A list of thirteen good things

Mainly in alphabetical order, mainly things which were happened in 2010:

1. Gotan Project "Tango 3.0"
2. Groove Armada "Black Light"
   
3. Hot Chip "One Life Stand"
4. Massive Attack "Heligoland"
5. OMD "History of Modern"
6. Pet Shop Boys "Ultimate"
7. Recoil "Selected"
8. Röyksopp "Senior"
9. Skywatchers "The Skywatchers Handbook"
10. Tracey Thorn "Love and its Opposite"
11. William Orbit "Pieces in a Modern Style 2"
12. Yazoo "Reconnected Live"
13. Various Artists "Buffetlibre PEACE"

Or so

Every week or so, is what I said.

Some numbers:
32. The number of new tracks which we have currently in the works.
42. The ultimate answer.
4. The number of birthdays I have had since we last released an album.
39. The number of pointless blog posts we will have posted this month.
9. The number of items in this list.
7. The age of one of our new tracks, in years.
17. The surname of East and Heaven.
3. The age of another of our new tracks, in months.
27. The amount of tea we have drunk.

Normal service

This is an important announcement. Pay attention at the back.

We are currently in the middle of mixing our new album. There, I said it.

Current plan is to roll out a single fairly soon, containing a couple of our favourite tracks and probably a couple of others that display what we've been up to recently. We'll probably put it on iTunes or something.

Then there will be a new album, I imagine some time in the new year, and that will have some stuff on it.

Nothing very specific at the moment, I'll admit. I'll try and update every week or so, including a detailed look at how the new stuff might end up sounding. Anyway, this is why our updates have been intermittent recently. In case you were wondering.

Looking Back - Dusk

This is the fourth and (to date) final chapter of my Looking Back series, which brings us to from 2006 up to the present day. If you've been reading its predecessors then... well... you have a lot more patience than I have.

Anyway, if I'm not mistaken we started this blog about three months before its release, so a lot has been said already about our 2006 album Dusk. But if you're joining us now for the first time, maybe it will serve as a good introduction. This will sound horrifically pretentious, but for me, Dusk is really the story of my life from roughly 2002 to 2005. Obviously you put a lot of yourself into anything you do, so this could be said of anything we've done, but I think this helps explain Dusk. I was in my early twenties, going through a lot of change, and struggling to understand who I was, and what that meant (if anything).

It's an album I'm immensely proud of, but it is very dark, and listening back with the benefit of hindsight it suffers a bit from its production. We made mistakes - some of the bonus tracks and different versions on the singles are better - but we also recorded a pretty good album.

So anyway, roughly in chronological order, my personal highlights of 2006-2009:

1. Writing Red Shadows after an amazing day walking the streets of Berlin. It's very literal - when it says "I walked along the wall today," I really did. Well, alongside it, anyway
   
2. Being inspired to write I Have Never. And several of the other tracks actually, some of which are actually verging on being quite good songs. In my opinion
   
3. Putting MP3s on the internet for the first time, and people actually listening to them
4. Writing Beneath the Silent Skies on Ilkley Moor (I took a piece of paper with me)
   
5. Working out what Signs of Life was going to be about
6. Making the artwork for the CDs, based on Simon's amazing photos. Incidentally, the sleeve for The End may not look it, but it's our most photoshopped ever
   
7. People saying we were quite good. We've been sent a lot of nice comments over the last few years, which was surprising and very pleasant
   
8. Being asked to appear on the Electraparade compilation
9. Working out the Ostkreuz mix of The End. Someone commented that we sounded a bit like Kraftwerk, so we duly made it sound more like them
   
10. Putting the iDusk EP on iTunes, and people actually wasting money on it. Thus far we have almost doubled our money on it, although we're not entirely sure how or why
    

That concludes this series of blogs. Whatever will come next?

Looking Back - Empires

Wind your way back through the postings of this blog, and you'll find one I unearthed in our archives from November 2003. It's the rather low-key announcement for our seventh album Empires.

For a long time after it came out, I was extremely unhappy with this album, but this was almost entirely unfair. There are a couple of less good tracks on there, and a lot of bad production, but there are also some of the best tracks that we've ever written.

In no particular order, my personal highlights of 2003-2005, and the aftermath thereof:

1. The rainy autumn day when I wrote When October Comes. As the British weather hammered against the window and I pondered my future, this song came very quickly.
2. Getting really emotional while recording the vocal for Not a Million Miles.
3. Recording the as-yet-unreleased Golden Wheel at Simon's old house, with him strumming a guitar, and me playing synth arpeggios.
   
4. Simon's first suggestion that Empires would be a good title. It was the name of an incomplete song, which was based around a quote from Winston Churchill. Somehow, in a world suddenly full of terrorism, imperialism, and wars that we didn't agree with, it seemed to be the perfect statement.
   
