/Postal Aid Package From Mum

I owe this track serious amounts of blame for my solo career even happening. I'd done Big Night Out In Rockingham and Go Bucket Inhale Bucket Go for uni theatre projects, and then I wrote this for a creative writing course. it went down really well and I performed it in all kinds of contexts over the next year, sometimes with guitar noodling from Mark, sometimes without.

I got Shane to lay down the bass onto his four track one afternoon. He recorded it with the tape in reverse mode. It sounded wicked. Then I laid down my original vocal (not this one). I spent a month or so working on noise and putting it into a crappy version of Acid I had on my shitty old Pentium 90. 

Once I was happy with it, I sent it off to the Noise festival, along with some other writing I'd done at the time (Fight Response). They really liked my stuff and featured this on their Mouthpiece compilation. It got a couple of spins on JJJ's The Sound Lab, amongst other places and led to my getting a good number of festivals and gigs on the spoken word/fringe arts scene. 

When it came time to put this album together, I knew I was going to have to touch it up, which I was really dreading. But it all came together really quickly. It was really just a case of playing with reverbs, distortion, compression, the sound mix and doing my vocals on a better microphone. I didn't have to reprogram anything, which was really nice.

The pitched up vocal was an experiment in Ableton Live. I thought it was wanky, but when I played it to Eleesha, who usually hates wank, she agreed it was much more expressive. I think it fits the theme of social alienatioin in there too. I'm still a bit nervous about it, because it is very odd, but I think it works.

19/05/2008