Quick post to let you know that I have updated our widget with 3 songs from the brand new record. You can also see a tiny picture of the new cover.

Notice – The “Buy” link on the widget doesn’t work yet, as the music is not yet up on iTunes or any of the other online music sites. It should be up by about mid-July. Of course we will let you know. You can also pre-order copies of the CD’s by sending an email to info@organical.net. We will have our online order system up shortly.

We’ve Lost Contact with Monster Island

Here is the official track list:

1.  Targets
2.  Atari, USA
3.  Rendering
4.  Hibakusha
5.  Soviet Video Kings
6.  Here Comes the Radiation
7.  GIANT Monster
8.  Danger:
9.  Diabolik
10. The Beach
11. 48°52.6’S 123°23.6’W
12. Bugs in the Mainframe
13. Pixel Dust
14. Purple Alert
15. Urawaza

If you come back in a day or two I will probably have gotten a copy of the master so I can post a song up on the site so you can hear the result of all our hard work.   We are all immensely proud of what we have accomplished.  Darren has put together some kick-ass graphics for the CD and we will shortly update the website with our new visual ID as well.

Stay tuned, hopefully the fun is just beginning!

I can tell you that we are tentatively planning for a mid-June release and will have an official announcement about this as well as other exciting stuff.

Watch this space for more very soon.

The Management.

So every year I do a top ten list of music/CD’s that were my favourite and each year I get more and more goddamn lazy about the whole process.   Here it end of January and I still haven’t got it together.   So rather then wait and calculate here is some stuff I liked as best I recall.

Remember from past years, I don’t pay attention to release dates, only when I heard first but I think all these came out in 2009.

Let’s do this countdown style-like

Worthy of mention are a couple of metal records that just fell off the list:

Benefit – Engram
and
Kylesa – Static Tensions

some other honourable mentions:

Amesoeurs – Amesoeurs
Slayer – World Painted Blood
Between the Buried and Me – The Great Misdirect
Them Crooked Vultures – Them Crooked Vultures
Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Metric – Fantasies
Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
The Dead Weather – Horehound

Now the good stuff:

#10

Katatonia – Night is the New Day

They haven’t lived up the promise that Viva Empiness tempted us with, but they are still capable of putting out really good if somewhat predictable metal.   Take them at face value and turn it up.

#9

Doves – Kingdom of Rust

Another band that I think are a little south of their best work, but still excellent.   They frustrate me with over-production but I love Jez Williams singing, and there are some killer bits on here.

#8

Baroness – The Blue Album

I wasn’t expecting to like this despite grudgingly enjoying the red album, but this rocks.  It’s catchy and fun and grooves like a record.

#7

YOB – The Great Cessation

If I had some more time before I finalized this list this might have sneaked up a couple of spots.  I thought YOB had broken up, so this record caught me unawares and I’m just catching up.   As heavy as it gets and I love the slow burns as much as the violent eruptions.   I just need to see these guys live.

#6

Converge – Axe to Fall

I’ve always dug Converge, but this is the first record that made my neck hair stand up.  A great recording and some fantastic songs.

#5

Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

Another long time favourite, and another great record.   One of my favourite lyricists, I encourage you to take the time and read the lyric sheet on this one.

#4

Wilco – Wilco (The Album)

It sounds like the fun is back in this record that was maybe missing the past couple.   I was a little late to the Wilco party, just tuning into them around the buzz of Yankee Foxtrot Hotel and this is the first record since then which has close to the same level of consistency.

#3

The Mars Volta – Octahedron

Another record that I thought found the band getting back to what they are best at.   This is there best since the first, everything seems more streamlined and songs benefit from the renewed focus.

#2

Mastadon – Cracke the Skye

The first of two classic’s this year, Mastadon go from strength to strength each record to me.   I think this is the best metal album in the past few years.  They truly are creating their own stamp and in their own style.   A common theme on my choices this year is that patience is a virtue in unravelling and getting at the heart of the greatness in these recordings.   Cracke the Skye doesn’t give up it’s secrets easy but they are well worth finding.

#1

Flaming Lips – Embroyonic

Who knew they had this in them?   While I have enjoyed the band since Priest Driven Ambulance, they seemed to be heading further and further into light fluffy clouds of pleasent psychedelic prog rock, like King Crimson’s younger, more hip brother.   This is a slab of brilliant nightmare.    This is a work of no compromise(a double CD no less!) that bypasses your frontal lobe and latches right onto your subconscious.

I’ll be posting my favourite records of 2009 shortly as soon as I can actually remember what I listened to this past year.  I’ll admit that I spent a lot more then I planned listening to Comic Geek Speak Podcasts.

Well, yeah… but when we’re in recording and mixing mode, those activities take priority. (Part of the blessing and the curse of having access to our own studio and self-producing… we immerse ourselves fully in the process.)

I’ve been playing with Organical for nearly 8 years, and one thing that perpetually keeps things interesting is that the songs are always evolving, always changing, always fresh or different. I’m really thankful to be playing with musicians who don’t get too attached to [em]the way things are[/em], and are constantly pushing and exploring, in search of [em]the way things could be[/em]. I thought i’d post a bit on our creative process… how we work on songs as a band, and how they grow and change.

Songs undergo a few “life stages”, and our listeners will be exposed to them at various points along their evolution. Some songs just naturally want to stay the same, but others are very open-ended and seem to have endless opportunities for experimentation inherent in their very structure.

Steve is the main writer in the band, and will bring in new material in various states of completion. Sometimes it’s a riff or a beat that he wants to build around, other times it’s a very fleshed-out arrangement of parts that we learn. But we all have freedom to create or adapt our own parts, grafting them onto the core of the song in various layers.

