Static Turkey

As you may have gathered, Röyksopp recently very kindly offered everyone the chance to remix their track Tricky Tricky, a challenge which really seemed to good to miss.

Our illustrious remixing career began in 2007, when Simon took on Erasure's When a Lover Leaves You. I think it's a great version - actually I think it's better than the original, and it certainly sounds more like Vince Clarke. It didn't win the competition, but never mind... Anyway, for some reason that I don't entirely remember, we've never mentioned this before, but if you're curious you can hear it on their official website here (scroll down to entry number 148).

Later in 2007, we had a go at Marsheaux's cover of New Order's Regret for a competition set up by the Electronically Yours website. For reasons best known to themselves, the results of the competition were never revealed - but we can only assume it didn't win!

We then went through a quiet patch on this front, unfortunately missing out on a couple of tracks I'd have liked to have had a go remixing, but there you go...

So then Tricky Tricky came along. As you might expect from a group like Röyksopp, it's a pretty complicated track. When the competition launched, I had a quick listen through to the early entries, and frankly they were rubbish. I thought, I can do that!

Actually, as it turned out, I couldn't. I worked out some of the sequences, and came up with a few interesting parts, but I didn't think it was working at all. Fortunately Simon liked one of the parts (the riff which runs all the way through our version), and so I rebuilt it completely using that. Everything else came together pretty quickly.

I think for the first time on a track of ours, it was recorded entirely using software synths in Cubase - mainly the TAL vintage synths which sound incredibly similar to Junos and SH-101s. I then indulged my recent habit of putting ridiculous amounts of effects all over everything, and Bob was our uncle.

I still wonder if the final mix wasn't quite right - but that's the sort of thing I always worry about. Judge for yourself on our SoundCloud page. The results are announced tomorrow.

SoundCloud

Hello you.

We're now on SoundCloud - you can find us here: http://soundcloud.com/hypernova

I'm working on redesigning the website, but you might not see any difference this side of Christmas. Then again, the chances you'll hear any new material very soon are quite slim as well...

Also polishing off the final vocal mixes for the next album. Not sure what I'll do after that.

Bye bye.

Blind Youth

We recorded this nearly eight years ago. Crumbs.

In fact, it goes back even further - having checked my notes, it seems to go all the way back to the summer of 1997. It would be great to say something about how nice (or, more likely, awful) that summer was, but it was quite a long time ago, and I was sixteen going on seventeen (someone should write a song about that!)

The song was originally called In Another World. It was one of my tracks, and it had music and everything. Well, in a sense - the main downside was that it wasn't especially good. Neither was it too bad though - some of the better musical elements were reused for Noise Gate, one of the tracks for my solo project (more on that another time).

The lyrics, meanwhile, were heavily reworked into Blind Youth. It's about trying to be non-conformist, and ending up doing the same as everyone else, but it's presented in a nice chirpy way, thanks to the music.

My notes also tell me that Simon started work on the music in autumn 2001, taking inspiration from Family Affair by Mary J. Blige and California Love by Dr. Dre. Our influences used to be so contemporary...

It never even changed much from Simon's original demo, which seemed to have it pretty much nailed right from day one. It's got scratching effects on it. We'd done that before around 1996 on a track called Down, but these taken from one of the floppy disks (remember them?) which came with our first sampler. They're probably the same samples that everyone else has ever used...

The vocal which you may (or may not) have heard isn't quite that old, although I'm not sure when or where it actually was recorded. And here's a fascinating fact: Blind Youth was actually the first track for which the vocal was recorded on computer (our first track, that is - I'm not suggesting this was anything particularly groundbreaking). It wasn't completed, as the computer in question didn't have anywhere near enough memory, but in a sense this was where it all began for me!

We put it onto MyFace recently because we thought you might like something different. How wrong we were...

It's only words

I've just noticed that prior to my most recent post, I last posted in December. Before that, it was last August, and before that, May. That's really not very good, is it?

Vocal mixes are plodding along nicely - most of them are very nearly complete. There are a couple more that need a little bit more mixing doing. Then I've got to check the levels on everything, which might take a little bit of time. Finally I'll add some effects, and we're there!

"Words come so easy when there's nothing left to say..."

Something to look at

I just noticed the typo in Simon's post about "4 news songs". Well as you'll know if you read my notes about the songs, only one of them was actually about news. Which is probably a good thing; if someone were to write a song about this blog, it wouldn't be very interesting.

Normally at this point we would make all sort of vacuous promises about progress on the new material. The truth is, we haven't done a huge amount recently, but things may be changing...

To fill in the time until we release something new, I will try to post a message as regularly as I can. I can't promise much content, but, as the song which we almost wrote once went, anything is better than nothing.

Here's a picture what I done:


"And that's pretty much the way that I felt until today..."

More new old songs on MySpace

Hello,

Thanks to Lord Tom of MySpace we have been able to upload 4 news songs to our MySpace page without having to delete any of the old ones. So now you can hear three more songs from the Dusk project and one is a very old track. In no particular order:

• Blind Youth - single from our Synopsis singles compilation from 2002.
  
• House of Cards - b-side to Bulletproof single. Find out what it's really all about.
  
• Never Wanted This - track from The End EP. Find out what it's really all about.
  
• Running with the Wind - b-side to Beneath the Silent Skies single. Find out what it's really all about.
  

2009 is the year of electro pop ...

... it's official because I read it somewhere, probably on the internet. Hang on, maybe I read it here? Anyway, electro pop is supposed to be the next big thing or the next thing that might possibly be big, but probably won't be, or something. It seems to help if you're female and hair like A Flock of Seagulls, but sadly, we fail miserably on both fronts.

Normally, we would refuse to have anything to do with a bandwagon of any description (anyway, by the time you see a bandwagon coming, it's usually too late, unless you have some kind of bandwagon-early-warning device), however, this is a bit different because we're actually on this band wagon (which is probably why we didn't see it coming - we were too busy trying to hang on). To be honest, it's probably the world's slowest moving bandwagon because we've been on it for years now and it doesn't seem to have travelled very far.

Bandwagons aside, we're quite busy doing stuff to do with our new album. Like recording. And mixing. And re-recording. And re-mixing. The wheels are turning, and we're edging forwards. We just need to fix a few punctures. And work out where we're going. And then find somewhere to park ...

2009 is also Chinese year of the Ox, but this is less relevant.