So.. in the last couple of weeks we have been recording vocals for the LP at a (fairly) secret (but let’s face it, well-known) location in north-west London. We’ve been dubbing onto the great instrumental tracks recorded at Furnace Studios in Bulgaria.
With James Ewers at the controls, free coffee, bubbly and fame cake, and guest appearances on BVs from Emma Richardson (Band of Skulls) and Alcxxk (Internet Forever – and he also did a wee bit of tromboning) it is sounding ACE.
Just got a few string bits and gang vocals to do now – going to Valley Studios in Winchester of this cos they’ve got a great feel there and we can piss about with real tape as well. Release will be sometime between October and next February. Keep an eye out for stuff on Soundcloud though…
EP News
In the meantime we will be releasing the Falmouth sessions very soon. This is a load of louder stuff recorded as Ann The Arc (Jimmy Shivers – bass; Dave Wade-Brown – drums) and produced by Dan Parry. Songs like ‘Hake’, ‘Wolf’ and yes, ‘Stutter’ plus a couple of others should make for a nice fat EP. Working title is ‘The Young Unprofessionals’ and we’re hoping Sotones will release it.
Last year I started sleeping with my guitar to make me empathise with it better and become a better guitarist. A bit like a samurai sleeping with his sword. I think it’s finally working…
54kg WizzAir luggage really worked against us at 3AM. Thanks, TfL
So…
1 producer,
2 engineers,
3 countries,
4 animals/toddlers,
5 musicians plus a Katy and a Rysia,
12 days,
15 tracks,
32 transfers and
countless bottles of Shumenska (cheap Bulgarian Beer)
later, we’ve finally finished tracking what will end up as my debut LP. It will be an incredible record with some unbelievably good songs played by amazing musicians sounding great and some gifted production…
If it seems strange reading that, well, it’s weirder typing those words, believe me. But that really is what’s happened, somehow. We’ve come so far in a few months from the midnight scribbles, to the 3am jams and demos, to the rehearsals, the fire and the fury in the studio. Listening back to the very, very rough tracks I can’t come to any other conclusion: this record is REALLY good.
I think I’m only able to write that without cringing because so many other people other than me have taken this project on now. Tom and Rysia have built an amazing complex out there at Furnace Studios, and he and Ben Startup of Valley got some wicked lush sounds. While with every passing day we’ve got more and more excited about the production James Ewers is injecting into the record.
4AM face
There were some blood and guts on the studio floor but James got some incredible performances out of Dave Wade Brown and Dave Miatt (TT), I think it sounds to me like the guitar of Dave’s life. On the last day he sat there nailing take after take for 30 hours straight, while Dave WB’s perfectionism/power/passion on the skins actually scared me. Jimmy Hatherley and Mike Anderson also did really well to get their heads round the material so quickly. Even Startup got on the credits!
I think you’ll be surprised in the extreme by the tracklisting, so we’ll keep that under wraps for now, but we should be releasing an EP of the Falmouth stuff ASAP, then tracks from these sessions (including the odd Hicks remix) later in the Summer. Not sure when the whole LP’s gonna be done. There’s some bits and bobs left to do (string, brass, harp, BVs) before the main vocals but we’re basically there. Shock.
More to come including a (late) diary (sorry, slow internet + busy actually doing the job when we were out there). Bye for now x x
PS: We’ve got some dates coming up, might turn them into a minitour if we can bolt on London and Bristol either side:
April 29th Secret gig, Laines, Brighton (email for deets)
April 30th Sotones Spring Social, Hobbit, Southampton
PPS: Thanks to Katy very, very, very much for helping us not degenerate (totally) into moon-howling freaks.
More PS: Woke up this morning to find the garden had burst into technicolor while we were away:
Big treat for everyone in London tomorrow, as Icelandic septet Hjaltalín come to visit us for a rare gig, the culmination of a national tour (so they should be super-tight). Last year’s Terminal was full of unexpected arrangements and quirksome hooks (think Neil Hannon producing a Björk LP with a brass section in tow) and one of my favourites.
