i literally started working on material which has now become this body of birds work over two years ago…there was no intention of necessarily becoming a birds record…more a process of free thought and exploring many different avenues of writing / creating. its so cool to see it become a band thing and the band has certainly made the music its own. the band started working together on it around early 2011…at the later stages of a project like this, its always super cool to have some nice left field surprises pop in when you aren’t expecting. a piece which was basically just chords called “irish” which we have had knocking around for quite sometime has finally found its place in this lot of material in the shape of something we are calling “boy”. a delicate and melancholic childlike ode to lost youth. the music has been floating in our creative ether forever. it was nice for kenny to find some resonance in it after this time.

on another note. one thing we are really taking our time with is our interactivity and connectivity with the presentation of this “project” (i am kind of loathe to call it a record, as we feel we can reach a lot wider with how we can communicate together with these little pieces). the record itself has a language, an ambience and a real purpose….both communal and internal. existential in a way i guess, both in lyric and also in the “sound” of the songs. and by that i am not talking about the chords / music etc etc..but the actual environment created around the song itself. so whilst we are careful to avoid the dirty words of “concept record”, we need to have everything around the music to adhere to its purpose. no one makes us do this right? so if we are doing this again…we really want to heighten the experience for you and also the band.

so, the talks about artwork, photography, types of media / multimedia / interactivity, delivery, videos , alternate artworks / items / pieces etc are well underway. it takes a long time to work all of this out properly. in the past we have tended to do it late in the game and thus we always find ourselves under pressure to just get the job done. we now the time time and focus to explore this intensively. its all about creating something that hopefully has a really meaningful and sincere connection with people.

this is on the brain after nearly a full day of looking at artwork after artwork…book after book and looking at creative folks more and more…

thats all i can think of right now (back to some horrible yet sickly delicious communal donuts)

thanks for reading :)

adam.

the magic doorway:

a few paragraphs of rambling thoughts…

its been a really busy month…hence the lack of updates. its getting nice and warmer here in la now which is most welcome after having a pretty dreary summer in sydney. it keeps the energy up. we’ve been going on this thing since early feb and its really starting to feel like it! we have been working in a studio over on the eastside of la, since we moved out of another in mid / late march. alot of the main keyboards are done….alot of the main guitars are done. on this material we are kind of trying to treat keys and gtrs as one spacial element as much as we can….they are very integrated. glenn and i move into yet another studio space in a few days for about 2 1/2 weeks of sprinkling sounds and icing all over the songs so they sparkle! kenny has started his vocals and is working with galaxy, just the two of them all day at the moment…its really cool, they are working on new approaches and subsequently he’s finding new tonalities in his voice and delivery etc. really cool stuff!

its feeling like we may make this record work…given that there are new approaches to alot of sounds / aesthetics, i’d have to honestly say, we have all been slightly unsure of how its going to end up. having said that, there is something inspiring about being out of your comfort zone while taking a new creative path. i think that lack of assuredness kind of helps you gain back some naivete in the record making process. its very easy to resort to comfortable tricks / methods. some songs have undergone quite seismic shifts, purely because we felt they were a bit to “us”. ornament hill, which started as a huge sweeping mellotron anthem, has now melted down into a super low end and mercurial sounding, almost old trip-hoppy drone…

blume / white leaves is sounding so stunning…kenny sung really gently over this gazey/postrock-y giant. personally, i consider this song closer to me perhaps than the others, as it had to really fight for its place..gtrs and keys etc, all had to be pretty much done in one tack due to the nature of 8 second reverbs/delay fx etc..a whirlpool!! hopefully it makes the record, we’ve never recorded anything like this…8 minutes of sheer radiance and positivity. either way, we’ll get this one out!

we bought a bunch of new toys to play with also which have been really inspiring..and have developed (hopefully) a couple of unique ideas to breathe some beautiful modern life into some classic old organs / keyboards etc. lots of drones on these songs. kenny was singing on a really milky black night sounding texture piece today called c-waves. looking forward to heading over in a while to take a listen.

thats all i can think of for now.

have a beautiful weekend.

