S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

I have decided to post a completely free download of my album Angels In Drag for general download. All it will take is an email address and a link will be sent. Please tell everyone you know to go and grab it. I will be doing the same for the next record. For the time being iit is just the mp3 files as a ZIP, but I’m working on an accompanying Flash app that will give all the info and artwork.

Get ‘Angels In Drag’ for free!

Well, work on the new record is going really well - we’re working on Mondays, recording a track each time. Jules (Maxwell - my producer) has been amazing… inspiring, unbelievably musical, generous, sideways, infuriating, funny, and he’s dragging my voice kicking and screaming down into the depths. Its been a great time. We’re recording all the parts in mono using one microphone - not that this is a new technique or anything, but I didn’t imagine it would be a route I would choose. Let me explain…

When recording a drumkit, for example, most engineers would use about 10 mics, on the various drums, and in the room for ambience and attack. Its called “multitracking” and is the most common way of recording today, in this age of big stereo and hi-fi, of radio hits and that kind of nonsense. We are recording every instrument, be it an entire drumkit, grand piano, hammond organ or whacking a pole with a stick, with one microphone, just moving it to where it needs to be a hitting record. Its very “freeing” in that the ideas move faster than the technical side of recording. You get through a lot quite quickly, focusing on performance and very often capitalising on mistakes in ways you can’t when you’re waiting 10 minutes to mic up the piano. We are catching a lot of magic. OK - the end result might not sound as grand as it would if we spent all our time getting everything technically perfect, but you know what? I’m just not interested in that anymore. My favourite records almost all sound shit, or at best just reasonable. And some technically immaculate records just fail to move you - any boy band album, for example, is a case of expensive recordings or purest banality.

So - I’ll keep you posted. Moving full steam ahead, I now plan to release “Angels In Drag” source tracks as a Creative Commons licensed project - watch this space.