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.

The last post of 2008

Here we go again ...

(List of excuses deleted)

We've done about half a dozen rough mixes of tracks for our next album, with more to come as soon as is humanly possible.

Thank you once again to everyone that has downloaded our iDusk EP so far. The number of downloads has far exceeded our expectations... but then our expecations were very low (always aim low, that way you can't miss). The EP will almost certainly not be available indefinitely, so if you're interested, make sure you act sooner rather than later (early bird, worm and all that).

We wish you a Happy New Year if you happen to be using the same calendar as us. If not, we hope that the next time this planet passes some arbitrary point of your choosing along its orbit of the sun, you will have a happy next orbit, or something.

PS. The jetstream was too far south again this summer. Could someone please sort this out? Hello technical support? Thanks.

All the broken promises

Close your eyes, think of home
So far from you
All the broken promises
None of them came true

OK, not very profound, but never mind. That was from a song we wrote in 2000, called White Noise. It sounded a bit like OMD, but not as good, probably.

Speaking of songs, you might be wondering where the new ones have got to. In his last post Simon said "keep checking back here regularly". For those of you who have (many hundreds, I imagine) you may be wondering what exactly you were expected to find.

So what has changed since August? We have done preliminary mixes on lots and lots of vocals; vaguely decided on what the album will look like; drunk at least 329 cups of tea; umm...

So here's an early New Year's Resolution for 2012 err... 2009. We will complete our new album, and stick it out. There, I've said it.

I'll go away again now.

New old songs on MySpace

Hello,

We've put two new old songs up on our MySpace page. The songs are both taken from the Dusk project, so they are at least new-ish. You can now hear:

• King for a Day from our most recent stop-gap iDusk EP. If you would like to know what on earth it's all about, you can consult Rollo's thesis on the subject here. If you like it, the track is available to download along with the rest of the EP from iTunes


• My Light - b-side on the Consequences single. To enhance your listening pleasure, you can read Rollo's musings on the subject here. If you like it, the track is available on the Electraparade compilation, which you can still download from the following sites: DJ Download, Ministry of Sound or Juno records.

We're currently working on tracks for our new album. I know this because I was doing exactly that before I decided to do this instead. After I've finished doing this, I will go back to doing that, or I might have a cup of tea first. I haven't decided yet, but I'll keep you posted.

For all this and to keep up to date with our lack of progress on the new album, make sure you keep checking back here regularly. I would suggest that once a day should be sufficient for the time being.

All is far from quiet

Why do birds suddenly appear? Thought for the day.

Anyway, we have been very busy making our next album, so I think you'll let us off for not "blogging" very much.

Some numbers:
- About 20 tracks being considered
- 5 are definitely on
- 4 are probably on
- 7 more will have to fight it out between themselves

I've been working on vocal mixes - initially just rough ones, but these will evolve into the final ones over the next couple of months. Simon's just started moving towards the final instrumentals as well.

As regards timescales - well, we'd better not make too many promises at the moment. But if it ends up being Autumn, I'll be annoyed.

Oh, and a special thankyou to everybody who has been downloading the iDusk EP off iTunes - ta very much!

Faint Footsteps

Sometimes it's best just to let the songs speak for themselves...

... and that's the last of my comments, for now!

What I Would Do

What I Would Do is a song which I was pretty proud of, for a long time. And then along came Flight of the Conchords, and they spoilt the whole thing.

In fairness, their song was a lot funnier than ours could ever be.

Well, anyway, this actually started life as an homage to Douglas Adams, and dates back to around 2004. Somewhere along the way, it all got shifted around, rejigged and rewritten, and ended up being a harmless but ultimately meaningless pop song. Which we both like, I should probably add.

... and I'm afraid that's all I can think of to say about that one. You'll probably find the comments get shorter and shorter from now.

Running with the Wind

A common theme with the b-sides for Dusk seems to be that they were started around the time we were completing Empires (well, I suppose we had nothing better to do). Running with the Wind is yet another of these. It's a pretty simple song about throwing everything away and biting the bullet, but I got stuck half way through, with one verse and half a chorus. I handed it over to Simon, and he did all the hard work on this one.

Musically, it owes a lot to the Dutch duo Sylver, and they should think themselves pretty lucky given the number of song titles they've stolen from us in the past* - In Your Eyes; Summer Solstice; Turn the Tide... (actually we may have borrowed that last one off them). Because of this, it rumbles along at over 130bpm along with slightly clichéd fills, bass and filters.

And so that was Running with the Wind. More tomorrow.

* This does not constitute an accusation of theft.

Point of No Return

This takes us into our last week of comments from Dusk. You're probably relieved to hear that; I know I am.

This was another track I started just after Christmas 2002. The person singing the song is basically saying that they wish they had taken things a bit more slowly.

It somehow got overlooked when we put together Empires, which is possibly a shame, as it probably would have been on there if we hadn't forgotten about it. Then it very nearly made it onto Dusk as well, but in the end, it was dropped because the album was looking way too down-tempo as things were.

It's quite a powerful song really (in a very laid back kind of way). The only other thing I want to point out is the not-entirely-intended reference to the Rail Riders comic strips I vaguely remember reading as a whippersnapper: "By quirk of fate..."

Lose Control

Around the time Empires came out, we went through a brief spell of experimenting with guitar-based songs. Inevitably, some of these were more successful than others. The first has still to be released; Not a Million Miles went straight onto the album; and this one ended up taking a bit longer.

According to Simon, Lose Control was originally inspired by Simple Things by Dirty Vegas, but clearly went on quite a long journey before ending up how it did.

It's a song about losing control... obviously. I think at one point I was actually genuinely envious of people who run around naked on the streets at night. Now I think I could have put some more work into the lyrics, but I think I thought they worked pretty well at the time.

General verdict: quite good, but we've done better.

Moving On

Moving On started life in Autumn 2002, and like so many songs of that era, took a very long time to be finished. Ironically, it almost got considered for Dusk at one stage, but was finally dispensed as a b-side, purely because it was a little old-fashioned.

The original chorus, which is the first chorus in the finished song, was written by Simon, but everything else was rewritten at some point along the way. At some stage it was merged with a song of mine called Yesterday Forever. It's actually gone through several incarnations, but the basic themes were always the same.

It's actually quite a deep song for us. The first verse was at one stage a comment about the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, whilst the second was about the Germans dealing with their war guilt. Around 2006, I went back in and took all the direct references out and made everything a lot more subtle, and I think it works a lot better for that.

Ultimately, it's about how we deal with our history - how do we decide which bits to ignore and which bits to remember? How can we ever begin to understand the evil things our ancestors did, and why do we commemorate them as heroes?

I think I'll leave you with that thought.

Never Wanted This

Guess what? This one's really, really old.

In fact, it dates back to about 2000, and somehow took seven years or so before it got released. Perhaps even more surprisingly, we both really like it.

It's been on a very long journey. The lyrics have been completely rewritten on several occasions, and it's gone through a couple of very different sounds as well. The original was very dark and analogue, but at the end of 2005, Simon re-recorded the whole thing on my MicroKorg, and made it sound less dark but still very analogue.

