Final Touches

The final touches are going on the album over this week before everything starts going to the final mix and master which will take another month or so. We're not exactly sure which songs are going to make it just yet.. we'll see what we think when everything comes back.

Street Soul Music continues to be elusive in getting that sound that we're happy with. Since it was first written four years ago and we've spent hours and hours listening to different mixes and trying different parts, it's become pretty difficult to re-approach it without wanting to run away from it screaming. Mr. Frisk (who was responsible for the stomping breaks remixes of the last single) has helped us loads with a couple of ideas to bring it into 2009 compared to the original mixes out there back from 2005! Fans who have been with us for a while will also remember Parasite which we stopped playing live a couple of years ago. It's going to be back in a new guise completely..

Summer approaches and we've got a little bit of time to prepare new songs and get gig ready for the festival season. That's er 11 days before Beach Break Festival (uh guys if you're reading this, we really don't have long..) which should be a fine start. Other highlights for the summer that I'm really looking forward to include Workhouse, Guilfest and Solfest which should all be huge, and of course Glasto.

I've not been blogging so much recently, Twitter seems to be more the way forward. (Blogging for those afflicted with ADHD.. you don't need to set aside 15 minutes near a computer and you can even do it whilst you're on the toilet. Perfect.) So check us out there if you've got your own Twitter, or thanks to the wonders of RSS, it's syndicated on the front page of our main site. (Or stick it in your own RSS reader)

It wouldn't be an update without of course letting you know how the van is doing. We were hugely worried about having to sell it due to the M25 emissions restriction but thanks to Boris, we can keep it for a while longer. We've been talking about getting the damn thing serviced because the horsepower seems to have dropped to a point where we're stalling in third gear when going uphill on the motorway which isn't good at all.

Current albums in the van that we're listening to include The Anomalies - Free Soup Social, which is brill if you like big hip-hop/funk/mash-up stuff. I was dead chuffed when Murf from The Anomalies gave us a couple of albums for free when we played at his venue up in Hereford. It's got the best album cover I have seen for ages and track 11 Oldskool is absolutely killer. I'm tempted to do a cover or a remix or something.

Also we're still listening to The Hoff's album. Can't remember which one it is, but Swampy bought it for £1.99 at Asda. As he says, "It's surprisingly good. Well, actually good is the wrong word. It's surprisingly enjoyable."

Breakspoll 2009: Best Live Act Nomination. Please Vote!

The kind folks down at Breakspoll have nominated us for Best Live Act in the 8th international breakbeat awards. Please spare a minute to cast a vote for us at the Breakspoll website. The awards ceremony will take place at Fabric on Thursday 26th Feb and will no doubt be a massive party oozing tasty breaksy goodness.

The Prodigy

Well over the past few years of blogging I am sorry to say that it appears I have fallen into that journalist trap of writing stuff purely in an attempt to be entertaining to the few readers who do stumble across this blog. As a result, I don't necessarily hold the opinions that I'm writing about I do have a tendency to exaggerate ideas and be very blunt for the sake of fickle entertainment. For that I apologise and I'll attempt to write in a more mature manner in future. This is the Internet after all, and you never know, even one of your true heroes could end up reading it and you'd be pretty devastated if you ever upset them.

I should also note that everything here is totally my own responsibility, not Stu's nor anybody else's in the band.

The Tale Of A True Slackers Convention

8:00pm - oh look, we've managed to arrive at the venue on time. that hasn't happened for a while

8:30pm - we've even set up really early

9:00pm - i hope the mixing desk comes in soon

9:30pm - we're popping out for fish n chips whilst we're waiting for the mixing desk and cabling to arrive

9:47pm - gosh it's very cold outside, is there any more vinegar, could you pass it over? ta

10:15pm - that was tasty but i feel a bit bad about not eating very healthily tonight. the mixing desk still isn't here? does anybody think we can pull it off without it?

10:40pm - oh dear, it's not happening.

10:55pm - well that's the third time in subsource history we've set up and not played. first e-mail to mail@subsource.co.uk telling us the location of the other two gigs wins a rare CD promo copy (given only to press so far) of our latest single, "Dark Is The New Light". Hint: G and P

11:10pm - well i'm going to synergy then. seeya later. oh yeah it's called luminopolis now.

8:30am - look at the snow! IT'S SO PRETTY!

That was the single release week

Buy the new Spamsource single.. and many, many thanks to all those that did. At this moment, we don't know how well we did - we were hoping to make it into the indie charts within the top 100 or so but information is currently still eluding us at present time.

