Sunday, 29 August 2010

TEAP TAPE

Luke and I talked about about doing up some of our 4-track recordings as a tape release, but considering we are both lazy as hell this is as close as either of us are going to come to getting it done. You can BYO tape though, by all means.

It's 2 very short sides of recordings from May 2010, recorded at Via Studios (great folk there) on Luke's Tascam 464 and digitally tweaked by myself.

The Entire Asian Population - TEAPTAPE (megaupload).

Saturday, 21 August 2010

Rogers XP-8 Drums

1979 Rogers XP-8 kit in blue mist with matching dynasonic snaredrum...





These photos make them look kinda small, but they are massive sizes: 13", 14", 16" toms with a ginormous 24"x 18" kick. I'm guessing a previous owner put the maple hoops on the kick drum, because I've never seen them on another set in pictures or catalogues. I think they look sweet.

Until next time...

goodnight, sweet prince(s)

1979 catalogue cover

Check out vintage Rogers catalogues over at drumarchive.com (if you're into that sort of thing).

Friday, 11 June 2010

it's alive!

HAI,

Totally not into updating stuff I guess. However I have spent the day drinking coffee, recording music on my new cassette 4-track, and riding my bike to the shop to buy onions.

not pictured: onions

I ended up with a Neu! motorik vibe mixed in with some Eddy Current Suppression Ring style downstroke guitar action. My old WEM amp gets that nice vintage tone when matched with the bridge pickup on my blazer. Then it was a bit of wah overdub for that Neu! vibe.

Everything was done first take, the ride cymbal is too loud, the guitars are out of tune, and the WEM has a fairly nasty mid-range squeal, but I'm happy enough with this track to release it to the wild...

Nu-Mansfield (.mp3)
(To download, right click the link and hit 'save target as')

Also, I have a HEAP of new jams from the down under version of The Entire Asian Population, so I'll probably post them at some point. There's a bootleg of our first show over at Turn it up to 10. We might go for a loopy motorik vibe at our next show.

Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Oroku Saki - or How To Alienate The Vast Majority

In early 2008 I started jamming with my new housemate David in our living room. We both had some crappy gear and would stand around making feedback and droning for hours on end. We decided to keep the music that way and I gave us the name of Oroku Saki. We bought a bunch of less crappy amps and put them all in a pile on stage.


if you look closely, you can see the desecnt into madness

It's pretty hard to pinpoint exactly what this band was a reaction to, so I'll just say 'everything'.

It's pretty surprising that we got booked at all, considering the audacity of the whole project. I guess it just helps to know people who put on gigs. Not many people got what we were doing, it wasn't really 'band' music. There was no clapping or anything like that, we'd finish a piece and you could hear a pin drop. In your face, suckers.

In August 2009 we went to Dropout studios for a couple of days to record with Mark Davidson from Cove doing the engineering. It was a long 2 days. We spent 11 hours the first day working on mic placement and sound, mostly due to David's well trained Acoustician ears (he can measure decibel ranges by ear). On the second day we finally got around to tracking a looooong take of the second half of our set. During the take, after what seemed like a lifetime with a slow debilitating illness, I tried to signal to David to move on to the next part. He took this to mean 'keep going with this part'.

Not pictured: respect

So this is a track from that session at dropout. If you make it through to then end (and like it) then congratulations, you're a psychopath.

Oroku Saki (.mp3)

After a while we got sick of it and decided to make a more conventional band, which eventually became The Entire Asian Population. But we'll do a show if you want to book us, you weirdo.

Tuesday, 2 February 2010

The Oroku Saki bass sound

To me, there's a difference between something being loud, and being heavy. Sure, volume helps - especially with saturated tubes - but there is still a difference. Because you can take ANY sound and make it loud. Put one of those battery powered marshall amps through a sm57 and 500w PA and it's going to sound pretty loud.

Then there's heavy, which to me is different. From the twisted French mind of David Degos came something brutally heavy, in the sound bass sound of our 2 piece guitar and bass band, Oroku Saki.

Maybe it was the gear, or maybe it was the way he thrashed that bass like it called his mother a whore. It's one for the ages.

Don't look directly at it


Maybe the juice gave him power

Next time I'll be posting the tracks we recorded (for the first time in history).

Thursday, 28 January 2010

Some things are not meant to be and the world is better off for it

I found this drawing of the schematics of an (extremely) short-lived band that was put together by me and David after The Entire Asian Population ended.

David was playing a cheap little keyboard wired up out of its headphone jack through a RAT pedal into a Fender Bassman 300 (essentially a Sunn 300T aka the biggest bass amp known to man and alien) and an ampeg fridge. I wired up my drum machine through a zvex fuzz factory, big muff, and holy grail reverb pedal through a marshall half stack to make noise and sound effects in between 'songs', and would leave them running while playing drums, with the kit mic'd up through the delay unit on the PA.

We flew too close to the sun that day my friends.


It was the most productive team meeting in 2009


Wednesday, 27 January 2010

The Entire Asian Population, Part IV(?)

Like Star Wars, I'm going to start the tunes at a point where a whole bunch of non-essential stuff had already happened before, that you may or may not care about at some point in the future.

At this stage, The Entire Asian Population was me, David, and Leigh from Scul Hazards. Leigh joined the band after the original drummer Raul broke his foot, and I think we had a few shows booked so Leigh did us a massive favour, and also the dude is a shithot drummer, as anyone who's seen Scul Hazards can confirm.

We stuck a couple of mics around the room we practised in at Karma Studios in Stoke Newington and outputted the mixing desk to a digital recorder. These are the best 2 cuts from that day, sometime in June 2009. E-drone was an Oroku Saki track, one of the first ones we ever did. We later re-recorded these 2 tracks plus 3 more so hopefully I'll post them at some point. There has been talks of Leigh maybe putting vocals on them - that would be rad.


Despite this being a vanity site, there are no decent photos of TEAP with this lineup.

We played a few good shows with Leigh in summer of 2009, and then called it a day because Sculs were moving back to Brisbane, where they are now. David filled in for them on bass for their last few London shows.