I might have to break this down into sub-headings…

Gigs

We didn’t gig much in 2011; we were all pretty busy at various times throughout the year, and aside from that, we were not exactly inundated with offers. Also, things are different now to how they were when I gigged semi-regularly (2003-2005) – the whole concept of “promoting” seems to have been replaced with sending out Facebook invites. I hate Facebook.

Anyway, defs going to do lots of gigs in 2012, starting with this bad boy. Yup, I know, Facebook. Aside from this, gonna try and put some shows on this year, and do more stuff in Derby/Notts. And Brum? Yeah, Brum. This sounds like New Year’s resolutions huh?

Musics

We finally finished Linear A, which was more of a relief than anything else. Some songs on there were written in 2006/7, so it was a bit of a cleansing exercise which has hopefully paved the way for some punchier (and more hastily-recorded) materials this year. Preliminarily trying to put aside some dates for recording two tracks in early February.

Ian has expanded on his engineering interests by sitting in on some sessions at Project 9 Studio, increasing his nerdiness by roughly 50% as he continues to garble on about expensive microphones. Much of this will be summed up on his new blog, where he mixes the technical and holistic in equal measure.

I have started tinkering on new songs by Mountain Schmountain, where I initially hope to add harmonies and twinkly stuff to the live show, and see where we go from there. As mentioned in the last post, me and Ian are home-recording the new Some Skeletons EP – final tracking weekend is booked, and we hope to have the whole thing mixed by mid-February.

Aaron will be joining a conservatoire next September to play cello – he just needs to pick one – we’ll try and get as much drumming out of him as possible before that point.

Any Other Business

Screw it, that’ll do. Fuck off 2011.

First off, what the devil have we been up to? As a collective, not massive amounts. We finished two new songs, which we will be debuting at our next gig – this brings us up to four songs for our next EP. Hopefully we can start recording it before too long, need to find a good place to record drums. Definitely a stronger set of songs than the last bunch anyway, most of which were written with solo recording project in mind, rather than full-on balls-out rawk. Which we most certainly are.*

*Mid-way through our last band practice, we all went out and bought toothbrushes.

Our next gig, by the way, is supporting Look Mexico.

Look Mexico are a great band. Back in 2009, me and Aaron both got obsessed with their album This Is Animal Music – he listened to it ascending the snowy slopes of Arosa, Switzerland, whilst I cruised around Cannock in my Rover at 2 in the afternoon, unemployed and poor. Anyway, if you happen to live in the East Midlands, and fancy seeing a couple of great bands (and us) you should come hit it, hard.

Individually, we’ve been fairly busy. Aaron in particular, has been playing a lot of cello lately, auditioning for conservatories or something. Me and Ian have been recording the second Some Skeletons EP…

Yes, that is a 1987/88 Rangers away shirt, well spotted. So far we have drums down, most of the geetars, scratch bass tracks and some hilarious guide vocals. During guitar recording weekend, I visited McDonald’s on 5 separate occasions in a 36-hour period. I think my body has given up hope of ever seeing a vitamin again and I look like a crystal meth addict.

For more recording notes/pics, Ian has started up a blog to document the SS recording, any Minoans recording, helpful links, and other things he’ll learn along the way. He’s also much more prolific than me… at least for the time being

So yeah, that’s us. Finally, are you ready for this year’s Alternativ Julekalendar? Get over there, try and crack the impenetrable Norwegian instructions and get on-board for 25 days of eclectic Scandinavian cool.

Crabb

As it turned out, I recoiled into my diploma, scared to start thinking about anything other than acoustics, in case I forget how to add logs together.

Seven. Six.

Historically, for me, Autumn has always been a good time for music. I guess, even out of education, it still always felt like September was a good time to crack open a new pencil case and start something. I know Spring has more of a “new beginnings” vibe, but, I dunno… I like mulch!

Seasonal variations notwithstanding, Autumn promises to be, erm, promising. First off, we may finally have some physical copies of Linear A by the end of next week. We also hope to record a new 3-track EP before Christmas. In amongst all that, me and Ian are hopefully on board for recording the next Some Skeletons EP – I’ve heard several new songs and everything sounds incredible. Can’t wait to get stuck in!

