Friday 4 May 2012

War and Peace, nahh. I'm more of a Hungry Caterpillar man myself.


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