PROPAGANDA

I spent the bulk of Tuesday knocking another song into shape. I did some weird stuff with it, and basically what has come out of it is that we now have what we think is the album opener...

Last night, B, Ash and I gathered, mostly so Ash could hear the current arrangements and we could toss around idea for the next batch of tunes. Ash likes the arrangements, and everyone's comments are more "the song needs..." and less "I hate this" (In fact that never comes up). Concepts, thoughts, etc. are thrown back and forth. Ash is going to take the more acoustic oriented stuff and really mess around with them a bit. I created some atmospheric stuff for "THEY'VE JUST..." and he will clean that up and build from there. I am confident in what he will come up with.

From the discussions recently, it has been my intention to do a song that was more dance oriented. I'm not saying techno, but something that was more loop based, more groovy, etc. Cerati has an uncanny ability to make great dance music that doesn't seem out of place on a rock album and this is really inspiring, especially since my roots in music are electronic. When in Russia, the MOGpac spent an evening in a house club called Propaganda, which was very inspirational for Ash and got me more interested in trying music of that type (and now infamous as being the place where Danny Boy Hamill lost his coat check ticket, thus keeping us in the club till they closed one night). Anyway, I think doing something like this has been in the back of my head as well as Ash's for some time now.

So the three of us formulate a plan that would involve Ash bringing lots of his gear into the studio and we would sort of "jam" a song out electronically. However, this is put on hold when Ash plays a series of loops out of his laptop that B and I go mental for. Immediately we pick up guitar and bass and start to jam along. And what do you know, a few hours later we have tons of parts for a new song. Instead of using the studio computer that runs Cubase, we recorded straight from the mixer into Ash's laptop, where he is running the program LIVE, which he swears by and is excellent for this kind of music.

This song is now called "THEME FROM PROPAGANDA" and will probably end up as the centerpiece of the album. It's the 7th song written thus far and we were lucky that the stars were aligned last night and we wrote a VERY cool song. Ash is going to arrange it as he would one of his club tracks and I have a vague idea for a vocal melody that might work in an Underworld/"THESE MILLION NIGHTS" kind of way.

We left the studio quite jazzed. Ash also has come up with a GREAT idea for a guest vocal spot. I'll be getting on that invite right away.

Tomorrow, I should be writing about the final Chemlab mixes and the new Acumen album should they actually arrive (JASON!)

F