ajs

Nonetheless, I think we captured a drum sound that surpassed anyone’s expectations. Our producer certainly thinks so, and in Galaxy we trust. After a week at Oceanway we took another week off, to allow our producer to comp down the drums. This week we relocated to Kingsize Studios, a more humble homely type studio to track the bass, guitars, keys and vocals. It was interesting week for me as bass was the first task to complete. I came out the gates like a pompous greyhound. Tracking 9 songs in two days and assuming that Armageddon wasn’t occuring the next day I would be finished in 3 days. Then Armageddon kinda did happen, except in was in my guts. That morning, around 6am, my body decided it was apt timing to shut down into furious food poisoning mode. I’ll spare you the details but lets just say… I think I saw satan in my toilet bowl. I actually amaze myself with how much I hate the world when I’m ill.

After three days, I got out of bed and finished my bass parts. Now Glenn and Sparky are having a blast putting all their crazy layers upon the foundation Westy and I have completed. Kenny stays at home tearing his insides out working on lyrics. His LA ‘tashe makes him instantly 25% funnier. Which is always great. There’s lots of great food in LA. I wish I had the appetite for it.

Soft Guts Berney.

last night we finished the drums for the record at a place called oceanway, which was a really beautiful experience…so much history. still, we made it our home for the first part of our puzzle. there are a couple of rhythm parts songs still to put together, which we will touch on in a few weeks…now that we have recorded the “real” drums, we can totally fuck them up to suit the spatially dreamo-scopic world we are trying to build here. two songs in particular…salt and ornament hill have taken big left hand turns right down heroin avenue…i dont know if we could make them dreamier? speaking of dreamier…we have met and made some new friends here which has been really cool, especially with regard to finding deeper parts of the city that have kind of been hidden to us in the past. a great friend once told me “surround yourself with inspiring people”. wonderful words. it really does help and we certainly are surrounded by inspiring and “inspired” folks. a few days off now before we begin all the space and texture building, a couple of us may go up into the woods around big sur, there is also talk of rollercoaster trips and snowboarding (which is all great until someone breaks a wrist…im looking at you berney. heh). we are circling a title for this project also, which is pretty exciting as we feel it’s going to really help focus the shape our vision even further. a good paper needs a headline right?

we just bought some orchestra bells for the record and a $99 guitar just recently. so it’s off to go screw around with them and east pasta and possibly hit a warm spa to end the night.

yours in a western haze.

sparkledragon

we are about 2 days away from finishing pre-production…for about 3 weeks now we have been shaping up the record…song by song…line by line…note by goddddddam note! haha oh man…boy, are our noggins tired. we’ll rehearse again tomorrow then go and record all of the songs live in a bit of a last demo batch before taking a week off…then shooting to the US to begin the 3-4 months of recording / mixing.

sitting today, feeling pretty relaxed at home here in sydney, while the seemingly unstoppable rain aims for our hair and clothes in its usual downward annoying fashion!

our producer partner has really helped us find a totally new level of creativity and connectivity as a band. we’ve never sounded like this…so the producer “Galaxy” as he prefers to be called…has become somewhat of a sagely friend / mentor and incredible respectful bouncing board to the band…im not selling that lightly. its really cool to find simpatico with a like minded soul.

plus…galaxy is a cool name…hah.

so, anyway today i thought i’d give a tiny insight into what we have to show for it thus far, in the form of working titles and succinct description. (in no particualr order).

here is the short list that has been cut down for the record (remember these are working titles..hence they are usualy complete RUBBISH!):

some of these won’t survive :(

——–

sawtales: short, swelling majestic ambience, very pulsey

motionless: suspended, haunting, texture instrumental piece

boss: modern field song, a huge building droning hymn

salt: a fuzzy, stylish look at the end of the world

irish: whisper quiet, watery, choral + mallety music box with huge weight, very spiritual

marrowing: ostinato driven exposition of dealing with the inevitable

redefining: lurchy, fuzzed out bass and drum driven modern gospel mountain

chestnut: fast, falsetto-ish, aching train ride of a jam..

