brutal insanity 2012 version

well i have finally completed redoing the old brutal insanity album from 1999. i am really happy with it too. just wished the original had sounded like this version.
i did what i thought about doing in previous posts regarding the album. i recorded new solos for three or four songs and it fit really well. god my speed has improved since 1999! i think i did all i could to get the frequencies correct too.
i also made it flow as a whole album by adding samples between most songs - racking my brains for soundbites i had heard over the years that might fit.
its now just 26 minutes of non-stop brutality. unfortunately because i added samples and because some ex-member holds the copyright (even though i nearly wrote the whole thing!) i cannot make it available to buy, however i have made it free to download.
i am content now knowing the album finally sounds how i always wanted it to sound.

http://soundcloud.com/jamiexgraham/brutal-insanity

BLACK METAL PART II

This took up most of my time between march and may of this year. but finally i completed the second song in my black metal project. (the first being symbols in the sand).
i am aiming to write nine songs so i can put together a full album of this stuff. but it's hard work! i really started to get bogged down with this one and it got to a point where it wasn't a labour of love anymore. yet i didn't want to rush it just to finish it. i can't remember how many tracks i ended up recording for it but i remember listening back to the finished version for the first time i was disappointed in it. i guess it's cos when you're recording something you listen to the passages countless times so i was sick to death of it. but now listening back to it i am pretty pleased with it.

"my own private armageddon"

i am just garnering a few ideas for the third song. i have a couple of riffs written for the next one. at the moment i am thinking of opening the next one with a classical piece. we will see. i seem to swing from one idea to another though during writing.

aside from working on this song i have been working on redoing the brutal insanity cd from years ago (see previous post). i started to write new riffs to play over it but when recording them it sounded to disjointed - kind of like an afterthought (which is exactly what it was). anyway i have redone 9 out of 10 songs - just adding little bits here and there and tidying it up a bit. it's just that the original cds frequencies and balance are all over the place so there's not a lot i can do with it.

once i have remastered the final song i am thinking of adding guitar solos to it - but then again it may sound like an afterthought. i will see how it goes. the other idea i had for it is this: i was going to take 3 or 4 songs at a time and run them together - linked maybe by samples so instead of it being a cd with 9 or 10 it'll be a cd with 3 parts to it - the first (that i am aware of) deathgrind concept album!

so i will post it here once complete and maybe make it available for download.

it's been a while!

wo when did i last post?! so much to catch up on! where do i start?
ok......looking back on my youtube account there's a few videos that i haven't posted here so here goes!

"the nocturnal silence"

this was a cover of the swedish band necrophobics early 90's classic. i really felt the sample of bela lugosi would top it off well. i play this song slightly different to the original.

"dreaming of drowning"

i had a simple riff in my head but by adding layer upon layer of guitars and synths it makes it sound anything but simple. my favourite "guitar sound" of all time is the sound billy corgan has on his underrated solo album "thefutureembrace". i sort of got that on this song. don't know how though - i think there'll be a bit of difference in the price of equipment we use!

"wolf at door"

once again i kept it simple. simple drum patterns, ugly little guitar riffs, just adding and adding things as the song goes along and grows. i think it has a sort of film score quality to it.

i have several other videos on my youtube account which i won't be posting here if you would like to check them out.

brutal insanity to reform?.......NO!!!!!

travelling in the car with me must be painful sometimes. getting ready to even pop to the garage or the shops i scan my cd collection - grabbing 5-6 cds for a 10 minute journey! at the moment all i am listening to is black metal or death (not usually the best music to drive to unless you want to get zapped by speed cameras!)
anyway i digress....the other day i picked out my brutal insanity album (my old band). i really like most of the music on it but it reminds me of bad times, petty squabbles etc. i suddenly had a eureka moment!
i find the cd plagued by shitty sounding weak guitars and tinny bass. i also hate some passages from it. so.... my idea is to not really remaster as such but to edit bits that don't do it for me and to write new guitar lines for each song and record them over it. keeping the original guitars but trying to beef the sound up a little bit. not sure if it'll work. anyway i guess it'll take a while what-with it having 12 songs on it. but i will cut two songs at least that i really don't like anyway - don't think i can make a good song from a bad starting point.
i'll be posting little bits here and may even make the whole thing available for download here when complete.
other that that i am still working on my black metal project but it's coming very slowly at the mo. also garnering ideas for and 80's cover cd for my parents xmas present - did my mum a cover of the stones "paint it black" last xmas and she loves it so asking various friends to add to my list of 80s covers. will whittle it down to 10 or so. got about 30 ideas so far. anyway here's a song from the brutal insanity album in its original form before i try and make it better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0oYwVRH9fE

missed opportunity.....

