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.

Old News is Good News

Simon has been digging through the archives to bring you news items from back in the olden days... if you're interested in learning more about the Empires era, read on!

As I'm sure you remember, we started this news blog in September 2006, and started off by importing the news items from our website dating back to 2003, namely:

• Wherever You Are Now (October 2003)
• Empires (November 2003)
• Second single (December 2003)
• Not a Million Miles (December 2004)
• The eighth album (December 2004)
• Not a Million Miles (December 2004)
• Happy new year! (January 2005)
• Downloads (January 2005)
• More Downloads (February 2005)
• Yet More Downloads (March 2005)
• "In the first half" (May 2005)

Note that most of those downloads are no longer available, due to time's winged chariot and all that. Anyway, you now also have access to the following, taken from our old newsletter Pure Hype:

• New material (PH089, March 2003)
• Coming soon (PH090, July 2003)
• Empires chronology (PH092, November 2003)
• Solitaire: the new single (PH093, January 2004)
• Two pictures on the wall (PH094, April 2004)
• Something in the air (PH095, August 2004)
• A taste of things to come (PH098, November 2005)
• Eighth wonder... (PH099, May 2006)

You can access all the old news items using the News Archive tag.

Decadence

It was ten years ago this afternoon that we released our seventh album Empires. Since that takes us way back to the early days of this blog, I decided to give it a quick listen to see how it has aged.

You probably haven't heard much of this album, I'm afraid, and there's nothing currently online. The reasons for this aren't especially complicated. The master tapes for much of it have long since been lost, and the vocals weren't very well recorded, and in general there's a lot wrong with it. This was, for us, largely the pre-internet age, and in all honesty we had very little idea what we were doing (we still don't).

But it's not a bad album actually. The opening track and single Wherever You Are Now has always been one of my favourites. Here We Stand was a surprise internet hit, and probably would have been a single if we'd realised this at the time. It's a song about the Iraq war, with some brilliant synth lines, and a lot of haunting lyrics that I'm rather proud of now.

Then the final single, Not a Million Miles, with its unique (for us) electro-acoustic sound. It's another favourite of mine, but I don't know whether it will necessarily work for everyone else. Solitaire, too, is unusual - it's pretty much the furthest we've ever gone from "our sound". I'm not sure whether it really works, but I like it.

Turn the Tide is fun - the lyrics are totally daft, but as an early attempt at Euro, it does it's job pretty well. And opening what probably ought to be side B is the lovely In Your Eyes. This one I'm extremely proud of.

Unusually for us, we even managed to get most of the good stuff on the album itself. Golden Wheel got forgotten about for another eight years, of course, and To Live a Lie probably deserved more than to just be another EP track (on the Not a Million Miles single), but otherwise the album is pretty much as good as it could have been.

Things do tail off a little towards the end, inevitably. I think it's fair to say that A Picture on the Wall doesn't really have the impact it was meant to, and much as I love it, I'm not sure When October Comes really does either. Midsummer's Eve would be a great penultimate track if only the vocal weren't so dreadful, and The Final Problem isn't exactly our finest hour either.

It's probably fair to say that this album isn't dull though - except for the slight tailing off, I think it holds up pretty well, a whole decade after its original recording.

Empires came out about 18 months after Zero, closing out a very busy period for us (we've never been anywhere near as prolific since). Our sound had advanced inordinately from the early Ephemeris sessions back in 2000, and we'd done some interesting - and occasionally even successful - experimentation too. Things would go very dark indeed with Dusk, and in many ways the more "pop" sound of Empires is rather refreshing. Listening back, it's still an album I'm extremely pleased with, and I'm really hopeful we can find a way of sharing it with you again soon.

Another little anniversary

It's 10 years since we released 'Synopsis', a collection of our first twenty singles (28th October 2002).

It's an interesting release because it includes all of the singles from our first six albums, plotting our development along the way. Certainly, quite a lot of growing up takes places during the course of the album.

Some of the single versions are quite different from the original album versions, which is a tradition that we still quite often continue when we can think of interesting changes that we would like to make.

With a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, we might be able to issue the second chapter in our singles history in the next few years, covering the period from 2003 onwards (three albums so far) and our adventures in the internet age.

Happy 20th anniversary!

It all started 20 years ago today.

The 26th October 1992 was when we released our first album Schizophrenia. It sounded about as good as you would expect for an album written and recorded by two people in their formative years using a few tape recorders, a tiny Yamaha keyboard and a variety of household objects.

It's not exactly a landmark in the history of modern music, but it's still an event that we look back on with a mixture of fondness, amusement and relief that we've learned a few things in the years since.

Our next challenge is to try to write and record our 10th album in time for our 21st anniversary...

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.

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.