Even more exciting news, one of mine and Aaron’s favourite US bands, Look Mexico, are touring over here in December, and we will be supporting the shit out of them in Derby. If you’ve never heard them, I wholeheartedly recommend checking out their songs and vids. If you fancy the gig, prove it to us through the medium of social networking – Facebook and Last FM are your friends. Huzzah!

Finally, here is a remix of Icy Path by Swedish artist Emma Bates. I’m buzzing hard off it; check it out and keep one eye on Emma’s soundcloud page for upcoming awesomeness…

Although I’ve been waiting to write the ‘our EP is finished!’ post for over a year, I can’t think of much to say other than that our EP is finished. Here goes…

Myself and Aaron descended on Casa French last night for one last cursory glance over the tracks before unleashing them on an unsuspecting internet. This short session was pretty representative of the whole lengthy process, and we soon hit a familiar hurdle: which mix is the most recent? Ordinarily, you’d go to the file name with the latest date in it, but when you throw in curveballs like ‘FINALFINALFINAL’ and ‘DRUMSFAFF’, it soon gets confusing.

In true Minoans-style, despite agonising over every detail for the last 18 months, we were still making major, sweeping and unchecked changes to the drum sounds at this, the final “mastering” session. In the end, we couldn’t even bring ourselves to describe the tracks as ‘mastered’, opting for the more accurate label of ‘louder’.

Before long though, we were uttering “that’ll do” with alarming regularity and with phatness achieved, and tracklist pitfalls hopefully avoided, a prototype CD was burned. Playing this back, and with no obvious problems, we were free to indulge in standard distractions – Ian’s cats, trying to take band photos, Ian’s cats trying to take band photos.

After that, a final listen to random sections in headphones and we were happy to draw a pretty hefty line under it.

We’ve called it Linear A after the name given to the script used by actual Minoans. I can’t take any credit for the name, as the suggestion came from my actual-Minoans-loving girlfriend. This gives the EP an optimistic feel, as if there will be a further 25 volumes.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve probably been pretty negative about much of the process, but being able to stand back from it, I am positive about the final result.

We recorded on 3 computers, in all our houses, a garage, a practice room and a function room. Ian invested in great mics, spent hours reading up on mic techniques, learnt every inch of Sonar, tested endless plug-ins, built vocal wombs. We experimented with mic placements, room mics, endless mojo guitar combinations. We butchered drum takes. Me and Aaron wrote and practised string parts, then spent stifling summer afternoons recording them. We tried to ensure the best bits only occured once.

During mixing, it did often feel like a war against our own tracking, particularly with the earlier drum tracks, but if I compare the finished results to what I first heard in my head, I think it’s been worth the endless tweaking.

Anyway, what next? I dunno what to do with the songs, so they’re on our homepage courtesy of Soundcloud – that’ll do us for now. We have a bit of new stuff to start demo-ing, so expect Linear B sometime in 2018.

A final thought; on the way up to Crewe yesterday, Aaron turned to me and said, “I hate mixing more than anything”.

This bad boy is really more of a summing-up than anything else; I owe you that much at least. First off, we did a gig a while back. We played fairly well, although turnout was less than enthusiastic. Here is a video:

This one is called Beebe, for the moment, and we’ll be recording it properly at some point. There’s a non-committal sentence for you. I did a remix for Otur, which was a lot of fun. It got uploaded here, which is kind of flattering, ’cause I really didn’t/don’t know what I’m doing. Here it is anyway:

Download audio file (Otur%20-%20Retrigger%20%28Minoans%20remix%29.mp3)

So then, the burning question; OUR ep? Well, we have been making a concerted effort to finish off the tracks, and currently have mixed and mastered (squashed to the point of ruin) final drafts of all 8 songs. Is there such thing as a “final draft”? Seems contradictory. Thursday has been earmarked as Tweakyfinish Day, but could easily turn into Faffaroundwithkickdrum Day. At the time of going to press, 3 sound “great”, 3 sound “ropey”, one sounds “good” and one sounds like I’ve just pulled it out of my arse.

