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.

Same drill here, get lost buster.

Yeah, nothing to see here. Stop reading.

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

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

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.

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)

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.