The song is about bullying. It started life as a song about being bullied, and ended up almost being a song about doing the bullying - which perhaps isn't as much of a transformation as it might seem. Generally, I think a lot of discontent went into the lyrics over the seven years it took to write, which led to some wonderful lines, such as "All my life, I've never looked back / But now I'm only human", and of course the eternal question "Why waste all of these years out in the autumn rain?"

House of Cards

Hello.

Previously in my very long and rather dull series of comments about tracks, I have told you rather more than you actually wanted to know about things that you probably weren't very interested in anyway.

I lost track of what I wanted to say during that sentence, so if you can tell me what it was about, please do get in touch. The next sentence is quite improbable, as well.

So around 1997, both of us wrote songs about helium. We mangled the two together very badly, and ended up with an appallingly bad track called Free Helium Balloon. This is one of those highly improbable coincidences, which you might think would only happen the once.

Until early 2002, when I wrote a song called House of Cards. Which is exactly the same name of a song which Simon had started four years earlier, and had never told me about.

This time, we learnt our lessons and sensibly kept the two tracks entirely separate.

Anyway... this is a song about the state of the world in early 2002, and it tells a true story. Like all good students, I spent many a whole night talking complete nonsense about the state of the world until the sun started to rise.

In retrospect, the time between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war was a slightly strange period. Some people agreed with the Afghanistan war; others disagreed, but at the time there seemed to be some degree of hope: a country had been liberated from an appalling regime; and terrorists were being rounded up across the country. In the UK, we still had some civil liberties, and everything seemed reasonably hunky dory.

All of this comes across quite nicely in the lyrics: there are lines such as "The sand is washed away, and who is right today?" or "... you wonder who is right, and why they fight". There's a wonderful line about the way we view history: "The faces of tomorrow stare like people who were there"; and there's even a little dig at what we were doing: "Sitting in comfort, we fought for freedom and peace".

As with many of the older Dusk b-sides, it is a song which has been through several different phases: it started off life sounding almost appallingly 80s; we tried to remix it to sound less dated, but failed entirely; and eventually ended up with the version which would appear as a b-side on the Bulletproof single.

So all in all, this is a song which I'm pretty proud of. It sounds like something from our Empires era, and honestly I have no idea why it took so long to get released, but I'm pretty proud nonetheless.

Broken

If Someone Else's Dream was a relic from the turn of the century, then Broken is most definitely a relic from the Empires era.

This one was originally started around Christmas 2002, around the same time that we were working on Here We Stand. Somehow it missed out on being on Empires, entirely failed to be on Dusk, and failed to be on any of the seven singles that we released in the meantime. And then we recorded and mixed it, saw that it wasn't that bad, and eventually put it on The End.

That wasn't really a terribly exciting story, so here are two more facts, which may or may not be of interest...

1. It uses lots of sampled sounds from a Korg Prophecy


2. It contains a siren sound that is suspiciously similar to the noise from Visage's astonishingly good Fade to Grey*

* If any lawyers are reading this, we would like to make it clear that this doesn't mean it was stolen, because it wasn't. Your honour.

Someone Else's Dream

I imagine psychologists have field days with people's songwriting. Or maybe it's all just a shade too easy for them? Either way, I don't think they would get much out of this one. Even so, there is a story behind it...

Between 1999 and 2001, our songs changed gear completely, both literally and metaphorically. Where previously we had done everything on one or two keyboards, suddenly we were using "synthesisers". But perhaps more to the point, where previously we had taken influences from pop music, we started to look at literature, books and politics.

But this song is not an example of that. Instead, it is something of a relic of that inbetween period, where songs seemed to be about something very profound, but actually weren't. In fact, it was as simple as having a list of good words and phrases, and working them together into a song.

Which is not to say that it's without its interesting references. You'll find references in there to a song by U2, a book by Susan Cooper, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Kalihari bushmen (actually, we wrote a whole song about them once).

The song first acquired some music in early Autumn 2003, but somehow didn't get released until the end of 2007. One verse got ditched, and then reinstated; and a whole album got released while it wasn't looking.

And so that's the story of Someone Else's Dream, which I haven't sold very well, but you can find it on the back of our single The End.

King for a Day

The story you are about to read is very long, and extremely dull. If you think you might get hungry, I'd advise you to have some nibbles by your side before reading any further, just in case, you know?

Established history says that we started making music in 1992. This is not actually entirely the truth, as we had actually been messing about unsuccessfully with keyboards from some time in the mid-late 1980s, and would continue to do so right up until about 2000, when we finally started to have some success at getting decent noises out of them (basically, we bought a sequencer, which finally meant that we could actually play the right notes, at the right times, and in the right order, all things we'd been struggling with up until that point).

Our first album, or more accurately, our first tape, was completed in 1992, and would later come to be called Schizophrenia. Sadly (I say this now with some sincerity), the original recordings were lost in the following year or so, but most of it has at some stage been re-recorded since then.

One of the tracks on the album was called Spud! (Yes, the exclamation mark was part of the title. OK. Before you say anything, we still had a lot to learn at that stage.) The final version was pretty typical of our early output (bilge), but it originally started life as a cod-reggae track, which for some reason at the time I thought was a good idea.

But it wasn't an idea which ever really went away. In 1997 I wrote another cod-reggae track called Fruit on the Tree, and shortly afterwards Simon wrote a track with the working title (the previous one had been called D; you can probably work out some of the other titles from that period). The tracks were merged, and, perhaps fortunately, that idea stopped there...

... for a little while. Four years later, Simon picked the track up yet again, this time ditching the frankly dire lyrics to Fruit on the Tree, and replacing them with the distinctly half-baked lyrics to King for a Day (as I recall it was a poor chorus; an even worse verse; and that was about it). And then, yet again, it reached a standstill.

Then in 2004, Simon had been listening to The Human League's Best Of album, and had been particularly struck by Empire State Human, so tried putting an electro beat and a 6/8 rhythm onto the track, and was very pleased with the result. But the next barrier was the lyrics.

Finally, three and a half years later, at the end of 2007, I decided enough was enough. I'd been dipping into the lyrics on and off since 2001, and still couldn't quite get them to work. Finally, I thought, there was no shame in just throwing it out in whatever form it currently was. So I made a few minor changes, recorded the vocal the same day, and that was that.

The final mix wasn't quite ready for The End, and so we were left with this historical oddity. When the idea of the iDusk EP was first floated, it seemed to be an obvious candidate, and so there you have it. After ten years of cod-reggae, and ten years as a rough demo, what are we left with? Superficially, an inoffensive track about nothing in particular, but somehow I don't think it's an understatement to say it's also one of the most important tracks we've ever written...

If, after all that, you want to download the track in all its gory glory, click on these words.

iDusk EP

Ooh ooh, news!

OK, so a couple of weeks ago I wrote something very mysterious and dull. I'm now happy to announce that I'm in a position to explain what the heck I was on about.

Well, we were feeling a bit bored, so we decided to make our iTunes debut.

So anyhow, it's called the iDusk EP (although it may actually be called Idusk due to a slightly overzealous spell checker), and it can be downloaded from iTunes in the UK, Europe, and the USA on or shortly after the 5th of May 2008 (that's today, for those of you not too clear on dates and the like).

