movements

For a couple of years, it seems like half the country has been waiting with baited breath to see what would become of Rend Collective Experiment. There's never been any doubting the talents involved; as a teen I was in in awe of Gareth Gilk's drumming, for example (and made a right arse of myself the first time this came out when we were supporting Numinous back in the bad old (read: MNC) days!) There was just too much quality shining out of the first two ORGANic Family Hymnal EPs. (In fact, for two years consecutively we somehow managed to get them to keep donating their wares to the church 21 promo videos. Add to the fact that they're some of the nicest folks in the industry, and it meant there was basically automatic euphoria whenever the news came out last year that they had finally been snapped up by a label. And not just any label, but Survivor Records, best known as one leg of the behemoth that is Kingsway Music. (Kingsway has many legs; if it were a minibeast, it would probably be a short centipede. But anyway.

The album seems epic already; take, for example, the revamp of original Rend track "Faithful". How to make it a full-throated reworking? A genius bit of inter-label management and the pulling in of a guy who's sure to shift a few thousand copies: Mr David Crowder (check it out on their myspace.) You'll remember that we love the Crowder around here so much that we think nothing of insulting his whole band to their megastar faces. So that call works for us.

Anyway, all this is merely a HUGE build-up to the highlighting of their first biggish budget video for (the single?) "Movements" off the new record (released in the New Year, which is, I believe, quite soon.) The pretty colours. HD loves well turned out girls and boys, eh?



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ah, nostalgia

Not being in the city anymore is really kicking in again; feeling out of the creative loop a bit, more than anything else. But anyway. Was reflecting on listening to half of the fabulous Maguire & I talking about their next wee bit of recording (unsolicited shameless plug for them, see right, be there or miss out.) Was wandering about on myspace and ended up on the MNC page, and took the time to watch the below video for the first time in a very long time. It made me chuckle, I must admit - last ten seconds in particular.

The current song set (of the longrunning acoustic-y project that has finally been tentatively named Pet Polar) couldn't really be any further stylistically from the MNC stuff if I had deliberately tried, but I do get a little regretful when I think about how damn good we were, how many great opportunities we got, and how we more or less blew the whole thing. Yeah, we shifted a few hundred records, played a lot of great gigs, a (thankfully lower number of) few crap gigs, got to team up with some great bands and artists, and had a couple of years of on-off mayhem. But we could've done so much more. We pushed ourselves quite hard when we wanted, but it just wasn't ever as much as we could have. I wonder if it was that we didn't take it seriously enough; who knows.

I'm regretful further because no matter how much it is talked about, it's been a few years since I seriously sat down in a studio setting as an artist and actually laid anything down, beyond recording crap multi-instrument demos in our back room at home. I'm fearful of forgetting how to play songs; I know there's MNC songs I've forgotten, and any time I do manage to churn a good one out now I have the same fear; that it'll never make it to being recorded, and so be forgotten.

Anyway, the video made me laugh. Coincidentally, the song in the background - Walk Away - came from a test recording we did in the first hour in the studio, hence how appalling it is - but I think I included it just because it never made it to the setlist for the fateful EP.



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