Simple Pleasures

[jobrok1]

Are they more like those market days with big white vans selling tools and bits of tools and other broken shit?

Pretty much!

Looking forward to hearing the raw sounds 

I've given him my old Zoom recorder and he has a (fairly knackered) old laptop at his disposal, too.

I told him some BM classics were recorded with less.

He opted for less. 🤣

[Eoin McLove]

 

I like his thinking! Maybe this is the beginning of an Irish filthy BM renaissance 

[ochoill]

I would love to write a decent post about myself and ochoill and hopefully he will,  but I definitely understand

Leave it with me I'll put it up later

[Jward]

He opted for less. 🤣

[jobrok1]

I like his thinking! Maybe this is the beginning of an Irish filthy BM renaissance 

I wouldn't be getting my hopes up too high. 

[Jward]

I like his thinking! Maybe this is the beginning of an Irish filthy BM renaissance 

I wouldn't be getting my hopes up too high. 

Don't be leaving any big knives or guns lying around the place!

Or petrol!

[ochoill]

I learned how to play guitar when I was 14.  "learned" - learned how to play about three chords, then drop D, and tried to play along with every single album I liked.  Mostly wrong.  When I was 15 I got an Argos electric guitar set and absolutely lived on it, even though all I had was the little practice Amp distortion I didn't care.

Fast forward a year and I am still shit, but I have a V-Amp multieffects, Music 2000 for the PlayStation, and a want to make some tunes.  Astfgyl, at the same time, was learning no instruments but was trying to sort of describe riffs out of me (such ham fisted riffs) and we were looking at what we both programmed on M2K.

A big auld love of Godflesh between us obviously.  Sitting in a bedroom in the gaff playing Final Fantasy on two separate portable tellies at the same time, drinking flagons, talking about Streetcleaner - "well why can't we do that?" He asks.

Because we are bad.

"Yeah but we could make something raw and rotten, sure look at what we are listening to, that all sounds like shit but the tunes are great".  Tapes of various old BM albums, some industrial, yeah alright he had a point.

Sure let's give it a go.  How are we going to record it?
"We have the tape deck there".

An absolute salvage of a tape deck, used primarily for bringing tapes up to a ruins in the woods for sessions.  No line in or anything.  Just the little condenser mic on the top.

Alright.  What will we call it?  Astfgyl picked up a copy of GF's Hymns off the stack of CDs.
"Antihuman"

Right we are on the right track here.  We are churning out some of the most hamfisted, messy, scruffy horrors.  I have to practice up every song to do it in one take, but all the riffs this other fuckin yoke is after writing are almost unplayable chromatic horrors.  I didn't change them.  Just fucked them up through serious lack of skill.

The "Studio" was the bedroom, with one of the tellies rigged up to play the drums and keys off M2K.  Memory cards prepped.  At an angle to that is the practice amp, and the tape deck slapped in the middle.  We only had vocals for one or two tunes so would figure it out later.  V-Amp for effects.  That was all the gear.

"Make sure to get the Chrome tapes from the shop, good 90 minute ones"
I will yeah.  I'm sure the 20c in the difference made them so much better, especially with the retakes we got up to.

About fourteen or fifteen songs went on that first album.  I can't remember a single riff.  The quality was absolutely stupendous.  If you focused really hard you could even make out some music over the hiss!

The vocals were even better.  Astfgyl though he could just let out a few roars into it but they were either too loud or not to be found in the mix at all.  The solution was to have him roar into a pillow a bit closer to the amps to get it to, ahh... sit in the mix.  First day of recording the vocals and the mother was downstairs, home from work, absolutely fucking us out of it for roaring the house down and having the tunes up so loud.  Later songs were deemed more effective as instrumentals and maybe recorded a little quieter.

Once it was done, we needed a name, and artwork.  "Easy Listening Atrocity" was an adolescently apt title, the artwork was a big red NO sign with the stock man off a men's toilet behind it.

"This is great" Astfgyl lied to ourselves.  "But can we get it on CD?"
Say no more.  One of the lads up the town has a PC that isn't our 3GB masterpiece you completely rattled by installing The Morpheus of Porn on.  He even has Cool Edit and Fruity Loops.
"Grand we can bounce it over to that and burn CDs"

Absolutely.  Off I went to said friend to use his PC, and record straight off the tape deck into the mic line in.  Sure we can even mix it and clean it up.  It will be UNREAL.

