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.

Free music all round!

You'll no doubt have seen the offer of a free download of our most recent single Blood, Sweat and Tears a few weeks ago, and maybe you even managed to snag one of them yourself. If you tried at some point but found all the codes had been used, don't worry - just try again later. We've been updating the codes regularly (in fact, we just updated them a moment ago) and there are still plenty left to post.

You can also download our completely free four-track remix EP Intermission at any time, by clicking here, including an exclusive version of Eyeballing, reworked by our friend Sappy. If you download rather than just streaming, you might also find an extra bonus treat hidden on the end!

Free download!

... as in "free".

How would you like a free download? For a limited time, we're offering completely free copies of the four track version of our 2013 single Blood, Sweat and Tears. All you need to do is click on this link, and try the download codes below. If none of them work, then the codes have all been used by someone else. Simple as that!

Codes to try:

• 9bbp-xra2
• yxxb-esuc
• 3qe5-3dax
• w87f-hhrp
• skwl-5ecn
• p3jj-73se
• rdg7-5xh3
• jjdr-3qap
• 7b45-c932
• vdsb-xtlh

Here's the link again. Good luck!

Aeration

The singles for our third and fourth albums Prophecies (1997) and Odyssey (1998) were pretty much all four or six-track EPs, typically around fifteen minutes in duration. Odyssey yielded just three singles - the "different" Rangoon Fairytale, the entirely uncommercial Atlantis Rising, and finally the one obvious single on the album, Aeration.

Odyssey remains to this day our longest album, with thirteen tracks, which we quickly acknowledged as a mistake (that's why the follow-up Ephemeris only had eleven). It is, in retrospect, consistent but dull, with way too many long and downtempo songs, but the short uptempo section, right in the middle, does stand out, with The Sky at Night closing Side A, and Aeration kicking off Side B.

Having established that it would be the next single, we set about remixing it, coming up with an alternative instrumental version, Back Into the Deep, and an extended version which combined elements from the original and the instrumental, which was confusingly titled Back Into the Deep: Part II on its initial release (for the 2003 CD reissue, we changed it to Back Into the Deep: Extended, so it was a bit less confusing). We then edited the extended version down, and came up with an exclusive single mix too.

The b-sides initially included Serengeti and No News is Good News, but we thought the latter might have potential as a single, and Aeration was partly being released to promote the new remix album Iliad, so we took The Cold Light of Day off the album and swapped it with No News is Good News.

Does God Play Dice?

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, Does God Play Dice? was our fifth single. Released twenty years ago today, it was the last single from our second album Nemesis (1995).

For the first time, it was just a two-track single, on a cassette tape with a Side A (an edit of the title track) and a Side B, the previously unreleased Self Destruction. This was primarily decided by the cassette stock that was available to us - a 3:28 demo tape which we could easily record over. So there was one simple rule - each track had to be three and a half minutes or shorter.

It would be nearly another year and a half before our big return with 1997's Prologue EP, and we've come to see it in a way as the end of an era. The last release of our very early days...

Interestingly, today is also the fifteenth anniversary of our later single Electric Avenue. More on that later...

Nemesis is, by the way, surprisingly not that bad, unlike our debut effort Schizophrenia (1992). Hopefully we'll be able to share it with you one day.

Intermission

Transmission is back, two and a bit years after the album came out, with one final punch!

We've released a lot of singles this time around, starting with Better Days and I'll Give You Electro back in 2011, then Here Comes the Summertime last year, and Blood, Sweat and Tears earlier this year.

While on that journey, we picked up a whole pile of remixes - some of our own, and a few by our friend Sappy, and so at the end of 2011 we put together an EP entitled Remission.

Now it's time for the follow-up: Intermission. It's got new versions of four songs from the album: Almost, I'll Give You Electro, Golden Wheel, and Here Comes the Summertime, plus the brand new never-heard-before track Splinters.


And now, if you don't mind, we're going to take a little lie down.

Got to be finishing something

There's something that we had been keeping under our collective hats. Transmission isn't quite dead yet - we've got one single left.