It's a bit of a relief having that week out the way, where every conversation was spent trying to mention it as subtley as possible, especially when you can't remember whether the person you're speaking to has already bought multiple copies for their extended family as Christmas presents for the next 3 years.

So now we're thinking ahead about the next single, looking to build on the success (or failure - we still don't know which) of this release. If you forgot to buy it last week.. go ahead and do it.. total sales still help us out too..

More imminently we're preparing ourselves mentally for the coming month where we'll be driving El Diablo Bastardo over 3000 miles (approximately the distance from London to New York) to play in far-flung places such as Berlin, Paris and Stoke-On-Trent. Stu and Nelly have told me that they've upgraded the East Wing of the van to include luxury sleeping quarters and seeing as we're going to be spending a good few nights cooped up in sub-zero freezing conditions (is Inverness inside the Arctic circle?) we're going to need them. Something tells me this is going to turn into more of a survival boot camp than a band tour..

Iglu & Hartly. Drop Beats Not Bombs

Hereford - Supporting Iglu & Hartly

Na na na na nahh, IN THIS CITY, na na na na na nahh, IN THIS CITY.

Backstage, the frontguy with long hair, presumably Iglu, is serenading me in Californian falsetto.. do you know this song? It's like totally awesome man. And the thing is as much as I was trying to dislike these catchy shplangy guitar pop songsters, they made every effort to actually make the effort to be amicable to everyone. They're alright, for Americans. Admittedly, the guy who's girlfriend that had her tongue down Hartly's throat might not share the same opinion. As we observe the drummer leave the venue with a young teeny bopper on one arm (and two on the other), citing, 'the soundman has taken the last bed at the hotel and I don't have anywhere to stay', my best reason for hating them is that I'd quite like to be them for a day.

If I didn't have to put up with playing shit music.

 
 

Birmingham - Drop Beats Not Bombs

Straight from the Holiday Inn in Hereford to Birmingham for a proper party. Four stages of music into the early hours, we had the honour of performing on the outdoor arena - out of the side of a custom-built double decker bus that has stage and PA built in. It's all well and good closing down a street for it but it actually gets too bollockingly cold to party outside in November.

 
 

Hallowe'en in Barrow. Testing out the Nord Wave

 

Some gigs make you feel old. Props to the Monster Monster crew for throwing this party.

 
 
Very eerie after-party. We found ourselves huddling for warmth in this spooky disused restaurant. With outside temperatures plummeting, we had a bit of a spinal tap moment as nobody had a clue where the van was parked except Kimba who had retired to the safety of the van hours earlier. So the rest of us roamed the streets at 4am getting totally lost.. it truely could have been the fateful demise of the band had guest soundman James not managed to answer his phone..

 
 

 

 

Look I've bought a new toy and I'm resenting it heavily. With the laptop crashing one time too many I've bitten the bullet and spent stupid amounts of money to sacrifice a lot of flexibility for a little bit more reliability. Okay, admittedly, there's something a bit sexy about the Nord Wave but considering what you can achieve with software on a laptop I feel like I've had a lot of money taken from me for a piece of gear that doesn't have huge amounts of technology in it. It just happens to be the only hardware synth on the market right now that does what I need it to do. Gah.

Mini-review:
It's a good, solid build. Well the knobs feel nice to turn, the stone mod wheel is cool but doesn't give enough grip for rapid wobbing. I worry about the weight of the wheel causing eventual damage to itself.. the mod wheel does need to be pretty durable to survive a Subsource tour, we'll see. Pitch-bend range is restricted to having one global setting rather than per-instrument which is annoying, but it is hands-down the best action on a controller I have experienced. There's absolutely no dead-zone and responds to the slightest of force without any unwanted motion.

The sole strength of the Nord Wave lies in being able to import samples as waveforms - this is a job it does well (with a slightly cumbersome software interface).. at this price you'd expect a better graphical display on the keyboard to let you know what you're doing. Given the amount of scope this synth offers I'm a bit confused as to the presets it ships with. There are some nice, warm sounds on there but the ones you'd be most likely to use suck pretty bad. (i.e. Piano/Rhodes). Plenty of strings/choir/pad sounds. Not sure how useful the synthesized trumpet/brass/accordion sounds are going to be useful to anyone. I'd love to meet the man who buys this for the accordion preset. Seriously, what are you thinking Clavia?

The Nord site states, "Great samples are not determined by their size in bytes, but by how well their detail and character are preserved". When it comes to imitating real-life instruments though, synthesized modelled instruments just don't cut it for me and in terms of sound I'd go for big, high-quality samples any day.

