So, we did a gig last year. First one in quite a while.

Here is the audio and visuals from the night for those of you who couldn't make it. Which, to be honest, was pretty much everybody.

Actually, while we are being honest, the audio is from a rehearsal recording so it probably sounds nothing like what we did on the night. Also, the visuals didn't get seen on the night because the projector was broken, apparently.

I have resolved to try and get back into blogging these tracks. It has been quite a hiatus but hopefully I will be able to pull my finger out and get a bit more regular.

Eh Yumm was constructed using the same bits and bobs we had used to create Stick it. We still had my brother’s sampler and were figuring out what you could do with it. The vocal “Eh Yumm” sound was taken off the TV and you can probably guess where the latin drums came from.

Um, okay, this requires a bit of explaining.

My brother and his mates started a band and they had all clubbed together to buy some gear. An Alesis QS6 if I remember correctly, microphone…

…and a shiny purple Yamaha A3000 sampler!

I was still unemployed at this point, living at my mum’s house with all our studio gear in my bedroom. By some quirk of fate, I can’t remember why exactly, all this lovely new gear had been left at our house. I don’t know why they weren’t using it themselves but here was an opportunity not to be missed.

I grabbed the first things that came to hand, a Lalo Schifrin compilation, a Jose Feliciano album I had just bought from a library sale, and the microphone and started stuffing things into the sampler.

Perhaps being unemployed and having to endure my own company for so long caused me to behave a bit daft and this was the expression of it. It’s mostly just figuring out what you can do with a sampler and having a bit of fun in the process.

The title and the “lyrics” are yet another Dirty Harry reference. It’s what you are supposed to do with a seven pointed suppository.

Gav was commuting to Perth from Carnoustie every day. On the A90 between Dundee and Perth there was a little sign that said “Carse Honey”. Quite fitting for such a sweet tune.

Recorded as a live jam, this is essential fenducci. Nice bit of melodic electro and one of my all time favourites.

We have the SH101 doing a Kraftwerk style white noise snare, strings, piano sounds and tuned percussion all wrapped up in a loose ad lib arrangement. Tasty.

Moody music with a slightly darker edge was what we wanted and we ended up with “Writer’s blqck”. That must have grated because what we came up with next was this.

Much more the thing.

Fewer notes. Fewer notes meant a much lower possibility of straying into chirpy happy melodies, our weakness.

Fuzzy borders relates to a misremembered phrase my mum was using at the time, something she had seen on TV. I think the actual phrase was fuzzy boundaries.

I remember this one. Lots of potential, lots of good ideas, completely unfinished. Hence the name. The Q in the title is probably just a consequence of naming tracks using a jog wheel on the mini disc recorder.

It was definitely going somewhere. The bass line is a peach and the hi hat patterns are lovely. I think that was the problem, it was just too lovely, too happy.

Neither of us are particularly angry. When you are creating music it tends to be a reflection of your state of mind and generally we were a couple of cheerful souls. This can be a bit frustrating when you want to create moody music with a slightly darker edge.

So, we just stopped development, recorded what we had done and broke it down into constituent parts at the end with a bit of improvisation. Again we thought we might reuse some of it when we got the sampler and again we never did.

So, as promised, here is the other version of “Standard” which appeared on the previous disc. The acid line is still there but the rest of the track has been worked and reworked into something with a lot more polish and sheen.

Is it better or just different?

It’s really difficult to decide. They both have their merits. This version, I feel, is musically more rounded and has more depth but because of this feels a little less gritty.

I guess they don’t really have to be compared in that way. Lets just look at them as an example of how we took an idea and pushed it through to it’s conclusion. Sometimes we stopped at “Standard”. Others, we elevated to something more like this.

As I said previously, this track is paired with snare sloth, both in it’s starting point and in the source of the name. I am really struggling to figure out where we were coming from with the names. “Snare” is self explanatory. Why we were talking of sloths and pies is a complete mystery.

I really like this one. It’s not the best mix-down unfortunately. It also sounds like there’s a bit of a nod to Orbital’s “The Box” in there somewhere.

This and the next track are a bit of a twofer. I couldn't decide whether to have them as a single track in two parts or two separate ones. I have gone for two separate tracks.

The downside of this is we lose the smooth change over between them but I think they need to be seen as individual tracks in their own right. They both started from the same source material which was the hand programmed drums but went in different directions. I am sure we tried to make them work in a single track but I think the beauty and simplicity was lost and it just didn't work anyway.

This isn't particularly representative of the rest of the disc. There are some real gems to come so lets just get this one out of the way. Quite fast and rather hard, it does the job its supposed to.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh.

We were young, energetic, and liked a good stomp back then. I think we have mellowed in our tastes somewhat and this isn't exactly coffee table music.

The title is a reference to Victorian Dad from the Viz.