We've got a b-side left over, and quite a few spare remixes that we'd built up too. For some reason we haven't entirely got around to releasing them yet.

All of which is really another way of telling you that we're about to answer the last single from Transmission, the follow-up to Blood, Sweat and Tears, and the sequel to our Remission EP from Christmas 2011.

Assuming everything goes to plan, we'll be releasing one last remix EP (from this album) very soon!

Dusk details

Coming out this Monday - reissued from way back in the olden days - are our much-loved album Dusk and its new companion Dusk Archive.

Here's Dusk:

Which contains the tracks:

1. Not Even Close
2. I Have Never
3. Beneath the Silent Skies
4. Calmwaters
5. In the Moonlight
6. Consequences [i]
7. Signs of Life [i]
8. Hidden Context
9. Perfect Geometry
10. Bulletproof
11. The End
12. Red Shadows

[i] - as featured on our extremely popular digital iDusk EP

From Monday, you'll be able to listen to and purchase the album in full from here.

There are a couple of samples below...

And then here's Dusk Archive:

Which collects together all 21 tracks from the singles between 2006 and 2008:

1. My Light [e]
2. Echoes of Perfection
3. Moving On
4. Consequences (Electrobongo Remix)
5. Point of No Return
6. Running with the Wind
7. Beneath the Silent Skies (Part 2)
8. The Healing
9. Bulletproof (Western Mix)
10. Fallen
11. Lose Control
12. House of Cards
13. Bulletproof (Kevlar Mix)
14. Heaven Only Knows
15. Never Wanted This
16. What I Would Do
17. Someone Else's Dream
18. Broken
19. The End (Ostkreuz Mix) [i]
20. Faint Footsteps
21. King for a Day [i]

[e] - as featured on the compilation Electraparade

[i] - as featured on the iDusk EP

There are also three bonus demo versions:

1. Moving On (Demo)
2. Echoes of Perfection (Demo)
3. Never Wanted This (Demo)

From Monday, you'll be able to listen to this in full and purchase it (should you wish to do so) from this link.

Here are some samples for the uninitiated:

Also back from the dawn of time

A few days ago I revealed that we've been preparing a brand new reissue of our 2006 album Dusk. That's still happening.

But there's more! We've also trawled through our archives to bring you all 21 bonus tracks from the five singles: Consequences, Beneath the Silent Skies, Bulletproof, The End, and the iDusk EP.

We talked about plonking them alongside the album itself, but we decided you would probably prefer to take this project in more manageable bite-size chunks, so we separated it into two: Dusk (the original album), and Dusk Archive (the collected singles, 2006-2008).

If that weren't enough, as a special bonus for downloaders, we've also tracked down the two original demos of Moving On and Echoes of Perfection which were released as special bonus tracks for the Consequences single in early 2007, and also a third demo from 2005 which has never before seen the light of day (the reasons for this should not be too difficult to work out).

The 24 tracks on Dusk Archive do admittedly have a total running time of nearly 100 minutes, meaning that a full trawl through the era will take you two and a half hours. But that's not bad for three years' work. As always, we firmly believe in quantity over quality.

Anyway, Dusk and Dusk Archive are both coming soon.

Back from the dawn of time

In 2006, we released an album called Dusk. Perhaps you remember it?

No, I didn't think so. It wasn't exactly widely released.

But the two or three years that followed were decisive for us. We released five singles from the album, each positively overflowing with bonus tracks (most of them were bigger than your average EP). Some of them were pretty successful. Depending on how you measure success, of course.

But by 2009, we were busy beavering away on what would ultimately become Transmission, and so its predecessor kind of got a bit forgotten. We left a few tracks online, but we neglected the full album. We're really sorry about that. If there's anything we can do to make it up to you...

Well, of course, there is! In a couple of weeks, Dusk is coming back! A brand new full-length version of the album in its pure, unadulterated form.

