Oxygen Thief B-log

Destroying It Yourself - album recording diary (of sorts)

2010-03-26T08:10:00.000-07:00

So I've finally set to work getting my first proper album up together...its working title is "Destroy It Yourself" as those are literally the only words that my brain doesn't immediately reject when I think about naming the beast...plus it's quite apt for the way I do things; recording, engineering, producing (ish), it all on my own.

I've tried doing recording blogs before, but whereas bands in studios tend to have lots of interesting things and adventures to write about the studio/city/country they're in, or can have one member writing/editing and uploading video whilst the others work hard...it's kinda difficult to do that when you are sat in your home studio* doing endless takes, on the fly mixing, and hoping that your fingernail doesn't completely disintegrate / 9 month old kitten doesn't spack out and ruin all the guitar takes by meowing outside my door / computer doesn't fall in half and lose everything..........that's more or less the beginning and end of my adventures.

Oh and the occasional stroppy "THIS ALL SOUNDS LIKE FUCKING SHIT" impulse that makes you want to burn down the entire neighbourhood just so that you can have a valid excuse for not recording anymore & not letting anyone hear what you have done so far.

But a few technical issues, broken strings, and the gradually disappearing right index fingernail aside I think things are going pretty well - I have 8 songs (out of about 15...11 of which will end up on the album) guitar-ready, and waiting for my voice to feel like it's ready to roar, as opposed to the croaking it seems to be fond of at the moment.

I did have to rerecord everything I'd done at one point mind.......not due to stroppiness, but because I changed my miking technique from L-R stereo miking, to near/far (wherever you are) which sounded an absolute fuckload better. As well as the mics, there's also a DI going from my guitar pickup, which is adding a nice (ie: nasty) edge to it as well. Couple that with the fact that each song has two guitar takes, with the far mic and DI hard panned left and right for each take, and the near mic panned to 50%, and it's sounding pretty ace when turned up loud at the moment.

It doesn't sound quite as good turned down quiet...but then again who wants to listen to music quietly? Especially my sort of stuff.

So yeah, that's probably all there is to say from the last 3 weeks of work (and one week of sickness, bleurgh). If you want more up to date stuff then I'm hashtagging my tweets with #destroyityourself before/during/after each recording session, so you can see what I'm thinking there.

Looking forward to sharing this when it's all done.

*read: spare bedroom.

Testing AGAIN

2010-02-02T13:21:00.001-08:00

Same drill here, get lost buster.

Testing something out

2010-02-02T13:11:00.001-08:00

Yeah, nothing to see here. Stop reading.

What are you doing, just go somewhere else ok? For fuck's sake, just leave me alone....

New songs gig = done

2010-01-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

I played a gig where all the songs were new, it's the first time I've done anything like that and it was an interesting new experience that I'll definitely repeat in future. Though maybe I'll leave out the bit where my guitar totally stops working.....

setlist:

Show 'Em Who's Boss
Makoto Nagano
Mestle & Portar*
See You Later Procreator
Terry Nutkins Salute
Nice Night For A Neck Injury (including eric** guitar failure)
Disaster Plan
Languages Our Specialism
Words On Walls***
Modesty Is Dead***

surprisingly all of that fitted into 30 minutes, even with the guitar malfunction - writing shorter songs ftw.

*as a side note, had the hideous realisation dawn on me that a bit in the chorus might be (ok, definitely is) quite similar to a riff found in Left Side Brain's "Well Well Well". Riff-thief. Looks like there's a little re-working to do...
**trawl through twitter.com/oxygenthiefyeah for the in-joke there
***ok, not "new" songs as I've been playing them for about a year...but newer than the last ones recorded anyway

Free music headfuck

2010-01-25T06:32:00.000-08:00

I won a new phone recently in a competition on Twitter, which was quite nice.

What made it really properly exciting though was the fact that said phone "Comes With Music" - essentially a 12 month long completely free, all-you-can-eat download fest of music, limited apparently only by the constraints of the Nokia store (which seems pretty far reaching at the moment...my split album with Jim Lockey & Ben Marwood is on there for starters) and the 32gb of memory that's crammed into the phone itself (though you can also download to the pc as well).

What's more, when the 12 months runs out I'll still be able to listen to this music on my phone (if I haven't lost/destroyed/eaten it by then) on my computer or, get this, on any cd copies that I've burned of the music that I have downloaded.

If you don't have the magic free music download thing then you can still download music from Nokia's website, at what looks like the same sort of price (79p per track) as you would get on iTunes.

My brain is melting with delight and confusion: I can legally download as much music as I want........and keep it forever.............and somehow the bands still get paid royalties for this?

But how much do they actually get? As I understand it, a chunk of the retail price of the phone itself goes towards paying for the music that people download...but I can't imagine these "purchases" count in the same way towards paying royalties to artists as someone paying in full would, that would be madness.