1. Consequences
2. Signs of Life
3. King for a Day
4. The End (Ostkreuz mix)

For those of you with iTunes installed, here's the magic link.

For those of you who haven't, tough cheddar for the time being. There are very good reasons why we went down an Apple-only route, but if that annoys you, please email us; the address can be found on our main website.

It has one of our favourites from Dusk; one of our more low-key tracks; and one of our favourite remixes. Oh look, it's got an exclusive new track as well! Comments will follow.

Why have we done this? Hmm, not sure, really. We thought it would be worth a go, if nothing else. If you want to, download it; if you don't, don't worry too much - we won't be too offended (you might not get Christmas cards for a year or two though).

Fallen

It may not have sounded it, but Fallen was one of the oldest tracks on the Dusk project. But not the oldest of all, as will be revealed soon...

Fallen started life as a sequel to a track called Swan Song, from our 2002 album Zero. Both were started well before the album came out, so its origins probably go back to mid 2001. Superficially, Swan Song is about a rock band on its last legs, going out on a blaze of glory, and so its sequel, initially called Come Back (with the footnote "the one after Swan Song") was about the not-so-glorious comeback.

I'd also made a vague request that Simon should write a song where the chorus and middle eight should have the same chords, so that the two could be combined in some sort of marvellous crescendo at the end (in fact, the chords for the verse are the same as well). So at some point around the time we were working on Empires, that is what he did.

You'll probably have realised by now that one or two things went wrong with the whole procedure. It's not called Come Back; it's not about a band making its comeback; and it doesn't have any sort of marvellous crescendo at the end.

Somewhere along the way, we realised that the whole thing wasn't really working out, and so we ditched (at various times) all but one line of the lyrics, and also reworked the whole production as well.

Instead, we ended up with (in my opinion) one of the stronger lyrics I've ever written, and actually a pretty good song generally. It may not ever have been album material, but it's a track that I'm very pleased with, and one of the ones I go back and listen to every so often.

The Healing

The Healing was the fifth and final track from the second Dusk single Beneath the Silent Skies. It was even on the album for a while - I just uncovered an early tracklisting where it was sandwiched between Perfect Geometry and Bulletproof, followed by a note advising that it should be replaced with The End. Which was undoubtedly a sensible move.

It's strange though, because The Healing is still one of my favourites. It's an unusually upbeat lyric over a decidedly midtempo backing, which is always a great combination. It's even got some lyrics that I'm very proud of, such as "We've turned our home into a war zone" (and also some that I'm less sure of, such as "... to reap the seeds that I've sown", which fortunately wasn't intended as a rhyme for the other line I just mentioned).

Somehow it got lumbered with the label of "another midtempo track", and got missed off the album. In fact, there's a very good reason why it shouldn't have been before Bulletproof on the album: the chords are the same, but backwards. It's a trick we've used a few times, and mostly you'd be none the wiser - but would it have been a good idea to put the two next to each other? Probably not...

Heaven Only Knows

Heaven Only Knows rather confusingly ended up as the lead track on the last single The End. For a long time it was one of our favourites, so you might be wondering why it wasn't on the album. The story is long, and not especially interesting...

The track started life as a sample from Simon's beautiful red SH-101, with a very analogue sound, with the working title Battleship Grey. When Simon passed it on to me, it was a lively track which reminded me (ahem) very much of the wonderful Röyksopp single Remind Me, which has some really evocative lyrics about happy memories, particularly about travelling abroad.

At the same time, Simon and I had been doing a lot of city breaks across western Europe, visiting obscure places on late night flights, and so I had a lot of places from which to draw inspiration. I've got a feeling there were already some rough lyrics, and I can't remember what remains of those, but I effectively rewrote the whole thing. I've got a feeling the line about "All the sins and the harsh regrets" may have come from the original...

At this stage it was all going well, and we must have been pretty happy with the production, because I don't think it changed in the slightest from the original demo. Unfortunately, it was in the recording process that we discovered it was almost entirely impossible to sing.

The final version is a patchwork quilt of different vocal takes from different sources, many of which were recorded several months apart, and incredibly it works pretty well. Once again we have a track which we're both pleased with. So much so, in fact, that it was very nearly held back to be included on album number nine.

And so it's a bit of a shame really, because this track could have fitted nicely on Dusk. But that was clearly never meant to be...

Neglect

Hello.

Well, we've been neglecting you a bit recently, haven't we? (Don't bother answering that; we already know the answer).

So here is some news...

Maybe you thought Dusk was over with, dead and buried? Frankly, so did we. It was an album which took about three years to write, record and mix. Then we prolonged the agony by releasing four singles / EPs / whatever you want to call them. And in the past, that might have been (if you'll pardon the pun) the end.

I'm not really at liberty to tell you what I'm talking about at the moment, so I'm just going to have to remain enigmatic. (Is that the right word? Probably not.) Anyway, suffice to say that Dusk still has one final trick up its sleeve. To celebrate this, the handful of remaining comments will make their way onto this very blog over the next couple of weeks, at the rate of one every day or two. I'm not going to make any promises about how regularly I can get them on here, but I'll do what I can.

That wasn't really news, and it didn't really say anything particularly informative, so here's something a bit more substantial...

The ninth album is really starting to take shape now. An impressive total (or should that be toll?) of 34 tracks are being considered, each in a varying place somewhere on the road between "vague musical idea" and "finished". Before you get too excited, here are some statistics:

• 2 are left over from Empires (yes, they are that bad)
• 2 are left over from Dusk, and are completed (but possibly not very good)
• 2 are left over from Dusk, but the vocals haven't been mixed yet (these two are OK, actually)
  
• 2 are left over from Dusk, but I haven't finished recording the vocals yet (one of them is quite good)
  
• 4 are left over from Dusk, and haven't quite got full sets of lyrics yet (none of them are any good)
  
• 1 is complete, but I want to re-record the vocal because it's not very good (yes, we now have some kind of quality checking procedure*)
• 1 is a song by someone else, which probably won't get released properly anywhere (I'm not sure why I'm telling you about it, actually)
• 1 is a song by Simon, for which he's hopefully going to take full responsibility
  
• 9 have been recorded, but the vocals haven't been mixed yet
• 8 don't yet have any kind of lyrics recorded for them
• 2 don't have any kind of words yet (or rather, they do have some kind of words, just not a very good kind)
  

* That's a vast improvement on what it replaced, which was nothing.

One of the nine recorded but not fully mixed tracks is called Here Comes the Summertime, and was recorded a few weeks ago in one of my more hirsute periods. It also coincided with me playing with my new iMac, which has a built-in iSight camera, and so I recorded a video as I was going along. It was fully edited in iMovie, and so it's not exactly up to the standards of Señor Spielbergo, or even (dare I say it) George Lucas, but in fairness it's our first ever video, and I didn't really know what I was doing (I still don't).

Hopefully the final version of the video will be ready to premiere in the Summertime; there might be a single at some stage; and the album should follow not long afterwards. If everything goes according to plan, which of course it never does.

In the meantime, you'll have to make do with the dregs of Dusk.