ugh......
checked my emails today. got my monthly smashing pumpkins newsletter. i hadn't read them for a while. i was unaware that billy corgan was running a competition for smashing pumpkins cover versions! i have done sooooo many of them. i often record covers when i am in between writing my own material. i only do them for my own amusement really. that and to get more experience in recording processes.
anyway on reading it the date for submissions has already been and gone! argh!
shit happens i guess. but to me more than most!

http://grungereport.net/?p=10513

 ok so regardless of that i thought i'd post one of my pumpkins covers. it's for the song "starla" - bside to "i am one". it also appeared on "pisces iscariot". thought i would cover it as it's not the usual song a fan would cover (being over 10 minutes long and layer upon layer of guitar and one of the great guitar solos). as per usual it is me on all instruments. enjoy!

music to come....

hmm thought i'd better post as i haven't done for a while.
i have been listening to a lot of black metal recently, ranging from burzum and abigor to usbm. but i have seemed to be busy doing other things besides music so after this week i will focus solely on writing.
i have set myself a target too - to write a black metal opus each month until i have 9 - enough for a full length cd. it doesn't seem too difficult to achieve if i look back at how many songs i was writing last year but this is going to take a monumental effort as the amount of work that goes into each fragment of a song is almost infinite.
last week i started writing the 2nd song for my black metal project "baal ov". it took over 3 hours just to record the opening 10 seconds. i could say an analogy of the process is a quote by boswell on the writing of "the life of samuel johnson" - "every word was like tearing a strip of flesh".
the beginning to the song - hmm - well i sampled for a beating heart (it was actually very hard to find a decent sample on youtube). i use the beating heart as the rhythm instead of a drum and a piece of music fades in over it reminiscent of goblins soundtrack to profundo rosso. then it kinda goes folky and then BRUTAL!!!!!!!
last year i would have been posting a song here every few days but hey i'm going for quality over quantity now.

i posted a new vid to youtube a few days back. i was a black metal song i did using samples of anneliese michels exorcisms as the vocal track. see what you think.
i was quite pleased with it apart from i didn't like the sound of the drums too much.
oh well - better go and get on with music now.

History of me and music part II

so here are snippets from my lecherous musical past - recordings of each band i was part of dating from 1991 - 2004.

spastic carcass - kill tim (1991)
a recording from my infamous first band way back when i was nearly 15. usually we only had a drum machine behind our songs but at this time we actually found a drummer. i only have two songs of this band where we recorded with an actual drummer. it is me singing. can you tell i made the lyrics on the spot?? i can't remember what had happened but tim (thumbnail), our bassist, had really annoyed me hence the title. it was recorded at a practice. we had the riff ideas in place beforehand. chris (i think that was his name!) the drummer improvised. i remember us playing the recording of the practice when we got home - tim had no idea what i had been singing until that point - i don't think he was too pleased.

scab sausage - puddle/the bug (1994)
the band i had with a friend called marcus. it is me on bass on this song. the song changes from "puddle" to "the bug" at around the 4.10 mark. the bug took its name from the dance craze in the film "hairspray".

inamorato - painting with multi-colours (1996)
song taken from our first demo. i played guitar on this and did the black metal type of screaming on the end riff (don't like my voice on this song - it wasn't harsh enough). i was usually given the basic riffs of the songs we did and made them pretty with my guitar work. we recorded the demo at a studio based in the warren building in hull. this is part of the demo we mailed to record companies (without success).

