rehearsal

Dissection

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What a week. I think I’d like to talk further about some these things, but being as how I’m also pretty busy this week, it will need to wait a little bit longer. Seemed right to do a brief summary though.

  • First off, on Saturday 21st we were recording dog Tired, which I believe I mentioned. Hoping for release early next week.
  • Next, Wednesday evening was a strangeday practice. The previous practice saw all of us feeling a little tired and kind of lack lustre, but this one was way better. The practice was in preparation for NAGfest. More of which later.
  • Thursday was the last NAG Open Mic. I’ve been running this open mic with Jack for 10 years. It was a really nice evening to end on, and I’m hoping to talk a bit more about that in a post dedicated to the subject.
  • Friday was a Roo’s Radio practice, again for NAGfest. It went on pretty late as we were trying to get the set ready and it had been a long time since we’d played together.
  • Saturday was the first day of NAGfest, a local music festival in its second year. Roo’s Radio were on at 6pm. Our set went really well. Paul, who had also done a lot of the organisation for NAGfest, joined us on drums, and it all felt very comfortable. Despite having not played for a while I think the songs are with us now.
  • Sunday was the second day of the festival, and strangeday were playing at 8pm. This set also went well, although I was struggling a little voice-wise due to a lot of late nights and lots of singing. We played a new song, Long defeat, which possibly went down better than all the other songs.

It was also great to catch a lot of great bands and friends at NAGfest. Jack, Ant, Steve, 3dBs Down, Ab and the Underclass, No Limit Street Band, Sam, Aaron, Hog Roast, One Day Elliott and Beer Pressure were all very cool.

Onwards

Back at play

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Ordinarily a band practice probably wouldn’t be particularly blog-worthy. But at the moment strangeday practices are so few and far between that I felt it might merit a mention.
So, last night we all headed out to M5 studios to set up and practice in “a matchbox”. Luckily there were five sets of ear protection in play otherwise there would almost certainly be some hearing impairment this morning. Look after your ears kids!

We kicked off with a brief run through of some old songs, each of us choosing a song. I don’t think they’ve told him, Hide, 10, Longshore drift and Sea change all got a run out, with varying degrees of success. We had a nice little jam at the end of Sea change as well. It felt good.

Then we moved on to work with a new song, Long defeat. Aaron had demoed this one up and sent it through for me to write lyrics and melody back in June 2015. In his words, “this is a bit of a frankenstein song incorporating riffs and from different writing sessions over time so you’ll no doubt recognise parts of it.”

This being me, the lyrics and melody weren’t written until December. Eek. In actual fact, once I got down to it, it was all sorted in a couple of hours, and I’m quite pleased with them as it goes. Maybe I’ll make a separate post at some point going into it a little.

It’s always great to start throwing a song around between us. Watching as sections change and evolve is quite the fun thing to do. We kind of got there in the end, and I even tried to get a recording by wrapping my phone in a coat. It didn’t work, the room was just too damn loud. It sounds like it’s been recorded on a ZX Spectrum 16K.

At our current rate, you’ll be hearing the song in around 6 or 7 years. So stay tuned for that.

We’re actually booking in an all-dayer for next month, so you may well get a report on that as well. It’s been a while since we’ve had an all day practice.