lucy jane - after a series of unfortunate events involving broken tape machines, unwanted distortion and endless uncomfortable phone calls, we ended up mixing our recordings in sunny rochdale at lisa stansfield's gracielands studio.
thanks to a hugely lovely and talented bunch of chaps, we've ended up with a superb set of mixes done in record time. our engineer steve was incredibly quick and amazingly creative, coming up with some really lovely slightly eno-esque treatments for a couple of tunes. luckily he appeared to genuinely like the music, which always helps. plus, it should be said that we'd got some generally very nicely recorded source material from our sessions at dropout. lucy writes about it here.we've also been doing a few gigs. we're not a pub indie band or a glorified karaoke act which means that in the wrong environment it can be hard work. but when the sound's ok and the audience are listening (or at least are quieter than us) then it can get sort of magical quite quickly. on the rare occasions we manage to hush a previously rowdy audience, i get the feeling that this is quite special stuff.
clang sayne - laura's moved to ireland these days, but is back in london as i write. we've done two gigs this week - one at cafe oto (london's hippest venue, according to matt) and last night at the gladstone. plus a radio session for resonance fm's dexter bentley show and recording this weekend. it's still a tidy little unit, and coincidentally winterlands is still picking up nice reviews, including one in the current wire mlagazine. for the gigs, we've gone back to doing more 'song-y' material rather than the more improvisatory stuff we've been exploring lately. even so, we never ever play the same song the same way twice anyway, so anyone turning up expecting to hear the album played live was likely to be disappointed. which is fine with me.
sonnamble - the new line-up's settling in but there's a sense that there's a lot of territory still to explore. conor's treatments and the playing seem to be finding a nice synergy. playing live wasn't easy for the duo, mainly because it takes a decent sound system and a fair amount of time soundchecking to get anything like an environment where we can get a good performance. the quartet might be a thornier proposition still, but i think we'll manage it....
