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.

Something borrowed

As I explained a couple of weeks ago, we have spent a lot of the last couple of years buried deep in our past, remastering such classics as Reign of the Morons (1992), Spherical Ditch Cheese (1995), and Make Time for Vindaloo (1996).

At the same time, we were vaguely thinking about the two albums which are currently in wide distribution, Transmission (2011) and Dusk (2006), both available through our official website here. Some of the highlights are available through iTunes and Amazon Digital too, but we wondered if it might be nice for a full-length album to be on there too.

Quite what that will be hasn't entirely been decided yet, and it won't happen for a few months yet. Hypothetically, a compilation might be nice, as we haven't done one since our singles collection Synopsis, which covered our first ten years, and that was fourteen years ago now.

So right now, you find us re-evaluating our back catalogue, trying to figure out what the highlights are, and whether some of them might fit nicely alongside our newer material, whether remixed or just remastered.

If you want to see (or rather, hear) where that leads, stay tuned!

The olden days

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

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

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

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

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

Album number ten

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

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

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

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

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

The year we forgot to write anything

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

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

The Videos - Blood, Sweat and Tears

For the Blood, Sweat and Tears video I wanted to try and emulate some of the shadowplay of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and other related films from the 1920s, but without any actual cinematic knowledge or lighting, that was clearly never going to happen.

The semaphore ("blood", "sweat" and "tears", depending on the chorus) obviously comes from the single artwork, and the handwritten lyrics just seemed to make a nice addition, even if I messed them up a bit in the middle. You can also probably see that apparently I hold pencils in a very strange way.

The video also stars my friend's cat Blue, who can be seen performing his typical act of running manically out of the room without warning. He died a few months after the single came out, which is rather sad, because crazy though he was sometimes, he was a very friendly cat.

The Videos - Golden Wheel

Sappy's video for Golden Wheel is pretty much the reason that the Blood, Sweat and Tears single came out when it did, and for that we should be grateful. It mixes from footage of me singing Here Comes the Summertime through to some rather raunchy posturing by a lady in a way that I do find a little bit disturbing, but I really like the 3D footage in the background.

The person running manically in the top left corner is a great addition, too...

The Videos - False Dawn

For our second video I wanted to put together a travelogue with all my sunset photos in it, and I think it works quite well, but pretty much nobody has ever watched it, so obviously it only really works for me.

Getting the photos in sync with the beats proved to be pretty much impossible, as the software that I was using didn't really have that capability.

You might recognise several images from the Dusk sleeve sessions.

The Videos - Better Days

There were a number of early video attempts for Better Days during the demo period, including one in which we tried to emulate the retro technology themes of the artwork, but the quality really wasn't good enough to use (and anyway I think a lot of the footage was lost in a computer crash).

The off-colour negative footage was recorded in Leeds in around 2008, but we didn't really have much to go in the middle section, so my right hand plays the part of Simon here.

The Videos - I'll Give You Electro

The first video that we completed was the extremely dull one for I'll Give You Electro. We really just wanted to test the water, and see what would happen if we released something on YouTube, and it did reasonably well. I think the main reason that we never got around to doing a proper video was this...

Sappy has a track record of making videos for all his remixes, clearly demonstrating that he knows what he's doing rather more than we do where promotion is concerned. I find the grainy footage of woodlands gives it a slight darkness which isn't there in the audio, but it works rather well altogether - I particularly like the different fonts used to say "electro".

The Videos - Eyeballing

Eyeballing was the first of our proper videos to ever see the light of day, as Sappy made his own visuals for the song by cutting together excerpts from old footage. The floating squares and chevrons make for a slightly retro feel, but it's pretty effective.

The Videos - Here Comes the Summertime

Here Comes the Summertime was actually the first video we made, way back in 2008 while we were working on the early demo versions of the album

It also has the rare distinction of only having come out as a single because of the video. The original intention when Transmission came out was to release some kind of video for a number of tracks, not just the singles. But Here Comes the Summertime is one of the longest tracks on the album, and we couldn't really be bothered filming enough footage to keep it interesting for five minutes. So we started work on an edit, and everything just spiralled out of control from there.

