minidisc and started recording it.

I wandered around from room to room, headphones on, mic in hand, trying to find the "sweet spot" where the tones of the helicopter would sound best. I needed a solid, set location to get the full effect of its shifting position overhead; what interested me was the way the drone fluctuated as it crept from window to window. But at every point I was frustrated by my flat. I switched the central heating off to stop clicks and rumbles from the boiler, but that still didn't do it. I couldn't move too much because the fantastically sensitive microphone was picking up little 'tic-tic-tic's from the burglar alarm's infra-red detectors. If I opened the windows, traffic noise spoiled the effect. I could hear the TV in the flat upstairs (almost impossible with the naked ear...) but persisted, trying to record something usable.

And suddenly, after about 20 minutes, I thought: What the fuck am I doing? What is this going to be used for? I'm not making a fucking Pink Floyd album. I don't want a song that mentions helicopters to actually have a fucking helicopter on it. What was I thinking? Is this going to be a po-faced version of Yellow Submarine? Put the minidisc down and make a cup of tea, dammit.

Hey, I thought, the kettle sounds really interesting mixed with the sound of the helic-
STOP IT. Stop. Ferfucksake.

Does The Pixies' Monkey Gone To Heaven have the sound of a monkey in it? No.
Does Bjork's The Anchor Song have the sound of an anchor? No.
Does Tom Waits' Downtown Trains have the sound of a train, downtown or otherwise? No.
Does The Velvet Underground's I'm Waiting For The Man have the sound of a man? Yes, but that doesn't count.
Does Aphex Twin's Kladfvgbungmicshk have the sound of a kladfvgbungmicshk? Pffff. If you need to ask, you oughtn't to be told.

Failure - and how you handle it, what you do when it strikes - has always been a key focus of my creative process. I'm fascinated by the results that out-and-out mistakes (or sheer incompetence, for that matter) can get you. "Fail again. Fail better."

So tonight I came to the conclusion that the last thing I want is for Molotov to sound literal, to turn it into some sort of stomping, antagonistic dirge. Somewhere in our sketches and arrangements there is an insistent, sharp, graceful edge to the song and we need to push that into the foreground.
Or die trying. Whichever.

An interesting failure link for y'all: http://www.institute-of-failure.com/

Acoustic

2005-01-20T01:22:00.000-08:00

An acoustic set tonight, supporting Leave Land For Water and North Sea Navigator. It was at the Metropol in sunny Bedminster. Remember how I said our version of Army Of Me was skeletal? Yeah. I'm afraid that tonight it had brittle bone disease. Notes snapping off all over the shop.

Otherwise things went OK. It was slapdash and under-rehearsed as we were added to the bill at the last minute, but fun nevertheless, and I want to play the songs out and about more now.

The Metropol is a pretty big space (about 500 capacity) dotted with red iron pillars. As our audience shuffled in slowly from the bar we could only see them in sillhouette, and I told them they looked like Night Of The Living Dead. With pint glasses. Is that a good thing to say to your audience before you start playing? Hmmm.

Hey, audience! Correct response to me telling you that you "Look like Night Of The Living Dead"?
"At least I don't look like a ginger David Blunkett."
That should shut me up.

It does get me wondering what we look like on stage these days. Actually I think we've got most of our bases covered:

Doug is obviously there for the ladies, with his perky physique and twinkling eye. He's also regularly seen walking around with a child cradled in one arm, so that's a poster op right there. I can see it now, Doug naked from waist up, little Milo by his side, caption: "My two favourite things are commitment, and changing myself." BEST. SELLER.

Neil's got the pink pound sewn up for us. We know this from exhaustive consumer surveys. I did wonder what they'd make of his new platinum blonde streaks and slightly bigger hair, but the latest figures have just come in and it seems to be playing well on Canal Street.

And then there's me if you're some sort of perverse freak that likes weird stuff. Y'know, unsettling stuff, stuff that looks like a cross between Bigfoot and a corpse*.
*actual description from Nightshift Magazine.

