Secret Transmission, or How It Took Thirteen Years to Fully Release an Album

I thought maybe we owed you a bit of an explanation for why it's taken quite so long to get Transmission on to all the major streaming and download sites. I'm not sure it's a full story, but in order to get anywhere near to understanding, you need to know a bit of history - both ours and that of self-released online music.

As you might have gathered from this blog already, we started making music way back in 1992, and spent the rest of that decade releasing our own albums and EPs on cassette. You're unlikely to ever hear any of that, by the way, as the vast majority is so terrible that listening to it carries a sentence of imprisonment in many countries.

Where things start to get interesting is around 2001, when we released our fifth album Ephemeris. Self-released on CD, we were rather proud of it at the time, so it was followed in quick succession by Zero (2002), Empires (2003), and Dusk (2006). During this period, we played around initially with online snippets of songs, and later full tracks, like 2002's Blind Youth, which you can still hear on Soundcloud here.

With Dusk, we finally saw some success. This was the MySpace era, of course, so we released a number of tracks there, as well as on now-defunct free download sites such as Unsigned.com, MP3 Unsigned, and MP3 Lizard. We built up a decent fanbase and decided to release something on an actual music platform, iTunes. So, we picked a few of the better tracks from Dusk and its singles, including one exclusive track, and put together the iDusk EP, which came out right at the end of the Dusk project in summer 2008.

Our next album Transmission came along after a bit of a pause, in 2011, and by then, self-released music was a lot more widespread, but the pricing model wasn't entirely friendly. Releasing a single such as Better Days wasn't too expensive, but putting the album online didn't seem worthwhile. We ended up with four singles on the main streaming music platforms - some of them are still there - and felt that we could redirect potential album listeners to Bandcamp instead. It worked reasonably well, for a while.

Of course, album number ten has since eluded us, and we've been pretty busy with other things, so we haven't revisited this as often as we should have. Back in about 2010, we had already been sharing our name with an up-and-coming Iranian band, and had cohabited fairly well - but in about 2017, another Hypernova have appeared and frustratingly, some of the streaming platforms have allowed them to take our profiles - and our listeners. Not that this is the fault of any of the other Hypernovae, of course - just a silly flaw in the way that music streaming works.

Some time around then, we did look a few times at trying to get a CD version of Transmission into the wild, but that never quite happened. For a while, we let it disappear into the wilderness - which we shouldn't have, and we're very sorry, and we'll try not to let that happen again.

Please be patient with us as we spin back up. We're intending to revisit the Transmission singles in some form early in 2025, but first we have a bit of tidying to do, trying to make sure that the main streaming platforms have our releases in the same place and that we're in control of what's happening. For now, please continue to enjoy Transmission - and any other releases that you may be enjoying - on your favourite streaming platform.

Live Transmission

As promised, here is the album that some of you have been waiting for since 2011 or so! Transmission is now live on all major streaming platforms. Here's a link if you want to find your preferred platform. Here it is on Spotify, if that's your thing:

Of course, it's always been on Bandcamp, if that's your preference:

Resume Transmission

It's been a while, hasn't it? I hope you are well. So are we, thank you for asking.

Let's leave the question of what we've been up to for the last few years to one side for a moment - maybe we'll come back to that later. For now, here's the good news: after a few failed attempts, we've finally figured out a way to reissue our ninth album Transmission! It will be back on all major streaming platforms in just a couple of weeks' time.

Once it's back online, we're hoping to get you some other material as well. Some platforms are still carrying the singles, and of course, everything we've done since about 2006 is still available on Bandcamp, but we'll be looking at other ways to try to get our songs to your speakers in convenient form. More on that to follow.

That's it for now. We'll be back soon with some links for you - stay tuned!

Schizophrenia

Today is a very special day for us, as we mark the 25th anniversary of our debut release Schizophrenia.

How we celebrate this is a difficult one to decide, really, as the album isn't actually very good at all. The lead single was Dangerous, which we revealed previously was based around the lessons of the Green Cross Code. It was released the following year as part of the Amnesia EP, and which was very nearly released again in 1994 as part of an aborted project, which would have consisted of half an hour of remixes, followed by half an hour of cover versions of hymns.