In the end, the plan to make lots of videos never actually came to fruition because we were too busy, and also we didn't know what we were doing with the video editing software, as you can probably tell.

Sappy's version of the video takes some of the footage from ours, but also uses some fun 3D model footage, which mixes in rather well actually.

The "Art" of Transmission (Part 3)

In the previous two parts of this post, we looked at the artwork for the first five releases from the Transmission project, leaving just the singles Here Comes the Summertime, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Intermission.

Here Comes the Summertime

My personal least favourite of all of them is Here Comes the Summertime - the ideas are fairly clear. The circle of caterpillars somehow seemed appropriate, the lyrics are handwritten, there's some kelp, and the weird seashore shape going diagonally across the image. The earliest attempts were blue:

The weather symbol in the middle - loosely styled on the BBC's symbols - doesn't entirely work unfortunately - we probably should have chosen either a cloud or a sun. But instead we were concentrating on making everything go a murky green colour:

The final result is definitely better than that green one, but ultimately compared to all the other singles it just seems a little bit of a mess:

You can listen to Here Comes the Summertime here.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

As you saw last week, many of the elements that worked their way into the fourth single actually came from the Remission remix EP. Even this had a couple of false starts though - here's the working version:

Which obviously still needed a bit of fine tuning (although if you're looking for trivia, that isn't actually a sad face - it's a character from one of the Inuit fonts I found on my computer).

This mimics the album sleeve very closely: the floppy disc has been replaced with a View-Master reel; the interference pattern has been replaced with a picture of our Korg Prophecy in the background (playing the patch "Lovely Noise") and the waveform has been replaced with the semaphore version of the song's lyrics. Finally, the icon in the centre is a droplet (although it hasn't been confirmed whether this is in fact blood, sweat, or a tear).

You can listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears here.

Intermission

For the final sleeve on the Transmission project, we had a lot of elements to combine. We did have a couple of leftover sleeve ideas, one of which we had vaguely been considering for Golden Wheel, if it had ever been a single:

I had also at one point considered wasting some money and getting an actual 7" single pressed for Distant Moon, for which this might have been the artwork:

Note the image of Simon playing his synths, which sadly still didn't make it onto the final release. I particularly liked the moon icon on this one, which sadly never saw the light of day on an actual release. For the final version, we toned down the colour slightly, and combined our favourite bits of both the sleeves:

I think the waveform on the right hand side may still actually be from the vocals for Distant Moon, but it didn't seem to matter hugely with this release. The spider icon, web, and vinyl are there from the Golden Wheel sleeve, and most of the elements are there from Distant Moon too.

You can listen to Intermission here.

So that concludes our little journey through the artwork of the Transmission era. Hopefully you've enjoyed the trip!

The "Art" of Transmission (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this post, we examined the genesis of the visual style of our most recent album Transmission, and looked at how the first two releases ended up looking the way they did.

I'll Give You Electro

After the multi-layered complexity of the album, we decided to keep the single sleeves relatively simple, but we still worked a few oddities into this second single:

This is the only sleeve from the album which doesn't contain any photos. The initial background is a sort of vague, badly stylised circuit board pattern (inspired by the badly stylised interference pattern on the album). Overlaid on that is some binary code, which like the waveform on the album says "I'll give you electro," except for fun I took out the first column, as they were all zeroes, and replaced it with the words "ELECTROHYPERNOVA". And the centrepiece this time is an electric danger sign which we drew especially.

Ultimately the lack of photo makes it just look a bit like a wallpaper, but it's reasonably effective.

You can listen to I'll Give You Electro here.

