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.

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).