brutal insanity - religious inveigle (1998)
off the 2nd demo i recorded with the deathgrind band. i think this marked the end of brutal insanity phase I - the music arrangements became more complex after this. this was a song that they had initially recorded a year previous to me joining on another demo but i liked the song for its ferocity and knew with me in the band we could record it a million times better. rich, the vocalist, wanted me to do the solo at the end and i hadn't written one, so i just did my best impression of trey azagthoth from "morbid angel".

mouthful of grub - grot (1999)
a track from my grindcore band. this is taken from our 2nd demo "sweet sickteen".i wrote everything and played everything in this band apart from drums. funny how this demo keeps popping up as a split cd with various below-par grindcore bands and the drummer gets all the $$ as he copyrighted it before i could! nice eh? again, this was recorded at the warren studios in hull. the deal at the studio was that you recorded from 9-5 on day one and on day two you mixed it. i remember the engineers face when on day one he asked me "so how many songs are we recording today?" my answer was 17! the norm would be around 2-3! but i got it done.

atheist is your stable mind - motion sickness (2000)
these recordings stem from the time i was in x.amp.L3 in which the main riffs from that band where used on the motion sickness demos. lee (our bassist) did all the arrangements. it took him months to put all the fragments and riffs together into coherent songs. then he would add tims emcee and my screams. very complex music and processes. it was more of a science project than music, which i didn't enjoy too much.

jenny - voice (2004)
i had been listening a lot to mike pattons "adult themes for voice" and "pranzo oltranzista" albums and yamantaka eyes work. the recordings were done initially for a joke. i was at my parents house with my youngest brother nicholas. the idea came up for me to interpret people he knew in song form. i recorded it in the kitchen using my guitar amp and a vintage microphone i picked up from a charity shop. the recordings became something of a cult with his friends. i got other people coming up to me to ask me to record a song about them.

after all of these bands is when i started to sit in my room night after night and come up with the initial ideas for future work including hence the hat.

ride the plaid wave

"automatic joy"
no the title is not a reference to the dresden dolls but it is named after a band in the mid 90s in my home town of hull. of all the different types of music i write and record this is the last of my fake bands to show (mike tv). actually i just realised that i have another set of songs that have a electro disco feel but they never got tied under a name. maybe i post one sometime. anyway i digress!
as an adolescent in the 90s i stayed away from all the britpop stuff and embraced the music from across the pond. those were the days! god i sound old! the smashing pumpkins with siamese dream, hole, pavement, mudhoney and sonic youth. (was not keen on nirvana though).
for years when it came time for me to do a guitar solo i'd just improvise as fast as i could, throwing finger tapping, harmonics and whammy bars into the mix, but when you are trying to solo over a grunge, shoegaze type riff it obviously doesn't work too well.
this song kinda reminds me of the pumpkins "why am i so tired". i could've kept playing over the chord sequence for aeons. i think i recorded two solos and merged the best bits.

mother! blood!

"theme from psycho"
i was sifting through recordings i did in the last year to try and post something death metally - which could've fit under the spastic carcass moniker. so here it is! psycho was etched into my memories since childhood. i remember my parents going out for the evening and my goth babysitter letting me stay up to watch it. at a guess i would say i was 8 years old.
i think that the main theme from psycho is arguably the greatest movie soundtrack of all time. it really suits it. so discordant and those sharp violin slashes within the piece (not the ones in the shower scene) actually feel like they could cut.
for this project i tried to figure out what each instrument in the original was playing and transferred that to guitars. i couldn't believe a death metal or heavy metal band hasn't made a good stab (no pun intended) of covering this. i just hope people will think i have!
the sample actually comes from psycho II. i could've opted for a more famous sample but i just adore this one. his real mother just turns up and tells him that he is her son, they chat then he bludgeons her to death with a shovel. not before calmly asking her if she would like a sandwich. classic!

hence the hat

"all for a girl"
this is one of my favourite songs i have written. i wrote this way back in 2005 but didn't record it properly until last year. usually i'll chop and change riffs in songs all the time but this one has stayed in the same form since i wrote it. i know to take the song to the next level it really needs vocals but i always get stumped with this one when trying to write vocal melodies as the first chord sequence is nearly identical to the pumpkins song "real love" - so i always get billy corgans lines in my head.
this is from my "hence the hat recordings", so i have now posted a hence the hat recording, a dads mod porn club number, (chocadooby) a baal ov one (symbols in the sand) and torture garden (for wherever they are).
i have mike tv and spastic carcass ones to follow. then i am thinking of posting a song from each of my other bands since i was 12 and hopefully after that i'll be getting some new material up here!