Remission

For the remix EP, we decided to take a more complex approach, like the album sleeve. It was actually combined from two different sleeves, as we couldn't quite work out which direction to take it. This is the original sleeve for what might have been the Eyeballing single:

This version didn't last particularly long, due to the slightly disturbing bloodshot look, and because we already had the vague idea that Blood, Sweat and Tears might be a later single. At the same time we were also working on alternative ideas:

Interestingly, the eject icon was never actually used, but ultimately, ideas from both sleeves were combined, and the colouring was altered slightly, to create the final sleeve:

Which is distinctly less disturbing than some of the early versions.

You can listen to Remission here.

I'll Give You Electro II

The reissue of I'll Give You Electro came about very quickly and largely accidentally. Since we were tweaking everything a bit (a different version of the single, with different b-sides) we decided to change the artwork too.

This early attempt proved how easy it is to make these sleeves into a bit of a mess:

In the end we added a photo of some banana plugs from my Chimera Synthesis BC-16 mini-modular synthesiser, altered the colouring, pushing the circuit board image right back into the distant background, and added a different centrepiece. I think I prefer this version to the original:

By the way, the title I'll Give You Electro II only came about when we were uploading the single and realised that we couldn't have two releases with the same title, otherwise it might have appeared on the artwork too.

You can listen to I'll Give You Electro II here.

In part 3, we'll take a look at the later sleeves from the Transmission project.

The "Art" of Transmission (Part 1)

Of all our albums to date, I think Transmission probably had the longest gestation period, and the artwork developed very slowly over a number of years. This week we're already celebrating the third anniversary of its release, which seems a good opportunity to take a look back at how the "look" of the album evolved.

Initial concepts

After a few false starts, the very first idea we had was that we would incorporate images of retro technology into the artwork, so I spent some time over Christmas 2007 taking photos of old tapes, floppy discs, and vinyl, like this one which you might recognise from the Remission sleeve:

Not having taken the time to find any sheets for the background or light the images properly inevitably meant we had to diminish the quality of the images somewhat before we could use them for anything, but soon we were coming up with concepts such as this:

With 7"-sized sleeves for the singles, and LP-sized ones for the album. The battered 7" sleeve is from a series of singles containing nursery rhymes which I had as a child, and the 12" sized one is from a promotional single (I think it's Alizée's Moi Lolita, although I might be wrong).

I chose the silhouette of myself from the original Here Comes the Summertime video, although we played with a few other ideas too. At some point the waveform concept made its way in, as well (note the album title Distance - I don't remember if this was ever seriously considered, but it would have been quite a good name).

By late 2010, we had a relatively clear idea of what the visual style might be, but we still weren't quite sure how to fit all the ideas together, so a brief sidestep took us to what I called the "squares concept", trying to build a sleeve using evenly spaced images laid out across the page:

From this you can see we gained the centrepiece, replacing the actual cut-out vinyl section, where somehow the cassette spindle seemed to fit the bill rather nicely. This would become one of the key parts of the album imagery.

Better Days

Once the album was almost complete, we decided that Better Days was would be the first release, and we wanted to keep it relatively simple, so we just went with the arm waving image on the 12" sleeve, without too much processing, so that you should still just about be able to tell that it's taken from a real photo.

My only regret is the choice of colour - I'm not sure why we never changed if from that foul shade of vomit green which you can see on some of the early conceptual versions above. But never mind...

You can listen to the Better Days single here.

Transmission

There were some quite effective early versions of the album sleeve floating around in early 2011, such as this one:

Which actually works quite nicely in its minimalism (and no, that wasn't ever going to be the album title). I was keen to use the image of Simon, because I really like it, but that was vetoed. Somewhere along the line, it lost the 12" photo backdrop, and gained the floppy disc pieces instead:

Finally, within a couple of weeks we had added the waveform (that's me saying "transmission," in case you were wondering) and the simulated interference pattern, and we had a completed album sleeve, although we weren't too sure about the colour:

We had already had a "green" album (2002's Zero), and so we wanted to try something different. Another early attempt used a colour called "grandma's refridgerator," mainly just because we liked the name:

But finally we ended up with the bold blue colour, and since we had never even had a blue single before, let alone an album, this definitely seemed the way to go:

With the album sleeve complete, we had what we thought was a strong visual style for the album, something worthy of following up the Dusk sleeves of which we were also very proud. We just needed to ensure we could keep up the theme for the rest of the album releases.

