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We decided to take some excerpts from the basic tracks from the album, and put them into a nine-minute montage to serve as both a demo as well as a preview of the album. You can get the mp3 file here, or check out our MySpace page to hear it.

These are the “basic tracks” of the album, in other words these recordings are the 5 of us playing live, with no overdubs or studio trickery of any kind. Of course, the final album will have plenty of overdubs (mostly guitars and vocals), and will sound a bit different, but we feel these relatively stripped-down files do a good job of capturing the energy of the 5 of us playing music.

The song excerpts are from Seems Like, Tip Of My Tongue, Too Bad For You, Breathe, Cackle, Sway, Long Way To Go, Make It Through, and Unglued.

Enjoy!

Still recording guitars for the album the album. I’d say guitars are about 2/3 of the way done. I’ve been doing acoustic guitar overdubs in interesting-sounding rooms with portable acoustic treatment (imagine that, JWL using acoustic treatment…..) including a cool church right on the Saco River in Bar Mills. Of course we’re also using “the band room” in the Shields basement, which we treated several years back for recording. Combined with the great sound of Jon’s drum room, we have a very interesting variety of sounds!

I’d like to get a song-in-progress or excerpts up here soon, to whet the Freakwitch appetite….

We had a GREAT weekend at Jon Wyman’s studio. In this shot, I was standing in the live room, and took this shot, you can see the back of Jon’s head, and Todd, Alfred, Matthew, and Yo as we listen back to some of the takes. And if you really look, you can see my reflection as I took this picture, right in front of the diffusors on Jon’s back wall.

After a weekend of chill, vibey, and productive work, all the basic tracks (meaning drums and bass) are finished for the new album. They sound great, these are easily the best basic tracks I’ve ever had to work with for Freakwitch. This is due to several factors…. Alfred’s drumming, Jon’s engineering chops, a great kit, a great room…. and most importantly, a well-rehearsed band of skillful people doing their thing…. there were very few edits required, only a handful, which were usually just splicing together different takes. This is refreshing in this age of grid-editing, drumagog, beat detecting, and drum samples; great drum tracks that don’t involve me programming fake drums! What a concept.

Next step…. JWL’s guitars. Stay tuned.

Well, we finished in time. Barely.

We’ll get mp3s up here soon, but first we want to finish artwork etc for the album.

It’s called Interconnected, by the way….

So it’s clocking in at right around 40 minutes. Minimum is 35, so that’s good.

Rain Song, Reach Your Heart, Penelope, Edge, Edge (reprise), Hope, Tip Of My Tongue, My Own Way. Not sure of the running order.

Also, we need an album title and artwork. Anyone have any ideas about that?

Still recording like crazy. Spent the weekend up the coast getting Guitar tracks from Todd and Bass tracks from Yo. Recording went well, and is (just about) done. I’ll probably add a few of my own guitar tracks here and there this week, but the bulk of the remaining work is in editing and mixing. We have 8 songs for the album, 2 of which are pretty much done. I am going to try to finish up one additional song each night before Friday, when we’ll get together and put this baby to bed.

Watch this space. Looks like we’ll (finally!) have some new music up here this time next week!

We’re giving the RPM challenge a serious go. We have about 40min worth of songs in various stages of production, and we have less than two weeks left. Some of the songs are coming out quite nicely, I’m particularly excited about The Rain Song. This week/weekend we’ll get the last of the tracking done, and next week I will be madly mixing and editing to finish by the 29th.

Not much else of an update, we aren’t gigging right now, but as you know we have a few lined up. We also are on board for this year’s Maine Pagan Pride Day, which is always fun. Last year there were dancers, and I believe that will be the case this year again as well.

Well, we’re signed on for the RPM Challenge:

This is the challenge: record an album in 29 days, just because you can.
That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something.

We’re going to give this a go. You can visit our user page to get more info or follow up on our progress.

It’s a slow time for Freakwitch by all outward appearances. We do have some gigs scheduled for later in the year, we will be playing several shows for Maine Vocals in 2008:

• Freedom Fest June 20-22
• Hempstock August 14-17
• Harvest Fest October 3-5

The fests are undergoing some changes, apparently they will no longer be held at Harry Brown’s farm in Starks. They are working on the locations, but we’ll let you know more as things clarify.

In the meantime, recording continues. I have been continually upgrading the recording setup, and indeed I’ve started Crafted Recordings as a commercial recording/consulting business. Plus I’ve taken a job in the acoustics industry. So there are a lot of changes happening around Freakwitch that can distract us a bit, but in the end these changes will support what Freakwitch is doing.

We are also thinking about taking the RPM Challenge and record an entire album, start-to-finish, in February. The idea was inspired by the National Novel Writing Month, in that it imposes a completely arbitrary deadline as a way to spur creative production. It’d be a good exercise for us if nothing else. We’ll make the decision one way or the other on this and keep you posted. Watch this space.