The quiet optimism with which we approached the initial recording sessions has been replaced with a weary shrug, via some colossal pessimism. I mostly hate the songs now. One shining positive to arise though, is that the track most recently recorded has come out sounding the best, which possibly shows we’re moving in the right direction.

If, by some divine miracle, it all pulls together on Thursday we’ll upload it for streaming while we let the major labels fight over the right to release it. If anyone from Polydor is reading, I am more than happy to replace Ian and Aaron with talentless hunks.

You can probably take some solace in the fact that blog activity is inversely proportional to actual activity. Put another way – them that talks abouts it, ain’t doin’ it. So, what HAVE we been doing??!

Mixing

After a couple of false starts, we’ve hit a real stride with mixing. I guess it’s an obvious path, but being so sick of the songs made us take them off their pedestal of un-mixability, which in turn has returned the early love/excitement… with INTEREST!! Only a brave man or a fool would offer a concrete finish date at this stage, but I’m fairly optimistic we can have it mixed before April. I need an optimistic image…

Hells yeah. I’ll leave Ian to explain the heroic and nerdly ins and outs of our problems and how we overcame them.

Practising

I know practising is kind of implied, but with us is really is touch-and-go a lot of the time. New stuff isn’t coming thick and fast, but I am happy with the songs we’re crimping out. Gear has been upgraded substantially since we started the EP, so we’re eager to get on with recording new stuff.

Recording a proper band

At the end of January we helped our friends Some Skeletons record a track for a compilation album. I’ll volunteer more information on that as it happens, but in the meantime their debut EP will be available soon… get yourselves over to their site. Brothas got audio-visual skillz, y’all.

Miscellany

Other than that, I’ve mainly been struggling with writing the correct month on any paperwork, since it became March. I’m never really confident until the date and month number coincide, but after that it’s plain sailing for Crabb. And yes, I AM seeking approval for something a 5-year-old can do. I’m also dry through the night, most of the time.

x

We’re all aware of our slackness, and as a result we’ve decided to up practice from zero times a week, to once a week. You don’t need me to tell you that’s an infinity-fold increase. A more subtle change; we got within 20 photos of having to PAY for our flickr account, so I thought I may as well host our pics right here on the site instead. Out of principle. We were never exactly the cool kid on the flickr scene anyway – our most-viewed photo is a bowl of nachos.

Our my***ce site is chugging along merrily, what a sack of crap that site is these days! Their redesign was the final nail in the coffin for me; at least before it was simple enough to use as a signpost to this website, now it’s like a bomb went off, there’s bits of it everywhere. It’s slow as hell now too, and of course there’s the 96kbps streaming (or whatever it is). The only reason I continue to let ours fester is that it’s still the first port of call for some people. In fact, just yesterday I filled in a form which asked for the band’s my***ce page. The mind boggles.

Should probably get a band twitter page, but we’ve already been beaten to twitter.com/minoans – by someone following Bill Cosby, Kim Kardashian and Chris Cornell, and who hasn’t tweeted ONCE! Gutting. Like the time we were beaten to minoans.com by a Greek dancing group in San Francisco. I’m not providing hyperlinks by the way, you want to read about the Cretan glendi on Sunday February 13, 2011 at the Nativity of Christ Greek Orthodox Church Fellowship Hall so badly then you type it into your address bar.

Damn, it does sound good though.

There’s no band news as such, in fact I’m mostly just stalling – while you’re reading this Ian is ransacking your house, searching for the evidence that will finally clear his name.

Kicking December off was Sleep Party People, a bedroom project expanded into an awesome live band. For the full audio-visual experience, check out the videos over at The Copenhagen X Sessions.

Compared to these vids, their rendition of Silent Night is fairly stripped back, but still keeps all the aspects that make them so intriguing, slow crescendos, soft piano, subtle guitars and keyboards, and I think what constitutes “trademark” heavily-processed vocals.