Hell, if we lost a few pounds I think even I could fancy us again. But then there's the old adage, "Don't get laid where you get paid." Having said that, we didn't earn any money tonight, so...

Army

2005-01-18T02:15:00.000-08:00

Our cover version of Bjork's Army Of Me has finally been squeezed into 128kpbs of Mpeg and hurled at the Icelandic One's listening crew. I say 'crew' but I have no idea of how they'll be sifting through their - no doubt huge - stash of remixes and interpretations. I'd like to imagine some sort of towering Chris Cunningham-designed cyborg device, mass processing every single file and sorting them into relevant subcategories: Screaming seagull choirs in this folder. Low filtered, speaker-destroying double bass drums in that folder. Then, once its job is complete, it will roar to life, unplug itself from the ethernet connection and stomp across country like a twenty foot high Mechazilla stuffed full of TUNE, towards the hut deep in the forest where Bjork lives. The Cyborg will obviously have a terrible headache, so Bjork will make it some green tea and they will sit by the open fire, talking of campanology and screensavers, or perhaps just quietly contemplating the enormity of the task ahead.

Something like that.
Shuddup.
Stop laughing at me.
Shudduuuup.

Whatever the results, it's been immensely enjoyable doing Army Of Me. And healthy. The tiny amount of time we had to pull it together meant that its construction resembled word association: you're forced to trust your instincts in order for things to move quickly enough. If that was even partly the thinking behind giving remixers and musicians such a tight deadline on this project, then hats off.

It also meant that we finally had to implement our long-standing plan of sending each other mixes and ideas via the web, meaning text after text from yours truly every time a new arrangement was uploaded onto the server: "nu mix online now. gdnight" Which of course meant "3am. Bshng head agnst brk wall. Pls dn't h8 me. Does cello snd shit? I need a drink. Pubs shut. Fridge = no beer. Arse. gdnight."

Neil has a regular habit of working into the small hours. Don't know how he does it. At about 1 am my ears begin to pick up inordinate amounts of background noise, and the floor starts to slope around like a boat.

If working late I also invariably have music-related dreams during the night which are rarely pleasant: one of the worst involved playing a gig where the pieces of my drum kit were slowly moving away from me in various directions of their own accord...

These recurring nightmares are probably influenced by gigs we did at the LagerhoUSE in Freiburg, Germany. The first time we played there, it was done using borrowed equipment. The bass cab made Doug sound like he was playing a massive rubber band on a spade. I was presented with a drumkit consisting entirely of rototoms. Neil had a guitar amp with one huge illuminated red button on it and nothing else. Halfway through Weightless he thought, fuck it, I need a boost, and pressed the button. The resulting sonic boom, well... lots of people have asked Doug what prompted him to cut his hair short, having worn it long throughout his late teens. Answer: the blast of horrible scything noise from Neil’s amp when he hit that red button was to blame. It flattened Doug against the wall, and when the poor boy collapsed to the floor, his hair came away from his skull in one piece, floating calmly off the stage and into the audience like a little brunette jellyfish.

Satisfied? Now let us never speak of this again.

Anyway, cutting a long story short(ish)
Our version of Army Of Me ultimately proved to be a spindly, skeletal lullaby, with sinister undertones. Most of the sinister was provided by a gloriously dissonant ‘cello part from our first session musician in years: Chipper from North Sea Navigator, Money, Max Milton Quartet and various other eminent Bristol bands (Chipper’s real name is only available via a written request made under the Freedom Of Information act.) She is wise beyond her years and has more CDs than London has teeth. It’s great to be working with someone who enjoys chilled-out atonal string arrangements as much as she loves Grindcore, Speed Metal or “The Fucking Champs.” In fact, Chipper comes out with band names that were anyone else to mention, I’d be convinced were made up.

Am I getting old and ignorant? Or are bands breeding like rabbits?

Final thought for the day: “Blazing Squad.” This is what happens when E17 don’t use condoms.