So would it be wrong of me to spend the next 12 months downloading every past album I could possibly ever want from this service, and then never spending any money on albums again (aside from ones that come out from 2011 onwards)?

It feels wrong, but then again I still haven't truly "got" the idea of paying to download music anyway - I do it, occasionally, but I don't feel like I actually "own" anything until I've got a physical item in my hands.......that I then immediately rip to my mp3 player and leave on the shelf to gather dust until I need to drive somewhere and realise my battery is flat so nab it for the journey and my girlfriend puts it back in the wrong case and I end up scouring through all my cds trying to find it. Grr.

I'm guessing that I'll end up using it in the same way I've used illegal downloads over the past few years* - to check out something I've been recommended, which I'll then go out and buy later on. And go to a gig. And buy t-shirts and hats and posters and badges and stickers and records.

Which brings me to wondering whether this would be a viable plan for the future - eliminate piracy by making all music completely free to download, and limit the licence so that you can only play the songs on one pc/one portable device...or possibly have it as a time-limited licence which you will then have to pay to extend to being permenant, or to be able to copy to different devices. Or you could be proper old fashioned and buy a cd :)

Maybe it's just a nice dream, but already in the 24 hours I've had this subscription I've downloaded & listened to albums by The Melvins, Them Crooked Vultures' album, Fantomas, & Kyus...all of which have been on my "to do" list for varying amounts of time, but that I've not had the spare cash to buy...but will probably be doing so now at some point this year.

Right, I'm off to eat tinned peaches, download some Peaches, and probably Peaches and Peaches as well.

OT

*yeah I know, I'm a prick and I'm killing music. But stop reading this footnote and you'll see that I have an explanation ready that I think more than justifies any nefarious activities.

2009 is dead. Long live 2010

2010-01-19T06:57:00.003-08:00

Blimey I'm crap at this blogging lark - it's been what, 6 months since the last one? Naughty Thief, must try harder.

So it's a new year, a new decade, and with all that come the traditional slew of resolutions and expectations for making improvements and progress that all too often fall by the wayside.

I'm pretty sure, for instance, that I decided I was going to blog about every gig I played last year........failed that one for a start. I only remembered that about a week into January and considered starting again, but I've already missed one so that's doomed before it even starts really.

But let's stop focussing on the negatives - a whole bunch of positive shit happened last year, including two major resolutions of mine:

1) Having a proper commercial release - achieved through the medium of Exclamation At Asterisk Hash, a split ep with the wonderful Ben Marwood and Jim Lockey, thanks to the and the good people of Broken Tail & Josaka, which despite Amazon and Play.com's best efforts managed to make its way into many a home over the summer.

Not got a copy yet? Why I outtta.....recommend you go here immediately and get a copy: http://snipurl.com/u4knq

2) Touring with a bill of likeminded boozehounds - again thanks to Jim & Ben this aim was securely ticked off my "to do" list............previous tours have always been a bit of a mixed bag of opening slots, acoustic nights, and random headliners dotted around the place, so it was such an awesome experience to be able to spend each night out watching two great performers do their thing......even if the resultant perpetual hangover turned me into a horrible moaning bastard every day at 5pm sharp.

1,000+ miles later these two already great pals have firmly been engrained into my being - like Spock and McCoy in Star Trek II (or is it III?) - and should one of them ever expire from an radiation overdose in a space exploration vessel, I fully expect to go a bit mad before scouring a newly terriformed planet in search of their reanimated corpse.

And if that isn't friendship, I don't know what is.

Head to Youtube for video evidence of how much sheer fun that week was.

Of course, whilst probably not quite worthy of such insane ramblings (yet), huge showers of respect and appreciation and thanks and other such gushing will have to be aimed squarely at the Lexapalooza family of organisers, performers and attendees (Evan, Dani, Frank, Chris, Dan, Pete, Paul, Anna-M, Ravi, Jay...and everyone who yelled "GOLD" really loud), everyone at Two Thousand Trees Festival, the !@*# tourettes (Kevin, Jacqui, Mr Addis, Winnie, Stan), to Johnny Foreigner and Tubelord for putting up with my relentless mission to always support them everytime they come to Bristol (and in the former's case for probably being a bit of a scary fanboy).

And of course a special mention has to go to Mrs Thief for yet another year of me heading out of the door without washing up, and coming in late and waking her with well meaning, yet ill advised tipsy greetings.

Here's to this year...which is already nearly 1/12 gone. Fucking hell.