By which I mean that we haven't bothered remastering it or anything. It's true, we thought about it, but in the end we decided that for all its quirks and foibles, this is how we sounded in 2006. And that's how the record should stay.

What we have done is worked pretty hard on the packaging. To make up for the slightly spartan sleeve on the original release, you now get a luxuriant 16-page booklet full of new sleeve notes and photos from the era, many of them never before seen.

So, coming very shortly: a brand new reissue of our most successful album to date, Dusk.

Blood, Sweat and Links

Hello!

Here are some places you can find our lovely new single Blood, Sweat and Tears:

• iTunes (worldwide)
• Bandcamp (full four-track version)
• Spotify (worldwide)
• Amazon: UK, USA, Japan, France, Italy, Spain
• YouTube (exclusive video)
• Soundcloud (stream track one)

This isn't the full list - you should be able to find it in a load of other places too, like Google Play, 7digital, Rdio and more.

At the time of writing, you can still also find our previous singles Better Days, I'll Give You Electro and Here Comes the Summertime from all of those places, as well as the album Transmission at Bandcamp.

Comings and goings

We have a new single! Finally!

The fourth "proper" single from the album Transmission is a completely new version of Blood, Sweat and Tears, almost entirely re-recorded and redesigned from the top. We've turned it into much more of a jaunty pop song for you, and are rather pleased with how it turned out.

You only get one b-side this time, a leftover from the Dusk era called Centuries Later, but on the plus side you get two completely new remixes of tracks from the current album Transmission. The full track listing is as follows:

1. Blood, Sweat and Tears (Single Version)
2. Centuries Later
3. Golden Wheel (Sappy's Spinning Mix)
4. Better Days (Phased Approach)

Here's the link to listen and buy at Bandcamp:

More details will follow over the next week or two.

Also, we're sorry to report that our earlier singles Better Days and I'll Give You Electro II will soon be coming offline from iTunes, Spotify, etc. We don't have exact dates (they seem to still be up at the time of writing) so head over to those sites now if you want to grab them. If you miss them, remember you can still find all our recent releases at Bandcamp.

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...

Here Comes the Summertime - The Video!

Oh dear, we seem to have missed the summertime. Oh well... have a video instead:

How to buy our new single

Erm. Three weeks later, and I forgot to post the second half of this information. Sorry about that! There are also many ways of buying Here Comes the Summertime...

1. Bandcamp: http://purehype.bandcamp.com/album/here-comes-the-summertime (exclusive four track version!)
2. iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/album/here-comes-summertime-single/id541827492
3. Amazon USA: http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-the-Summertime/dp/B008H3C5UA
4. Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Here-Comes-the-Summertime/dp/B008H3V6QY
5. Amazon Deutschland: http://www.amazon.de/Here-Comes-the-Summertime/dp/B008H8CEJM
6. Amazon France: http://www.amazon.fr/Here-Comes-the-Summertime/dp/B008H30VI8
7. Amazon Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/Here-Comes-the-Summertime/dp/B008H37LJA
8. 7Digital: http://www.7digital.com/artist/hypernova/release/here-comes-the-summertime (also available worldwide if you search for it)
9. eMusic & MediaNet: should be available but I can't find it at present

But don't forget if you're not ready to buy it yet then you can just listen to it - see this post for more 
details.

How to listen to our new single

There are many ways. Please accept our apologies if one or more of them isn't available in your country, but as a bare minimum one or two of them should work...

1. Bandcamp: http://purehype.bandcamp.com/album/here-comes-the-summertime (exclusive four track version!)
2. Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/04VKvQMXD2rGuCbM9b8q35
3. Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/hypernova/here-comes-the-summertime

Places for which we don't have links yet, but where it should also be available:

1. Rdio
2. Muve Music by Cricket
3. Zvooq
4. iHeartRadio
5. Nokia Music
6. Simfy
7. 121 Music
8. Deezer
9. Rhapsody
10. Basepoint Media
11. We7
12. 24/7 Entertainment

We'll follow this up with a guide on how to buy it shortly, if you're ready for that!