When it comes to the electronic sounds, there's plenty of scope to play with a two oscillators, two LFOs and a nice polite filter (very useable and playable but won't let you get properly angry filter sweeps like Novation would - then again, I can see it as a safety mechanism for avoidance of rupturing big soundsystems and violating health and safety guidelines at gigs). Again at this price I'm disappointed at not having a second filter and multiple types of overdrive over the single 'tube overdrive' offered.

I couldn't possibly recommend this to anybody who wants to jump in and make a great sound straight away - to get anything decent out of this you're going to need to spend some time creating and tweaking your own sounds. For this much money, you really shouldn't have to. Personally I'm looking forward to seeing what the Waldorf Blofeld keyboard has to offer which is out very soon, is much cheaper and seems better specced.

The customisability of the Nord Wave is a great thing but Clavia don't seem to be taking advantage as much as they could... they should have boosted the sample memory available (the 256MB it comes with must be dirt cheap to manufacture these days), increased the number of banks available and had an area on their site encouraging users to form and share vast arrays of sounds. Then get Rob Papen/BT/Brian Eno or anyone of their ilk to do a few celebrity soundbanks and hey presto.. it'd be a true winner.

On BBC Radio With Nihal

Kimba, Stu and Paul chat to Nihal on BBC Radio Asisan Network to Nihal about music with a message. Find out more about what inspires the band's music in this interview through the BBC iPlayer this week. (From 2:12.30)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fc9xp/Nihal_04112008/

Stereo MCs. Does anybody watch Hollyoaks?

The past fortnight has taken us back to The Croft in Bristol for what was in my mind the best gig since Glade in the summer. The amount of energy expended by the audience that night was something else. Also we got to wish Holly a happy birthday, probably one of our longest-standing fans who we get to see once a year (she won best-dancer award at one of our first shows http://www.subsource.co.uk/blog/2005/05/from-muff-jamm-night-winners-of-best.html)

Getting to support the Stereo MCs the day after at the Brixton Jamm - another great gig. We stuck around to check them out too, which was interesting but had the sardine-in-a-tin thing going on.. the place was rammed to capacity (or probably even over that) which makes a good vibe, but getting a decent oxygen supply can also be good too.

Finally a return to Hull (where I am always on guard since the first time I went to Hull, me and my brother were almost killed by a massive 'TO LET' sign that happened to fall from a church as we walked under it. Surely we would have been dealt a fatal blow to our heads if it wasn't for the fact that we happened to be also walking under a small plastic bus shelter as it happened - ever since then I have always maintained that God's been out to get me. I can safely say that once more I've been to Hull and back and gotten away with it.

So after playing at Funky in Hull, we're out n about talking to the crowd and promoting the single. I sit down next to this one couple and ask them if they saw the live act. They say no, they just got here and within two sentences the guy proudly tells me that the lady he's with is Leanne from Hollyoaks. I try to tell them a little more about the music we do and she says, 'I hope it's nothing like this' as she points her thumb over her shoulder towards the banging drum n bass in the background. I size her up and it's pretty clear that she's probably more at home at a shit club in Oceana listening to shit house like Cascada or something shit like that. So being a diplomat and a realist, I figure they're not going to like the single so ask them not to sign the e-mail list because they'll probably think we're shit. But we're talking major C-list celebrity here, so I ask her to write 'Leanne from Hollyoaks missed Subsource, but thinks they're probably shit' and she promptly obliges with an autograph.



I've just been on the cast list on their site and there's no mention of a Leanne so maybe I've been had. But the look on her face when I told her that, 'it's probable that she'll think we're shit but at least I know for fact that Hollyoaks is a big steaming pile of shit' tells me otherwise. (And that was my cue to promptly leave). If anyone knows anything about someone called Leanne being in Hollyoaks (apparently stage and actress name) please get in touch and clear things up for me.

I've been a bit ill with the cold and inevitably being cooped up in the vehicular deathtrap on wheels with the others I've managed to give it to them too so we're all a little bit ropey at the moment as we get on with promoting the single online where we can. It's getting a bit ridiculous constantly pushing it out to people, I even tried to sell it to the postman this week. Please show your support by pre-ordering the single if you can. In the words of the great Ringo Starr, pre-order the single with peace and love, peace and love.

http://www.7digital.com/artists/subsource/dark-is-the-new-light/

Peace and love

PRE-ORDER SINGLE ONLINE NOW!

Counting down the days now, support your friendly, neighbourhood punkbreaks band:

http://www.7digital.com/artists/subsource/dark-is-the-new-light/

Here you can pre-order all four versions of the single for the bargain price of £1.79. (That's 44.75 pence per track).