5. Listening to the completed version of Wherever You Are Now, while walking through the forests near Berlin. This will always be a special memory for me, and if we ever make a video for this song, I know exactly what it will be.
6. Working out the final tracklisting for the album, sitting very late at night in a Berlin youth hostel with a CD on shuffle.
   
7. Devising the album artwork, which for the first time used relatively undoctored photos from our holidays. We could probably do better now, but they were an important step following the Photoshop swirls of the Zero era.
   
8. Entering In Your Eyes into a BBC songwriting contest. Obviously it didn't win, but it was our first stab at trying to crack the outside world.
9. Our first forays into the world of online music. Uploading Here We Stand onto an MP3 site, and it taking six months to get approved, possibly because I used the word "Iraqification" in the description?
   
10. Lots of people, including Greek band Marsheaux telling us a couple of years later that they really liked Here We Stand.
    

Next time: we'll be coming right back to the present, with 2006-2009.

Trimming the fat

If you're the sort of person who cares, you'll find a number of tracks on our download sites have changed. To start with, I've got rid of a lot of the less popular (good) ones. Next step, possibly tomorrow, will be to start replacing them. The end result will be that a selection of the same 6 or 7 tracks will be available on all the sites.

The reason for this is simple: the tracks that we had were all over the place. They will now be all neat and tidy and whatever.

There's also some generally constructive stuff going on elsewhere, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Looking Back - Ephemeris and Zero

It was in late summer 1998 that we bought our first proper synthesiser, and then on the run-up to Christmas, a 4-track tape recorder. Together, these two events truly heralded a new era for us. We ditched everything we'd ever done before, and started from the top, recording what resulted in our fifth and sixth albums, Ephemeris and Zero.

It was truly a golden age. For the first time, we could record songs in decent quality, and in time. Vocal recording was still an ordeal, but at the same time we were still learning how to write proper songs. Truly, it was one of our most creative periods, and although we still managed to churn out a lot of dross, we also managed to write a handful of very good songs.

Roughly in chronological order, these are my personal highlights of 1999-2002:

1. Recording lots of rubbish on our new 4-track tape recorder. My favourite recording is a very avant-garde track which for the sake of argument has always been called Noise Demo, which consists of lots of sweeps and noises from the two synthesisers we owned at the time, augmented occasionally with sounds played in from a tape of someone (not me) singing which I had found in the middle of a road somewhere.
   
2. Recording State of Decay and a six-minute techno-dance-trance jam on Simon's new SH-101 synthesiser (ours is red). Which, in my opinion, is still one of the best devices we own. A few months on, we recorded another wonderful jam, which features Simon playing chords and me jabbing random notes on a second synth.
   
3. Buying an Apple LC and Cubase in early 1999. For the first time, we could record music and keep it in time. We also learnt quite quickly that everything we had written up to that point was largely guff.
   
4. Learning how to use Cubase through The Chaos Theory and Nature of the Beast. We made a few mistakes, to say the least. Most of these ended up on our 2001 EP Behind the Waterfall.
   
5. Spending a year in Germany, learning how to write quite good songs. You can almost see the evolution taking place within the year. Early experiments, such as Carol Vorderman, for some reason never made it through our extensive quality control process. Genesis, our europop-flavoured synopsis of the beginning bit of the Bible, did.
   
6. Ephemeris, technically our fifth album, but our first to be any good. Statistically, more than half of the song titles contained the word "of" or began with the letter S, or both. That album was definitely brought to you by the letter S and the word "of".
   
7. Writing a song about homelessness, called Urban Sprawl, which was an attempt to be a bit less pretentious than Phil Collins, but failed on almost every discernible level. We recorded Part 2 versions for this and a couple of the other tracks on the album, and you could make a good case that they are better than their corresponding Part 1s.
   
8. Zero. A great title, and some very good songs. Also, lots of very long and dreary songs which turned out to be impossible to sing. It might have been improved if we hadn't released it quite so quickly, but at least there were only two songs containing the word "of" in the title, and only three beginning with S this time.
   
9. Electric Avenue, State of Decay, Tower of Babel, Britannica, Closer to the Sun, Swan Song, Blind Youth... For the first time, we had some good songs on our roster.
   
10. Our Greatest Hits album Synopsis, which contained mainly rubbish, because we had only written a handful of good songs at that stage and we were damned if we would put them all on the same CD. We then followed this up by reissuing the first four albums, which has been proven to be the point at which global CD sales started to decline.
    

Next time: 2003-2005.

Looking Back - The 1990s

And so it begins.

Our early history is probably not very well documented. And with good reason - it's not something we're especially proud of. You could view the 1990s as a learning curve for us, starting with next to no equipment or experience, and ending with just a little of each.

