The olden days

I was speaking previously about the progress - or, more accurately, the lack of progress - on our awaited tenth album, but of course as everyone knows, things were much better when we were a lad.

Spurred on by the successful reissue of our 2006 album Dusk and its accompanying archive a couple of years ago, we have also been looking at remastering some of the material from the preceding seven albums.

Unfortunately there's a lot of work involved, as some of them aren't in particularly great shape any more, and honestly a lot of them never were. At best, they are crackly, unclear recordings, and in a number of notable instances the original recordings no longer actually exist.

On the plus side (inevitably, that statement depends on your perspective) there are something like 250 tracks to choose from - that's approximately 150 songs, and 100 remixes, second parts, and alternative versions. A lot of them have never seen the light of day before, and we're hopeful that a lot of them never will, but hidden in amongst them, there are actually one or two good apples.

So what next? More on that next time...

Album number ten

Time for an update on the long-not-awaited follow-up to 2011's Transmission, I think!

Basically, we've got more than enough good songs to get on with recording the next album, but we haven't quite managed to find the time to actually get on with it.

Also, we've noticed on the last few albums (actually going right back to 2004's single mix of Not a Million Miles) that the subsequent remixes of songs often end up being better than the originals. This might be because recording an hour or so of music for an album, all at once, is actually quite a lot of work. Anyway, there are plenty of recent examples too, in particular I'll Give You Electro, so we've decided to do something about it.

So with all of that in mind, this time around, the vague plan will be to release it pretty much as we go along, starting with some EPs, and then reworking as necessary until it takes the shape of an album. I suppose that presumably means that our recent record of releasing albums further and further apart may well continue ("recent" ones have been early 2001, early 2002, late 2003, end of 2006, and late 2011, so we aren't actually due to do anything until roughly 2018 anyway).

But what can you do? Not a whole lot, it would seem.

The year we forgot to write anything

Well, I started writing a post, and then forgot to finish it in time to post it. Apologies for the delay - normal service will be resumed; we're just not quite sure when yet. Things have, admittedly, been a little quiet recently. I was just on the verge of writing a big long post with all the major headlines in it, but then I thought to myself, why not split it out into multiple posts? That way it looks as though we're actually doing something!

So keep an eye out for the major headlines as of early 2016 over the next couple of weeks...