Sleep Party People – Silent Night

Download audio file (01-Sleep-Party-People-Silent-Night.mp3)
Download

On 5th December I was treated to Your Headlights Are On. The drum and keyboard intro (and to an extent the vocals) immediately brought to mind ‘Scary World Theory’-era Lali Puna, except less stark. Then a delicious keyboard motif runs through the song, beautifully underpinning the great melancholy vocals.

I’m not quite sure what is meant by, “sadly, no friends on the playground, snow don’t fall, Santa doesn’t like the rooftops”, but it’s heartbreaking all the same.

Your Headlights Are On – Leave The Light On

Download audio file (05-Your-Headlights-Are-On-Leave-The-Light-On.mp3)
Download

There was a nice little run of songs on December 6th-8th, first off the un-Google-able DU, who apply glitchy keyboards to Norwegian Christmas Carol ‘Deilig er Jorden’ (nope, me neither), swiftly followed by the equally untraceable You Wish.

[Edit: DU label page and You Wish myspace page, y'all.]

Their track is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde number, starting off like some kind of Kate Bush/Tori Amos ballad, before fading away and bursting back to life as a thoroughly enjoyable 80′s-sounding romp, complete with synth-bass, jingle-bell arpeggios and what sounds like Gruff Rhys on lead vocal.

You Wish – Run Away

Download audio file (07-You-Wish-Run-Away.mp3)
Download

Cold Mailman quietens things down with the haunting acoustic track, ‘Ghost of Christmas Past’, which is reminiscent of Red House Painters, but undeniably Scandinavian. The track ends with the great mysterious line, “She tied my feet together, that’s why it took me so long to answer”.

Hey, you can’t love everything though, right? I can’t say I loved the next 6 tracks – prog-jazz, twee-pop, lounge, more jazz, weird metal, post-punk-lite – you get the idea.

15th December got us back on track with ingvild Østgård and her song ‘Noel’ – probably the most Christmassy song of the lot, despite the use of a banjo.

Short, but sweet, 16th December offered ‘Desemberbarn’ by Lucy Swann. It’s a fairly straightforward track, built around a perfect little keyboard part, but the vast array of cool and subtle backing parts demand repeated listens.

18th December was my personal highlight, the wonderfully-named Shooting Tsar. I was hooked from the instant the track kicked in with glockenspiel and playful vocal melody, and it just got better. A boy/girl storyline, complete with Grammatics-esque vocals and harmonies, strings, gentle guitars, loud guitars, noisy guitars.

The band say this is the first song they’ve done together, and are doing more recording early next year – I, for one, can’t wait!

Shooting Tsar – Calendar

Download audio file (18-Shooting-Tsar-Calendar.mp3)
Download

The next four tracks included a slow, long song and a couple hip-hop tracks, none of which I could be bothered with, and an Efterklang remix, which I liked mainly by virtue of it being Efterklang.

21st December was a good day, with two tracks up for grabs. First off, Einar Stray & Kakaogjengen, and the track ‘Nattasang for nissunger’, which falls somewhere between the aforementioned Efterklang and Björk at her most rustic.

The second track was a spot-on cover of ‘Walking in the Air’, by Siri Nilsen, making great use of ukelele and cello backing, it could easily have been pointless, or even horrendous, but really works… écoute.

Siri Nilsen – Walking In The Air

Download audio file (21-Siri-Nilsen-Walking-In-The-Air.mp3)
Download

The last 4 tracks miss the mark for me – the most interesting of them being the duet between Kjetil Nernes and Karin Park. I can’t stand the male vocals in it (soz Kjetil), but Karin Park’s are great – imagine Joanna Newsom, if one day she decided she wasn’t kooky enough, and decided to go live in Norway for 4 years to develop a twang.

So there you have it. All the tracks are available on the Alternativ Julekalender website, so if anything has piqued your interest I suggest you high-tail it over there. I’m off to look for local government admin vacancies in Trondheim.

Skål

Download audio file (Minoans-Horse-demo.mp3)

download

At 5 mins long, it’s a bit of a dumping ground for unfinished bits of songs I had – it definitely needs an overhaul in terms of arrangement, hence why it’s strictly a demo version.

The advantage of classifying this as a demo recording is that we’ve managed to avoid the copious faff which has plagued the main EP recording. Plagued/enhanced I guess? This demo is entirely without enhancement.