!!!chocadooby!!!

 

"Chocadooby"

so this is a song i did under the band name of "dads mod porn club". i used that band name for all my silly, funny or offensive music i recorded (which was quite a lot last year!)

i absolutely love kinder surprise. i love them especially for the crappy toys inside. i took samples from the creepy kinder surprise advert from the 80's where a sinister humpty dumpty character talked in a gobbledegook language. most of the riffs i basically ripped from the band "fantomas". 

towards the end of the song you can hear me saying "mom i really want a kinder egg!". 

Black Metal! \m/

"symbols in the sand"
 in my very first post i described how last year i had written so many different styles of music that i couldn't possibly pigeon-hole them all under one name. this is a song i wrote late on last year under my black metal moniker "baal ov". again it is me playing everything. i think all in all it took around 200 seperate tracks to record. the audacity program only allows you 16 tracks. to get over this i export the 16 tracks and re-import them as one track thus allowing me to add further tracks.
the title was originally "swastikas in the sand". i always find it easier to write black metal music during the winter months, the season lends itself well to the music. black metal in itself incorporates so many different styles. i guess it is a broad term that ranges from the stripped down apocalyptic sound of early burzum and dark throne, the folk elements that many bands including ulver and primordial integrate within their music to the majestical and epic compositions of abigor (whom are my absolute favourites in the genre).
i have a few other songs recently written in this style but not to a standard i would like. i guess maybe my next song will also be in this mode.

New song!!!!

 "for wherever they are"

Just finished my latest song "for wherever they are", which has taken a bit longer than i had anticipated (17 days to be exact). based on kentucky hymn variations, with layer upon layer of guitars, pianos, strings and harps. the premise behind the title is a dedication to all lost souls, whether it be runaways who dare not make contact or bodies that lay in unmarked graves and the like.
i wanted some sort of other-worldly production so i placed a tonnage of reverb on each track and took some recordings off shortwave radio. the sample at the beginning is an excerpt from an interview with richey edwards from the manic street preachers.
initially the song wasn't going to be another instrumental and i had a line for it. i kept singing "leave the light on" over and over again, but i think it suits the song to be left without vocals.
hmm what next for me? well i have unused tablature scrawled in my notebook so maybe i'll get around to patching some of those riffs together but for the next week or so our place is being decorated which means limited access to my recording room.
hope you enjoy the song!