Nine facts about our ninth album

1. We've written lots of songs for it
   
2. One of them is called Better Days
   
3. We haven't thought of a name for it yet
   
4. It sounds really good so far
   
5. We're between 0% and 100% through the recording process
   
6. It's between 0% and 200% better than our eighth album
   
7. I've run out of facts
   
8. 
   
9. It will be released in summer 2008
   

The Download Chart

Well, as Simon said, 2007 was a mammoth year for downloads. Some misguided fool clicked on our tracks nearly 6000 times, so thanks very much if you are that fool. And here's the chart of our least unpopular tracks (the numbers in brackets refer to their respective 2006 positions):

1. (-) Perfect Geometry
2. (-) Consequences
3. (-) The End
4. (1) Here We Stand
5. (2) Turn the Tide
6. (-) Beneath the Silent Skies
7. (-) Moving On
8. (-) Bulletproof (western mix)
9. (-) Point of No Return
10. (-) Echoes of Perfection (demo)

To hear what you've been missing out on, why not head to the audio section of our main site, which can usually be found here.

What he said

... except there was one thing he forgot to mention...

We completed our fourth and (probably) final single of Dusk just after Christmas. It's called The End for no particularly good reason. Here's a picture:


This time we've gone completely overboard, with no less than seven songs:

1. Heaven Only Knows
2. Never Wanted This
3. What I Would Do
4. Someone Else's Dream
5. Broken
6. The End (ostkreuz mix)
7. Faint Footsteps

And it's a happy new year from him.

Electraparade for download - right now!

What do you know? You wait ages for one download site to come along, and then three appear at once.

Yes, the Electraparade compilation album, which includes our track, 'My Light', is available to download from the following sites. Take your pick, and choose wisely, depending on whether you want to pay a miserly 79p per track or a very generous £1.10:

DJ Download

Ministry of Sound

Juno records

Should you need anymore convincing, here's an unbiased review of the compilation courtesy of Electro Garden. Apperently, we were a highlight.

Go on, do it now, before you regret it!

Frohes neues Jahr and all that ...

Hello and happy new year to you (all).

I seem to remember that when we started this blog, I was going to write regular updates, just on the offchance that anyone in this or any other universe would be interested in what we'd been up to, had for breakfast, read in the Daily Mail etc.

X months later, erm, well, that hasn't quite happened has it? Road to Hell, good intentions, paving and all that. Personally, I blame the Daily Mail. Or maybe I was just lazy? Or could it be that muesli is a bit boring?

Anyway, at this time of year, it seems to be obligatory to do a review of the last year's highs and lows, preferably in a bitesize chunks top 20 format and then to make outlandish predictions for the year ahead. Do you see a bandwaggon? Well we're a band (some might say) and we're jumping right on it:

So, 2007 was pretty good for us. We released four singles from our Dust album, all packed with new songs and remixes, we were featured on the Electraparade compilation CD (buy it now!), we wrote and made demos of a pile (cohort? phalanx?) of new songs and did we remixes for Erasure and Marsheaux (not that they asked us to, mind). All this whilst trying to hold down normal jobs and occasionally have lives.

The whole MySpace / internet thing has been quite entertaining. I like the idea that anyone can knock a track together in their bedroom and then minutes later the whole world can either tell them what a steaming pile of manure it is, or propel it towards the hit parade. We've enjoyed the feedback that we've received about our songs and have been amused, encouraged, inspired and bemused in various measures by the comments that have arrived over the last 12 months.

And what of 2008? If everything goes to plan, we should have a new album out this year. The only obstacles in our way are (i) finishing the writing, (ii) doing the recording, (iii) doing the mixing and (iv) other obstacles that we haven't yet thought of. As I mentioned in the 'idle boasts of 2007' section above, the writing has been going well, so we will soon see how the album is shaping up. With a bit of luck, it will be a bit more upbeat and 'of the moment' than Dusk, but whether this constitutes an outlandish prediction remains to be seen.

Most importantly, you've been missing out on the weather updates for the last year, so here's the official summary for 2007: Summer: Wet (Jetstream allegedly too far south), Winter: Cold, everything else: Sunshine and showers.

My one and only new year's resolution: To try to make my contributions to this blog a little more frequent.

More this time next year ...

The End

This brings our week of comments to an end - hopefully you've enjoyed / endured / bothered reading the comments.

So, as you might have gathered by now, the new single is called The End. It will contain, among other delights, the brand new Ostkreuz remix of the track of the same name, and will be released very shortly.

The End was originally written in Spain, in summer 2004, but it seems to have somehow avoided having castanets in it. The other thing it doesn't have is very many words - in fact there are only 85 in total. Somehow, and rather astonishingly, despite this (or perhaps because of this) it's one of my favourite tracks on Dusk.

One of the comments we got back about the track seemed to suggest it sounded like Kraftwerk, which to be honest we could never really see, but it was rather flattering anyway. So we decided to try a Deutsche Mix approach, which wasn't entirely successful (it still sounds nothing like Kraftwerk), but it's a nice new approach nonetheless.

Although the single's called The End, that's only one of the tracks on there, but somehow this seemed to be the best name for it (even if it's a joke we seem to keep reusing!) News about exactly what the rest of the single entails will follow as soon as we've come to a final decision!

Hidden Context

Oh, the delicious irony.

Because of course, a "hidden context" is the one thing that this track doesn't have. Or, come to that, a hidden meaning, which might have been a better name for the track anyway.

Well, the slight lack of meaning aside, there are some quite fun lyrics on Hidden Context, which in some ways echo a number of tracks off our first couple of tracks. And we definitely owe a debt to Sparks for some of the inspiration.

Certainly, the whole thing was thrown together very quickly (well, relatively speaking - we're probably talking weeks rather than the usual months or years!) It's tempting to wonder how it ended up on the album, but if nothing else it provides some light relief between Signs of Life and Perfect Geometry.

My Light

As far as I can remember, we never talked about putting My Light on the album, and I'm not entirely sure why not. Whether or not it would have worked is another question, but maybe we should have tried it just in case...

So when we were offered the chance to submit a track for the Electraparade compilation, we decided to go for this, because it was new; because we liked it; and because it didn't seem to have a place. And then we ended up putting it on the b-side to Consequences as well, and that was probably because we were a bit short on other completed tracks, although I don't really remember right now.

When we wrote it, it was another case of a line just dropping into my head (the bit about 'my light in the darkness'), which normally means I've accidentally stolen it off someone, although I think this was relatively original. Although I was very worried that it would end up being too soppy for a long time, but I think I rescued it in the end.

Perhaps more interestingly, the music is inspired by Hallowed Ground by Erasure. Which, when you consider that Empires b-side Fateful Hour was inspired by Imagination, means The Innocents has been responsible for a disproportionate amount of inspiration in recent years. Especially given that it's not even their best album.

In the Moonlight

If Dusk is our autumnal album, In the Moonlight is definitely the most autumnal track on it, and in a way defines the mood of the whole album.

For a long time, I kept a list of 'good titles' for inspiration (I suppose this habit stopped when I realised it was a bit silly to write a whole song around the title, although it means we now have the problem that we can never think of titles for songs). One of these was 'The Devil in Winter', and there were probably some others here as well.

