What's up?

Hey,

it's been a while. I'm not in a mood to post pointless bullshit every day just to keep you entertained, so I take some time to just post pointless bullshit to keep you entertained every once in a while.

Kidding aside, you might actually want to know what we are doing. Well, I'm back and recovering from a nice tour with Wight, and I really need a vacation, but despite that fact we're not sitting on our lazy asses doing nothing, that's for sure. I have been communicating with some people getting the first 2013 live appearances fixed. We have no album out yet, the local black metal scene isn't doing so well, especially in the live sector, and Sperrfeuer and I also play in other bands which are quite busy, so it's not that easy, but we have some stuff coming up, so stay tuned.

Furthermore, I am having a very creative time right now. For some reason, I usually get creative when I have absolutely no time to work all the ideas out - which is the case right now. I am trying to get myself at least an hour a day to work on new ideas beside my job and studies though, and it kind of works at the moment. Keep in mind I also have to practise quite a bit to keep my bass playing skills up for my other band.
 I presented some riffs for a new song to the other two guys today to a great response, so I guess I'm quite successful with my work flow. Also, we are still working on another new song, which has the fastest and most technically challenging riffs and drum patterns we have done so far.Which doesn't say much considering our amateurish approach at playing instruments, but it's still hard to learn. ;-)

But we ain't done yet. As my bandmate from Wight, Rene, who is in charge of producing and mixing our album, is currently on tour as the sound engineer for My Sleeping Karma, who support Monster Magnet on their current European tour, the mixing dates are postponed to December. Meanwhile, we have some time to take care of the artwork. I must admit that it's quite hard for me - I'm a creative musician, but I have less than zero imagination when it comes to visual art. Luckily, I have band mates who are a bit different. Our stage imagery is based on ideas by DTM and Sperrfeuer, and it's going to be the same with the album artwork. The guys had a very creative evening tonight, with me only sitting around, drinking good Hessian beer and saying "Hey, that's great!" or "Fuck hell, this looks horrible!" every once in a while. We're not done yet by a long shot, but it is starting to take shape.

Well, that's it for today. Tomorrow, I will be heading to Würzburg to play bass at the Psychedelic Network Festival with our improvisational kraut rock project WICHT, which is basically a collaboration of my other band Wight with jazz trio Nic Demasow. Rene was flown in from Norway - skipping a couple of dates on the MM/MSK tour - just for this gig (fetched him from the airport today), so be there and expect the utter kraut out armegeddon.

Good night
Mithras

Studio report Pt.II

As announced last week via facebook, we have finished the album recordings. While I was still on vacation, Rene and Sperrfeuer Heretic met in a small studio to edit the live recordings and make a first rough mix. Last week on Tuesday, I went in to record guitar overdubs. While I had rhythm and solo guitars readily arranged for some songs, I had no idea what to do on others. We ended up getting a bit creative with arrangements and sounds, actually utilising all five pickup configurations of my Strat. Also, there is one rhythm guitar arrangement we spontaneously made which goes back to an idea by Rene. It does help if the producer is an experienced guitar player, especially for me, originally being a bassist and doing studio recordings on guitar for the first time. Anyway, let me tell you the songs sound FAT with two guitars. I tried to make the parts for the second guitar less dominant so we can still reproduce the sound live, though.

We recorded all Tuesday afternoon and got drunk at Rene's place afterwards. After a quick trip back to my home to finish some emails I had to write and to make some phone calls, we recorded the rest of the electric guitars as well as an acoustic guitar part on Wednesday. After that, we went for the vocals. Two songs on Wednesday night, four songs on Thursday. Although I take some pride in basically being able to scream for quite a while without straining my voice, my throat did hurt after recording vocals and backing vocals for an entire album in merely two days. But I suppose it actually sounds pretty good... or pretty ugly, if you will.

Sperrfeuer and DTM visited in the studio a couple of times, but as bass and drum tracks are completely recorded already, there wasn't much to do. Now, we went back to the rehearsal space yesterday and started working on new stuff immediately. There's one new songs where Sperrfeuer wrote lyrics, which inspired me to write some crazy riffs - let's see how this one turns out.

Next week, we will start mixing the album, after that I'm on tour with my other band - www.wightism.com - which you should definitely check out. Then we need to find someone to get the album out there... we will probably not make a 2012 release, but it will be out in early 2013 for sure.

Yours
Mithras