History of me and music

me aged 3

i have had music around me ever since i can remember. my mum playing elvis and buddy holly records were my first memories of music. 3 years of age i used to go to the local market and make the most of the record stalls offer - 3 ex jukebox 7 inches for 60 pence. buying such luminaries as lene lovich and blondie.
i got my first proper guitar on my fourth birthday. i had lessons at my school, but for some reason my teacher insisted that i play the guitar right handed even though i'm a lefty. it felt awkward and not wanting to get into trouble i stopped my lessons and left my guitar to gather dust.
at around 12 years i really started getting into metal. i picked up my old guitar and started trying to teach myself old sabbath tunes. a couple of my friends who were brothers had electric guitars; marcus and tim hanson, and their father had a huge collection of metal albums and a 70s gibson flying v.
around that time there was a few shows on british tv about heavy metal. i remember seeing excerpts from a slayer concert and i was hooked. i borrowed tonnes of my friends fathers albums. i really loved his kiss records, especially his copy of "alive" as he still had the original tattoo transfers. i only knew kiss from their recent "crazy nights" record. i was taken aback by their image and was soon hunting down their albums and video footage. my favourite member was ace frehley and for my 13th birthday i was given a black les paul copy.
i had a few private lessons but my tutor really tried to teach me theory early on and it turned me off going. later that year i wanted to start replicating (or trying to) a lot of solos i heard - notably eddie van halens tapping and sounds he got using the whammy bar. unfortunately my les paul didn't have a whammy bar so i saved i bought a young chang guitar - it was total metal! complete with cracked effect paintwork and a floyd rose.
me and my friends really started getting into the death metal scene at this point. each lunchtime we'd head home from school and spend the hour listening to morbid angel, nocturnus and deicide.
at our school there was one band who everyone apart from us thought were sooooo cool. god i remember them doing an awful free and black sabbath cover at assembly one day and the place going crazy. i thought they were real pussies so devised a plan to make a death metal band with tim, marcus and my younger brother scott.
studying death metal lyric sheets and what-not as we tried to come up with a name, we noticed the lyrics were either gory or anti-christian. we didnt know enough on the subject to portray ourselves as anti-christian so we tried to think of some idea that would also get under peoples skins. we came upon the name "spastic carcass".  really just for a shock effect. i designed our logo and had personal guitar picks made. we came up with slogans and i remember making cassette inlays for each taping session we had (usually at tim and marcus' house).
as time went on our playing got better, tim shifted from rhythm guitar to bass. i also started to listen to a lot of different music including frank zappa, bjork and 70's prog rock. my obsession with the smashing pumpkins began too. i started to feel the need to write and record songs that werent necessarily within the death metal genre so marcus and i started a little side project in 1994 called scab sausage.
we wrote silly comedy songs, pretty little guitar instrumentals and anything else that took our fancy. i also started using samples as interludes in our home recording sessions, anything from excerpts of frank zappas "uncle meat" to snippets of me secretly recording my grandfather.
i noticed around the mid '90s all the kids who i knew from school who'd initially picked up guitars as some sort of teenage fad had lost interest, yet here i was, 18, still playing for my own amusement and pleasure. i knew at that point that i would still be doing it some 20, 30, 40 years later.
tim joined a local deathgrind band called "brutal insanity" who had a few demos for sale in the local indie shop. they were seen as a joke in and around where i lived. but their drummer was good; we had found it hard to find a drummer, let alone a good one. up to this time we'd only recorded with drum machines. we asked the drummer jon to join us for a practice. he realised that as musicians we were light years ahead of his band. so he decided to join us whilst keeping brutal insanity on the go.
we played a few local gigs - for me and marcus these were our first gigs. our setlist was made up of death metal covers. we also went to what used to be my local pub where they had an open mic night. surveying the clientele, which was largely made up of middle aged people, we thought it'd be hilarious to get up and play our standard set of massacre, obituary and necrophobic songs. the host band even introduced us as "spastic carcass"! to our surprise we went down really well - the usual criticism though was that most people didnt like the singing. we continued playing those songs at the same places for a few months.

cover of inamoratos 2nd demo

around winter '95 we started to write new material - however it was slightly different to mainstream death metal. we became influenced a lot by melodic black metal and avantgarde music and it started to show in our music. we found a violinist to play with us and changed our name to "inamorato". our line up was me on guitars and screams, tim on bass and main vocals, marcus on guitar, jon on drums and sarah on violin. i felt our material was good, in a way sounding like "my dying bride" yet more melodic and progressive. the original line up didn't last long though as sarah wasn't anywhere near our standard of musicianship so we replaced her and used keyboards instead of the violin. we recorded two demos which were sent off to a few companies but they didn't bite. most responses seemed to focus solely upon our young ages for being the reason they weren't interested.
disheartened and missing music with balls i asked jon what he thought about me joining brutal insanity and actually making it a good band. he jumped at the idea.
i remember the original members at the first practice just stood open mouthed at the standard of my guitar playing. suddenly this laughing stock of a band werent a joke anymore. around the same time jon and i worked on a grindcore side project called grot.
the difference i felt between grot and other bands within the grindcore genre is that the songs i wrote were very intricate and exceptionally complicated. i put a lot of ideas into those 30 second songs! we recorded 2 demos and if i remember correctly they sold pretty well in the spanish underground scene for some reason.
a year or two passed in brutal insanity and several demos later i got my old friends tim and marcus into the band. the line up had become me on guitar, with jon drumming, rich doing the typical death metal vocals, tim on bass and marcus on 2nd guitar.we also secured distribution and recording contracts with indie label "morbid records".
in the summer of '98 we went into the studio to record our first album. i took quite a few of the best riffs i had written for the grot demos and transformed them into real-length songs.