You can listen to Transmission here.

In part 2 of this post, next week, we'll share some of the concepts and final designs for the early Transmission singles.

Leftovers

A few new versions were released after we published the initial commentary on this blog, so let's grab a nice chunk of bread and mop up those last few leftovers.

Golden Wheel

You can see the original notes for Golden Wheel here.

Sappy's Spinning Mix

Our friend Sappy approached us and said he'd like to try remixing Golden Wheel, and came up with this new version. As with some of his other mixes, particularly Eyeballing, it was a total surprise to us and took it in a completely different direction.

At one point, I think we had vaguely considered releasing Golden Wheel as a single in its own right, but we never quite got our acts together...

Funnelweb Remix

I wanted to try a remix of Golden Wheel around the time it was originally released, and it ultimately became this. I didn't have any particular grand plans in mind - just to try changing a few bits here and there, and maybe extending it slightly. The vocoder line from this was later added to the album version, but the backing vocals on the original never made it onto this remix.

Better Days

You can see the original notes for Better Days here.

Phased Approach

This slightly cacophonous version started life around the time we were finishing the album. I wanted to try remixing it from a completely perspective, and this was what happened. It gradually builds, adding a new part every couple of bars and steadily getting louder and louder.

At one point I was going to leave the choruses off altogether, but they seemed to work at the end, like one of the remixes of Useless by Depeche Mode. I did try putting them back where they belonged, but it never quite seemed to work as well.

Almost

You can see the original notes for Almost here.

The Extra Mile

Almost was the newest track on Transmission, and the one which helped us get back into gear and finally finish the album. We worked on it in parallel, and my take - and remember this was just for fun - was a drum and bass version. Several of the noises and ideas from that version made it into the original.

I'd long since ditched that version when in mid-2013, Simon decided to resurrect some of the ideas from it, building this great extended trippy version, and mashing my vocals a bit at the front. As one of our favourites and the track which had launched the album, it seemed a natural lead track for the remix EP.

And with the lead track from the seventh and final single Intermission, that concludes the commentary for the tracks on the Transmission project. We hope you enjoyed it!

Splinters

As a postscript to our ninth album Transmission, we released a second remix EP in October 2013 entitled Intermission, which included one previously unreleased track, Splinters.



Splinters was initially written by Simon, starting almost exactly a decade ago. It took three years to transition from "idea" to "demo", and even longer to finally appear on a release, as it took a very long time for us to find the right sound. Despite that, it's one of the early Transmission-era tracks which helped to define the sound of the album.

The lyrics come from a frustration about party politics, particularly Tony Blair and his cronies.

The lyrics:

You pierce my skin with your splinters
You freeze my spring back to winter
You turn my world on its side
And switch my day into night

And there’s no one but you who can take the blame

You wage acts of war and you expect me to talk
You redefine the crime as you lay down the law
We’ve suffered your arrogance so many times
And now you go asking us to toe the line
Splintered words

Your words etched deep on my conscience
A stream of venomous nonsense
You spit and you twist with your lies
And you’re the thorn in our sides

And there you go, you spew more rot and hatred

You wage acts of war and you expect me to talk
You redefine the crime as you lay down the law
We’ve suffered your arrogance so many times
And now you go asking us to toe the line
Splintered souls
And there’s no one without their head in shame

You wage acts of war and you expect me to talk
You redefine the crime as you lay down the law
We’ve suffered your arrogance so many times
And now you go asking us to toe the line
Splintered minds

(R. Martin / S. Martin)