Have a quick listen now, on Spotify. Words like lush, cinematic and winsome all apply, but I think there’s enough Skandinavian willfulness there to keep it interesting, too. See ‘Hooked on Chilli’ or ‘Feels Like Sugar’. Great, isn’t it? So I’ll be seeing you at the Slaughtered Lamb in Shoreditch (MAP – tube Farringdon or Old St – one of my favourite venues for this kind of complex-arrangement music) tomorrow, 7pm on Tuesday 8th March. Oh, it’s a God Don’t Like It-curated show too, so the support act are going to be ace.
The nearer we get to recording the LP (2 weeks to go, and counting..) at Furnace, the more I seem to listen to PJ Harvey, Pulp, Pavement and (cat) Power. Obsession with all things ‘P’? Will we have a plethora of parping polyphones all over the place? I THINKK SO>
Barcelona
Well. A very kind person took me on a weekend trip to Barcelona to see the sights. The sights in question being the excellent capital of Catalunya herself, but mainly mates Nathan, Bobby (The Beaux Hardts) and Paola. Not been there since 2000, and since I was drunk then and drunk now I can’t really claim any deep Theroux style observations on the ephemeral nature of change in the world’s great cities, or the permanence of poverty, or anything like that, beyond the usual ones everyone makes about Barca.
These are:
The girls in Barcelona are all REALLY HOT
Why is Park Güell so far from the centre of town?
Supporting Barca (a winning team) is (whisper it) lots more fun than supporting one that is slightly less than triumphant like Saints [but see 1].
Yes, the girls in Barcelona really are all REALLY REALLY HOT [2].
Oh, and their Boris bike system (or ‘hire bike’, as they quaintly put it) works with a lot less fuss than ours. Anyway, here’s some quick crappy sketches:
Sun. Drenched. Rooftop. Morning. Coffee. MMMMMMM... because every dickhead has to have a go at drawing it...MEGA quick sketch from the top of Park Güell. FYizzle...
Laptopless coding
Years and years of touring experience, science fieldwork and sofa sofing mean I am a seasoned and unflappable traveller. ‘Seasoned’ like a piece of rotten wood is…
So having nearly missed my flight out, I also managed to leave my laptop charger in London. Instead of doing something sensible like getting pissed in the sun I decided to wireframe all the code for the next HADPACK iteration on pen-and-paper. WHOOOOAH!
Yes, it is oldschool, but it really is true what the textbooks say: working on paper first really helps you to think clearly about your code, especially if you’re working with complex class inheritance structures (oh, yes…)
Coding HADPACK (HIV Antigen Determining PACKage) from the ground upMore HADPACK work - thinking about how the UI interrelates to the experimental design process
OK, so there’s a bit of work left to do still. Back to the laptop…
Footnotes
1 – Although Bob informed me that Bilbao (one of the earliest Spanish teams ever founded) first played in red-and-white striped shirts that they got from which South Coast port’s city team? That would be Southampton St. Mary’s, known nowadays as Saints. And Athletico Madrid followed suit. So Saints can at least claim the credit for kitting out the first ever Spainish football teams.
2 – No, I’m not being silly. Bob & Paola’s is just a tennis ball’s boff from the Ramblas, where Orwell (nearly) had a shootout with the Facists in la Guerra Civil. My guess is it wasn’t a lack of munitions that stopped them firing (as claimed) but the beauties of Barcelona. Make love, not war…
(sorry for bad typing, weird catalan keyboard disaster epic)
a quick reminder that this week there are loads of gigs happening in weird places courtesy of Soton Unstaged / SMILEFest (more)
I´m playing the Thursday show at the Quilters´ Vault, as is Anja McCloskey. The gig is 7pm – 9pm only (don´t know when I´m on within that). i think they´re filming it too for the uni TV, so best frocks only please. The vault is a cool medieval bolthole on the High st below bar — down near the isle of wight ferries where Unit 22 used to be. if you don´t know where that is there´s a map here.
i´m going to be playing a bunch of old and new stuff, totally acoustic, the demos from the album basically. it will be good. if you want a sneak peak of some of the album tracks go here. and if you want a full prelisten email me and i´ll send you a soundcloud link.
