This record being set straight

OK. No one asked for it but I'm telling it to you anyway.

The album we recently finished is entitled "The misery quadrant" and it contains 7 songs with ambient landscapes.

Tracklist:

01) Another species falls 9'22''

02) Dormant 8'01''

03) Massive subspace distortion 4'41''

04) A century of interplanetary war 15'25''

I - Declaration

II - Crossing the battlefield

III - Twilight of vengeance

05) Firesnake 10'48''

06) Temporal inertia 4'07''

07) The silent galaxies 7'44''

Total playing time: 60 minutes 10 seconds.

Read the previous post on this blog to check out the video song. Also, the 2nd song has been unleashed to the unsuspecting public in audio form, HERE.

The rest will follow later. We hope you like the songs.

T

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"Another species falls" musicvideo

Here it is, 100% DIY music video.

Progressing with the music video thing

Just got the first version of music video (for "another species falls") basicly ready. Some finetuning might still be needed, but I'm surprised how well it seems to be turning out considering certain aspects of it. Gotta say it's really timetaking thing to edit video. I must have spent about 20-30 hours into the musicvideo editing already. Or something like that. And it's not even any complicated video, more the opposite. Very basic video, done with very basic programs, freeware tools and stuff.

It might be that the video gets into releasing condition already during this coming weekend. If that happens, you can bet it will be mentioned here.

Front cover

Just put up the front cover at Flickr. Check it out if you want to take a closer look.

Master v7 = the final version

It was mutually decided that master version 7 is the final package. As a little celebration of material getting ready, we just posted one song ("dormant") from the album both to Myspace and to Mikseri. You can find the links to both places in top right corner of this blog.

What else is there to say? Not much right now, ... so go and enjoy some scifi doom.

Cover artwork, vol4

Cover artwork got finished today. It was just a matter of some minor details / tweaking. Both front cover and back cover are done, and not just those but also the PDF-file for lyrics is ready. It turned out rather graphic and dark looking. Not exactly printer friendly, ha ... but it's not jewel case sized, and not really meant to be printed, more like for digital usage. A4 sized.

Small preview pictures of front & back covers:

 

Oh yes, and in case if it still was unclear, the album is called The misery quadrant


Next up; I'm starting to chop the video clips I got from Timo (already done some pre'tweaking for them) so that I can finish the music video. We'll see how it goes.

Videos shot

All video material seems to be shot now and Antti will start mutilating the files soon. I haven't received any ideas for improvement so I have a strong feeling the album is finished. Remains to be seen, as I've said that before, hehe.

Antti has also been perfecting the accompanying pdf text file and it looks really good so far! I have a feeling it hasn't reached its final version yet, as there are some ideas we want to try out first. I expect all of this to be done by the end of the month. Hopefully the video is also finished by then.

T

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7th master spinning

I've been listening the seventh version of master since returning from the trip. Listened it few times through, even that the slight flu I'm having is preventing me from top condition (from judgement point of view). Anyway, this seventh version sounds very good for me, and all the changes and additions done by Timo feel like defninite improvements.

More notes from the session

Here's the "roadmap" to song #5.




T
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Notes from the session

T
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Belay that order!

Hah! Just when I get to say this is finished, I find it's not.

After listening to the package a few times, I noticed several minor things that needed slight corrections. Most of these things were volume level-related corrections, and I have now bounced a new master. Oh, and yes, there was one major correction as well, I redid vocals for one song (or more accurately, for the Part I of that song) as I thought the old ones didn't have enough rage in them. Problem solved.

I think I'll a couple days need to pass before I'll listen to it again, maybe that gives my ears enough time to recover.