We’ve settled into a good, efficient technique for miking up drums. A little extra effort at this stage goes a long way at the mixing stage.

With drums done, and bass recorded at leisure (Ian’s leisure) we nailed the guitars and most of the vocals at a single evening sesh at Chez French. Have I ever told you about the ISOcab? I’ll get Ian to explain it more, but basically all you need to know about ISOcab is that it allows guitar amps to be cranked to ear-splitting volume, past 10pm, with a man who works early mornings asleep next door.

Excuse the jumper – when I’m out of work my clothing gets increasingly bizarre. It was also cold… or so I thought:

Do-dur-dur-dee-do. Frustratingly, the last bit of proper singing just wouldn’t settle down into a decent melody, and it was also getting too late to start screaming. So, last verse and shouting were recorded at Chez Crabb. Ian then mixed it on his tod, and I kept rejecting the mixes until I decided to stop being a dick.

Finally, a quiz – what in the hell is going on here?

Answer: SNARE RAGE!

YEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAA

These were done to replace the utterly rubbish screams which littered the EP. You’ll notice me and Aaron used different snares. Yes, we’re THAT particular/brilliant/pathetic.

This is just a heads-up. If you like being eased gently into Christmas (like me) and you enjoy painfully obscure Scandinavian bands (like me), you can do no worse than head over to Alternativ Julekalender. It’s like an advent calendar, but instead of chocolate, each day a new Wintery song is added.

[edit: download links are now available direct from the site]

You can follow the link to stream the songs, alternatively you can have your name added to the mailing list by emailing:

alternativjulekalender {at} gmail {dot} com

…that way yule (LOL) be sent download links.

Day 386 was shaping up to be a tall order; a full day of vocals, some keyboard experimentation and a last ditch round of rough mixes before stepping back to prepare for some kind of mammoth mixing session.

Busy, busy, busy.

This goes some way to explaining why the only decent photos I have are this:

and this:

Rest assured, between sitting on the settee and eating our Mexican feast, a whole load of crazy, rock-star shenanigans went down undocumented.

Anyway, the rough mixes are encouraging, and mixing is earmarked for January. Bit of an outrageous gap I know, but if you’ve learnt nothing else here it’s that we never rush anything – Knossos wasn’t built in a day and all that. A long weekend is called for.

So yeah, things will probably be a bit quiet again until New Year – a sprint to the finish line and now we’re trying to find our medals and maybe pick up a carrier bag of free stuff.

Me and the Bride went to see Paramore last week – I’ll add a couple of pics here when I get them. Even though I’m an indier-than-thou pretentious twat, I’ll happily say it was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. My only gripe was that the amp heads were hidden from view so I was denied a good amp-perv. Aaron is going to see them in Brum later, but despite all this Paramore-love, our practises are getting heavier – at the moment we’re about as heavy as Slayer.

We’re back into a regular practice routine – I can tell this because the tips of my fingers are red raw, the nails of my right hand are a mess, I’m shouting more (GENERALLY), and I’m slowly acclimatising to our arctic practice room.

Ooh, on that note, let me introduce you to our newest member:

His singing’s not the best, and his guitar playing is a tad amateurish, but for the most part he’s happy to stand in the middle of the room blowing out hot air. His favourite bands are Type O Negative and 5ive. He doesn’t have a favourite guitarist because he says you should be your own influence… but, if pushed, Avril Lavigne.

He’s also…

…

…

…

…

OUR BIGGEST FAN!!!!

We’re not as lame as you think; we have excuses. Heaps of them!

In any case, we’ve had a couple of sessions to blow off the dust and get reacquainted with the songs – tried to locate missing keyboard parts, finished off the remaining niggly guitars and worked out what still needs doing. Final vocal session has been pencilled-in and is begging to be Sharpied.

*whisper it* the end is in sight

We’ve also just had our first practice in two months. Here is Ian trying to remember the starting chord of each song:

And here is Aaron, pointing to his crotch:

I’ve been messing with the site, you may have noticed. I’m continuing to edit it in full public view because I don’t know how to edit/test it offline. So don’t be surprised to see borders turning bright green, huge spaces suddenly appearing and all headers turning momentarily to IMPACT.

