the last month and a 1/2 has been insanity for josh and i. we're starting to get a good idea of what the album is gonna sound like while we've been doing the most gruelling travel schedule in our short little careers.
we started off the month of september going to indonesia, land where they smoke the clove cigarettes, for a gig, the next week we found ourselves in hungary and ibiza. 25,000 miles in less than two weeks. hello air miles!
all this travelling has become something that i'm getting used to. i've historically despised planes, even though i love travelling... so i get to go on a plane as part of my job. "it could have turned out worse" i always think when anything about flying gets to me.
then, not three weeks later, we did a tour of australia, which for me was a dream come true in and of itself. ever since i was a kid i wanted to go to australia. unfortunatelly, i didnt get to take much of australia in except for clubs and airports, although we spent a few days in sydney recuperating after the tour's first three dates.
on that tour we co-headlined with b.t. and above and beyond...which gave me a lot of pause. b.t. has inspired so much of my music career since he first came out in 1994 on music now records. his first album, IMA, was so revalatory for me - he was the first true dance music artist of the 90's in my opinion, and his music was the first dance music where the details meant as much as the melodies.
my point being that here i am on tour with him in a land down under...a place i that i always wanted to go to...it was quite unreal to be honest. josh met brian for the first time on the tour and they hit it off in fine style. they're both tech-heads and they talked about making music in machine code. brian truly is a very smart motherfucker who is so smart that i dont even think he comprehends how smart he is. in conclusion.we're gonna all make music one day. hopefully soon.
which gets me back to the music making thing... josh and i have spent this entire year working on a full length artist album. when we met molly thru email in january, we believed that with her, we had a solid foundation for which to start an album. we have thus far recorded 5 songs with her and 3 of them are being played in our sets. "tracking treasure down" is fast becoming an anthem, another song "let it go" has a bit of the rock/dance hybrid that has come to be our "unplugged mix" style, and we also have been playing the cover of kansas' 70's hit "dust in the wind" - it's a very summery house track which will surprise the house heads who probably think we're a trance act.
in the spring, our publicist in the uk, hugh, happened to pop up on my aim and ask me if i had ever heard of a singer named jan burton from the band syntax...and that he's back solo since syntax broke up, and perhaps we might want to work on music with him?? fuck yeah!! i LOVED syntax' album and especially the song we used on the nip/tuck sountrack.
we jumped at the chance, jan was over in san francisco a week later in our recording booth. so far we've been playing two songs out which feature jan's vocals. one is called "dangerous power" which seemed to do the most damage of any tune in our arsenal on the aussie tour, and another one called "new path" which was recently deemed playable at gigs.
we also have quite a few more tracks to finish and start road testing as well as a few surprises that may or may not end up on the finished album.
we are planning on releasing the dance version of tracking treasure down very soon on 12" vinyl and thru the various mp3 download sites (including itunes) on our organized nature label. Tracking Treasure Down will be ORGN 005 following the release of ORGN 004 Bigtop "Sub/Tidal" (our side project with breakbeat legend bassbin twins)
i've also completed a bootleg mix of PJ Harvey's "The Slow Drug" with l.a. house producer trent cantrelle. it has a rui da silva meets creamer and k vibe going on and is quite sexy if i might say so.keep your ears open for it ;)
well, that about does it for me tonight. signing off. gonna make a jam tomorrow.