Another highlight, questionable though it might be, is the church organ-fuelled Ritual Blessing, featuring samples of a sermon. A reprise would have been the final track on the hymns project, and finally appeared alongside the collected b-sides from the era on a reissued version of the album in 1998.

There are low points too - too many, in fact, to write about in any detail. One of our favourite songs on the whole project is the b-side Merciful Rhythm, and the fact that we prefer a b-side to most of the album really says quite a lot.

You can also read about the twentieth anniversary celebrations here. As you may have realised, the tenth album didn't quite make it in time for the 21st anniversary.

Behind the Waterfall

After our fourth album Odyssey (1998), we found ourselves in an interesting situation. We had a huge backlog of songs, most of which weren't quite good enough for an album, but some did still show some promise. Meanwhile, by late 1999, we were already working on what would eventually become Ephemeris (2001), and knew that none of the older tracks would really fit alongside the new ones.

For those of you who weren't there at the time, the end of the twentieth century also saw a lot of people looking back at their past, and for us it seemed a good opportunity to finish our first period, the early days. So Ephemeris would mark the start of a new era.

Hence Behind the Waterfall, released on this day in 1999. On its initial release, it was a four-track EP, featuring Behind the Waterfall, Rome Wasn't Built, Annotated Dream, and Avalon.

The title track is typical of the era - it's actually quite good, but the lyrics are appalling. Twelve years later, we re-recorded it with a new lyric, which you might be able to hear soon. In those days, we always made a point of writing one of the tracks on our own, so Annotated Dream is one of mine, and Avalon is one of Simon's. I can't think of anything to say about Rome Wasn't Built.

Then in 2001, a few months after Ephemeris, we decided we were actually quite fond of Behind the Waterfall, and so it became the first of our reissued releases, accompanied by three more previously unreleased songs - the daft Friends in High Places, The Chaos Theory, which was only ever released in the form of a six minute long 12" version, and the inevitable closing track And Finally...

Amnesia EP

Today in 1993 saw the release of our first single ever!

If you're not too familiar with our history, what we loosely term our "career" in music had started a little over a year earlier with our debut album, the frankly dreadful Schizophrenia, and due to some problems with the record company and some general incompetence, we hadn't quite got around to releasing a single yet.

In summer 1993, we played our first live concert, in Worcester, just a short set with highlights from the first album, which was moderately well received. We recorded it, just in case it was ever going to be useful, but we didn't intend to do much with it.

With releases, we had faltered somewhat. We knew we wanted Dangerous to be the lead single, and so we started work on a set of four remixes, which over the course of one mammoth session led to our first attempt at a single, the Brain Cell EP. The two b-sides were going to be Merciful Rhythm and Seeing is Believing - neither of which actually made it onto the single in the end (Merciful Rhythm resurfaced six months later on our second single, and Seeing is Believing eventually turned up on our second album Nemesis in 1995).

The Brain Cell concept was shelved - we revisited it a couple of years later in 1995, which actually never happened either, but it was that which led to the development of the second album. For the first single, now called Amnesia, we took five of the six tracks from the Worcester gig. We were considering You are a Mirror as the second single, so we left that one off for now, and replaced it with a hastily thrown together b-side, Tunnel Vision. It had completely daft and meaningless lyrics, just like most of the things we released during this period, and there we had it: our first single. Thrown together in a couple of days.

Stream of Consciousness

Exactly fifteen years ago today, we released the second single from our comeback fifth album Ephemeris. After the success of the first single Electric Avenue, we opted for a remixed version of Stream of Consciousness as the follow-up.

The remix was fairly minor as it turned out - we just rejigged the album version a little, adding a few more beats here and there and edited it slightly. It had been four months since the album came out, and for some reason it took us a bit of time to get our act together with the second single, so the rework was a little cosmetic.

Backing up the a-side were two previously unreleased tracks. First was Elements of the Eucharist, lyrically a slightly haunting religious-inspired piece, which, as with many of the songs we were working on around this time, became a bit of a daft pop song. As you can probably tell, we're rather proud of it.

Finally came The Thief of Baghdad, which we had thought initially told the story of the thief in a very silly and irreverent way, but after it came out we had a sudden moment of realisation that it actually tells the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which was a bit of an oversight. But never mind, it's another totally daft pop song, and really that's all that matters sometimes.