Recording news double-whammy coming soon. Maybe.

Then yesterday, after falling completely in love with ‘Dance Away’ by Roxy Music, I picked up its parent album, ‘Manifesto’. It was only when I spotted both CD cases side by side, that it hit me how similar they are… DEAD SIMILAR!

Maybe? Or at least pretty similar.

Anyway, the Minoans machine is slowly grinding back into action. Half-term is approaching so we may rope Jamie in for a few more violins, and possibly a viola or two? We need a day of Minoan vocals, and then I suppose mixing can begin. We are also trying to find gigs that are worthwhile. I sound like a BROKEN RECORD!!!!

My first copy of Vespertine used to get stuck on a 20 second portion of Aurora. Totally ruined that song for me. See also: You Can’t Do That by the Beatles, which had the misfortune of closing side A of a Beatles compilation my Dad made for me and my brother, and was mercilessly scythed in half.

I loved that compilation. Me and my brother used to fight over who got to listen to it on our huge 90′s personal stereos, with the loser reluctantly settling for ‘With The Beatles’ or ‘Abbey Road’. The first tape I ever bought myself was ‘Rubber Soul’, from Boots, no less. Remember when Boots sold crazy stuff like tapes, computer games and electronic typewriters? It used to be a pleasure going in there, now it’s just a toiletries-chore.

Current Listening-wise, aside from the aforementioned albums, I’ve been back on ‘Solitude Standing’ lately. It’s one of the few albums that I never get bored of – the lyrics are great, the overall feel of the album is quite unique I think, definitely a night-time album, loads of interesting sounds, and of course Suzanne Vega has that great smokey voice.

Shame about the dodgy 80′s font which pretty much ruins the album cover.

Recording-wise, 7 of the 8 songs are pretty-much tracked, and the majority of the work on the 8th track will be vocals. Basically, I’m saying that with one session of guitars, one of vocals and one more of violins, we can be fully tracked. The only spanner in the works at this late stage is this fellow:

The Powertran Transcendent 2000.

Pre-empting my love of all things difficult and outdated by almost 30 years, my parents decided to spend part of 1981 building an analog synth. Good points: gratuitous soldering inside, gorgeous warm sounds, TEAK! Bad points: it has trouble staying in tune, the keyboard part has a tendency to become disconnected, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Bonus points: the fact my parents built it despite never to my knowledge showing any interest in electronic music, the fact my mom then played it in church services!

But yeah, having only last week remembered this was in our loft, it’s now sitting on my floor, making me want to add synth to everything. Oh, and saying “it has trouble staying in tune” is a massive understatement. It decides, sometimes mid-note, to jump a semitone up or down. I play a part in Cm, but then the next take I have to do in C#m, before smiling and telling myself that it adds character, same as the rest of my ropey gear.

I need limitations, otherwise I get swamped by choice.

What else? Oh, here is a live pic from Up Your Street Fest:

The rest are here. I made a lot of mistakes, but we were loud, so it kinda cancels out. Gig-wise, I’m trying to decide whether to enter us into a local Battle of the Bands or not. It’s £20 to enter, and BotB’s that require an entry fee are usually money-making farces. Not wanting to give away the ending, but the winning band is the band that sounds most like Snow Patrol, shhh. Still, there’s this masochistic part of me that wants us to enter and get trounced – the last BotB I took part in gave marks out of 10 for APPEARANCE… so defeat is assured.

We look a right state, not scruffy in a cool, “aged-jeans-L’Oreal-bed-hair” kinda way, I’m talking crotch-holes and dried-on baked beans. On the other hand, real bands look like this:

Ha, which reminds me about this:

What a bunch of douches. Anyway, I’m gonna wrap this up otherwise I’ll be talking bollocks forever. Oh, one more thing, if you happen to spot Aaron at an airport, with a large Snowboard-shaped case on his back, page me.