brutal insanity album - me bottom left

i wrote over half of the material for that album. we received pretty flattering reviews for it too. a lot of people liked it for being half an hours worth of great hooks and non-stop brutality. unfortunately we were not great business men and were maybe somewhat too trusting of one of our very own band mates.
jon the drummer dealt with the label and distribution side of things - little did we know he had copyrighted all the material under his own name! the band lasted for one more split cd but i left before that, upset with what a so-called friend could do when there was a little money involved.
a few years passed. i lost touch with friends and ended up playing smashing pumpkins covers alone in my room for eternity, wanting somehow to start writing material that wasn't just brutal. but that time wouldn't come yet. i was still in the mindset that the music i wrote had to be complicated and a bitch to play if it was to be deemed any good. ho hum.
in late 2001 i bumped into tim. he was talking about putting a band together. not a death metal band though, which immediately made me take notice. he was trying to find the best musicians he could and he stated that as i was the best guitarist he knew would i be interested. so we formed a band called x.amp.L 3. the idea behind the band was that we wanted to obliterate any peers in our city (which wouldn't be very difficult! even now they all still seem to be oasis and pete doherty clones). as if when we played live it would be so intense and so beyond other local musicians comprehension, it would make them bow at our feet and throw down their instruments. if i had to define the music we wrote i guess i would have to say it was jazz, prog, maths metal.  i was on guitar, tims vocals were now more that of an emcee. we recruited a guy called lee on the bass with whom tim had been working on music with and a guy called pete who tim had also worked with as the drummer.
i remember our practices were very harsh and negative. the atmosphere felt like if you made a mistake you were castigated. which i never understood as after all it was only a practice. the longer the band went on, the longer we took during practice for a breather, usually hanging at a nearby bar shooting pool. x.amp.L.3 disbanded before we recorded anything which was a shame. i think some recordings from practices are laying about somewhere though and some electronic versions of pieces can be heard upon our "motion sickness" recordings.
deluded with the thought of being in band i decided to go it alone. i took to my bedroom once again and started to really analyse how writers such as billy corgan and thurstan moore put songs together. i know there's no real formula but it started me off writing songs that were much simpler in their form yet probably more complex in emotion than what i had written previously.
during the next couple of years i split my time between holding down a day job, writing a novel (which remains unfinished) and writing around 20 basic tracks, taking in the styles of grunge, psychedelia and prog-rock.
in 2009 and 10 i recorded these songs and new ones using the audacity programme, using my keyboard for the drum and bass tracks and anything else i felt a song would need. these became known as the "hence the hat" recordings. i went under the name of "hence the hat" for a while. i recorded around 30 plus songs, all of which were instrumentals as i had little confidence in my vocal ability.
In the beginning of 2011 i became very ill. Mentally and physically. I found solace in music more than ever during this time. going into overdrive musically, nearly every waking hour was spent in my room writing and recording new material.
i found myself drifting from the "hence the hat" style i had created at times. one day i'd be writing an elegy on the piano, the next i'd be writing a 10 minute black metal symphony. i remember hearing how billy corgan used to pretend he had a band called "the smashing pumpkins" long before he even had one member which i felt drew paralells to my "hence the hat" ideology. i also had the idea that as i couldn't pigeon hole everything i wrote or recorded into one genre why not form around 6 or 7 bands - all of which i was the only member.
i think i devised the idea as follows:
hence the hat - pretty music
dads mod porn club - strange funny brutal music
spastic carcass - death metal
baal ov - black metal
mike t.v - grunge, shoegaze music
the torture garden - goth, doom, melancholy music.
overall in 2011 i wrote and recorded over 130 songs completely. my greatest triumph musically in 2011 came in april when i decided to test myself in the extreme. to see if i could write and record a song a day. the rule was they didn't have to all be regular length songs (but most ended up being exactly that!), as at first my idea was just to record a riff or fragment of a different song a day. i succeeded in this.
i have all of those songs just laying about gathering dust on a usb now, and every now and again i may post one here.  i recently got in touch with tim again and we decided maybe it is time to start another band. i told him that if i don't do it now then i never will. maybe it will fail - who knows? but i think it could do me well to get back out into the world and show it what i have been doing with myself.