So, the album demos are rolling along. Recording in March is looking like more and more fun. This weekend we cooked up a load more demos with Dave (Miatt & Wade Brown, Thomas Tantrum) and Campbell Austin (Moneytree) – starting to sound really good as we work the kinks out. Have a wee listen:
The ‘preproduction demos’ in that set are the ones you want… We’re making track notes on Soundcloud as we go (which is a really nice easy way to do it, by the way – remember minidiscs..?) So please let us know what you think, just click on the bar under the waveform to comment!
I am leaving facebook for a while*.
It is boring but compulsive, and that is a bad combination of things.
Here’s what I’m doing instead.
You can comment below thru FB / Twitter / Disqus
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Or follow me on Twitter
Yes. I’ve had enough, finally.
To get my instant-gratification social-networking rocks off, I’ll keep using twitter to send important ‘ooh, look, I just saw a banana that looks like Woody Harrelson’ updates. If you want to follow that crap see http://www.twitter.com/lonelyjoeparker
For actual communication I’m gonna use letters on this site, just like this one below. You like? I do.
I have a pen
So to fling new demos at you I’ll keep using myspace a bit but also soundcloud cos the whole thing’s just… nicer. Like this new demo:
You might have heard that I’m not working for Sotones any more. It was a big wrench, and I still love them all, but I’ve been brewing a really good record for 4 years now, and the time is ripe to go for it.
The LP we are doing has ended up a mixture of new stuff and (ahem) Greatest Hits...
The idea is that I want to concentrate on things I like, those being:
writing,
doing science,
playing,
presenting science
and touring
… and not things I don’t, like
updating facebook
checking facebook
spending entire weeks on facebook
So the plan is that Dave Miatt, Dave Wade-Brown, Michael Anderson and me (plus a couple of special guests) are going to go out to Bulgaria in March to record an album at Furnace Studios…
We’re doing a lot of pre-production on this one, even though most of the songs are fully written because it’s basically gonna be, in Davo’s words “a Joe Parker greatest hits, yeah? Done really well, really.. right! Isn’t that what people wanna hear?!”
We’re down to a shortlist of just 30 songs now, which includes faves like Number Nine, Brooklyn and Stutter but also new ones like Sherine!, Barny’s Bathroom and really new one Dead Man’s Pen (listen above or on Soundcloud). NO, Liz – Spanish Girls is not on the list!!!
When we get back we’ve got about a month to mix it. Some will be done by us, some by friends (Parry etc) and also remixed (paging rude_NHS and Ed Hix now..) and there’s going to be a few sprinkles of production magic courtesy of the brilliant James Ewers (My Luminaries.)
It depends on how the sessions go, but the likely plan is we’ll do a couple of free tracks and a single over the summer (anyone up for a 7″?) with some gigs then aim to get the LP out about October in time for all your crimbo stockings.
But we gotta get there first – so there’s pageloads of arranging and rehearsing to do for now! Will be bunging new tracks up on Soundcloud – updates about that on this site and also twitter if you want to follow us on our little journey…
In the meantime we’ve got a couple of gigs before we go:
Sat 12th Feb
SeeSound.co.uk showcase, Alleycat, 4 Denmark St, Soho WC2H 8LP. Deets here – doors 4-11pm — SET TIME 8pm
Thurs 3rd Mar
Soton Unstaged, Southampton. Oxfam Music Stage (TBC – check here for full details)
Listening a lot to Black Hearted Love at the moment (PJH/John Parish). Looking forward to her new album, too…
Well. Thats enough from me, so see you soon and thanks for leaving the warm blue safety of Facebook and coming over to mine for a bit.Hope you enjoyed it, come back soon!
Joe xxx
*Okay… I’ll still put gig listings up there, and let you know when the LP’s done and records are coming out… Logged in to Facebook or Twitter? Comment below, no sign-in needed!
That’s her heading up the reviews section of The Fly this month. I don’t know if the album’s actually any good because I’m not going to listen to it until I buy it, and I’m skint now. But (for once) The Fly’ve put a good artist on the front. Normally you have to buy your way into that rag (e.g. same issue – The Joy Formidable cover and, surprise, surprise, full page ad just inside…) but PJH just storms in there by the force of her back cat’s unimpeachable, eclectic brilliance.
The vault is a cool medieval bolthole on the High st below bar — down near the isle of wight ferries where Unit 22 used to be. if you don´t know where that is there´s a map 