this fire / with fire: our marching cultural campfire theme

copper: we have tried capturing the sound of the night and compassion…really pretty rolling drums and bass interconnectivity

blume: a blitzy, nearly 9 minute long, almost shoegazey  / post rocky ode to reconnection…

blue lincoln: named after a hire car…really washy / ambiguous mess of stomp and distortion

ornament hill: slow, quasi-fuzzed out mellotron laden 100 tonne pendulum swing

hornets: very dreamy sounding, city-esque modern look at “now”

circular/waves: another very ambient / textural number…lots of loooow piano over feedback and bass

deadpoets: a 2 part look at ourselves…part 1. dream-like mantra. part 2. its time to yell and make alot of noise.

lets see if that makes sense come record completion time.

thanks for listening. dinner time!

adam.s.z.s.z.s.z.s

ps. hoping the album sounds like this looks….

ok, so pretty sure its sunday…and we have a day off today, so while i watch radiohead live on ABC i figure it’s a good a time as any to add an update.

we have been in pre-production now for about 12 or so days…we are still here for another couple of weeks with the producer re-writing, refining, rehearsing the songs, to be ready for tracking next month across the ocean. the producer has been really instrumental so far in pushing us and helping us focus on the important details…

some of the tracks have been given radical overhauls. we are down to the final 17 or so tracks newer ones with typically lame working titles like “salt” and “irish” have made their way to the top end of the list with some re-invention… at this point in record making, you find that songs are kind of jostling for position into the top “x” spots. we have been working a long time on one called “redefining” which was a big slow moving kind of spiritual sounding piece (at this point…to avoid offending any people one way or another…it should be noted that my usage of the word spiritual is purely a secular thing ;) )….however now the song has become some sort of lurching, distorted, choral singalong styled angular anthem…its sounding huge. (a week ago it was destined for the b list!).

there are some really beautiful musical themes centred around the various workings of humanity, death, society, care, examinations and the end of the world. however, as glib as that may sound…its such a positive sounding body of work.

the band has become very rhythmically driven, as opposed to the wall of guitar chords of old…every song must have a unique identity and pulse… gtrs and keyboards have integrated more than we have previously explored, with glenn and myself almost becoming one big wash of beautiful noise. kenny is exploring, exploring…settling then re-writing melodies…(even the good ones! hah)…

this record is all about exploring and reinventing all the things we have done…for some of us this is becoming a deeply thoughtful and quite the brother to brother spiritual process…sometimes it’s almost as if, the music is kind of incidental to the energy and feeling that we are trying to posit…this requires alot of listening, listening and talking.

i am certain a few of us will barely make it out of this…haha

yours, with sore head and happy ears.

adamjohnspark.

I believe that to be truly creative, you need to take an idea all the way from inception to completion. After all Thomas Edison said “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”. And he was Homer Simpson’s idol for a whole episode.

So if we take that definition of “creative” into account, we need a new label for the right brain who would struggle to nurture a moment of inspiration to fruition without his left brain buddy.

As far as writing music goes, I prefer to use the very layman labels of “gut feeling guy” for the right side and “orgainising the chaos guy” for the left.

The first moment of inspiration, that touch from a muse, is a right brain activity. Kick ass. Suddenly something that doesn’t exist outside of your mind is eliciting a physical reaction. A gut feeling. It could be thinking of a melody so bitter-sweet that your eyes begin to tear up. Or coming up with a lyric so evoking that empties the air from your lungs. A clever artist will grab on to these fleeting pieces of gold and see where they take him/ her.

Then you start figuring out how to really hone in on that feeling. We want more of that sadness. We want less air in our lungs (no wait, we need that to live but you know what I mean). Whether you’re aware of it or not, the left brain has now taken over. He’s deciding if the melody should repeat itself 3 or 4 times for maximum effect. Or if that amazing lyric should be at the start or the end of the chorus to really drive the sentiment home. Should it go to a minor chord? Or will that make it less enjoyable when it goes back to the major verse?

Now the important thing here is that lefty will always check back with righty to see if what he’s proposed is continuing to get that physical reaction. And righty is always asking lefty for more options. This back and forth continues until you have a finished piece of art. The two parts of the brain are constantly tagging each other in an out so that they are working as ONE CREATIVE BRAIN.

