I had been thinking of my blog as a sort of semi-private thing, but looking at the stats today it seems I'm probably wrong. Much of what I've done online in the last few years has been music related, and I've done what I can to promote it to my friends, and anybody else I can reach, asking all to listen to what I've been doing. There's been a lot of self-promotion and that does tend to be the way of the internet and social networking, often we find we're only listening to one person's self-promotion in the hope they will reciprocate when we've got something to say ourselves!
However blogging has always seemed to me to be somehow more private, I kept a blog on myspace for a long time and over the years I've found myself glancing back through it as one would an old diary. Sometimes that's been practical, like re-learning the lyrics to an old song I'm busting out; and at others it's just been to remenisce and wander through my old thoughts. I never really got a sense that I had readers or that people were following my sporadic blogging. Apart from very occasionally from a handful of close friends I never really got any responses to my monologues, so I started to think of them as an externalisation of my internal thought processes, or perhaps a way of organising my thoughts before I take them out in public with me.
Today I glanced through the statistics and saw that I've actually had over 100 views, although I'm sure many of those actually came from my returning visits to check my discography entry against recordings I actually had and editting the entries to better reflect reality. Interestingly though I can see that I've had visitors from here (England), Australia, Iran, Germany and America; and that's made me realise how once those thoughts are out there they've been published publically and may come up in google searches on any of the subjects I've discussed. Hopefully this new appreciation of the workings of the blogosphere won't overly affect the things I choose to write about, although I'll happily admit I'll try more than ever to avoid the overly personal... I have no desire to air my dirty laundry in public.
The discography project led me to rediscover a whole bunch of material by my old band Kiyomori that we recorded either while the band was in the process of forming or after we'd recorded and self-released the Uprising EP and started making demos of new material that we hoped to eventually record as an album. For a few years now I suppose I've felt slightly irrationally ashamed of the stuff we did as Kiyomori, the mixture of politics and heavy rock is certainly not to everyone's taste - but I think I started to forget it was to mine! The Manic Street Preachers were one of the first bands I really fell in love with and the Holy Bible, the most visceral of their early albums, was easily my favourite.
I suppose another reason for my Kiyomori-related dispassion was the way in which our plans to follow Uprising with a proper album just slowly stagnated and fell apart. After recording the EP in France we returned home, designed the sleeve, got some copies made and even some badges!! We got copies for sale in local record shops and we got local radio shows to play us, so things seemed to be going well. Then I'm not really sure what went wrong, our promotion of Uprising seemed to stop and we didn't actually release the EP online until a year later, by which point we we'd already decided not to play some of the songs off it any more and we certainly weren't promoting it. At the same time we'd also started the demo's for the album in ernest, making pretty decent home recording versions of songs that had made it to the live set, including Puppet On A String (with some excellent synth work from Tim Mantle), Bangin', The World They Built For Us and Dance Like A Robot. After that we stopped working together effectively, we started lots of things and finished nothing.
I think ultimately we each wanted the band to go in slightly different directions... to my mind we already had an albums worth of material that we just needed to spruce up a bit and then record properly, but this wasn't the album everyone wanted to make. Sean was increasingly vetoing songs and after having many of my ideas rejected I stopped coming up with stuff, I felt like I had no idea what the desired material was supposed to sound like so I stopped trying to write it. We stopped gigging and found ourselves endlessly jamming a handful or riffs and grooves searching for the songs within them that stubbornly refused to materialise... for some reason that just put an image in my head of that Mighty Boosh episode where they come across Razorlight searching in the desert for the 'new sound'.
Anyhow, this discourse on Kioyomori's untimely end has been a detour I really wanted to talk about a new project I've set for myself, I rediscovered a whole load of the songs we'd started recording and not finished and decided that, combined with the 4 songs we already completed home demo's for, they'd make a pretty bloody good album. So I've begun to finish them off for a laugh! A lot of these tracks all come from one session where Ben and I recorded ourselves jamming our way through all our unfinished songs at the time. I had put guide and sometimes ad-libbed vocals on some of them and Ben had cut the more confused jams up into working song structures. When we took this work to Sean he wasn't really into it so it was all abandoned, but I think there are some real corkers in there and I wanted to hear them (sort-of) finished. It's not an easy task, I'm working on top of rough mixes so I can't take anything away (which would be really helpful for some of the ad-libbed vocals that make no sense) but it is quite fun and I can't wait until I've finished and I can sit back and enjoy the Kiyomori album that never was!!
Notes:
Work so far: -
Gekokujo - Rough mix had ad-libbed vocal, guitar, drums and a bass line in the verses (Sean wrote the riff). I finished off the lyrics, matching them to the ad-lib and recorded vocals and put a bass guitar and synth on the track. Currently I'm trying to mix it so the new vocal disguises the old ad-lib, but it's never going to be perfect.
Unsung|Unstrung - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Most of the lyrics were written, so I've just added vocals to reinforce the guide and added bass, additional guitars and keyboards.
Bird in a Cage (Part 2) - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Again I reinforced the guide with more vox, put a bass and some synths on the track... I had to rebuild the intro and outro too as the original was too slapdash for even my DIY tastes.
Tick Tock - We played this live as Kiyomori a number of times but never made a demo. A few years ago I made a ropey home demo with an extra instrumetal outro I had been working on, but my demo never had any drums as I had nothing to make drums with at the time. I've been playing around with writing drums for it using midi, but can tell already this is going to take awhile, I played some beats in using a keyboard, but I'm going to have to go through bar by bar and match the beats to the odd timing of the track, which wanders from the click quite badly and has a different tempo on the outro.
Other tracks:-
Fighting Fire With Fire - I'm gutted about this, we spent ages on it and it was the closest to the standard of the four we considered finished. Sadly it looks like we never mixed it down and Ben's computer has a terrible worm, I booted up the session the other day and tried to mix it down but it only managed 25 seconds before crashing and even then some of the guitar tracks have disappeared. I'll try again to get it off there and failing that I'll record it again from scratch so there's a record as I love the song and it's bizarre structure.
Rendition, Invisible Hands, Deliverance, Not In My Name - I never finished the lyrics to these songs but luckily I have versions with drums & guitar and versions with drums/guitar and adlib. So it should be easy to add bass, vocals and synths when I've written words based on the ad-libs.
What Goes Around - I have a version of this with Ben playing the bass and me doing a terrible ad-lib. Annoyingly there's no instrumental version so I'm going to have to sing the already finished lyrics over a load of gibberish and try to hide it in the mix... nearly finished though and also one we played live once.
More To Lose - I was surprised when I listened to this, it was much more finished than I had thought. I thought it was an abstract collection of ideas but it actually has verses and choruses and all you'd expect. It's drums, guitar and an ad-lib vocal, but the ad-lib vocal actually makes a sort of sense so this one just needs a bass-line and some synth work and it's finished!
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