As we learn and develop the songs, we play them extensively in rehearsal, tweaking arrangements and sounds, offering up suggestions to each other for different parts to play or different sounds to try. No egos involved at all… we’re all mature enough to give and take criticism constructively, so (for the most part) nobody’s nose gets out of joint.

As we prep for a record, the arrangement will generally get locked down and we record the song in that stage of its evolution.

But we don’t stop there.

We all firmly believe that songs are living, breathing entities, and that the recorded version of a song just documents one moment in the life of that song. So once we’ve committed it to a recording and have had a bit of time away from it while mixing, we return to the song with fresh ears as we re-learn material to start playing live again. We don’t allow ourselves to become slaves to the recorded version of the song.

This week was one of those great evolutionary pushes for a few of our the songs we’ve been working on for the new album. Recording is done, so we’re starting to re-learn material for a live set (including a Deftones cover that sounds awesome.) We picked things up surprisingly quickly, and found some new and interesting ways of changing things up a bit, re-imagining the songs without altering them at their deepest levels. Our live set should be very interesting. Some things are going to have to be re-worked a bit on the sample/loop side of things, but that’s something else that’s going to evolve. We sometimes shy away from using the machines on smaller gigs, but we’ve accepted and re-affirmed with ourselves that the machines are a big part of who we are… part of the Organical sound which makes us unique and different. So we’ve made a conscious decision to embrace the machine and integrate it into our live set at every opportunity, wherever it’s appropriate.

The evolutionary process is always fun, and in a way, it makes us the best Organical cover band anywhere!

Now that we’re mixing we have started up the Organical machinery and started to clean ourselves up for public scrutiny again.    If you go to our last.fm site, you will see we have added pretty much the entire Organical back catalogue, so if you are a user of that service, please add us to your playlists and radio stations and the like. 

Darren has also started to work on the visuals for the new record so we’ll start to freshen up our website(maybe, or maybe we’ll wait to the new one’s all complete) and new logos and whatnot may be appearing all over the place.   

We got out and played a couple of shows recently and it felt good to shake the rust off a little bit and get out there.   We played at the lovely Smiling Buddha in Toronto and had a great time with a bunch of friends and some gracious bands.   I broke my throat and electrocuted myself but everyone had a grand time.  

Then last weekend we headed up to Peterborough for the first time and made fun there as well.   We had some challenges including John breaking the skin on his snare (WOOT?) but everyone seemed to have fun including us and we will definitely head back up there once the new record is done.  If for no other reason then big bottles of Corona.  and I mean big.   I really should have taken a picture, you have no idea.

Lots of activity is starting up as we get closer to the record finish, I’ve been updating our web presence and we’ve been tossing around some graphical ideas for both the website and the CD art so expect that we’ll start putting some more info up here.   For instance, if you go to our Last.fm page you will find all of our previous music there.  You’ll also notice a new widget here on our homepage, which is the TuneCore one we are trying out to maybe replace our existing one when we update the site.

I’ll add more info here as I think of it.

We had originally planned to record 20 songs, which grew to 21.   With everyone taking as long as it has, we decided to drop one for sure and maybe come back to another one that we have been planning but haven’t been able to pull off yet.    It’s a complicated piece and we did a kick-ass demo of it but haven’t got our heads around recording it.
So we now have 19 songs, and we are in clean up mode.   Clean up is when we go through all the songs track by track and look for glitches (digital noise, or other
unexpected noise on a track) as well as timing and tuning errors and what not.   We also organize the mass of tracks and do some general housekeeping on levels and removing any EQ’s or processing we put on the tracks during the recording.  Often I will do a quick "rough mix" of a song so I can listen in the car and make sure that all the structural elements are in place and also to work on lyrics and flow.

Ed and I split up the songs, He’ll do cleanup at the mother ship studio, Bad Vision, while I work at my satellite studio, The Nether Regions which has replaced my Big Nowhere location. I’ve been there for a couple of years, but since we have been doing most of the work at Bad Vision, I’m still not settled at The Nether Regions (or settled in my Nether Regions for that matter.)

While i am cleaning the songs I am also going in and completing all the sequence work which I have mostly done in FL Studio (some is in Ableton Live.)   While it is fundamentally possible to ReWire FL Studio to Sonar I find it doesn’t work the way I want to and so it’s just annoying.   What I do instead is take a rough mix of the tracks from Sonar, maybe broken down into stems of drums, guitar, bass and vocals and then import those into FL Studio.  Then I can adjust any of the stuff I have in FL Studio, which might include soft synths, drum loops, sequences and samples, or all of the above.   I also do a lot of processing of these sounds directly there.    Once I have tweaked to my heart’s content, then I export all the sounds out of FL Studio as separate tracks, or groups of tracks which are then imported into Sonar.  It’s an extra couple of steps to do it this way, and I am edging away from using FL Studio and doing more stuff in Live or directly in Sonar, but I have because so accustomed to the workflow in FL Studio that it’s hard to adjust.

Doing this is time consuming, but also somewhat fulfilling because all the little flaws, or timing issues or what not that we have lived with in the ghost sequence tracks we recorded with can be cleaned up.   Sometimes it’s just a matter of polishing them off, other times it may require some deeper surgical procedures but in either case it’s very satisfying.

We have a couple of shows in the next month or so, which means rehearsal as we haven’t played as a band much in the past year while we’ve been recording, so some of the studio work will slow down a little.  My hope is that we are through all the cleanup and mixing in the next 3 or 4 weeks.   

We really will need to manage our mixing time better then we have in the past as we have a tendency to work a mix to death.   I want to keep the energy up and just bang out mixes.  Ideally I’m thinking a session per song.  Once everything has been through that process, we listen, make notes, final adjustments and then complete.