From that blossomed a slightly confused track. I have a habit, or rather had a habit when I was writing the lyrics for Dusk in particular, of using the second verse to turn the song on its head, and this is an example of this. At the beginning the narrator is clearly having trouble understanding, but the blame is placed at the feet of the person the song is being sung to, whereas by the time the second verse comes around, the truth is starting to dawn. And I think by the last bridge, the explanation has been found.

It's always fascinated me that a song consists of maybe twenty or thirty lines, with no more than 150 or 200 words altogether, and yet somehow in that you have to try to find a way of telling a story. Well, unless you're just stringing random words together, of course. But that's a story for another day.

Sadly though, neither of us remembers an awful lot about writing it, so we haven't got much more to say here...

I Have Never

The second track on Dusk is I Have Never, which has the unusual claim of being the only track we've ever written (as far as I can remember, anyway), where Simon has told me to write more lyrics. It started with two verses, and ended up with four. Does it feel too drawn out because of that? You decide...

Its other claim to fame is that it contains an entirely unintentional reference to Merry Christmas (War is Over). Can you guess what it is?

Anyway, obviously the name comes from the popular (?) drinking game of the same name, which is a very good tool for getting to know complete strangers very quickly, and in a very short space of time. Hence the introspective lyrics, which I'm probably being much too cagey about here.

And continuing the drinking theme, the sound of the song is built around samples from Absynth. The synth though, not the drink. Which makes you go mad, anyway.

Signs of Life

Signs of Life was actually a fairly late addition to the album. With a couple of exceptions discussed previously, we started writing tracks for what would eventually become Dusk in 2004, and somehow, due to other commitments, it ended up taking around two and a half years to complete.

By late 2005, most of the tracks were written, and in many cases already recorded in their final form, but for whatever reason we held back, making minor tweaks, until it eventually surfaced at the end of 2006. The proposed 2005 track listing wasn't even all that different: Hidden Context hadn't made it on, and Consequences hadn't been written yet, and a couple of more uptempo (and distinctly out of place) tracks were included instead: Running with the Wind and soon-to-be-released Heaven Only Knows. Apart from those, it was almost identical.

By that stage, Signs of Life was already complete (subject to a minor remix in late 2006), but it hadn't cemented itself as one of our favourites, and so was largely ignored. Which is ironic, given that it has since become one of my favourite tracks on the whole album. But at the last minute, we decided to remove The Healing, and put this on instead.

The track is actually mainly Simon's work, from, by his account, a stream of fairly meaningless random words. But for me it struck a chord - in autumn 2004, I moved to an anonymous northern city, and that seemed to me to be exactly what the song was about. There seems to be a strong feeling of claustrophobia, and of being lost in the crowds.

Our 2001 album Ephemeris included a track called Age of Ignorance, which is fairly similar in terms of mood and subject matter - although, given its era, it's probably a lot more pretentious. And many of the sounds on the final version are sampled from Simon's old Yamaha keyboard, which we used a lot on our late 1990s albums Prophecies and Odyssey, which all makes for a strong mix of past and present.

Bulletproof

It's very nearly a year since Dusk was completed, and we're very close to finishing the project as a whole (an announcement about the final single will follow, hopefully in the next week or so, although we've not entirely decided what's going to be on it yet). However, the track-specific comments have ground to a halt somewhat, so I have formulated a cunning plan.

And it is this: every day for the next week, I shall add comments about another track. That will still leave us with a few more for the new year, but it will help clear the backlog, and it might help put somebody in the mood for the new single when it eventually surfaces. So, here goes...

Bulletproof was started in early 2004, not long after Empires was released. It was a track that we were both very fond of, so an obvious choice for the album. It is, however, another case of coming up with an idea for a song, and flogging it entirely to death by using the metaphor in every single line.

It's always reminded me a little bit of Depeche Mode in style. They probably wouldn't have gone quite so over the top, but top marks to Simon for avoiding using gunshot samples at any stage of the production.

The idea of remixing Bulletproof came about very simply: I was never happy with the mastering of the album version, and I wanted to have another go. In the end, I didn't: in the summer, Simon remixed it to create what would become the Kevlar mix instead.

At the same time, I'd been playing with some ideas for a remix which essentially borrowed the bass line from a certain successful 80s hit which should probably remain nameless. Unfortunately, this wasn't really going anywhere, so I passed it over to Simon, who carried out a very impressive rescue job, and created the Western mix.

Catching Up

Well, as promised, a handful of new tracks are slowly making their way onto the download sites, including Bulletproof (western mix) and Lose Control from our latest single, as well as My Light from Electraparade.

Recently we've been working on the ninth album, which we're hoping will be complete early next year. We've got about twenty tracks in progress, and we're currently working out which of those to concentrate on.

We've also been plodding on with the next single / EP / whatever it actually ends up being. Thus far, we've got four new tracks and another remixed track from Dusk in progress. I need to record some more vocals; and then we might have something worth releasing.

If that weren't enough, we've also been remixing Marsheaux's version of New Order's Regret for a remix competition. Details, and possibly a downloadable version, will follow at some stage in the future.

And that's about it really. A bit boring, maybe, but that's where we've got to...

Single news

Yes, it's that time again.

Here is Bulletproof:



The tracks we've chosen this time are as follows:

1. Bulletproof (western mix)
2. Fallen
3. Lose Control
4. House of Cards
5. Bulletproof (kevlar mix)

Yes, that's right, you get not one but two highly special new versions of Bulletproof. The Kevlar Mix is an extended version of the album track, which was recorded in September, whilst the Western Mix comes at the song from an entirely new direction. More information on each of the mixes will follow in due course.

There are also three previously unreleased tracks, all of which have very long histories: Fallen was started in early 2002; Lose Control started life in late 2003; and House of Cards was even considered for inclusion on Empires over four years ago. They've all been revisited since then, and we're actually really pleased with how they ended up sounding.

To prove how not bad some of these are, downloads will be available from the normal sites in the near future.

We've decided there will definitely be a fourth single, which we will try to throw together by the end of the year. At the very least it will be a double a-side containing a couple of our favourite tracks which didn't quite make Dusk; at best it might be an EP, or even a mini-album - anything could happen! We've got some new (old) songs to record; and one more track from Dusk that we want to try remixing. Time will tell, and we'll put up more details once we actually know ourselves!

And then we'll be all ready and rearing to start 2008 and the ninth album...

Oh yes, I remember

"Some news will follow in a bit," I said.

OK, that was a lie.

So then it was September, and Autumn was almost upon us. It would be easy to pretend that we'd spent the summer eagerly beavering away at new material, but that would be another lie. In fact we've both been far too busy enjoying the nice weather. And the rubbish weather, of which there has been quite a lot this summer.

So, here's a roundup of the latest news, in no particular order:

I have been finishing lyrics and starting to record vocals for the not-very-forthcoming ninth album. I'm really pleased with the direction it's taken so far, and I think we both hope to have it finished much more quickly this time, maybe early next year. There's a lot still to do, but we've also got a lot done already, so things are looking up. Rejoice.

