crows to burnaby

ARCTIC's new album, Today Brought Me Here, has just been announced. As anyone who's been reading this blog knows, Marcus Martin and I have been working on this album for quite some time, and it still hasn't sunk in that it's actually done and will soon be out there amongst people.

• How to hear it and how to get it: While the CDs are on their way, we've started taking pre-orders. Pre-ordered CDs will be signed and numbered, you can have mp3s of the album immediately, and orders of 3 or more CDs will include a free shirt. While pre-orders are going on, you can only listen to the tracks and pre-order the CDs if you're on the mailing list, which is a quick 'n' easy signup and as soon as you've confirmed you get a link to the page.
• Online liner notes: From the pre-order page you can also get to the online liner notes - along with tracks, there's lyrics and images and credits.
• Custom covers: You can also use our Cover Generator to create, arrange and print your own CD cover the way you like it, with the info you want. The possibilities are, well, not infinite, but pretty massive, and it's a ton of fun. Check out the image up top for some examples.
• Auction for the Arctic and ARCTIC: If having a signed and numbered CD just isn't special enough for you, we're auctioning off a master CD of the album. It's framed, along with a signed note and a NWT license plate from a truck Marcus drove while growing up in Yellowknife.

  Half of the proceeds will go to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to support their conservation efforts in the Arctic region. The remainder goes to offset our manufacturing and touring costs, so we do more of what we do.

  The auction starts on Sunday, September 9 at 8 PM PST and ends on Sunday, September 16 at 8 PM.

I can hardly believe that the CD is done. It's been quite a journey. Which is only appropriate since that's what this is all about: journeys and changes and where you find yourself, and how you got to where you are.

I hope you enjoy it.

Nothing particularily auspicious about this year so far. I guess it needs time to find its feet.

Most of the past week has been spent recording, specifically a song called "Anything More". It's been slower going than some of the other songs. The solo version is quite different from the band version. The band version is much more upbeat and energetic, and it's sort of what we're used to now. But we're not recording the full band, and the song needs to have more of the same lonely haunting quality as the rest of the album. So this is more like the solo version.

We're trying to keep it simple, but as we've discovered time and time again, "simple" is harder than it sounds. We've spent hours fine-tuning a short keyboard line, or adding an interesting guitar part, only to decide in the end that the song was better without it. These explorations can be frustrating, yet at the same time necessary. It's easier to accept something you've done as good once you have toyed with it a bit and discovered that it didn't need anything more. It's like in order to keep things simple, we have to start simple, add tons of layers, and then take the layers back off again.

Plus, who I am kidding, all I have to do is count how many tracks we've got and I have to admit it's not really all that simple.

But it's slowly getting there. And even though "Anything More" bogged us down for a few days, we've still probably made more progress in the past month than we did in the six months prior. We did the end guitar part of "December 25th" in one day, and it felt right immediately; hardly any tweaking necessary. The biggest thing remaining is final vocals for most of the songs. Of course, now that the holidays are over and "real life" is picking up again, the pace may slow slightly, but it's nice to hear real, measurable progress in the meantime.

It's been ages since I've written anything about recording ARCTIC. This is mostly because it's been very stop-and-go for the past several months - between NXNE, Marcus's solo tour, and a few live shows and rehearsals, and myriad other timing & scheduling issues, it's been hard to get into a recording routine. When you start and stop over a period of weeks, you forget where you were and what needed to be done, and all the gear gets moved around and has to be rewired, and it takes so much time just to get back to where you left off. Now that the band won't be playing out for a few months, the focus has switched back entirely to recording, and there's been some good things happening.

We spent some time rewiring things, adding a new ribbon mic and an incredibly helpful and amusingly named studio control center, shuffling bits of the studio around, and creating something more like a proper sound booth between dividers. That and some creative buffering helped to cut down on some of the ambient sound in the studio. It wasn't that bad before, but it's better now. We're also having a smoother time of switching between mics and speakers as well as dodging latency.

And of course, it's not as if nothing was tracked that whole time - there are a good solid number of songs in various states of doneness. There's also very different multiple variations of a few of the songs. One song was originally in 4/4 but it looks like the version that was spontaneously recorded in 3/4 is going to win out. Another started off slow, then was rerecorded at about 1.5 times the speed, but I think we'll be going back to the slow version.

Everything is far enough along now that I can listen to all the tracks and get a sense for how cohesive the album could be. It's not defined enough to be able to come up with a track order or anything, and there's still a handful of songs that aren't anywhere near done. But it's enough to get a rough feel for how it might flow, and I think we've done the most complex parts already. It's less nebulous, and that's nice.

Okay, people. I hope this is coherent, because it's 2:00 am and I'm feeling a bit fuzzy.

I set myself a challenge this weekend. I have a bad habit of starting songs or experiments in Pro Tools, hitting a point where I don't know where to go with it, abandoning the song and leaving it alone forever. I had a few hours in the studio tonight and I decided I would start something from scratch and just post whatever I came up with at the end of it all. That'd force me to turn it into something I was willing to share. Good exercise.

It's nothing earth-shattering, but here you go:

The Untouchables (6.1 megs)

Now I must hit SAVE on this post before I change my mind. Then I must go home and go to sleep.

UPDATE 11/1: Haha, I see I'm getting hits for people searching on "The Untouchables". I forgot there was a movie with that title. This song has NOTHING whatsoever to do with it.

(or, "Okay, you can listen now.")

I finally have enough songs done that I think are listenable enough to release out into the general realm. They've been a sort of learning experiment to see what I can do on my own, and to figure out what I sound like. They're all written, produced and recorded by me, with the exception of "Here First" - Marcus Martin did some of the production early on and basically enabled me to get started on all of this.

There's still more ways I could improve everything; it's sort of a perpetual process and at some point you have to say "stop". I'm considering The Pace Changes to be a sort of demo-in-progress, where I refine & replace songs as I learn more and improve my playing and writing. Music online is a lot more malleable - you have the option to change releases in a way that you didn't when everything was CD-only. So occasionally I might replace a mix, change the track order, or add another song. Or it might just stay like it is forever; we'll see!

I'm still working out a glitch in "Shiny New Toys" where the bassline develops a bit of a buzz when it's played in any of the Flash players. The mp3 sounds fine, so if you want to hear the version the way I want it to sound, download the mp3 directly from Project Opus.

You can hear the songs in two places:

• Project Opus (preferred). Five songs are here.
• Myspace (obligatory). Only lets you upload four songs.

Hope you like 'em.