I'll leave your strained eyes (and with all this rambling, probably minds as well) with a list of upcoming gigs - see you there :)

OT

Tuesday 26th January - New songs only gig @ The Louisiana
Friday 5th February - The Frog & Fiddle, Cheltenham
Saturday 6th February - House party, Treforest
Sunday 7th February - The Angel, Aberystwyth
Monday 8th February - Ten Feet Tall, Cardiff
Thursday 11th February - Peewees, Trowbridge
Thursday 25th February - Mandela Bar, Bristol University

Tuesday 9th March - Mother's Ruin, Bristol w/Chris T-T

then it's album recording time......woo!

--------------------------------------------
Currently listening to:

Thrice - Beggars
Left Side Brain - Collider
Lightning Bolt - Hypermagic Mountain

Reading:
Douglas Coupland - Shampoo Planet
www.richardherring.com/warmingup
Mike Mignola - Hellboy
Luna Brothers - The Sword (Image Comics)

Watching:
Lost - Season 5
Day of the Triffids (BBC version 2009)

The Artist Formerly Known As Plinth

2009-10-14T05:40:00.000-07:00

So, Anthony Gormley's One&Other project has finished - 100 days, and 2,400 people later it's all over........I didn't realise I would be ushering in the final 24 hours of the event with my slot yesterday morning at 9am, but I am honoured to have been chosen to participate.

I would like to say a huge thanks to everyone who came along to watch, to everyone who watched the live stream, and to those who had a gander later on.

If you've still not seen it, it's available via http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/oxygenthief ........I don't know how long it'll be up there, so enjoy it while it lasts!

I'm pretty knackered now and looking at the next week or so there doesn't seem to be any time to take it easy and recuperate, so if anyone has access to some sort of sleep-based time machine that I could pop myself into tonight & receive the equivalent of a month of early nights then I'm willing to pay you upwards of £30 for the priviledge of borrowing it.

Tour video diary parts 10 & 11 - the end!

2009-10-07T01:24:00.000-07:00

here it is - the last installment of our tour video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry-DlQe7Hh4

Tour video diary part 9

2009-10-06T01:28:00.001-07:00

Tour video diary parts 7 & 8

2009-10-05T04:37:00.000-07:00

Day 7

Day 8 - in which our racist expectations of the people of Newcastle are all confirmed...

New guitar?

2009-10-01T07:55:00.001-07:00

I've just accidentally started trying to haggle down the price of a sexy new guitar (http://pictures.kyozou.com/pictures/_7/6010/6009019.jpg) that I'm hoping to get from a shop just up the road near Gloucester.

This place has it for around £430, other online stores have it £495. I already thought I was getting a bargain.

However, local shop doesn't have it in stock at the moment...so out of curiosity/boredom I emailed the £495 ones and said "could you beat this other shop?" not really expecting anything.

£495 shop says "ok, how's about £399 delivered"

Well, I'm torn now between the desire to try and buy from a small local dealer (something I believe is especially important considering the current economic climate*) and the desire to save myself enough money for a really nice bottle of whisky.

So, I emailed the £430 one saying "well, this other place will do it for £399 now...what do you reckon?"

They've said they'll see what they can do...

I feel a bit bad now, £430 isn't a bad price and the bloke in the shop seemed really nice......I bet he has little hungry children, and gives a chunk of his profits to a donkey sanctuary and because of my desire to save money they're all going to starve to death.............I'm going to hell.

.
...
.....
.......
.........

Ah sod it there's no such place, and if they match the cheaper price I'll probably spend that money on strings/picks/a cable/a new capo in his shop anyway............so everyone's a winner

*I hate myself for typing these words.

Tour video diary part 6

2009-09-23T04:42:00.001-07:00

Tour Diary - day 5

2009-09-13T07:52:00.001-07:00

Tour video diary part 4

2009-09-10T10:17:00.001-07:00

I have a stupid laugh...

Tour video diary part 3

2009-09-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

Tour video diary part 2

2009-09-04T15:14:00.001-07:00

Tour video diary pt 1

2009-09-04T01:37:00.000-07:00

We are all dead

2009-08-22T02:13:00.001-07:00

Ah man what has happened to us? Anyone would think that 9 days in a row playing gigs+drinking booze until we either fall over or fall asleep is somehow not the best way to maintain a healthy demeanour. Jim is zonked out in the car, whilst Ben and I have a staring competiton with the floor. It's hangovers like this that make me understand why people become religious - never again is the refrain that we're quite tempted to make right now. But we won't of course - we'll drive to Reading for our day off, go to sleep, and then get right back on it again. 'Sometimes the only way to get back on the horse is to tie yourself to the fucking saddle' wise words young Marwood, wise wise horrifying words.

!@*#ing tour diary - day 3

2009-08-16T05:26:00.000-07:00

It's so hot here nobodycanbreathe and all we want is some a i r
but there's none, and when we open the windows there are bikers trying to climb in and belly dance at us, and noise from a gazebo of musical happenings that has been set up purely to distract from our fun, and the road is closed so I had to park miles away and then we propped a window open using a pint glass and then BRENT opened it (despite Kev's slow motion "noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!") and it fell down to the ground and smashed in the middle of some hells angels who didn't turn out to be that happy about it.