For some months I have been about to try and remix Bulletproof for a possible future single, but never seem to get around to it. It will happen eventually. At some point, we'd like to do at least one more single from Dusk, possibly two if we can manage it. OK, here's a promise: I'll try and blitz said remix in the next couple of weeks, so we can have a single ready within the next month or so. Of course, whether that's a promise in the New Labour sense remains to be seen.

Simon did a really good remix of Erasure's track When a Lover Leaves You, the original version of which appears on their not-particularly-good new album Light at the End of the World. He has rather generously called it the Hypernova Remix, even though my involvement was limited to saying "Well done," in a very patronising voice when I heard it. I've just spent ages searching the website, and finally managed to find the page where it's posted here. Scroll down a bit. Keep scrolling... we're number 148 on the list. I think you'll agree that it sounds more like Erasure than the original.

Electraparade can now be bought for real dollars. If you have a bit of spare cash-money, click on one of the links on Electraset's MySpace page there. Someone had even singled out our track My Light as one of their favourites, which is all the more impressive given that we don't wear nice hats or do songs about Hoovers. So thankyou.

I've been for lots of nice bike rides around the Yorkshire countryside, averaging a little under 100 miles a week in recent weeks, and I'm hoping if I pretend to be really enigmatic and German, we might one day turn into Kraftwerk. The other positive thing would be that we'd only release an album every decade or two, which I'm sure would be preferable for most people.

Also, Bruce Parry's Tribe and Michael Palin's new series are both extraordinarily good. Are you actually interested in what I'm saying here? What's that? It's more interesting than going on about music? Yes, probably...

Right, that's enough for now. Some more news will follow. In a bit. Possibly.

Beneath the Silent Skies

This is a song dating back to some time in 2004, and it's really just about enjoying the little things in life. The basic premise is this: if you close your eyes, you can find heaven anywhere. Even in Yorkshire. Anyway, we had some trouble shoe-horning the title into the lyrics somewhere, but it seems to work. It's not my best vocal performance ever, and really the song might have worked better if I'd made a better job of singing it, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

It's actually not changed an awful lot since the original demo. It started off life trying to be electro, and probably ended up a lot more gentle than Simon intended. Then, in summer 2005, we came back and remixed it, although we didn't change much except the drums. At the same time I had a vague idea that we should do a prog rock extended version, where it just disappeared into an entirely unrelated instrumental section, and thus Part 2 was born. Initially, it was an extended version, but Simon took it apart, and we never found a good enough reason for putting it together again, and there you have it really.

Some news will follow in a bit.

The difficult second single

Oh look, it's Beneath the Silent Skies!


That's our new single, available on Monday from no good record stores, even Woolworth's.

It contains five tracks:

1. Beneath the Silent Skies
2. Point of no Return
3. Running with the Wind
4. Beneath the Silent Skies (part 2)
5. The Healing

As always, specific comments will toddle along for each track later. The main track is identical to the song of the same name that we put on our last album Dusk, but we've also included the 'Part 2' version, which we recorded at the same time.

This time round, you don't get any exclusive downloads, because although demo versions of the second and third tracks do exist, they're really not terribly good. No, instead, you can download either (or both) of the first two tracks, and enjoy (or endure) them in your own time. Then, if you like them, you can send us lots of money, and we might send you the other three tracks on a 'compact disc', if you can remember those things from the olden days.

The main site is here: www.hypernova.org.uk - why not tell a friend?

Expect the marginally less difficult third single in September, or thereabouts.

Electraparade

Oh, two posts in one night. Aren't you lucky? (As some Roman guy said, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. I don't know how that's relevant though)

So this is Electraparade:


Twelve electro classics for the twenty-first century, you see? It says so on the front. Well, more strictly, eleven electro classics - one of them is by us:

1. Martin Degville "Planet Bi"
2. Electraset "Just Another Number"
3. Alien 6 "Close to Perfection"
4. Starbase 109 "Engineering Workshop"
5. Electroflex "Appreciate Me"
6. Hypernova "My Light"
7. One Moment "Cold Stare"
8. Neuvogue "Random Number Generator"
9. Synthface "With Your Love" (Studio Version)
10. Payola Disco "Skinny Girl"
11. The Silent Age "Contrition"
12. Silver Factory Superstars "Still Love"

The CD was put together by Electraset, who can be found there. You can track down the others on MySpace as well, which is what I did. Some of them are pretty good. Some are better than good. And others put us to shame completely. One of them comes from Birmingham.

I think if I had to choose, my favourites would have to be Starbase 109, partly because their song is excellent, partly because they have a song called Vacuum Cleaner, and partly because they wear nice hats. I would like a hat like that.

So anyway, I'll return to this subject when I've heard the CD in full, but if the samples on MySpace are anything to go by, it's a pretty good CD. Except for our track, of course.

More on that story later...

Attention! I bring news.

The next single might be Beneath the Silent Skies, and may (or may not) be ready imminently. It could have some extra tracks on it, including Part 2 of the title track. Nothing is certain.

Yes, summer is here, so a song about butterflies and killing time is in order. But I'll tell you more about that another time. We've got somewhere between five and ten b-sides ready to roll (as that is what b-sides do), so there's enough for another single afterwards. There might even be enough for another one after that.

We did talk at one point about doing a compilation of spare tracks and remixes. This might not happen this year, due to the thing I'm going to write about in a second, but I hope it will appear at some point in the future, as we're building up quite a big pile of decent spare stuff now. Maybe we should try Swap Shop.

Anyway, the next album, which will probably not be called H9, is well under way. We're currently in the demoing/writing stage, which is generally followed by the recording stage, and then the releasing stage, and finally the getting on with something else stage. Of course, anything could happen, as I probably mentioned above, as the demoing/writing stage of what would eventually become Dusk lasted about three years. On the other hand, this time we've been very happy with the way things have gone, and we've already got enough good tracks to fill an acceptably good album. As I said previously, this going to be as uptempo as we get.

And finally... somehow, by quirk of fate, we have appeared on a compilation called Electraparade. The specifics will follow very shortly, and I'll try to think of some imaginative things to say about it, which might prove difficult, given that I haven't heard it yet.

Oh, hello, by the way.

Echoes of Perfection

Well, I think we all go through times like this.

This is a very introspective song which I started in summer 2004. I'm only starting to realise now just how sombre Dusk is, and if this had been on the album, it would have been about as dark as it got.

Despite all of this, I really like it. It's deeply personal, unusually well expressed, and Simon did an amazing job on the production.

Well, anyway, the chances are that if you've heard this song, you've only heard the demo. I can confirm that the final version is at least a little bit better. Also, it's an important historical moment, as it's the first song ever to feature Simon on backing vocals.

The good news is that we've been writing tracks for the ninth album for the last few months, and it sounds like it might be the most uptempo album we've done since... well, since ever really. So if you like us when we're dreary, then make the most of it while it lasts.

Consequences

As with many of the songs on Dusk, Consequences started life some time around the middle of 2004. In fact, this was a very late addition: if the album had been released a year earlier, this would have been one of the tracks that wouldn't have been on there. It was the last track to be completed for the album, last summer.