That was the day I learned about the stunning combo of noise reduction and hard limiting.  Absolutely reddened the recordings into the PC, burned them out to one "Master" CD.  You never heard anything quite like this.  The MP3 quality alone really added the most pronounced and unlistenable artefacts over the whole thing.

"It's grand nobody will know.  Let's make ten of them"

Of those ten, it is maybe possible Astfgyl still has one.  Absolutely atrocious, completely hilarious, worst recording known to man, but so chuffed at 16 to have my first album out.  We sold none.  We could barely give them away.

That didn't stop us and we immediately began work on the follow up, "Autophobia".  In an attempt to improve the quality, we relocated to the garden shed and made just enough standing room in a pile of bicycles and lawnmowers.  I borrowed a bass combo off a friend to use for the guitar, there were two inputs on it so Astfgyl could use a mic in the aux in - the newsagent's finest €5 3.5mm in plastic mic - and we could do more vocals.  We could run the aux out of the telly into my practice amp.  And for recording, of course, the dire auld tape deck is back in action.

We could get the volume up louder with these amps and in the shed, much to the detriment of anyone else in the terrace, and of particularly terrible effect on the condenser mic in the tape deck - sure louder will make it clearer right?  All our favorite bands record loud!

The addition of vocals did leages to not actually improve any of the songs whatsoever.  The greatest addition to the recording though was the best of robins in the shed, which I noticed would fly down and attack me if I played any high string discords.  There were lots of high string discords.  Another day we got plagued by wasps and found a nest in a compost heap beside the shed, so we took a quick break to put firelighters in it in hope of driving them away to record the next day.

The album was not better.  I think Astfgyl even insisted on using some sort of fucking wingdings font for the track names.  This one though, I can remember one riff and name of a song, "Existence is Futile", and that riff got reused and rewritten on probably every release since.  Same trick - bounced across to Cool Edit and "Mastered" for CD.  Appalling.

The condenser mic days were unreal but soon we both chipped in to get a train to Dublin and buy a Tascam 4-track.  The quality did not improve but at least we could do a few takes and DI the guitar.  It made bouncing out some of the stuff to PC easier and eventually we had a PC we could actually use Cool Edit ourselves on.

I have maybe three or four of the EPs from this time here but more than half of our output - a good eight releases or so from when I was 16-18 - are gone forever.  We actually did sell a handful but it was to lads in town.  One album, "Punishment in Hell for Luxuria" was actually grand (by comparison, likely very rose tinted) but I don't know if Astfgyl still has a copy of that.

We went digital when I was in college and released sweet fuck all by comparison - two albums and an EP in 20 years is it?  We didn't play live though the intention was there and I used the playstation as a drummer in a different band too for gigs.

Anyway I hope ye enjoyed that bad recollection of tape recording.

[astfgyl]

 

It was fuckin beautiful man so it was. I have a couple of the cds at the gaff I may send em on so you can never listen to them again 

[son of the Morrigan]

  , Ah that's fucking class, fair play to ye.
I've listened to some of the Antihuman stuff on Bandcamp, demented tack!

I fancied myself quiet the talented death metal vocalist when I was 15 or 16 so naturally I taped myself doing death metal covers of the poetic musings of Jim Morrison.
Recorded myself doing all of LA Woman and Morrison Hotel lyrics, Chris Barnes style, with subtle nods to Glen Benton.
It was a thing of beauty I imagined. Be great craic to listen to now but I more than likely taped over them.

[Eoin McLove]

Savage. It's funny, with the right alignment of stars you might have accidentally farted out a timeless classic of industrial doom.

I have old tapes of the metal show that cut in with me and a friend of mine, aged 12 or 13, butchering Therapy? on an acoustic and interrupted here and there with little squeaky farts and even squakier giggling from the two geniuses.

[son of the Morrigan]

I'd say I more than likely did, I could have accidently changed the face of music as we knew it.
Perhaps I should re-record it and send the tapes to Rick Rubin, I still have the tape recorder and all.

I'd say I recorded over them taping the metal show myself and all.

[astfgyl]

  , Ah that's fucking class, fair play to ye.
I've listened to some of the Antihuman stuff on Bandcamp, demented tack!

No way! Can't believe anyone came across it in the wild. Unreal man sound

[son of the Morrigan]

I think I might have got to it through a link here somewhere man.

[astfgyl]

Ahhhh. Wind gone straight out of the sails.     

[jobrok1]

Didn't ye have a track or two on the Metal After Mass comps?

I'm pretty sure I have 'Songs for Shitting' and another one stashed away in the IMA drives and cloud.