Ok. I’m going to make a sweeping (and slightly controversial) statement. THE IDEA THAT TRUE CREATIVITY STEMS PURELY FROM THE RIGHT BRAIN IS FUCKING DUMB. It’s as stupid as trying to write purely from the left side of the brain! The two sides of the brain have to work together or they will each find themselves totally out of their depths. THEY ARE LOST WITHOUT EACH OTHER! (Sorry about all the caps. Passion.)

I’m aware this can be quite a divisive stance to take, but it’s something that I believe to be totally true. Creating art is a wonderful craft. That’s right. A craft.

Also as a final note I’m aware that this is a very, very simplified (possibly quite incorrect) idea of how our brains work, but I would hope that it sheds some light on the creative process (or at least my take on it).

Glenndogs McDiff

The band is in a good spot, everyone seems to have respected opinions, there’s no politics or egotistic bullshit. This can really spoil a band. I’ve been there (excluding Birds), I was probably responsible for some of it. We’ve picked up on some older ideas that have been waiting for their time since France.  Binary has a whole new vibe to it and it’s working, more so, as a live band too. Woodwarms also has a new approach and some new sections. The constantly used metaphor that each song is a rubic’s cube, you move one part and the whole thing changes. Song’s are puzzles.

Our producer is arriving in less than two weeks, and that’s exciting.  We’ve had a few skype chats about the songs, and already he’s provided great advice. I like that he gives us a little creative challenges like writing 100 song titles. He’s here for around a month and then we’re all off to Los Angeles together for 14 weeks. Indeed, it will be quite the adventure!

Ian Patrick Le Bern.

is art is an object or an effect?

This is something that a couple of us talk about a bit… the idea that art, in any form, is not merely a tangible object but an “effect”. I guess the long standing view is that art is something created by a person or persons that has never existed (even poor facsimiles would still possess 0.01% of something unique). So the thinking is that once it exists and one can look at it, touch it, hear it, smell it, taste it…then by default the art is the object, which we “observe” right?

What we discuss is that art “occurs” between the ‘object’ and the ‘observer’. That the term should not be limited to a finite object of creative matter, but to include the intangible field of effect that happens at the moment where the object ends and the connection with the person begins…

here is a drawing which illustrates this:

Now of course, it should be noted right now that our scholarly theories have no foundation in anything academic…other than the school of fine whisky, late nights and good beer!

But we think its pretty cool to think about music in this way:

Regular souls like us will never have a direct connection with many listeners…99% of it will be speaker -> ear of a wonderful stranger or video or whatever…but the if the idea of great focused creativity is to be able to accurately position a listener in such a way that they find themselves completely beholden to what your artistic intention, story or theme IS…then adhering to the law of averages, the more people that you can create a similar “EFFECT” with…then that’s when really cool art is happening…its not the music. That’s not the art in our discussion…it’s the effect is having on the person who we will never know…if any?! Now, of course many people will argue that interesting art will have a completely different effect on people..being subjective and all…which is cool…if that is the artists INTENTION (meaning, if they are deliberately creating a sense of ambiguity or surreality etc ).  But if it is not the intention and there is a general smearing of opinion from one interpretation to another…then has the artist succeeded in moving people in any intended way? Perhaps, but then is that just art for arts sake, relating only to the “object” of art itself and not the all-important connection, of which our patron souls seek? It sort of harks to the old adage of “if a tree falls”. If we made something in the dark, and we nor anybody else saw it or experienced it…would it still be considered art? Or simply something we made?

However, if we illuminated the room…then something happens right? Maybe that’s a bad analogy but it kinda makes sense to me right now.

I suppose the point is…that there is a feeling that great art / music / film / photography / sculpture…you name it, occurs when there is more than one of us (humans) present…that maybe totally untrue, but it’s the current thinking in the white parker camp. And that connection is what odd souls like us value and seek when we are working. I could go on and on, but it becomes circular quite quickly when the stream of consciousness is open and the fingers are not quick enough to capture it all.

ajs.