From memory, this was one of those very suspicious cases when some lyrics just fall into your head: most probably the Head in my hands / I regret those demands couplet. I liked the rhythm of the words, and just kept writing. That said, when I first handed the lyrics over to Simon, they were very incomplete - essentially I'd written the verses, but there was no chorus, so quite a bit of it is his work. Anyway, a few rewrites down the line, I think it sounds pretty good.

According to Simon, the riff was supposed to sound a bit like Delerium, but I doubt anyone else had ever spotted that - I certainly hadn't.

I had a number of ideas for a remix, so I volunteered to do one. Most of those ideas were things like a slightly breaky beat, with electro backing, and things like that. Of those ideas, a grand total of zero came to appear on the final remix. Somehow, it ended up a very laid back affair, in which the hi-hats were accidentally turned into bongos, and stayed that way. In retrospect, there are a few things I'd like to go back and change, but generally I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Simon did a quick spit-and-polish, and then it ended up on the single.

The cruel consequences

Quiet at the back, please.


That's our new single, which we've decided to call Consequences, after one of the tracks on it.
It only took four months to put it together, which given that it has five songs on it, is quite an achievement.

The single will have the following tracks:

1. Consequences
2. My Light
3. Echoes of Perfection
4. Moving On
5. Consequences (electrobongo remix)

Specific comments will follow. Generally, they were all written along with the Dusk tracks, but only Echoes of Perfection was ever considered for the album itself. The last three tracks are all special new remixes, and the Consequences remix isn’t even remotely electro, so the name is highly inaccurate. I just thought I’d get that in before some bright spark decides to point it out.

For the first time ever, there will also be two exclusive download tracks:

1. Moving On (demo)
2. Echoes of Perfection (demo)

These will be available from the usual locations over the next couple of weeks, so you can hear what you could have won.

If we get around to it, we might do another single before the summer ends. The fact that we’ve already done four tracks for the next one will have very little to do with when it finally arrives.

More to follow, at some point.

Feed Bäck

MySpace is a funny place. As far as I can make out, it seems to be populated by the following:

1. Spammers
2. Bands/film makers/porn stars who want to raise their profile
3. People who want to show off how many friends they have
4. Normal people
5. (insert your own joke about the Murdoch empire here)
   

Anyway, it's quite good fun, as long as you realise all of the above. I've found a lot of fantastic music on there, as well as a lot of rubbish (I should probably state at this point that if you're a friend, the chances are it's because we like you - we don't just accept anyone you know).

We've had some nice comments over the last couple of years, and I'd like to take this opportunity to respond to some of these here...

• I know my vocals aren't all that great. But I think they're generally good enough to show how the song should sound, and that's really all that matters at the moment.
• In no particular order, I believe the following are to blame for my vocal style: Jon Marsh; my Granddad; and maybe also Andy Bell to a lesser degree (because I couldn't possibly sing that high). I don't think Edwyn Collins was an intentional influence, but he's pretty good too.
  
• I don't think either of us can understand the recent popularity of Here We Stand. We both like it, but neither of us had ever thought of it as a highlight. This just goes to show what we know.
• We don't (currently) play live because (1) we live about 3-4 hours away from each other; (2) we see one another about once every 2 months; (3) we don't think we'd be very good; (4) I can't sing very well (see above); and (5) we don't like one another very much.
• We would like to do something with a UK electro-clash attitude, but we can't, mainly because we don't know what it is.
  

Something I have great problems with are the labels people insist on putting on things. This is particularly evident on MySpace, where you have to give yourself a category. We went for 'electronica'; 'pop' and 'electro', but we've been strongly ticked off for 'electronica', which is probably not unfair. I'm quite tempted to change them to 'Christian rap'; 'concrete' and 'melodramatic popular song', the trouble then being that nobody would be able to find us. Maybe this would do the world of MySpace a great service.

If anyone can define any of the following for me, I would be grateful: 'zouk'; 'tropical'; 'shoegaze' and 'acousmatic'. I also come across 'IDM' a lot in electro circles, but I have absolutely no idea what that is either.

The next single will be Consequences, with some extra b-sides and stuff, and will hopefully be finished in the next couple of weeks. I'll change the tracks on MySpace when that happens.

Not Even Close

Two tracks on Dust were written way before any others, and, perhaps slightly strangely, they have ended up being the first and last tracks. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but I don't think any of them are particularly interesting.

So Not Even Close begins with a noise that's not too dissimilar to Goldfrapp's Ooh La La. This isn't intentional: Supernature hadn't come out yet when we first recorded this track. It was supposed to sound a bit like I Feel You from Depeche Mode's wonderful Songs of Faith and Devotion album. Never mind, the good ideas are always the most widely used.

It's a song about our (young people these days') disillusionment with British politics. You'll find all the obvious references in there, such as "we trusted your smile, not your lying eyes" and "there's no need to be truthful, or honour what you said". It isn't the first song we've written about this sort of thing - also check out No Man's Land on Zero and Down from Nemesis (admittedly the latter was rather less obvious, as the references to Major, Blair and Thatcher were removed, and the line "I wish I had hair like Michael Portillo" was replaced by "I wish I had hair like an armadillo", which makes much more sense).

Apparently the chords are the same as Not a Million Miles (off our last album Empires), but played backwards. We've done that before, as well. Proof, were it needed, that very little we do is actually original.

Latest news

We're currently working on the new single - the first from Dusk. This is the state of play at the moment:

• It will probably have four or five tracks
• We haven't decided what the a-side will be
• One of the b-sides might be My Light, unless we decide to do something else with it
  
• There might be a remix
  
• We know vaguely what the artwork will look like

... and that's about as far as we've got. We really seem to work very slowly these days.

We've got lots of b-sides (i.e. particularly rubbish tracks) to get rid of release, so there will probably be some more singles afterwards, too. And we're also contemplating doing something special at the end of the year - it is our fifteenth anniversary, after all!

Particularly observant readers might notice that I've been adding old news items to the bottom of this blog. I don't really know why - it just seems to make a nice archive of what we've been up to. I might add some more, if I find them.

Calmwaters

We've written several songs about water over the years. In 2001, we had Cloudburst, then on our last album there was Turn the Tide, and now Calmwaters. I suspect it's because I'm a geographer at heart, and like colouring in maps of oxbow lakes, and that sort of thing. And the National Geographic is a particularly good magazine.

So this brings us to Calmwaters: a song about taking life gently, and drifting on the ocean waves... No hidden messages - even if you play it backwards (you may also find that this makes it sound better, too). No profound psychobabble - even if you play it backwards. Nothing like that. Just a gentle and drifting tribute to being lazy. Obviously X-Press 2 did something similar and rather better a few years ago, but I'm not sure that's a problem.

In a way, this song is the exact opposite of Turn the Tide, but with all the same watery references, just to hammer the message home. Well, recycling is good, you see?

Simon did most of the production on this one, using drum samples from an old drum machine. We then went back later on, and added loads of reverb and flanging to the drum sounds, to beef them up a bit. And then we went back again, and took all the sound effects off again.

Proof, if it were needed, that the path to the truth is a long and windy one.

That's windy as in bendy, not as in gusty. Or as in flatulent. Although it might have been that too...