It’s hard to imagine that just 10 short years ago, it was a very different landscape. In place of flesh-tunnels, angsty-screaming and tight jeans were boater hats, pseudo-psychodelic gibberish and sensible corduroys. People were chubby, had awful hair, wore Reebok Classics. Britpop was long dead, Fred Durst was gearing up for his 15 minutes, and we all still thought we could change the world.

My comrade in all the madness was this man:

His name is Simon J. Curd. Together we spent the best part of 8 years assaulting an ever-changing music scene under various guises. Also, he is hands-down the best songwriter I know. I managed to grab him during a brief visit to Cannock, and he kindly sang a verse for us.

As well as playing bass in the soon-to-be-regenerated Thousands of Reflections, Simon is also recording an EP for his solo project, Mountain Schmountain. Basically, expect great music to be emanating forth from his general direction this Autumn.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go burn my favourite t-shirt.

At first he was like…

…but then…

…he lol’d.

For those of you that don’t know, Ian is an Acoustic Consultant, so if he claps his hands and doesn’t immediately pull a face, that’s good enough for us. Incidentally, his “it’s not okay” face is the same face he pulls when he hears an out-of-tune note but doesn’t want to say so. He is the very model of diplomacy. Anyway, we then choose our recording space based on which venue will piss off the smallest number of people.

Down to business. With a few vague ideas tucked away from our brainstorming session, we decided it was time to attempt a violin recording session with the ever-enthusiastic Jamie Parkes, just to see how much we could bash through.

Before Jamie arrived, we took the chance to re-do some trumpet parts with Aaron’s brother, Beat.

You might remember me mentioning that we recorded a song in the wrong key? No? Of course you don’t, why would you? Anyway, we sat Beat down on a stool. The lights came up, he rose from the stool, threw his trilby stage left, the drums came in and he burst triumphantly into the song two semitones higher. The audience went wild, Louis gushed with pride, he couldn’t believe how far we’d come, the rest is a blur. We had won X Factor and our lives would be transformed forever.

With Beat off to enjoy a short-lived flirtation with chart success, the rest of us got down to serious… faces.

This is Jamie trying to make sense of the chaos. He even took the time to make notes on his bowing – it’s a joy to watch. Furthermore, if watching him write music down was good, watching him perform is a bona fide privilege. The whole recording is meant to sound as organic as possible, and Jamie tapped right into that, really getting into the songs and instilling his character into his playing.

I reckon we’ve got chance for one more violin sesh before the new school term kicks in and Autumn steals Jamie from us. It’s a tall order, but with a little preparation* we may be able to nail the rest of his parts in one fell swoop.

*write some freakin’ parts

This is where we discovered, by pure chance, that the seemingly useless weapon given to us by our nerdy comrade “A-Grade” (Steven Seagal wearing glasses) – I dunno, a Rubik’s cube that explodes when solved, or a kettle that barks – is somehow actually JUST the trick. After saving the world (yet again! lol) we return home to our flat where our kind-hearted landlady (Queen Latifah) starts giving us shit about not paying the rent, calling us broke-ass bums and saying we should get jobs instead of lazing around all day.

Can you imagine??!! If only she knew!!

Anyway, getting back to the music, ’cause this metaphor died about 5 minutes ago, this was the point at which our sprawling piles of tracks finally began to sound like finished songs.

Our first task was to comp the drums we recorded on day 275. Through a combination of better mic techniques, a great sounding room and Aaron’s secret weapon – The Black Panther – the drum sound makes all the previous sessions sound like a frozen haddock headbutting a washing-up bowl. Well, actually, an array of haddocks, tuned to different pitches. Anyway, with the drums sorted, various “admin” duties finished, and Ian’s new bassline in place, work could begin on guitars.

Here is a shoegaze guitar part:

The basic components of shoegaze guitar are delay and pitchbending, but feel free to add chorus, flanger, phaser and tremolo. Oh, and whammy bars are for weaklings; REAL men bend the entire guitar.

