The Times, or Be like Bruce.

Floundering/rocking.

On Monday night, I tried to record "The Times", the ninth and final song for the album. With Dave and Kate overseas, and the rest of the songs nearing mixedness, time is running out to get this one recorded. After clearing it with bandmates, I decided to play it all myself with the help of my friend and Ranger Spacey bandmate Karl, who offered his work's warehouse as a venue. This aligned nicely with my ongoing pursuit of ever-higher levels Bruce Springsteenissitude (Born in the USA was recorded in a converted factory called the Powerstation), so after work on Monday, i set up a makeshift studio there to record this last song.

I didn't realise, however, that Karl's unassuming IT warehouse in the back streets of Marrickville adjoins Boeing's Australiasian turbine testing plant on one side and CERN's southern hemisphere large hadron colliding facility on the other. These are assumptions i made based on my analysis of the loud droning sound that persisted all freakin night. This was fail #1.

Editing the turbine solo.

Fail #2 was that i had only demoed this song acoustically and hadn't really given a lot of thought to a drums/bass/guitar arrangement. There was a lot of tense floundering going on as i tried to write parts on the run... I was even considering changing the key of the song to accommodate the droning. It was becoming obvious that a more developed demo was the only thing we were going to get out of this session.

This is probably not how Bruce did it.

i never sleep...

"The Silent Mixer"

Can you call yourselves a band if you have no recording and have never gigged? The case is arguable. It's hard to see here but this is the next photograph in our ongoing exhibition - "Evidence of Music Making in lieu of Music". It's me in a studio allegedly trying to mix the eight alleged songs that allegedly comprise the debut briscoe record. If you look closely you can see my mouse-clicking finger poised to do some excellent editing. Actually, Luke the engineer was just having a wizz and I jumped into his chair for a misleading second.

The mixing is going well though, and will hopefully be finished by the end of the month, but it's been my life for so long now that i really can't imagine it finishing. I'll believe it when i hear it, or when i see the photos of me hearing it.

Up to now i've resisted the urge to post demos to preserve the sanctity of my conventional recording and release aspirations, but having now experienced the odyssey of recording with plenty of bands, i realised that a song i demo today won't see the light of day for at least 2 years, if ever. And at this stage i know the five people who read this blog anyway.

While i was in the studio this week (see photographic evidence inset) I wrote a topical ditty about feverishly working towards an unlikely goal and being battered by expectation, mostly your own. I demoed it yesterday so i'm just gonna post it. By the time we get around to recording it in 2032, North Korea will probably have deleted the internet anyway. Enjoy.    

i never sleep cos i'm trying to get on someone's wall DEMO

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