Despite that, we did manage to write a couple of good songs (looking back, we had maybe a 4 or 5% hit rate, which isn't too bad), and we did still enjoy ourselves immensely. But rest assured, although most of the early recordings do still exist in one form or another, there is absolutely no chance that you are ever going to hear them.

So, roughly in chronological order, these are my personal highlights of 1992-1999:

1. Writing our first proper song in around 1992, which was called Dangerous and was largely based around The Green Cross Code.
   
2. Pointing two tape recorders at one another and turning songs by the likes of Simply Red and Prince into songs of our own, by shouting over them until you couldn't hear the original any more. Unsurprisingly, in the case of Simply Red, it actually made the song better than the original.
   
3. The original recording of our 1993 EP Amnesia, which was then called Brain Cell, and included the sound of us drinking tea. If we ever turn out to be influential, this will be cited as an early example of sampling.
   
4. Connecting our first computer to our first tape recorder to create sequenced (i.e. in time) music. We used an insanely complex programming language called APL, and wrote all the music in code. There was a nanosecond gap in the music between each verse.
   
5. Recording an album of hymns. For some reason, we never got around to releasing it.
   
6. Writing our own fanzine, Pure Hype, despite not having any readers, or, most of the time, any news.
7. Unscrewing a cassette tape, and sellotaping the two ends of a tape together to create a loop. When played back, this created a very odd sounding "sample", which we even used once for the drums (borrowed from Blue Monday) on a remix of our 1995 track What Makes It Go. Obviously, it didn't keep particularly good time, but neither did it sound much worse than when we didn't use it.
   
8. The Yamaha PSS-380. Oh yes. Bought in Nottingham, in 1997, this was our first foray into the world of digital synthesis. It was a revolution. Not long afterwards, I repaired our first keyboard, the PSS-150, which still works to this day, with all of five different sounds and a drum section which we can confirm does indeed provide all the excitement of being a real drummer.
   
9. Buying our first proper synthesiser, the wonderful Casio CZ-1000, in a second-hand shop in Wagga Wagga in August 1998. We made lots of digital sounds, including some great snare sounds. And some dreadful kick drum sounds.
   
10. Buying our first 4-track tape recorder at Christmas 1998. Now we had a means of properly recording, and even (occasionally) of staying in time. The foundations had truly been laid for the next decade.

Next time: 1999-2002.

Coming Soon - Looking Back

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how the music used to make me something...

But I knew that if I posted more regularly on our blog, it might help me gather my thoughts a bit, which would be A Good Thing.

Where was I? Oh yes, back in July last year, I started putting together a new series of blog posts called 'Looking Back'. And then promptly forgot about them. Until now.

So... every week for the next few weeks, assuming I don't think of anything better to post inbetween, I shall blog my ten favourite moments of each "era" of our history. You may, or may not, enjoy them...

Almost weekly update

Things that I have done this week:

1. Lost my internet connection for a week
2. Broke my mouse
3. Did some tweaks to the Hypernova website
4. Updated our MySpace page
5. Posted the word "nearly" on Twitter

It's good when things happen, isn't it?

Things That Have Happened

Our last post was A Very Long Time Ago. That would be a good song title. Unless someone steals it first. I remember a very funny interview with Meat Loaf once, where he was complaining about how he had announced the title of one of the songs for his next album, and then somebody stole it. I can't actually imagine why anyone other than him would write a song with more words in the title than the song itself, but apparently it's a real problem for people like him.

Where was I? Oh yes. I think maybe I'm getting old, which would probably explain why I keep forgetting things. At the very least, it would explain what happened to my hair. And my teeth.

A lot of things have happened in the last year. One of these was that I turned 30, which was a bit of a non-event as it turns out, and we haven't written any songs about it.

We haven't written many songs at all, actually, but this is definitely something we are trying to remedy. As we've described many times before, we effectively have an album's worth of material which isn't a million miles/years away from being completed, but never quite seems to get there.

The old website mysteriously expired, so we started a new one. Why not go and have a look? It's almost finished.

I moved house. When we started working on Album Number Nine, I was based in Yorkshire, and Simon was based on the edge of Birmingham. Now it's even worse - he's in Southampton, and I'm in Los Angeles. The prospects of us ever playing live become ever more and more remote. Which is a shame, as I would very much like to do it one day.

These actually all sound like quite good excuses, but it's still frustrating that we haven't managed to finish anything for so long. Until now. We have the beginnings of a plan.

But that's all you're getting for now. I'll try and "blog" more often, and if I leave this post with an open ending, I might be more likely to write the next one. The suspense is for me, you see, not for you. That said, I could also leave this post with a half-finished sentence right at the