collabs

Music: ease and desist – mad dog

~ Clicky Steve ~ Leave a comment
ease and desist album

When it comes to making music, I’ve tended to avoid using too many samples – preferring to create the constituent parts of any track with my own hardware. Over time though, that has changed, and in the middle of 2019 I decided to try working on some completely different styles of music than I would usually.

One thing led to the next, and before long I had a track which was crying out for someone to rap over it. I took to the Internet, and found Maya Miko, who came up with awesome vocals, based on my ideas. The video for that track is below.

Throughout 2020 this pattern continued, and I found myself with a bunch of tracks coalescing around the same kind of musical theme. I tried collaborating with a few different vocalists, but in the end, always ended up going with Maya’s takes.

MAD DOG 2020 is the culmination of this experiment, resulting in a six track EP. It took over a year to put together, and mixing/mastering this was a particular challenge, as adjusting for a totally different genre to what I usually work with was tougher than expected.

The EP is up on Spotify to stream (under the ‘ease and desist’ moniker), and also available for download on the Cow Tongue Taco Records page:

Hog Wild EP

~ Clicky Steve ~ 1 Comment

Back in November, Lee came to stay with me for a week or so while he was looking for a new flat. We decided to make the most of the time by collaborating on a new side project.

In between making food, walking the dog, and working from home, we took turns writing and recording parts of what turned out to be a five track EP. Lee focussed on the drums, guitar, and bass, while I added the vocals and electronic parts. Both of us helped shape the structure and feel of the tracks, and Lee did some kind of production wizardry to make it all sound fantastic.

Gear wise we had a pretty simple setup, despite what the pictures below suggest. Lee had a basic audio interface for the instruments, I used a cheapy Behringer condenser mic for the vocals, and the synthy parts were almost all based on a single Eurorack voice (utilising a C64 SID chip).  Listening back, it’s pretty crazy to think that the songs can sound so huge when they were literally all recorded between my kitchen and living room.

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One of the coolest bits about the project for me was the collaborative part though. It’s easy to get stuck when you are working alone. Here though, whenever we hit a block, we would just pass what we had on to the other person. More often that not, they would hear the potential in what we thought sounded crap, which helped push the process along. A healthy way to produce, and truly collaborative rather than combative.

Here is the result:

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Artwork by the fantastic Ghostvoices / Jake Brown.

You can download the EP for free over on the Cow Tongue Taco Records label page. It will be available to stream on Spotify etc from the end of the month, and there will also be a limited cassette tape version available too.

https://cowtonguetacorecords.bandcamp.com/album/hog-wild

New Track with Al Roney

~ Clicky Steve ~ 1 Comment

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Last week, my friend Al came round for a couple of beers, and brought with him some of his beautiful synths: a Korg Arp Odyssey, and a Dave Smith OB-6.

We played about with them for a while, and then hooked our setups together for a wee jam.

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The result came out pretty well, and we ended up recording a couple of tracks. The first – Ikebukuro – is below, filled with big swirling synthy sounds right out of the 80s.

Here’s a direct link for posterity, incase Soundcloud goes bust like they are threatening to.

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drouth (reprise)

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Writing vocals for electronic tracks is a totally different ball game to other kinds of music, and can be particularly daunting if you come from a more traditional style of songwriting. Because of that, back when I was writing drouth, I found myself hitting a wall fairly frequently, and I wondered what it would be like to ask some other artists I know to give their own take on the tracks if they had free reign to do whatever they wanted to them vocally.

I pulled together a few talented folk who were up for giving it a bash, and despite some initial protests (‘wtf am I going to do with this!?’), they have re-imagined the tracks in some amazing ways… to the extent that the new versions are even better than the originals.

Here’s a bit more info on who is on there…

Andrew Howie

Andrew Howie is a Scottish singer-songwriter with an incredible voice who has been making music on a whole variety of different instruments for as long as I can remember. For this release, he turned his hand to ‘bottle neck’, which resulted in the seriously cool ‘bottle neck heart attack’. You’d think he had been doing this electronic stuff all along.

You can find more from Andrew on his bandcamp.

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Christy Scott is an old young friend and tcheuchter upstart from the true North-East of Scotland. Usually found foraging in the more traditional music world, she brought some impressive soul to new versions of both ‘mex’ and ‘bottle neck’.

Follow along with her inevitable successes on her Facebook page.

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Carly Stambaugh is a fellow Automattician, from across the pond in San Francisco. She wants to be Cyndi Lauper when she grows up, and lended her vocal stylings to a new take on ‘obsolete by design’. Photo credit: Marcus Kazmierczak

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Pulco aka Ash Cooke is a Welsh madman who lives in the middle of nowhere, and a long term collaborator and friend. He is one of the most prolific musicians I know, with a huge back catalogue up on Bandcamp – well worth checking out. He brought his unique brand of spoken word beauty to two tracks: ‘wealth sprouts wings’, and ‘Mr. K’.

As for the music itself, you can download it for free over on Bandcamp, stream it below, or check out Spotify in a couple of weeks when it appears. If you like any of the tracks in particular, give the folk above a shout. I know they’d appreciate the support, and they definitely deserve it!

mexxed again

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When I was recording drouth, there were a bunch of tracks that I wish had vocals, but that I couldn’t quite come up with something on my own. In the end, it worked out for the album that they remained largely instrumental… but I thought it would be cool to get some different folks to do their own take on vocals.

As part of that, musician pal Christy Scott lent me her voice for a couple of tracks. Ultimately, the idea is to release all of them as a collection. For now though, here’s a new version of ‘mex’, with Christy on vocals. I think it sounds pretty great…

You can download it here. (right click > save as).