And then it stayed hot.

But at least we had some music to entertain us (and beer, the more you drink, the less not being able to breathe seems to matter) : thanks to everyone who played, and everyone who listened, and those Hells Angels for not killing us all.

!@*#ing tour diary - days 1+2

2009-08-14T03:47:00.000-07:00

Day 1 started in the most rocking of all ways : installing a washing machine at home. The dream is being well and truly lived ladies and gentlemen.

DIY done, gear loaded, obsessively checked and rechecked to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything (and then checked again just to be on the safe side) it's road time.

The next 5 hours pass in a blur of Tesco bbq ribs, traffic jams, fruitless hunts for interesting whisky, and lustful browsing through the biggest music shop ever + then it's finally time - gig #1 of the tour.

To say that Reading was a fun night would be like saying that the weather has been a bit changable recently - both totally accurate, but a bit of an understatement : sing-a-longs, stage invasions, Shine 7 being the prime source of dj material (WELL I CAN'T TAKE IT, TOO MUCH TIME'S BEEN WASTED ahh), and hanging around with the progressively more destroyed Josaka crew.

Bonus points also to sir Winship for being possibly the drunkest person in a room packed with really quite drunk folks.

Heading back to Ben's for post mortem whisky and beer, the last 30 minutes of Dracula 2000 (what...it was Judas all along? Vampire necks are made of grass? WHATTHEHELLISGOINGON?) untill we gradually passed out watching someone excitingly swimming lengths on the Big Brother live feed.

Andthenitwasday2 - in which Jim felt like death warmed up, frozen, partially thawed out, and then kicked down a spiral staircase...we fed ourselves bacon bought from the proceeds of last night's merch sale (thank you Readingites) and lounged around watching Murder She Wrote (the bus driver did it...twice) and Monk (who said OCD couldn't be fun?).

Our daytime whittled away with detective shows and pig flesh (oh and Jim pausing to give God a quick ring from the big white telephone) we drove the winding roads to Devizes well aided by the skills of DJ Ben "random play all" Marwood, played the most tedious, yet profitable, quiz/fruit machine ever, and then ate fish and chips by the lake. Romantic eh?

The show was an open mic affair, with each of us getting 2 x 3 song sets...I have to admit that I was initially a bit dubious about how that would rank on the awesome scale, but it soon proved itself to be a great way to spend an evening - play some tunes, sit and have a drink and a chat, play some more, repeat.

To add to that, the unparalleled generosity of both sir Boom of FT board fame, and sir Stan of Lockey, deserves a spontaneous standing ovation - you guys are great.

Later we drive home to Bristol after, with a bounty of cans of 6X and a bottle of Bushmills sat waiting patiently in the boot for their chance to entertain us, Ben orders pizza, and we channel hop the night away before reluctantly remembering that some pillock* decided that it'd be clever to set tomorrow's gig up as an all dayer, and so we'd have to be up and out of the house in 7 hours. What a dick.

*ok, it was me

Tour soon!

2009-08-02T14:35:00.001-07:00

Wow, the tour is starting in just over 1 week. My plans of getting a bit fitter in preparation have fallen a little flat a) by getting really drunk a bunch of times (2000 Trees + the Aftermath being notable cases) and then b) getting swine flu. Balls. Still suffering a bit, but will hopefully get better in time to have another couple of jogs, do a few pressups, and get slightly more in shape, ready for 11 days on the road drinking whisky and making noise. Can't wait, this is going to be awesome

Education Fail

2009-07-01T05:49:00.001-07:00

Yeah, gibberish or double dutch perhaps

Here comes the bride

2009-06-30T05:51:00.001-07:00

T minus 4 days till awesome Dr Owen gets married + my coversong learning duties end for the summer. I've really enjoyed doing this + taking part in people's big days, but I'm also itching to get to work on some new songs, polish up + record some older 'new' ones that I've never got round to playing live, and generally throw myself headfirst into rock action for the summer. I'm playing in Bristol on 29th July, which will (as well as being an ace night with some great bands) act as a warm up for the !@*# tour. Think I'll set a target - 3 new songs that night?

Swindon!

2009-06-18T17:20:00.001-07:00

Holy crap that was fun - just got in + am enjoying a well deserved beer and one of the several million episodes of Quantum Leap sitting on my Sky+ box. People of Swindon, you sure love yelling the word 'Gold' - sorry for laughing like a cretin each time, it was just too fucking good for words. Brilliant. Couldn't think of a better way to start the Ben/Jim/me tour fun.

Woo!

2009-06-02T16:32:00.001-07:00

Split album arrived today, bloody awesome. 1 month, 1 week till release day...can't wait