T
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Indeed

I am currently listening to the master 3.0, some revisions have taken place before this point. The first one was ok otherwise, only the vocals in the last song had indeed one fatal mixing error which was corrected very quickly when detected. This lead us to the 2nd version. While listening to that, I felt the last song introduction was not quite there yet, so I added one harmless little crescendo (which happens to be a reversed bass drum reverb, although heavily post-processed) to give more impact to the song itself. So far I've heard this 3rd version few times now and I think this is it. Unless Antti feels something's missing or somethings are simply too much after his return, I see no reason to alter anything.

Sure, things are never perfect, but that's what keeps us on our toes striving more toward that ever-elusive utopian state of things : ) I have a feeling the next one will be even better one!


T
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Quadrant of joy

I know what Timo wrote below ... it might take over a week before I get to hear our dear master (I mean, the master). Well, the situation right now is that I'm actually listening the master, and not for the first time, but for the second time already. And this is not the first master version, but second version as Timo himself found already one fatal volume error in one song's vocals. Which got fixed already.

Going to listen this 2nd master tonight bit more (gotta pack tonight too, hah!) and try to find possible issues.

EDIT: 3rd master version spinning now ... but I'm soon off to never neverland of sleep and away for bit over week then.

Unbelievable

I would never have believed to have gotten this far this quick. I'm listening to the first draft of the master version of our album as I write this. It all went unbelievably smoothly with the ambient scenes and in slightly over 5 hours later I burned a CD of the first version of the master of this megalomaniac opus.

It might take over a week before Antti gets to hear this, but that's ok. He needs to approve my ambient selections and overall decisions before we even play this to anyone else. Meanwhile I get to shoot some videos.


T
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Listening & commenting

So, yeah ... now I've heard all there's to hear when it comes to these "final mixes" of this current stage. It will still take a very exciting twist, as Timo gets into "final ambient stage" = the final ambient elements are created/finished and combined with all the songs.

Some minor fixes were made in this listening session, to the doom metal itself - but nothing really dramatic. Actually I'm surprised how little amount of things there were that demanded more attention. As I'm soon about to embark on trip to south, Timo will have almost luxurious amount of time & peace to finetune the final ambient elements as he wants & sees fitting.

This project has certainly advanced really fast, much faster than I thought about a month ago.

We're on fire

Antti has heard almost everything I've been up to tonight. So far, I have a potential final mix of each song, and there are only 2 more he needs to hear before I proceed to the next stage, which is adding the ambient elements/scenes between songs.

The faster songs (say what?!) required some extra attention because of the drum reverb. They swing like a mule in swamp nevertheless!

A synth passage was replayed earlier today as I was not satisfied with the sound or the performance, but in addition, I managed to include a little solo in there, too! Antti liked it too, so we decided to leave it like that. People listening to this stuff need to have an open mind, I know we weren't scared of trying out anything "new" or unusual with this little package! We sincerely hope some of you like the results, no matter what.

True, we are way ahead of schedule, but who doesn't like surprises? It is also very fitting that Antti will have a break from the music so he can rectify things when he returns with fresh ears, if need be. I hope he doesn't find too many things that require attention!! : )

Also the video is progressing, but not without some expected problems at the editing table. I only wish video software was as userfriendly as it should be. But now when I think of it, all of this we have been doing so far, has been without any headache, so I think we can live with this : )

I still have some videos to shoot, but there's plenty of time for that while Antti's away.


Later,

T
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From test mixes into real mixes

If the music is slow & doomy, the progression is the opposite currently ... Timo is already doing quite possibly final mixes (he'll explain the stuff himself better, later) and I've been listening some 4-5 final mixes - some corrections have been made, some finetuning, but it's all going more than smoothly.

My trip comes at a fitting moment, I'll have a complete break from hearing the material (and quite probably get to hear final mixes with ambient elements added before the trip, looks like it!) and then after some 7-8 days I'll hear it again with "all new ears" so to speak.

PS: I did some additional music video testing tonight too, and am quite satisfied with how those went. The software is giving me some headache, but nothing too dramatic anyway. The end video might be simplified somewhat if the problems can't be sorted 100% but it's still going to be nice lil' musicvideo.