Long time no speak in
0’s and 1’s. I’m sitting here writing this blog instead of revising for my
biological psychology exam. Don’t judge me. Saying I’m in a band makes me look
cooler than if I say something like lesions or a tumour in Broca’s area
(located in the temporal lobe on the left hand side of the brain and associated
with the construction of language and meaning) causes Brocas’s aphasia whereby
an individual can no longer construct language into a sentence, write or read
comprehensibly. See what I mean? Boring.
Right back on the cool
side of the fence (well as cool as being in a small time post-rock Balkan folk
band can be) we have been listening to the fruits of our labours from the start
of the year for a week now. Chris Donald dropped us the message we’d been
waiting for since January and Thursday we converged on Chris’ house with our
gaffer to listen to our album in full. The excitement was almost too much to
bear.
In our opinion the
week of freezing to the bone in St Nicolas’ church in Dormston for a week was
worth every second. The atmosphere of the place has been captured and really
added a transient quality to the songs.
Hearing your own music
back is really bizarre because of their subjectivity. For instance, I can only
hear them as the scribbles on the back of bank statements that became a fun
pastime for me and my friends to do a couple of times a week. To be honest I
don’t hear real music. I hear a selection of ideas that I have been with since
their birth that never seem to have the same effect upon me as hearing someone
else’s music. I hope this is a shared experience for musicians everywhere (?).
It becomes more than a
selection of ideas when you take it out of the setting of you and your friends and
play them in front of strangers. You get feedback from people who have virgin
ears. This is something I wish you could do for when you listen to something
you have recorded because in our case I hear all the mistakes and problems or,
me personally, I hear all the lyrics I scribbled down in a hurry on the back of
a phone bill or frantically typed into my phone with one hand while I was
driving and thinking “this is nowhere near as good as anyone else’s lyrics”. I feel they are like the Hungry Caterpillar in comparison to War and Peace. Self doubt is a dangerous gremlin to have but perhaps it brings a certain
quality to our music, maybe not.
When you listen to
music and something really connects with you, it dawns on you that you wish
you’d written it but you’ll probably never write anything as good but I’d like
to think that when they listen to that song they think “fuck, I’ll never be as
good as….”
This is why I’d like
to borrow someone else’s ears/auditory system/cortex and listen to our music to
lay my demons to rest.
Anyway, enough of this
shite.
We are so happy with
the end result and cannot wait for you to hear it. All being well we have set
the release for about 2 months time and there is a lot to do before then so we’re
busy busy busy. We would like to thank Chris Donald in infinite amounts for all his hard work recording and mixing the album. He is the mother fucking man and that is no lie.
Me love you long time.
William
Always love reading your blogs. 2 months cant come soon enough. See you tomorrow
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