Whilst the main objective was to track the guitars for this updated song, we also took the opportunity to break out the Jaguar, crank up the gain, and record some downright repulsive guitar parts on other songs:

With guitars done, I went to fetch Aaron. Meanwhile, Ian was gaffa-taping together lampshades, mic stands, duvets, amps and a workmate, to create the incredible vocalWOMB. When me and Aaron returned, we heard a muffled voice. It was Ian, emerging from the womb. Here is Aaron inside it:

And here is me. I’m now so fat that my belly button is visible through a fairly thick t-shirt.

STOP LOOKING AT MY BELLY BUTTON! Anyway, our workmanlike approach to vocal tracking paid off, we soon rattled through the parts, singing almost entirely in tune, and then inexplicably decided it was time for gang vocals.

I use the word ‘vocals’ lightly, it really was just shouting. My sister could hear us from the garage, and when we ventured outside later, I fully expected to meet this sight:

We finished doing vocals when none of us could speak. Then we did vocal impressions of people with low, gruff, voices. These impressions were awful, so we started some rough mixes. After the utter disappointment of our impressions, these mixes turned out to be incredibly encouraging for all of us.

Up until now, we hadn’t really spent much time mixing the drums we’d recorded – this was intentional, to stop us mixing as we went along, but even though we aim to mix again from scratch once everything is fully tracked, it was a very useful exercise to start playing with the drum tracks. It also justified the amount of effort we put into tuning and miking the buggers.

So then, a summary! 7 of the songs are almost completely tracked; the 8th song is a bit trickier as we’re still wrestling with instrumentation, but it should come together fairly quickly once a decision is reached. The last major bit of tracking to do is violins, and after that it’ll just be tidying stuff up, and adding a few odd parts, little keyboards, glockenspiel, fiddly guitars…

…as for mixing; rather than dreading it, for the first time we’re actually looking forward to it.

EP recording has gathered a little momentum. With cellos in the bag/under our belts/finished, we’ve started experimenting with violins. Our violinist is another long-term bum-chum, Jamie Parkes. Here he is, doing some parts for my old band, circa 2003. Note also an impossibly young Minaaron lurking in the background.

Jamie is an exceptional musician and has a great knack of thinking outside the box. I’m all ‘can you just play an F# for 4 bars?’ and he’s all ‘screw that’ and starts on some furious Kid-A-meets-Psycho-suite workout. Which is, of course, supercool. Let Scouting for Girls keep the boring string parts. Anyway, we’ll start nailing down the parts in the coming weeks – I’m dead excited about recording them.

Looming on the immediate horizon is an arduous weekend of vocal recording. I enjoy singing but I do not enjoy singing in tune. The EP tracking chaos has reached the point where I’ve had to make excel spreadsheets to keep track of things. As much as I enjoy making excel spreadsheets, a side-effect of this is that you start thinking of the songs as agenda items which need to be ACTIONED.

GOING FORWARD, we’ll use any breaks in the vocal session as a chance to re-do naff guitars. Every time Ian’s back is turned, I will be firing up the 4140.

Away from your favourite threesome, I’ve been listening on and off to the new Sun Kil Moon album.

Anyone who’s been within 50 metres of me will have had SKM shoved down their throat at some point… and rightly so. Furthermore, I’m the only person I know who doesn’t find him/them mind-blowingly boring. The new album is by no means representative, but if you fancy a listen, head here.

Springing straight back to us though, like a fat kid who never learns to let the muffin tin cool down before digging in, we have a rather exciting engagement over in our spiritual musical home of Derby.

clickclick->> UP YOUR STREET FESTIVAL!! <<-clickclick

Headliners are Minoans-favourites, Tubelord, and the supporting cast is a veritable who’s who of Derby music, with various phresh new bands rising from the collective ashes of The Jesus Years, The Little Explorer, Plans & Apologies and Younogodie. For a comprehensive list, myspace links etc., head to the facebook link above… and get ready to LOG IN, mutha’uckers.

The rest, in summary: Smiths renaissance, fantasy football 10/11, Kurt Vonnegut, Inception, first two Weezer albums, DGDF#BE (capo 5), IRS-era REM, George Orwell, Sherlock, work trousers that fit, Arovane, incurring unnecessary fines, and the nagging sense that on 2 days out of every 5, I would definitely win Popmaster.