Red Shadows

One of the essential tourist trips in Berlin is East Side Gallery. Located alongside the river, just a couple of minutes walk from Ostbahnhof, it is the largest part of what is left of the Berlin Wall.

To walk alongside it is an incredible experience. Today, it is both daubed and scrawled with graffiti, some official, some added later by tourists; some beautiful and inspiration, some utterly pointless. I think the one that struck me the most was about two-thirds of the way along, where someone had written two words on some painting recording Germany's transition through the twentieth century. Those two words? "Llanelli rule". Indeed. And why not? The Berlin Wall: the seemingly untraversable schism, running through the centre of a previously great city. Oh, and by the way, here's my favourite rwgbi team.

Even though it's just a short section - about a kilometre in all - it's still surrounded by oppressive concrete blocks, and somehow the West becomes completely invisible behind the wall, even painted in vivid colours, with BMWs driving past, and aeroplanes flying overhead to some unknown country far away.

I lived in Berlin for just over three months, but at the risk of over-egging the already eggy pudding, this was the one experience that really inspired me more than any other. And the song is a pretty accurate account of how I felt the first time I went there. Nothing has disappeared, perhaps physically, but mentally there is still a very clear wall. But everything has changed - I've lost count of the times that Germans, both Ossis and Wessis have told me that there is no difference between them. I don't think even they believe it.

We would like to apologise for this entry; we appear to have been invaded by the travel supplement. Normal service will resume next time.

Merry new year!

Dusk is now done and dusted. We completed the final mixes on Boxing Day. MP3s will be available through the usual sources very soon. In the meantime, email us if you desperately need a copy.

The first single will be unleashed early next year, and will contain a number (between zero and three) of new non-album tracks.

In the meantime, we'd like to wish everybody a very happy new year.

Perfect Geometry

As the album's release grows ever closer, I'd like to share some thoughts about some of the tracks that made it on - maybe some that didn't. First, Perfect Geometry.

It seems it was started in early 2004, and took around a year and a half to reach completion. I'm particularly pleased with the lyrics, although they're a little bit abstract. There were a number of influences, probably including some science fiction somewhere along the way, but the most obscure is in the second verse, which references the Human League's "A Doorway (?)" (from 1990's dubious Romantic). There's no particularly good reason for this, other than that the title gave me some pointers for where the verse should go.

So why is it called Perfect Geometry? Honestly, I don't know - it was probably one of those cases where the title came first. Over recent years we've found it harder and harder to come up with titles anyway... But I think it fits really well, particularly with the first verse. In some notes I made when I wrote it, I said that since we wrote so many miserable songs, it would be nice to write something about perfection. And so what do we end up with? A miserable song about perfection.

I think the music - entirely Simon's work - is outstanding. It fits really well with the lyrics, and with an unusually half-decent vocal performance, this is definitely a stand-out track for me. According to him, it was originally based on a Kylie Minogue riff, from a track called I Believe in You. Since I've never heard it, I can't comment.

So all told, a noisy electro track of which I'm especially proud...

More next time.

Announcing Dusk

Here is a picture of our new album Dusk. It will be finished very soon (we hope).


This time, there will be twelve tracks, namely...

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

We intend to follow this with a single some time in the new year, but we haven't decided what it should be yet.

More commentary and audio samples will follow very shortly, and the album will be done when it is done... (hopefully before Christmas).

By the way, it isn't a Best Of. Well, not intentionally.

Meanwhile, somewhere in outer space

I came up with a track listing/sequence for the album, this weekend. I'm quite pleased with it, and Simon has now approved it, so we'll probably stick with that. Stand by for a full announcement in the next week or so.

This week, I've been listening to obscure German elektro, and would like to recommend the following:

• "Wo Versteckt Sich Gott?" by Witt - it sounds a bit like an elektronik version of Rammstein, which is never a bad thing.
• "Barfuß im Weltall" by Peter-Thomas-Sound-Orchester feat. Giorgio Vocoder - the end theme for a very silly film called Raumpatrouille Orion. If you imagine the music from Austin Powers with a vocoder and beatbox, you'll have the general idea.

That is all.

Tunes

In place of the now traditional weather news, here are a couple of tunes that I quite like at the moment:

• Faithless - Bombs : I think it's a good song with a good video.
• All Saints - Rock Steady : A surprisingly good comeback single.

I did some more mixing at the weekend and half-wrote (or wrote half of) some new songs, but nothing is finished yet.

Time marches on

We now seem to have a shortlist of around 13 tracks (yes, that's a very short list). We are currently conferring about which of them should be on there, and which order they should be in.

There are still a few remixes to be done, and other bits and bobs, but we're hoping to have it finished in the next couple of weeks. The "artwork" is pretty much ready to roll too. We'll probably start thinking about a single around Christmas time, for release in the new year. I expect we'll leak a few of the tracks onto the web before long.

Sunshine and showers, by the way, if you were wondering...

Do you really want to know about the weather?

No, I didn't think so. Anyway, I re-recorded and mixed 'Heaven Only Knows' yesterday. For the record, it was quite a nice afternoon ...

Mixing in the rain

Yesterday was a thoroughly miserable afternoon in the West Midlands - it rained practically the whole time. I amused myself by mixing the vocals to 'The End' and 'Consequences'.

Back online

As of today, the official Hypernova website will be back online. Hurrah!

Now we can channel our creative energies into something useful, like finishing the new album.

We are doing stuff...

Yes, really: I'm mixing vocals and we've got a stack of half-written songs and semi-defrosted ideas that need working on.

Admittedly, at this rate the Human League will have a new album out before we do...

Back soon!

We'll be back shortly!

Eighth wonder…

Work continues on our forthcoming eighth album, as yet still untitled.

The album is currently expected to be released some time this autumn, with a single around the same time.

A taste of things to come

Where on earth has that new album got to?

Numerous queries have been fired in our direction, along the lines of “the website has been saying ‘2005’ for months now – will the new album actually be released this year?” Well, finally we can give you an answer (of sorts).

The probable answer is ‘no’. For various personal reasons, work on the eighth album, still under the working title ‘H8’, has been rather slower over recent months. Whilst it is true that we were hoping to release it by now, it now seems increasingly probable that it will be next year by the time it is unleashed.

In the meantime, we’ll update you with the current situation: Around 40 tracks have been written and demoed, and a shortlist of around half have been identified as likely album targets to concentrate upon.  Vocals are steadily being recorded, and a number of ‘final mixes’ have already been completed.

Stay tuned for more when we have it.

"In the first half"

Alright, so we might have been lying when we said the new album would be released in the first half of 2005. Hypernova have been very busy with other projects, and would like to apologise for the delay. There definitely is an album in the pipeline, and it's "Not a Million Miles" from being complete (do you see what we did there?). On the other hand, it's not complete yet either.

In the meantime, writing and recording continues, and the album will definitely (hopefully) be completed this year.

We've also been getting a lot of feedback for the downloads, some of it positive, and so thanks once again to everyone who has listened to our music. Don't forget to keep checking the downloads page for full details - five tracks are now available, and we intend to add the sixth (Solitaire) very shortly.

Yet More Downloads

Once again, thanks for your downloading! Midsummer's Eve will also be available very shortly.